Recycled Content--2020 in hindsight.

Tom Vilsack. Joe Biden. And a few days of breathing room on the Ag Census.

Hey there, The Cocklebur readers. I appreciate you.

I know I said I’d have 2022 Ag Census analysis today but I’m gonna just plug in some older stuff instead. Was I right or wrong? Probably wrong.

Point being—I’m trying to learn to take my time and get things right. And that takes time and effort and energy and. . . . . .

Anyway, in the meantime I’d like to offer you up an analysis I wrote about the Biden/Vilsack plan way back in 2020 before they even got elected. I think you’ll like it, even though I was being a bit edgey. Seems relevant now that we have President Biden and Tommy Vilsack back at USDA.

Tell me what you think, and happy Thursday.

—Bryce

Thoughts about the Biden/Tom Vilsack Rural Plan.

As a writer with a point-of-view who has a readership of approximately three little league baseball squads, I find solace in the bookish data-driven world of policy as a solution to the world’s seemingly solvable problems. And by problems, I mean listening to real people I know in the real world and then translating that into real public sector funding. Also, it’s possible to pay for things by taxing the rich in order to give poor and working class people more money and health care and infrastructure that works and better schools. . . .

My brand of public policy “solutions” includes a thing called the “cash economy exemption” which provides amnesty to all of the people working in the shadows if they ever get caught doing things like mowing somebody’s yard for $40 while collecting unemployment. Also, taking your Grandpa’s junk pile to the scrapyard to clean up the back 40 shouldn’t trigger an IRS audit because you happen to be a black dude making a living in Winston County, Mississippi. That would also be included in the “cash economy exemption.”

Now, this is gonna be in shocker territory, but you won’t find “innovative solutions” like the yet-to-be-introduced “Cash Economy Exemption and Penal Colony Reform Act of 2021” in the 2020 campaign literature anywhere. Bernie didn’t write the damned bill. EWarren didn’t have a plan for that. And Joe Biden, well, he’s too busy trying to increase dairy exports so his buddy Tom Vilsack gets a performance bonus or raise or something.

Speaking of Joe Biden, that old white dude in a suit is partying like its 1996, back when I was sportin’ a fake ID and Billy Clinton was feeling really confident defining “is.” In 1996 I went to a “rally” on the University of Missouri campus where Hillary Clinton and the lame-oh campus Democrats lectured us hippies and hiphop DJ’s about the merits of the “Macarena” in turning out soccer Moms and winning over voters. I argued that year that the Democrats were working too hard when all they had to do to win Missouri was point out over and over again that Bob Dole was from Kansas and he probably was a Jayhawker with secret plans to assassinate Norm Stewart.

(Apologies to some readers — that last paragraph was super ridiculous and full of inside baseball about the Missouri/Kansas rivalry so please just move on if you don’t remember Stormin’ Norman or the former Senator from Kansas who really loved feeding the world and made erection pills palatable to old white dudes).

I mention 1996 mostly because it’s 2020 and it seems like the national Democratic Country Club is tapping the same tired old voices and running the same tired old playbook for how “Democrats are gonna win in rural America, again.” I would describe that strategy, in general, as being less mean to rural poor people than Republicans while also leaning in to agriculture exports and ethanol harder than Republicans.

Seriously though, Joe Biden’s “Plan for Rural America” isn’t terrible and I support a lot of things in it (focus on beginning farmers, local food, climate action, etc.). That in mind, I’m gonna provide some comments and feedback, Rural Policy Diary style.

WARNING TO READERS — YOU ALL KNOW I HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT POLITICS AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT WHEN I TALK SMACK ABOUT CORPORATE DEMOCRATS YOU SHOULD JUST STOP READING NOW. (Or, you could send me hate mail to my new P.O. Box because you want to support the U. S. Postal Service from the forces of privatization and existential dread, whichever you prefer).

My main critique of the Biden Rural Plan goes to the heart of what I’ve come to see as the corporate Democrats’ “Corn Belt/CAFO Appeasement Plan.” But other names could be in the running for this branded strategy, including:

— The “We Can Maybe Peel Off Some Farm Bureau Votes If We Act Republican Enough” Plan.

— The “Heartland Is Morally Superior” Pete Buttigieg Training Institute.

— The “We’ve Been Losing Ground Since 2000” Rural Democrats Think Tank.

— The “Export Our Way to Prosperity/Thank a Farmer” Caucus.

This group of rural Democrats, who know how to put on dress clothes and get regular haircuts, has a pre-existing network of consultants and campaigners and talking points. So they do know how to raise some moo-lah and work a campaign. They might not win much, but they are aware of the rules and know how to actually play the game of electoral politics.

