Biden taps director of Wisconsin's Office of Rural Prosperity as one of his key agriculture and rural policy advisers

Kelliann Blazek

President Biden has appointed a Wisconsinite with extensive rural-policy experience as a special assistant for agriculture and rural policy. Kelliann Blazek will serve as one of 21 advisers on the Domestic Policy Council.

Blazek was appointed first director of Wisconsin's Office of Rural Prosperity in April 2020. But "before returning to Wisconsin, Blazek worked as counsel to U.S. Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, and helped include provisions in the 2018 Farm Bill that supported local food economies, organic agriculture and food-waste reduction," Mitchell Schmidt reports for the Wisconsin State Journal. "She also taught food law and policy at the Antonin Scalia Law School and spent time at the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic and the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. She grew up on a small beef farm outside of Bangor in La Crosse County, which her family still runs."

Blazek's appointment will likely be welcome news to those who want more rural voices in the Biden administration. A recent panel of rural policy experts at Kenyon College, for instance, agreed that not having such voices has resulted in "major structural problems" in nationwide policy. 

"It’s worthy of note that Wisconsin was not only one of the states Biden flipped to defeat Trump, it’s the site of Katherine Cramer’s research about rural resentment of urban, governmental and media elites," said Al Cross, director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, publisher of The Rural Blog. Cramer, a political-science professor at the University of Wisconsin, is the author of The Politics of Resentment, a book that chronicles how rural Wisconsin voters felt disrespected, misunderstood, and left behind by city-dwellers and liberal elites.