America Needs Farmers, Just Not Their Politics

Photo by Mike Zevenbergen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

America Needs Farmers. This statement has become a cultural touchstone made popular during the farm crisis of the 1980s in an attempt to raise awareness of the difficulties suffered in the Midwest agricultural industry.  This phrase and branding has seen a bit of a renaissance in the past decade and has recently became featured on bumper stickers, commercials, apparel branding, and even partnerships with major universities like the University of Iowa. America Needs Farmers, or “ANF”, has become less of a slogan for awareness, and more a brand or identity that midwesterners tout alongside Carhartt or John Deere.  It is a slogan that is now almost synonymous with the Iowa Hawkeyes and rural farming, and is controlled by the Iowa Farm Bureau, a 501(c)5 organization representing farmers across Iowa.

The interesting thing about this slogan is that it is true.

Or at least mostly true. America DOES Need Farmers, or more accurately America needs a strong, robust, and sustainable agricultural industry both to feed the country and to feed the world.  The United States has some of the most fertile and accessible land and water in the world with excellent technological infrastructure to sustain its exploitation, and this is the building block of our civilization.  In our media, when we talk about American agriculture, there is no escaping the images of bucolic rolling landscapes with smiling nuclear families fading to stories about grit, hard work, and pick up trucks along side pieces of million-dollar farm equipment. These are the salt of the earth people who care about sustainability, feeding America, who know the value of a hard days work and have little time for the hustle and bustle of the cities and just want to be left alone. After all America Needs Farmers, right?

However, this image seems to be missing what the reality is like for those living in and around these communities in the Midwest. If we listen to the way our media tells it, they’d have us look to much of the political and economic distress of the country, particularly in the Midwest, and be left scratching our heads as to why these issues with the environment, among other things, persist despite having many solutions to these issues close at hand. It is no secret that US agriculture is responsible for much of the pollution in the midwestern region of the country. In Iowa, lakes are unsafe for recreational swimming, rivers and streams remain polluted and diminished, air quality is some of the worst in the region. Cancer rates are extremely high in rural areas, and the worsening ecological status of the Gulf of Mexico can be traced directly back to the factory – and family – farms in Iowa. The nitrate levels in the water supply have become so dire that rather than adhere to regulations passed over decade ago, the Republican-led legislature in Iowa simply refuses to monitor the nitrate levels so no action can be taken.

This lack of accountability to their own communities is something the America Needs Farmers crew has applauded, yet they remain silent when asked to justify their unilateral support for such legislation. Strangely, monitoring nitrate levels and enacting sustainable practices – like controlling water run-off, respecting immigrant workers, and child labor laws – are burdensome regulations, but these same voters are very quick to regulate bathrooms, books, and abortions.  But who is anyone to critique? After all America Needs Farmers.

Digging deeper into the history of the rural farmer, the bearers of this slogan have consistently been in favor of other goings on in the Midwest, from fighting against environmental regulations – to the detriment of the things listed above – to cheering on the diminishing of civil and human rights of Iowans and Americans at large. These agricultural groups have been successfully lobbying for federal government aid for their members while stonewalling access to those same benefits for others. The Iowa Farm Bureau and other organizations that represent similar interests almost exclusively donate to and support candidates that, on top of blocking sustainable and accountable policies for agriculture, attack the civil and human rights of all citizens.  Rural farmers are almost exclusively supporters of right-wing candidates that are in favor of banning books, discriminating against minorities, attacking immigrants, defunding public schools, and in some cases are overt and open supporters of Christian Nationalism.

Due to their outsized influence on national and state politics, this demographic wields disproportionate political power that is used to diminish the progress of the country at large in nearly every category.  Remember, farmers – meaning people who work the land they live on and own – are a scant 5% of the population in states like Iowa. Agriculture is big business but most of the physical work isn’t done by the farmers themselves, isn’t done by the landowners, but rather is done by low wage laborers that are more often than not immigrants. This is not a new phenomenon nor an unexpected one due to the way these states were settled and organized. Rural states and areas tend to be more white and less diverse, tend to have more economic disparity, tend to be more insular, and tend to be more prone to grievance-based politics and straight up misinformation.  For example, in the latest polls during the 2024 Republican Caucus, one of the biggest issues amongst Iowa Republican caucus goers was opposition to immigration despite the agricultural industry being entirely reliant upon immigrant labor and the state itself being thousands of miles away from the nearest border. This is not seen as a polite thing to say or point out, despite the overwhelming data that shows this pernicious voting pattern.

This seems to be because after all, America Needs Farmers, and it just wouldn’t be nice to highlight this disparity.