Lots of them are former elected officials or public servants that move between government jobs, academia and the nonprofit-industrial complex. These are people, for the most part, who I would consider decent, fair-minded liberals who can be counted on for bail money or donations to support more access to parking at the farmers market. They are also more executive-function-capable than a lot of us, so they always nab the best campsites via prebooking through online reservations. Also, these are the people that get way ahead in the queue for the next Ted Genoways or Sarah Smarsh or Chris Leonard book at the public library so I have to wait for months.

These rural Democrats are the people who win at “meritocracy” is what I’m saying. A lot of them got college-educated in communications or journalism and think that “messaging and framing” are the cat’s pajamas. Or they’re MBAs or lawyers or something who get off when somebody tells them “you should run for office someday.”

There are numerous players in this tier of professional Democrats who are regularly counted on to provide knowledge and wisdom and advice about and for the rurals in the room. You got your Focus on Rural America, your Rural America 2020 and your One Country Project, to name a few. If you take a minute to peruse their collective advice for how to win rural voters this November, you’re gonna come away thinking that rural voters care primarily about export-oriented agriculture and ethanol.

And, wonder of wonders, former Vice President Biden’s Rural Plan includes very similar positions and focus for making rural America not-so-Trumpy again.

Notably, here’s the first detailed component of Biden’s rural economic revitalization agenda:

“Strengthen our agricultural sector by:

Pursuing a trade policy that works for American farmers. More than 20% of all crops grown and products raised in the United States are exported, supporting hundreds of thousands of jobs and helping to stabilize farm income. But America’s farmers and rural communities have paid a heavy price for President Trump’s tariffs. While Trump is pursuing a damaging and erratic trade war without any real strategy, President Biden will stand up to China by working with our allies to negotiate from the strongest possible position. And, he’ll make sure our trade policy works for American farmers.”

Ethanol and other liquid biofuels shows up a bit later, but they are gonna get theirs:

“Promote ethanol and the next generation of biofuels. Joe Biden believes renewable fuels are vital to the future of rural America — and the climate. The Biden Plan will invest $400 billion in clean energy research, innovation, and deployment — more than twice what America spent to put a man on the moon. And, as part of this effort, developing the next generation of biofuels will be a top priority. The Biden Plan will invest in research to develop cellulosic biofuels in a manner that protects our soil and water and addresses the challenge of climate change, while turning grass, crop residues, and other biomass into fuel. Doubling down on these liquid fuels of the future will not only make value-added agriculture a key part of the solution to climate change — reducing emissions in planes, ships, and other forms of transportation — but will also create quality jobs across rural America. From day one, President Biden will use every tool at his disposal, including the federal fleet and the federal government’s purchasing power, to promote and advance renewable energy, ethanol, and other biofuels.”

The process that got to Biden’s focus on agricultural exports and ethanol as cornerstones of his rural electoral strategy is not that complicated. He listened to the known players for advice. Those players wrote the documents and then ran them through the Democratic Platform Committee.

In addition to the organizations mentioned above, Biden has likely heard the same thing from longtime rural U.S. Representatives Collin Peterson (D-MN, Chair of the House Agriculture Committee) and Cheri Bustos (D-IL, Chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee). Peterson and Bustos are are in the Democratic Leadership, so that means they love to spend a good amount of time worrying about kids these days and all of their ridiculous ideas like reducing pollution and putting solar panels on rural schools.

But let’s be honest. There’s one “rural Democrat” who stands above the rest and the rest of us should probably just go ahead apply for permits to build that statue while we’re tearing down monuments to the Confederacy that were built during the McCarthy Era. That’s former Iowa Governor and President Obama’s Secretary of Agriculture for eight years, Tom Vilsack, if you aren’t a fan of long-winded foreshadowing.

Vilsack is considered by a lot of mainstream corporate Democrats to the be the consummate “rural whisperer.” I haven’t really figured out why, but then again, I have always wondered why the agricultural exports conversation leaves out the pesky fact that farmers don’t actually export anything themselves. Farmers raise crops and livestock and then sell those items to companies on the domestic market, then those companies decide what happens from there. JBS, Cargill, Smithfield, ADM, Bunge and Tyson do the exporting, not the Iowa corn farmer nor the Oregon dairy CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation).

Tom Vilsack, by the way, graduated from his old job as head of USDA and is currently collecting a $999,421 per year salary as president and CEO of the U.S. Dairy Export Council. Dairy exports might be increasing, but does it really matter if U.S. dairy farmers continue to decrease in number and struggle to pay their bills? Exporting our way to losing 9% of dairy farmers nationally in 2019 is not a very good strategy in my opinion.

