The 2016 election made the nation fully aware of the stark political divide between our urban and rural communities. The map showed the hard reality: we are deeply divided between red and blue. But not between red and blue states. Across the nation we are divided between urban blue and rural red, with some purple mixed in — suburbs, some smaller towns, a few outlier progressive rural places.
We all read plenty of commentary in the aftermath. Every media outlet from the coasts seemed to send some reporter off to some rural community in the Midwest or Appalachia to interview folks about their political views and identity. But hardly any commentary or reporting looked into the background of the divide, or asked in any serious way what happened to the American landscape to produce the divide. Few dug into the history of the changing dynamic of rural and urban America. How one national party has long exploited trends in rural America, and the other largely has pretty much ignored them. How one party has sowed division between the cities and countryside, and the other has never figured out how to respond.
And virtually none of the commentaries, and scant few politicians, addressed one of the main causal factors: how over the last seventy year the spread of industrial corporate agriculture has degraded land and water on a massive scale, while hollowing out our rural communities and economies.
This is all background to this story from the Storm Lake Times in western Iowa. You may recall that the small-town Storm Lake Times and its editor, Art Cullen, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for reporting on the impact of corporate agriculture on water quality and politics in Iowa. In “Broken Towns” Cullen highlights local songwriter Todd Partridge:
If you are looking for the frustrated while male, stuck in time and place, Partridge knows him. Sac County always has been reliably red Farm Bureau territory, the home of Rep. Steve King. Partridge is of these people; he sings about the guy challenged to pull his tooth out with a pliers drawn from his overalls. True story from Lohrville, about the same size as Auburn down the highway where the hog trailers roll.
Some of those “deplorables” are his neighbors, old school chums from Wall Lake View-Auburn, and even fans of his band “The King of the Tramps” that plays around western Iowa.
His protagonist is “unhappy like us all,” whose place used to be self-sufficient like him. Now he’s working for Con Agra or Monsanto or Tyson. His job is 15 to 30 miles away and half the homes in town are rented, owned mainly by just a couple landlords.
Iowa is one of the most intensively commodified agricultural landscapes on the face of the Earth. The logic of economic efficiency has been worked out to the nth degree—and shows in the utter transformation of its native prairie landscape, the degraded state of its soils and waters, and the draining of its human community. “People look for an answer to decline, and are led to believe you can find it in the way things used to be.”
The Raccoon River that runs past town toward Des Moines is filthy with ag chemicals. When the chemicals came on hard following World War II, corn yields nearly doubled while the number of farms dropped in half. Then the huge hog confinements came in to gobble up all that corn, and drink the underground aquifers dry. You can smell them in the dew of a still summer morning.
“We’re pimping ourselves for $16 an hour as hog confinement janitors so we can send our profits to China, which owns the hogs,” Partridge laments.
You put up with it. You mind your own business. Economies that slowly eat at the heart of rural places — endowed with natural abundance and wealth —appear to be too daunting to fix. The people are told that government is the problem. And that abortion is murder — it’s preached all over the region every Sunday.
Still, it is easy to be here. You can be left alone. Nobody ever heard of you or even noticed, until you do something that should be entirely predictable: tell the world to take a flying leap, because we are going to Make America Great Again.
There will be no change in this reality—social, political, economic, or environmental—until we change the behemoth: the corn-soy-hog empire that rules so much of the American landscape. Until we begin to rebuild our rural places from the soil (and water) on up. We have plenty of enterprising farmers and food processors who know what to do and how to do it, but they do so in the face of markets and policies they have to fight all along the way. Relocalizing our food systems, rediversifying our farms, prioritizing soil and water conservation and restoration, sequestering atmospheric carbon through more perennial farming options on the land, focusing on human health and nutrition, treating immigrant farm laborers with respect as neighbors, encouraging young people to stay and invest themselves and make a difference, addressing the opioid crisis as one of the human spirit… all and more are parts of the way we get to the roots of resentment, and foster change. It won’t come from looking down on, or away from, rural America. And it won’t come fast. But it will begin to come when we listen, and speak the truth of how we got here.
If you are not a Midwesterner or rural person, please read the whole piece.
And if you are presidential candidate, please absorb the story and speak it as you travel among the broken towns of Iowa.
