Corn Belt Mafia

How Farmers Rule and Why It Should Inspire Us

In late April of 2017, the President of the United States learned that Wisconsin dairy farmers were having trouble with Canada. Specifically, Canada wasn’t letting much milk from American cows into the country, and dairymen in the Great Lakes region were pissed. In response, Donald Trump announced that he planned to pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA.

This move was a five-alarm fire for leaders and businesses in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. Since it was approved in 1993, NAFTA had transformed trade on the continent, creating a cross-boarder interdependence that, if suddenly severed, could collectively cost the three countries hundreds of billions of dollars. So within minutes of the announcements, people leapt into action. Phone calls were made, closed-door meetings were held, and a full-court press was initiated to get the President to change his mind.

One meeting that took place shortly after the announcement was called by a mystery man representing the interests of American farmers. Some say it was Secretary of Agriculture Sonny Perdue, others say it was someone else. What exactly happened that day in the Oval Office will be forever off-the-record, but there are rumors.

I’ve heard that the only things brought to that meeting with the President were a black marker and a big, colored map of the United States. But this was no ordinary map. It was an electoral map, and each state was colored the way it voted in the 2016 election. The middle of the country was solid crimson– Trump country, without a doubt.

I imagine there was no preamble. Right away, the President’s man pointed to Iowa, and with the black marker, jotted a dollar figure over the irregular rectangularness. It was the amount of money Iowa farmers would lose were the U.S. to withdraw from NAFTA. And then he wrote an even larger figure over the state of Texas. One over the state of Missouri. Nebraska. Idaho. Arizona.

He explained that American farmers overall had a lot more to lose from curtailing free trade with our nation’s largest trading partners than a few Midwestern milk sales. After all, the amount of corn and soybeans, beef and poultry, apples and avocados that the U.S. exchanges with Canada and Mexico dwarfs what we send to any other country. That means that if the trains suddenly stopped at the border, the price of agricultural goods would plummet, and farmers everywhere would suffer. This is not pocket change they’d be losing, he’d emphasize. This could be a “lose the farm”-level of economic devastation.

I think he would have left Wisconsin, home to the farmers the President hoped to save, until last. “$2.7 billion” is the number he would have written across this red state– the approximate amount of food and agricultural products that the state exports to Mexico and Canada every year.

“More than 80% of American farmers voted for you, Mr. President,” I imagine he would have concluded. “And farmers need to trade with Canada and Mexico.”

We’ll never know if it was this meeting, the calls from leaders in Canada and Mexico, or some other plea that won the day– probably a combination of all. But about twenty-four hours after President Trump issued his threat, he agreed to renegotiate trade with our North American neighbors while leaving NAFTA in place. Many American farmers and their advocates breathed a sigh of relief, and by the end of 2018, an updated agreement was in place– one which emphasized even more agricultural trade, especially for U.S. dairymen to Canada.

This is a story about the Corn Belt Mafia. A tiny group with the power to move American politics, and then move it again– flipping and flopping our political system in pursuit of whatever policy is favored by the most farmers.

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How Did Farmers Get the Power

Whether you’re a hardcore political wonk, a non-voter, or something in between, you probably have an idea about the political power of farmers. Washington’s commitment to farmers has passed into the realm of general knowledge and even satire. Writers and commentators across the political spectrum feel comfortable saying things like, “farmer aid is obviously necessary” and “I gladly, even proudly, subsidize small family farms,” without providing any further explanation. Politically-inspired TV shows like Veep and The West Wing casually drop references about “the zucchini lobby” and “corn subsidies,” and their audiences nod or laugh along, in on the joke. Even beyond explicitly political media– from reality TV shows to meme culture– if farming comes up, mentions of farm subsidies or other policies are likely not far behind.

All of this is evidence of the extraordinary cultural reach of the Corn Belt Mafia. This group is small but mighty– a ruthlessly organized collection of farm policy groups, lobbyists, support industry representatives, and farmers themselves who shape and reshape federal policy– from entitlement programs to environmental regulations to disaster aid– to meet the desires of America’s farmers and ranchers. Like the families of a traditional mafia, the Corn Belt Mafia is organized by membership in grassroots organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation, the American Corn Growers Association, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, and the Western Growers Association. The heart of this mafia’s territory is the nation’s breadbasket– Iowa and Illinois, but they also have strong and influential outposts in essentially every state in the union.

