Bike ride through Iowa for Minnesota man to end

A Minnesota man is expected to finish a 780-mile round-trip bicycle ride today that took him across southern Minnesota and central and eastern Iowa over the past few weeks. 26-year-old Ben Stallings is chief operations officer of World Population Balance and he’s preaching as he bikes about our planet’s growing numbers.He says the world now has six-point-two billion residents, that’s twice as many as 40 years ago and four times as many as a hundred years ago. That works out to 75-million new babies every year or 144 every minute, which takes into account all diseases, wars, natural disasters, etc. Stallings says the message is of particular importance in the heartland as this is where much of America’s food — and the world’s food — is grown. He says the folks in rural Iowa seemed to receive his message readily.Stallings visited several Iowa towns along the way, including: Algona, Ames, Fort Dodge and Iowa City. He says people in Iowa know the wide-open spaces aren’t empty. It’s all being used and the people who live there are providing the food and other resources for the people who live in the world’s cities.Stallings is due back at his home in Minneapolis late this afternoon. He left on May 20th. He says his only setbacks have been due to the weather, as he’s done a lot of camping out and faced lots of rain and headwinds one day with gusts up to 50-miles an hour.