But hey, I also don’t think it makes economic or environmental sense to set up gigantic water-guzzling dairy CAFOs in the desert just to “develop export markets” for dried milk protein concentrate that some agribusiness company cooks and ships as a means of looking out for its shareholders. It certainly doesn’t make sense for the climate, especially when liquid manure from dairy CAFOs is one of the fastest growing contributors to greenhouse gas emissions by agriculture.

It’s worth pointing out, too, that the 2009–2016 Vilsack-led USDA’s “all of the above/corporate agribusiness is our friend” strategy has been the subject of disgust and scorn by most of the family farm/sustainable agriculture/progressive populist practitioners and advocates and activists I’ve spoken with since I became a freelance writer in 2017 (the occasion that set me to typing for hire was Trump’s cancellation of the WOTUS Rules that the Obama Administration should have issued 6-months previous but they were too busy waiting around for Hillary Clinton to get elected and keep Vilsack in power at USDA for 8 more years or something).

I am glad that the Biden-Vilsack Rural Plan includes this provision:

“Strengthening antitrust enforcement. From the inputs they depend on — such as seeds — to the markets where they sell their products, American farmers and ranchers are being hurt by increasing market concentration. The Biden Administration will protect small and medium-sized farmers and producers by strengthening enforcement of the Sherman and Clayton Antitrust Acts and the Packers and Stockyards Act.”

But it would been nice if Tom Vilsack would have listened to the thousands of livestock of farmers who participated in the “stakeholder process” USDA rolled out while Vilsack’s boss, President Obama, was busy deporting Brown people or bailing out Wall Street bankers. Because Vilsack had all of the authority and wiggle room and data he needed to do right and protect fair and competitive markets for livestock and poultry farmers back in the day.

Here’s my analysis (props to the Daily Yonder for publishing my commentary) of the situation when Trump canceled the fairly narrow and weak Vilsack “GIPSA rules:”

For those looking for clues as to why Democrats have failed to find any traction in farm country, look no further than the debacle over implementing the GIPSA rules. When family farmers called for aggressive changes in the nation’s approach to assuring fair and competitive markets, the Obama administration offered weak rules to appease meat processing corporations. When implementing the rules required swift and decisive action, the Obama administration slow-walked the proposal, making it easy for Republicans to run out the implementation clock.

With this kind of track record in mind, it’s easy for farmers to ignore party platforms and policy whitepapers. Saying the right thing is important, but it’s only part of the policy-making process. Taking action and delivering on your promises is more important. Just ask the hundreds of thousands of livestock producers and organizations that represent them how the GIPSA rules didn’t make it over the finish line. You’re likely to get an earful of disgust, toward the Republicans who terminated the rules and toward Democrats who failed to get it done when they had the chance.

Talking smack publicly about Tom Vilsack is likely to make many a rural progressive uncomfortable, and I understand that. But there are at least two other rural progressives who share my views (disclosure: I have eaten numerous cheeseburgers and drank beverages of various kinds with each of these Vilsack critics. Also, we’re all from Missouri so maybe that’s saying something).

When Vilsack endorsed Biden, my buddy Jake Davis (who is a farmer, policy analyst and operates a local food hub and grocery store) had this to say to Fox News:

Vilsack, the former Iowa Democratic governor, endorsed Biden and joined the former vice president on his “No Malarkey” bus tour of Iowa in an appeal to rural voters. But some farmers said the move shows that Biden is tone deaf to the harsh realities of dairy farmers who are suffering from closures and bankruptcies.

“Vice President Biden clearly didn’t think through the ramifications of having someone like Secretary Vilsack on the bus tour and writing your agriculture policy when the former secretary is taking a million dollars out of the pockets of dairy farmers across the country,” said Jake Davis, national policy director at Family Farm Action, a non-profit progressive advocacy group aimed at curbing corporate agribusiness growth.

Davis, a farmer from Missouri who hasn’t endorsed in the 2020 race, called Biden’s tag-team with Vilsack this week a “clear misstep.”

“It just seems like a risk that one didn’t have to take,” Davis said.

Joe Maxwell, who was a rural Missouri State Senator and then Lieutenant Governor, had this to say about the former Secretary of Agriculture now shilling for dairy exports while dairy farmers go broke:

“The fact remains that they are grossly overpaid considering the (lack of) success dairy farmers are seeing in the marketplace,” said Joe Maxwell, former executive director of the Organization for Competitive Markets and an outspoken critic of mandatory checkoff programs. “Perhaps they should let their executives go and bring on a team that could actually help the the dairy farmers of America.”

All fun and politician ribbing aside, the fact that Vilsack, and many other corporate Democrats, keep embracing the “maybe someday farmers will stop liking Trump and then rural America can be great again” plan is just bad vote counting. Because the truth is, the number of people that make up the “we love agriculture exports and ethanol” vote is incredibly narrow.