The Corn Belt Mafia is not new to Washington. In fact, the current incarnation of agrarian politics has been generations in the making. The Corn Belt Mafia’s origin story is shrouded in mystery, muddled by countless revisions that have transformed farmers from ordinary citizens into leaders chosen by destiny. After all– everybody eats, and therefore farmers should be in charge.

There is an intuitive logic to this. After all, if you control the food supply, then you can control the people, and by extension, their leaders. But the relationship between the American food supply and the American farmer is more complicated than the idea that “farmers control our food” suggests. After all, the vast majority of American acres are not used to grow food that’s consumed in the U.S., or by humans at all, and a significant amount of our food, especially produce, is grown overseas. On top of that, since most Americans buy their food from grocery stores, restaurants, and other food businesses rather than directly from farmers, it’s not farmers who control the supply, the price, or the distribution of the food we eat– it’s the intermediaries. So the idea that the Corn Belt Mafia’s political power flows from their direct power over our food supply feels half-baked at best.

Where, then, does the Corn Belt Mafia’s power come from? Frankly, the harder you look, the more baffling it becomes. American farmers are not a tremendously large voting block– today, they represent less than one percent of American voters, and their ranks are growing both older and smaller all the time. They are not an inordinately wealthy bunch either. Though the average American farmer is wealthier than the average American, farmers are not particularly prolific campaign donors. Farmers are overrepresented in the halls of power, only about six percent of elected officials in the House and Senate identify as being engaged in farming– hardly a majority. In short, there doesn’t seem to be a politically expedient reason for lawmakers to spend so much time and money catering to farmers.

And yet, politicians are, now as ever, eager and enthusiastic to serve the interests of the Corn Belt Mafia. This is not limited to a small group of politicians, or even to a single political party. Democrats and Republicans alike both serve farmers, though each put their own spin on it in order to claim that they alone are the true agrarian champions. But beyond cosmetic differences, many candidates from both parties, and even those that position themselves outside the two-party system, continue to favor extensive farm legislation, namely the Farm Bill, but also a raft of other federally-funded support programs and regulatory exceptions aimed at improving the economic wellbeing of the farming class.

This kowtowing has continued even as some policymakers, eaters, and even farmers themselves have questioned the actual impact of policies like the Farm Bill. Accusations that farm programs are wasteful, ineffective, and even harmful have become commonplace. And yet in the last ten years, in the same period when criticism has ratcheted up, dramatically more federal funds have made their way to farmers than ever before. During the first Trump Administration, farmers received more than $50 billion in federal payments on top of normal Farm Bill programs, which already amount to billions every year. During the Biden Administration, farmers received more than $40 billion on top of Farm Bill programs. Despite mounting resistance, even from some within the agriculture industry itself, farmers remain one of the most well-protected and subsidized groups in America.

But why? Why does the American political apparatus sway in the winds of farmer sentiment– even when it, ostensibly, doesn’t need to? How did farmers become so politically powerful in spite of all that is working against them? Why would a sitting President make a costly and unpopular move on the behest of farmers, and then get talked into flip-flopping in part by the very farmers he set out to help?

One possible answer to this question is that the basis of farmer power is simply a matter of perception. After all, according to a 2020 poll by Gallup, Americans trust farmers more than any other profession (politicians included). Overwhelmingly, Americans agree that farmers rule. So maybe the pull farmers have in the political realm flows mainly from the goodwill they’ve built with ordinary people, and that’s the whole story. But then again, many other groups enjoy good public perception– nurses and doctors, firefighters, teachers, even tradesmen– but lack anywhere near the same level of political cache.

Another possible answer is that the cadre of agricultural trade groups and farmer lobbyists fight dirty. But there’s not very good evidence this is true. Farm groups rarely support primary-ing their perceived political enemies, for example, in part because so few politicians would dare come down in opposition to them. Farm groups are powerful, without a doubt– they’re some of the oldest political advocacy groups in the country, and this long legacy serves them well. The industry also has well-heeled backers, both within its ranks and beyond. And there is indeed a taboo, amongst state and federal officials alike, against running afoul of agriculture’s power players. But this suggests that farmers and their representatives are powerful because they always have been– which just isn’t true. This argument doesn’t help us understand how farmers got powerful in the first place.

