LINCOLN — From his farm west of Davenport, Iowa, Glen Keppy has watched as a plastics factory and now an Amazon warehouse have gobbled up acres that used to produce corn, beans and wheat. The encroachment of development, Keppy said, is one of the reasons why it’s so important to preserve the history of farming through efforts like a multicounty National Heritage Area, a locally governed adjunct to the National Park Service.

“People come in by the busload,” he said, to watch demonstrations of old-time farming with teams of horses and steam-powered tractors.

“That’s what you call preserving what Iowa was made of,” said Keppy, a former president of both the Iowa Pork Producers Association and the National Pork Producers Council.

He just ended a three-year stint on the board of the Silos and Smokestacks National Heritage Area, which promotes historic farms, museums, bed-and-breakfasts and tourism in a 37-county area of northeastern Iowa.

When asked if such heritage areas threaten private property rights — as has been claimed by critics of a proposed heritage area in Nebraska and Kansas focused on prairies and homesteading — Keppy said not at all.

“We are not at all into forcing preservation; we’re just suggesting it. We’re just an organization that tries to put things together,” he said. “There’s not an evil bone in the body of the organization, or the individuals.”

Some officials at tourist attractions in south-central Nebraska and north-central Kansas express similar puzzlement.

They say they were blindsided, and disappointed, after Gov. Pete Ricketts and a coalition inspired by a retired Colorado researcher-writer whipped up a firestorm of protest over the proposed Kansas-Nebraska Heritage Area.

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