Mark Bittman:

It's a pretty significant shift from the status quo. Twenty-three million acres — some 75 percent of Iowa's farmland — is used to grow corn and soybeans, most all of it through what's known as industrial agriculture, using expensive equipment and a massive amount of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Those two crops are highly subsidized by the federal government, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

And corn and soy are mostly grown to produce ethanol and animal feed. The remainder that's eaten by humans is mostly in the form of junk food.

Sarah Carlson is the strategic initiatives director at Practical Farmers of Iowa, or PFI.