Scott Mortimer, publisher and general manager at Meredith Corporation, which includes Successful Farming, notes that grain prices are rising, land prices are at historical highs and the technology to produce crops has improved.
Governor Terry Branstad of Iowa, who calls the Ag Summit a "bold and brilliant" way to educate presidential candidates about farming, notes that agriculture was booming during the 2008 and 2012 elections, and so was not much discussed.
He gives a tour of the Duchy Home Farm, which he converted in 1986 to organic farming, noting that at the time it was "something that nobody really wanted to know about except a few people who thought it was pretty crazy".
"We're not just a petting farm; we're a real working farm", notes Kari Lucas, the farm's director.
So far, researchers have found very little evidence of the virus circulating on farms, noted virologist Malik Peiris of the University of Hong Kong, but "you don't need many infected farms to have the virus amplifying in the live poultry markets and causing a threat to humans," he said.
Since we considered a relatively long time period (full year) and diseases with prolonged periods of infectivity of affected animals, we assumed the potential for disease transmission during brief stays at markets to be negligible compared to that on the farms (noting that this assumption would not hold for acute infections which are transmitted over short time scales).
(No small-scale farmer could possibly support himself solely by farming, he noted).
This is the earliest evidence of farming activities noted in Sri Lanka as well as in south Asia.
The wind farm, Google notes, is already in operation and has been contracted to sell all of its energy to the Central Iowa Power Cooperative, which will use it to provide electricity to about 15,000 homes.
Having grown up on a farm, Brown notes, "that could have been my life had I not been bitten by the actor bug".
Grassley, who owns a farm, often notes in Senate Judiciary Committee hearings that he is the only non-lawyer on the panel, which oversees the judicial nominations process.