Let’s see what the 2017 Ag Census has to say about that:

The AgCensus documents who gets the vast-vast-vast majority of government payments. These people are the “real farmers” in Trump’s base, the ones who like to stand behind the President in DC while they’re wearing cowboy hats and dismantling environmental “burdensome regulations.” They’re the Farm Bureau and Commodity Group members, nearly always aligned with Republicans, whose religion is “feeding the world” corn, soybeans, rice, wheat, cattle, cotton hogs and poultry. They are the row croppers and CAFO owners, because most other farmers don’t get a lot of government support (other than conservation programs).

One important thing to point out is that of the 643,145 “farms receiving government payments,” 238,041 are Conservation Reserve Program or other conservation easement program landowners. There would be some overlap, so it’s not as simple as subtracting 238k from 643k, but I want to point that out.

This AgCensus table lays it out in a bit more detail. Note that there are 554,195 farmers receiving government payments once Conservation programs are segmented out.

The table that makes all of kinds of sense to me is below, showing farms by concentration of farm products sold. This shows how few farmers we’re actually talking about in terms of “farm voters” that the Trump-Farm Bureau-Commodity Group Big Ag Lovefest actually represents. 68,608 grain farmers is one factoid.

These are livestock numbers from the same table. 42,289 cattle producers, 9,844 dairy farms, 10,924 hog CAFOs and 18,348 poultry represent 75% of sales for each product.

And for those receiving government payments: 70,868 farmers collect up 75% of the government cash.

Now I’m going to admit that this ain’t a perfect analysis. But this groups of 75%ers makes up the vast majority of the Farm Bureau and National Pork Producers Council and National Cattlemen’s Beef Association Club. Let’s be generous and say there’s 125,000 of them (there’s overlap between commodities).

I’ll point out I’m not talking about veggie and nut and fruit producers here, because as a farm ownership class are very very small in number and they don’t have much for crop subsidies and government payments (though they are certainly responsible for more than their fair share of water extraction).

My main point is that Democrats trying to triangulate about exporting soybeans and beef and prioritizing ethanol impacts about 125,000 farms nationwide.

Instead of focusing on this handful of producers, I would suggest that the political analysts and the media expand their notion of the “farm vote.” Take the local food/farmers market/sell-to-restuarant and foodhub types? There’s 130,056 of them, too. That’s equivalent of the Big Ag club when it comes to actual number of voters.

Or what about conservation program participants as a key component in the “farm belt voting block?” There’s 238,041 CRP landowners. 155,000 of those don’t have receipts, which means they are not farming much outside of landing their conservation payments. So that’s a sizeable block of potential voters larger than the Big Ag Base, too.

My biggest contention is that the GOP-supporting brain trust that gave us the Big Ag commodity system is all snuggled up with Trump, even if he’s responsible for reducing exports. Democrats should stop trying to bend over backwards and love up exports and CAFOs and ethanol. They’re a tiny, tiny number of “farm voters,” and taking these positions upsets a much, much larger number of people who oppose CAFOs and nitrogen-fertilizer water pollution and wildlife habitat destruction.

My advice to Democrats courting the farm vote: go where the votes are. Stand with the more than 800,000 cow-calf producers, the 150,000 local food producers and the more than 200,000 conservation easement program participating landowners.

Or feature and focus on the millions of rural SNAP recipients as voters. Or on the gas station attendants and waitresses getting undertipped by Republicans as a rural voting block that matters. Or the rural solar installers and windmill technicians as a group. All of these “potential rural voters” are included in the Biden plan. They’re just not given their due.

I also want to note that I’m not a Democratic party hack and I support Republicans or whoever also wants to take this stuff and run with it. Because overproduction of commodities is terrible for the farm economy (low prices = low farm income). And overproduction also increases greenhouse gas emissions and pollutes the water.

This one isn’t landing like it should, and I have more to say on these matters, but I need to get work and earn some money instead of embarrassing myself by picking a fight with people who actually have cars that run and influence in the world.

Let me know if you have love or hate or none of the above for the Biden-Vilsack Rural Plan. I’ll keep my nose to the grindstone trying to elevate the good people who are improving rural policy one low-income housing project or antitrust enforcement action at a time.

Rural Policy Diary is an experiment in sharing data, concepts, ideas, frustrations and analysis that emerge from my rural policy reporting. My core concerns are economic justice, the ecological and climate crisis, rural wealth and labor extraction, public ignorance of rural diversity and the games that politicians play to distract us all. I use this platform to organize my thoughts and catalog information that isn’t published elsewhere. I don’t spend a lot of time editing these posts for clarity and linearity.