Though the real roots of farmer power are obscure, it’s still possible to find them. And this little-known history reveals that it’s not the public, politicians, or Washington elites who handed over the reins of power to agriculturalists. It was farmers themselves who seized control, who chartered their political destiny by building and sustaining a grassroots movement that spanned generations, securing for themselves unprecedented political, social, and economic power.

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Farmers Move America (And So Can We)

Today, it can be easy to feel like movements– especially movements led and advanced by ordinary people– can’t succeed. Not only are the cards of our current political and economic system stacked too unfairly in favor of the rich and powerful, but we “ordinary people” are simply too divided, by region, by religion, by experience and countless other factors, to ever coalesce around a single vision.

The fact is, American farmers started their movement in the midst of conditions at least as harsh as our own. During the radical early days of agrarian organizing, the average American farmer or rancher was not only deep in debt, lacking in formal education, marooned in the rural hinterlands, and generally cut off from communicating with the world, they were also regularly attacked and disdained in the national media. These farmers invented the phrase “dirt poor.” And after a long week of laboring in drought-stricken fields, they’d gather in the dirt floor homes they built with their own hands to read week-old newspapers from Chicago and New York that crowed about how great Wall Street was doing while scolding the whiny country bumpkins in Kansas and Nebraska who were just too stupid to understand that things were going well.

In that era, businesses were essentially unregulated. The leaders of both parties were hopelessly captured by the elite, and poor farmers and workers were largely shut out of American democracy. In Southern states, poor farmers of all races were literally excluded– prevented from voting by a combination of Jim Crow norms and the poll tax. Elsewhere in the country, ballot box-stuffing was common, as was paying the poor for their votes. At the same time, titans of industry and the monopolies they controlled were running amok, killing their own workers in their factories and in the streets. And all the while, those in power declared that the nation had never been stronger or more clearly on its way to realizing our collective destiny.

In the face of all this, farmers planted the seeds of the power they continue to harvest today. Some of those seeds were held over from even earlier generations of farmers, but many were discovered and cultivated in the trenches of those violent years. This was not the work of a single day or a single person, it was the excruciatingly slow march of tens, then hundreds, then millions, using trial and error to find their way to the seat of power from which they remade the system. In other words, the political influence of farmers we see today was first carefully cultivated and rigorously organized, and then fought for tooth and nail as part of one of the most disciplined and all-encompassing social and political movements in American history.

Perhaps this sounds hyperbolic, but it’s only because so much of our nation’s agrarian history has been forgotten. For most of us, our history teachers skipped directly from the Civil War to World War I, even though it was in those intervening decades that America’s farmers created and advanced one of the country’s only viable political third parties, which even after its demise continues to shape our political parties to this day. This movement represented a rare moment in American history when the poorest and most vulnerable Americans seized the reins of their democracy, their economy, and their society, and fundamentally reshaped it to serve their own interests. It was an intensely revolutionary time, one of several in the history of American agriculture. And one that most people have never heard of.

I’m fascinated by this hidden history of agrarian organizing, activism, and movement-making, and the evidence it provides that agrarian tactics and strategies remain effective today, both within the realm of farm politics and beyond. I think by understanding the overlooked stories of how and why farmers have come to rule the political roost will also reveal how groups and movements that wish to loosen the Corn Belt Mafia’s hold on food and farm policy might begin to tap the same hidden wells of power– from shaping consumer sentiment through patriotic myth-making to marshaling public protests to unseat the establishment.

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Farmers Rule

Farmers, now as ever, occupy a special place in the American imagination. Farmers are not just trusted and respected, they are beloved, a living symbol of American values– grit, ingenuity, integrity, and unfailing will to work towards a better life. This is true on a generic level, but it’s also true on a personal level.

“Nothing scares a member of congress like a grown man– a farmer– crying in his office,” I was told by a former Republican staffer. “There’s not much they won’t do to avoid that.”

