The Farmers We Forgot

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One cannot rule out a blizzard in Minnesota after Labor Day, and so when I travel for Thanksgiving or any time in the fall, I am careful to fly into Des Moines instead of Minneapolis, and then drive the 200 miles north to my hometown. I like to drive through Iowa during autumn because it turns back time. When I travel straight north, I traverse latitude, moving toward a place where the thaw arrives later in the spring.

Out my window, I see the corn plants get younger, because the later thaw brought a later planting. The fraying husks of central Iowa corn are still tidily wrapped on northern Iowa corn, and have not yet lost their greenish twinge in Minnesota, tasseled in rows. After my visit, I drive back to Des Moines and see the reverse: I witness the cornfields age as I travel south.

In a few weeks more or less, it will be harvest day, and bent and bowed under a burden of seed, they go to our reward. I marvel that until the very moment that the harvester turns the corner, the corn plants still strive to survive as they ever had, indifferent to the machinations of men.

This indifference goes both ways, it seems, in 21st century American politics. My country has just elected a new president, who is figuring out what to do in office. How he will govern America’s farmers is one of many unknowns, and looking back on the campaign season doesn’t give us many indications.

Indeed, transcripts show that farm policy hasn’t come up even once during a presidential debate for the past 16 years. For more than a hundred years before that, however, the hyperbolic praise of American farmers was a campaign mainstay. So much so that Charles Warren of Mutual News opened his moderation of a 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon by stating, “It’s a fact, I think, that presidential candidates traditionally make promises to farmers.” He then queried the candidates, “Why this constant courting of the farmer?”

Well, it’s 2016, and the courtship is clearly over. How did we get from there to here?

American farms are still hugely important. According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the gross output of American farms is $393 billion. That’s more than eight times the figure for coal mining, an industry that held the spotlight several times during the presidential campaign.

The Farm Crisis of the early 1980s is considered to be the worst financial crash that the United States farming sector had experienced since the Great Depression of the 1930s; it completed the boom-and-bust cycle that had begun with a steep rise in agricultural speculation during the early 1970s. Out of its aftermath emerged a new permanent reality that has changed the entire concept of farming in America: the end of the self-supporting family farm.

Today, there are basically two types of farms in America: giant corporate farms that tend to express their political preferences through lobbying, and smaller-yielding, largely family-run farms, many of whom are operated by owners who take on a second job. The farmer vote that was courted for more than a century was a ballot cast by an American who farmed, and by farming supported a household. That farmer is no more.

I am not a farmer; I am a researcher who studies the plants that come to your dinner table, which means that I ask questions for a living. During the 2016 campaign season, I asked the questions nearest to my heart while driving through Iowa with the windows rolled down, and no one but the corn plants to hear me.

Why must a third of American farmers work a second job in order to make ends meet? Why do American farmers toil for months to grow grain and raise animals for our dinner plates, when the United States Department of Agriculture estimates that up to 40 percent of food is thrown into the garbage? Why are we fermenting 40 percent of our biggest crop into fuel for our cars while our planet is still home to 795 million undernourished people?

These are the issues that I care about, but based on their respective campaigns, I can’t be certain that either party even knows that they exist. The closest that a voter could get to ascertaining differences in the food and agriculture platforms of the two candidates was at an event sponsored by the nonpartisan Farm Foundation in October.

The event was a striking microcosm of the larger election. Sam Clovis, radio talk-show host and a co-chair of the Trump campaign, made statements and fielded questions on behalf of Donald J. Trump, while Kathleen Merrigan, a former United States deputy secretary of agriculture, did the same for Hillary Clinton.

The fact that an estimated one in every four agricultural workers is undocumented is a sticky topic for a presidential campaign built upon anti-immigration sentiments, but Mr. Clovis attempted to soften some of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric by assuring the forum that there will be no “massive deportation activities.”

He maligned the Clean Water Act as the “poster child of government overreach” and referred to the Environmental Protection Agency as a “special interest,” illustrating his position by way of a farmer friend (a “no-till guy”) who resented being held responsible for the runoff water that collects in his ditches.

You can’t drive through Iowa and not think about farming: No less than 85 percent of the land in the state is devoted to farms, many of them more than 1,000 acres. This is the place where seeds are sown. It’s where farmers grow the corn that will be fed to pigs as grain, or fed to you as syrup, or fermented to ethanol for your gas tank.

It’s also home to plenty of family farms that will live or die on a turn of phrase within the next farm bill. Of course, the president-elect won Iowa by a large margin, and so local voters expect him to act in their best interests; I wonder what that will be.

For me, every presidential election both begins and ends in Iowa, with the caucus kicking things off and my long drive home for Thanksgiving pondering its resolution. I have followed the Cedar River so many times that I can use the grain elevators of Charles City, Osage and St. Ansgar as mileposts.

Everything about Iowa is familiar, and yet this year, everything is different. I will always regard the flyover as my home, and never more so than on the fine autumn days when I must slow down, and drive through it.

But this November showed me that the Midwest of my childhood is like the seed from which the corn plant grew: It is both part of me and gone forever. Much like the American family farm is to the American presidential election.