Comment on The changing face of Iowa's family farms

Family farms, the wellspring of many Iowans’ values, have shrunk in number and gotten larger and more complex, but, with few exceptions, they are still run by families. “Yes, farms have changed. The farms are bigger and more specialized. The machinery is nicer. The yields have doubled. But they are still operated by families who want to take care of soil and water,” said Iowa Corn Promotion Board President Larry Klever, who raises corn and soybeans near Audubon. Klever said family farmers, who operate more than 97 percent of the state’s farms, are tired of hearing that food today is produced mainly by soulless corporations and industrialized agriculture. Family farmers reject the “Big Ag stigma” often associated with large-scale grain and livestock production, he said.   But modern farms “do tend to mirror the corporate model more than the old image of the family farm,” said Neil Harl, a retired Iowa State University agriculture and economics professor and longtime observer of the Iowa farm scene. In 1950, in an era before farm values were expressed in dollars per acre, Iowa had 206,000 farms with an average size of 169 acres, according to U.S.