Rural voters strongly rejected President Biden, but his administration has started programs that are already reversing the decline of rural America, says Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, a longtime politician who has given 12 years of his life to the job, more than anyone.
Vilsack summoned Jonathan Martin of Politico for an exit
interview, and his frustration came through. “I think the challenge that we
have in rural America is that we talk a lot about programs and not about vision,”
he said when Martin asked what went wrong for Democrats in rural
America.
“The vision is, you don’t have to get big or get out,” which
has been a basis of federal agriculture policy since Richard Nixon was re-elected president in 1972, Vilsack said. “You
can actually have diversity within your agriculture and in your national
resource base in your rural economy and that can create enormous opportunity.
And we’re investing in it.”
Vilsack cited “carbon market” payments for preventing greenhouse-gas
emissions and other programs designed to help small and medium-sized farmers
and boost local and regional food systems. But he said rural voters have yet to feel the impact of changes made under Biden.
“After 50 years of one approach, you can’t do this in a
matter of a couple of years. You have to build the foundation. Now, the
foundation has been built. The economic model is changed by virtue of the
investments we’ve made in this administration. At least 10,000, probably more
than that, investments have been made just in this department, in creating a
different model so that small and mid-sized farming operations have an
opportunity to stay in business.”
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| Vilsack served eight years under Barack Obama and four under President Biden. (Associated Press photo by Carolyn Kaster) |
“Change is occurring,” he said. “It just hasn’t resonated
with people like you. Or people in this city. You gotta understand the
economics of this. You don’t. Nobody in your business understands it, which is
the frustrating part for me. When you have a ‘get big or get out’ mentality,
when you have an economy that is commodity-based, the big guys do really,
really well,” but smaller producers may not.
He said 2022 was the best year ever for farm income, “but if
you went out and talked to folks in rural places about that . . . that’s not
how they would have seen it. It was a record year for a relatively small number
of folks. So what happens, these folks are on knife’s edge, bad year comes,
they have a hard time. Who is in a position to buy their farm? The larger farm
or investment banks. . . . So you’ve got this model that we’ve had for 50 years
that has slowly eroded economic opportunity in rural places.”
While debate about the Farm Bill is “all about reference
prices” for crops, “The reference prices are about half a dozen commodities out
of 100 some commodities,” Vilsack said. “We’ve created an opportunity in all 50
states, over 100 commodities. We’re paying farmers to do this. We’re giving
premiums for what they’re growing and raising. It’s a brand-new concept. It’s
really innovative. And it creates not only a better value for the farmer, it
creates the ability to get that ecosystem market credit, to transform their
waste into something more valuable.”
He added, “People out there are beginning to get it. I’ve
had people come up and say, you know, for the first time, I see my kind of
operation at USDA. For the first time, I see some change. I see some investment
in small and mid-sized farming operations. You want to ask about legacy? That,
to me, is the most important legacy.”
Vilsack said USDA “doesn’t get anywhere near the attention
it deserves. Not for lack of trying, man. We tried.”
When Martin noted “the collapse of local and regional press,
which would be a way to get your story out,” and cited a newspaper Vilsack
knows well, the two-term Iowa governor interjected, “That’s bullshit. . . . The
Des Moines Register is a shadow of what it was. But it doesn’t necessarily mean
that it can’t cover what it should cover.”
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