The issue then, is what does the American Farmer bring to bear on this fundamental truth of our global trade and food infrastructure?  When we hear about new farm bills that include SNAP benefits or corn subsidy and the support for rural American infrastructure, what does that really mean? How do we square the American farmer who fiercely fights for corn and ethanol subsidy yet routinely and proudly votes against expanding school lunch programs or SNAP benefits? What does it mean for rural Americans when we invest in rural infrastructure to build better roads and bridges at the federal level, then state level farmer-backed candidates shunt the money to factory farms and business owners so the corporate shareholder or gas station franchisee gets a nice cash or tax guarantee while those who work IN the gas station or AT the local co-op, or ON the farmland and hog lots see nothing but higher prices?  Can we make sense of the messaging about sustainable and community-based practices from agriculture groups while they specifically demand less investment into crop diversification, more allowances for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and oppose quicker transitions to renewable energy? I have yet to read an article or watch an interview from another group of purported “forgotten voters” DEMAND the federal government guarantee price controls and guaranteed insurance on their product or lifestyle.

Why should such a group that is prone to misinformation, Christian Nationalism, and fear of outsiders hold such disproportionate power when these supposed “outsiders” are already well outside their communities?  Why should a rural school consolidate or shut down because of the fear of black residents in the next city over or brown authors in a library four counties away? If America Needs Farmers, surely, they also need schools, roads, clean water and a future for their children?

The answers to these questions seem to escape us and this is something media outlets, Democrats and some Republicans have been trying to find for some time. But I don’t think they are going to find the answers without asking these questions and laying bare what is really going on in these communities and regions. For such a self-manufactured image of hard working, boot strapping pioneering families that believe in the power of markets and free trade, they certainly seem to believe “Capitalism for thee, socialism for me” when it comes to maintaining their way of life. The most stable and consistent voting bloc for right wing candidates – white Christian Nationalists, and deregulatory self-interested populists – have been rural agricultural communities. They seem to be ready and willing to gut the basic premise of community, institutions, and even democracy itself if it means they can maintain a privileged status as primary beneficiaries of big government bailouts and act as cultural stand-ins for the Midwest. Essentially, if one could draw a Venn diagram of the MAGA movement and cruelty alongside rural midwestern farmers and ANF die-hards, they would find they have drawn a circle, if not in behavior and attitudes then absolutely in voting patterns and poll responses. Rather than dance around the often ugly and scary reality of the voting pattern of rural farm communities, they need to be challenged and called out head on for what these rural voters have done and continue to do. 

Ultimately the demise of rural America may very well lay at the feet of those very rural Americans, and we shouldn’t let slogans or phrases or misinformation shade our view of what it is like in the Midwest. If we do, we end up with what we have now, a place that is seen as “fly over country” that is to be left behind and forgotten, populated by a people that are hellbent on making sure that becomes a truism rather than an idiom. There is a supposed honor in being from a small town, a supposed hard reality embodied by the American farmer and hard work. But when we pull back the curtain or pop the hood, we seem to find only grievance, fear, privilege, and cruelty. We find a rural demographic more than willing to sell their fellow citizens, their futures, and their children down river if it means scoring points against ‘city folk’ who are seen as alien and different (despite being dependent upon them for labor, finance, and stability) and keeping the federal handouts – and media cameras- coming.

Hand waving away of any problems as a “farmer” problem or a “rural” problem misses the forest for the trees; in reality this is an American problem and it is not made more honorable or palatable because their town is small or their hands are dirty. When those hands are washed at the nice kitchen in the federally crop insurance-backed house, with the late model farm bill-bought pick up truck, on land that only their grandparents were allowed to legally purchase because of the color of their skin, we find beneath that nitrogen-rich dirt clean white hands that see the authoritarian MAGA movement, rising fascism, outright racism, and persecution of sexual and ethnic minorities and think; well hey, things are going alright for me, lets hope things never change. They know what they are doing and they do not care because they are farmers and they can’t be wrong or immoral or the bad guys; they are the REAL Americans.

Because after all, America Needs Farmers.  But maybe America doesn’t need their politics.

https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/national-pork-producers-council/C00201871/summary/2020

https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/iowa-farm-bureau/C00200329/summary/2018

https://www.thegazette.com/environment-nature/iowa-senate-passes-budget-that-could-cut-iowas-water-sensor-network/

https://www.statista.com/chart/23242/farmers-presidential-election/

https://farmpolicynews.illinois.edu/2017/03/clean-water-act-des-moines-water-works-lawsuit-revisited/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iowa-caucus-entrance-polls-2024/