It’s getting to be that time of the year.

Although it is early in the season, you just may have seen someone working in the fields already. You may have seen a tractor rolling down a rural road. If you are a farmer, perhaps you have been looking over the fields and getting the machinery ready.

All that activity means one thing — the time to start planting is drawing near. Yes, there may be a late season snow storm, but spring is coming and with it comes the annual planting.

Spring is the time when the pace quickens on the state’s roughly 90,000 farms.

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a huge portion of the state’s land is devoted to farming — an estimated 31 million acres. That’s hardly a surprise to anyone familiar with the Iowa economy, because agriculture has been the key to prosperity here since pioneers first arrived.

Even though farms have always been center stage in Iowa, the business of agriculture is changing rapidly.

The impressive scope of the state’s agricultural sector can be expressed to some degree in mind-numbing statistics. Suffice it to say that Iowa farmers are leaders in the production of corn, soybeans, pork and eggs. And the bounty of Iowa’s farms supply a growing ethanol and biodiesel industry.

Iowa truly feeds and fuels the nation and the world.

It is a mission and a calling that our state’s farmers will continue to fulfill for decades to come.