There is something practical about this fear. A farmer’s tears do not just represent a single person’s sorrow. Farmers are not just farmers. They are American toughness incarnate, and to see this symbol of our collective strength reduced to tears is to reckon with the fact that our institutions have failed the very best of us. I’m sure for those with their hands on the levers of power, this feels like the harshest of indictments, the kind that they’d do just about anything to avoid.

And when I say just about anything, I mean it. Over the last century, America’s leaders have moved heaven and earth (in some cases, literally) in their efforts to help and protect farmers. Some of their efforts have been successful, though many others have failed. And the impacts of these failures were myriad, they’ve cost trillions of taxpayer dollars, run afoul of the Constitution, caused irreparable environmental damage, and led to radical interventions in markets across the economy. All of this, done and justified in the name of the American farmer.

What’s more, today, those vast and costly programs are failing a greater and greater share of farmers. Despite massive federal payouts to the industry, many farmers continue to struggle; with volatile prices, high costs, consolidation within agriculture and in the industries that support it, increasing competition for land from non-farmers, and countless other challenges. This seems to signal a growing disconnect between the Corn Belt Mafia and the grassroots farmers who created it, a chink in the armor of this powerful group if it’s not addressed.

On the other side of the existing political efforts to support farmers is a broad spectrum of people hungry to change American agriculture. People and organizations run the gamut, from human health advocates and food connoisseurs who crave a healthier and more wholesome food system to nature lovers and climate crusaders looking to blunt farming’s destructive tendencies on the landscape. In the mix too are labor activists aiming to protect farmworkers in the face of lax regulatory protections, those fighting to increase equity in the distribution of farmland and opportunities, and even national security hawks who see the current structure of our food and farm system as overly-dependent on overseas products and inputs.

But like a long-armed jock holding back his much smaller opponent as they swing at the air, the Corn Belt Mafia apparatus has largely foiled attempts to make anything more than cosmetic changes to farm policy. Despite this broad coalition of would-be changemakers, almost no progress has been made, and lawmakers have largely doubled down on the status quo. And yet these adversarial groups keep attempting the same old methods, facing off with the farm industry using the same tired tactics, despite decades of evidence of ineffectiveness.

What, then, would a more effective strategy look like? This is where things start to get interesting. Because whether you’re looking to buttress, redirect, or subvert the political power currently held by the Corn Belt Mafia, it starts with gaining a deeper understanding of the movement that farmers have built. It requires knowing that farmers hold this unique position in America’s public and political consciousness is not a matter of pre-destiny. Farmers, and by extension their industry and lobbyists, reached this height through deliberate and consistent action. And the good news for the rest of us is that the American farmer’s journey is not only fathomable, it’s replicable.

Over the next year, I’m planning to share what I’ve learned in this vein– an account of the steps that farmers have followed in order to define their narrative, advance their cause, and consolidate their power. We’ll plumb the depths of agricultural history, tracing the progress of agrarian efforts over time to understand how others might follow in their footsteps.

There’ll be insights here for anyone looking to collaborate with farmers, to take on the Corn Belt Mafia directly, or who are simply curious about movement-making. Plus, we’ll find answers to nagging questions about our democracy– like why Iowa matters so much in national campaigns and why rural voters have more power than urban ones. All of this knowledge is not only critical for anyone hoping to operate in modern policy arenas, but also for anyone hoping to replicate farmers’ success. And most of all, understanding how farmers came to rule rather than be ruled, is critical for those aiming to go toe-to-toe with the Corn Belt Mafia, and win.

At its heart, this story is a tale of how a diverse and tempestuous group of ordinary, working Americans joined forces to level the economic playing field and revolutionize our democracy, forcing it to serve the people rather than elites and special interests. For many today, this story sounds like a pipe dream. But the history of American agrarianism proves it is not. Though the work is difficult, time-consuming, and often deeply discouraging, our ancestors found success by following the path we’re about to explore, and that success has been resilient enough to spawn the modern day Corn Belt Mafia without undermining public trust.

After all, farmers don’t rule by divine right. Farmers rule because they put in the work. And so can we.