Photo of happy farmer by Serg Grbanoff, available via Shutterstock.

Jason Benell lives in Des Moines with his wife and two children. He is a combat veteran, former city council candidate, and president of Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers.

America Needs Farmers.

This statement has become a cultural touchstone. It became popular during the 1980s farm crisis, as a way 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—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. The slogan 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 most interesting thing about this slogan is that it is true. Or at least mostly true.

IMAGE VS. REALITY

America does need farmers. To be more precise, America needs a strong, robust, and sustainable agricultural industry, to feed the country and to feed the world. The United States has some of Earth’s most fertile and accessible land and water, with excellent technological infrastructure to sustain its exploitation, and those are the building blocks of our civilization. 

When U.S. media cover 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 and feeding America. They know the value of a hard day’s 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 misses what the reality is like for those living in and around these communities in the Midwest. Going by the media coverage of the political and economic distress in rural America, we’d be left scratching our heads. Why do these issues and environmental problems persist, when many solutions seem close at hand?

It is no secret that conventional agriculture is responsible for much of the pollution in the Midwest. 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 farms, and family farms, of Iowa.

The nitrate levels in the water supply have become so dire that rather than adhere to regulations passed more than a decade ago, the Republican-led Iowa legislature simply refuses to monitor the nitrate levels so no action can be taken. The America Needs Farmers crew has applauded this lack of accountability to their own communities. 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 school bathrooms, books, and abortions. 

But who is anyone to criticize? After all, America Needs Farmers.

GOVERNMENT AID FOR FARMERS, BUT NOT FOR OTHERS

Digging deeper into the history of the rural farmer, the bearers of this slogan overwhelmingly favor certain political goals, from fighting against environmental regulations to cheering on as government undermines other people’s civil and human rights.

Agricultural groups have successfully lobbied 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 who, in addition to blocking sustainable and accountable policies for agriculture, attack the civil and human rights of all citizens. 

Rural farmers largely support right-wing candidates who favor banning books, discriminating against marginalized groups, attacking immigrants, and reducing public school funding. Some of those candidates overtly advocate for 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) make up less than 5 percent of Iowa’s population. Agriculture is big business, but most of the physical work isn’t done by the farmers or by landowners. Rather, low-wage laborers—more often than not immigrants—do the heavy lifting.

This phenomenon is neither new nor unexpected, considering how 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, recent polls indicated that immigration was one of the biggest issues for Iowa Republican caucus-goers, even though the agricultural sector relies heavily upon immigrant labor, and Iowa is more than 1,000 miles from the southern border. This is not seen as a polite thing to say or point out, despite the overwhelming data that shows this pernicious voting pattern. After all, America Needs Farmers, and it just wouldn’t be “Iowa nice” to highlight this disparity.

MAKING SENSE OF CONTRADICTIONS

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 Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits, or corn subsidies, or funding for rural 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? 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 call for less investment into crop diversification, more allowances for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and slowing transitions to renewable energy?

I have yet to read an article or watch an interview featuring another group of purported “forgotten voters” who 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?

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.

CAPITALISM FOR THEE, SOCIALISM FOR ME

Some news media, Democrats, and Republicans have tried to answer these questions for some time. But I don’t think they will succeed without highlighting the contradictions and laying bare what is really going on in rural communities. For all the stereotypes about hard working, boot strapping pioneering families, who believe in the power of markets and free trade, many of these people 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.

A Venn diagram of the MAGA movement and cruelty alongside rural Midwestern farmers and ANF die-hards may form nearly a perfect 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 they have done and continue to do. Ultimately the demise of rural America may very well lay at the feet of those rural voters.

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 seen as “flyover country,” to be left behind and forgotten, populated by people 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 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 the river, if it means scoring points against “city folk” and keeping the federal handouts coming. Those city folk are seen as alien and different—even though the rural economy depends on them for labor, finance, and stability.

Dismissing these trends 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. Many of 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 their grandparents were allowed to purchase because of the color of their skin.

We find beneath the nitrogen-rich dirt and clean white hands, that many see the authoritarian MAGA movement, rising fascism, outright racism, and persecution of certain ethnic or LGBTQ groups, 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. They are farmers, and they can’t be wrong or immoral or the bad guys, because they are the real Americans.

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