Dr. Jay Lehr has the title of Science Director for an organization called The Heartland Institute, which is a national nonprofit research and education organization with the goal to “discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems.”

He is also an entertaining and passionate speaker who believes in spreading the good news about agriculture to places that are far removed from the farm – like the streets of San Francisco. He spoke about the importance of being an advocate for agriculture to agribusiness corporate leaders meeting in St. Louis at the AEM AgExecutive forum Thursday.

“People don’t understand agriculture and they believe the myths that they hear. They don’t even understand what fertilizer is, they think that we are despoiling the land when in fact we’re the best environmental stewards,” Dr. Lehr said.

He encourages people in agriculture to be pro-active in talking about modern farming and he is particularly interested in promoting precision ag. “The average person thinks that farming today is the same as it was in his grandfather’s day and it’s changed dramatically – using global positioning systems, geographic information systems and variable rate technology, automatic steering – which allows us to reduce our inputs by being more accurate.”

Listen to an interview with Dr. Lehr here:
aem-forum-lehr.mp3

You can also download the 9:30 interview with this link: Dr. Jay Lehr interview (mp3)

Check out the Flickr Photo Album from the AEM AgExecutive Forum here.