Noah Flora
This morning, while checking my beef cows for heat, I thought about “cow tipping”—the notion that, for fun, yokels sneak into a pasture and tip over a sleeping cow, because cows sleep standing up.
This has absolutely no basis in fact: Cows sleep with their legs folded under them, resting on the ground.
The whole premise of cow tipping is absurd to anyone who has spent any time with these thousand-plus-pound beasts that don’t move anywhere they don’t want to go. But the idea lingers in pop culture. It’s probably the most frequent question I get when I’m wearing my part-time-farmer hat.
Another question I get is how us farmers—a.k.a., rural American Trump voters—feel about the President’s trade war, which has sent agricultural commodity prices downward.
I can see why people ask. Trump voters in Midwestern states, also known as “farmers,” are getting jerked around by Trump’s trade war, which has resulted in retaliatory tariffs, most notably from China, and his plan to give farmers $12 billion in emergency relief, to address a problem he created.
My home state of Iowa is a popular backdrop for news stories featuring a fifty-something male farmer in front of a John Deere being asked if he’s losing his Trump religion. The New York Times ran a story headlined, “Why Trump Might Cave to China: Iowa Soybean Farmers.” The CBS Weekend News reported on a group of farmers sitting in an Illinois machine shed, with one saying he was worried, but would be a loyal soldier in Trump’s trade war “to the death.”
Our President, who spends up to eight hours a day watching TV, seems to have internalized this messaging — he announced his plan to deliver aid to farmers during a visit to Iowa, while sporting a “Make Our Farmers Great Again!” hat in John Deere green and yellow.
Like cow-tipping, the notion that a typical Trump voter is a farmer is just not based in fact.
Nationally, farmers and their families make up just 2 percent of the U.S. population. And while Midwestern “farm states” have higher farmer populations, it’s comparatively small even there.
Like cow-tipping, the notion that a typical Trump voter is a farmer is just not based in fact.
According to the latest agricultural census, there are 48,000 Iowans who say operating a farm is their primary occupation. If we assume that that every farmer not only voted but voted for Trump, that would be 6 percent of his electorate and 3 percent of the overall Iowa electorate in the 2016 election.
In fact, in Iowa—the farmiest of the farm states—a majority of Trump voters in the last election didn’t live on farms or even small towns. Most Iowan Trump voters live in larger cities and their suburbs. The same is true of Trump voters in other Midwest swing states.
It was once true that most people in Iowa and other farm states did farm. But the farmland you see today out of an airplane window is most likely farmed by a large operator. Some 60 percent of the state’s farmland is now controlled by mega-farms—those with an output of at least $500,000 a year.
These same mega farms eat up most of our country’s impressive agricultural subsidies, and will be getting most of the $12 billion in Trump’s trade war bail out. For example, Iowa’s third largest consumer of agricultural subsidies is an outfit called Greenview Farms. According to the Environmental Working Group’s database of agricultural subsidies, between 1995 and 2016, Greenview received $4.5 million in subsidies for their operation, which consists of 13,000 acres of soybeans and corn. This is some forty times the average Iowa farm size of 345 acres, which itself has doubled since the 1950s.
Our national mindset of rural middle America is outdated. Did you know there are more African Americans in Iowa than farmers? More Hispanics, too. And farmers themselves are becoming increasingly diverse.
There are more African Americans in Iowa than farmers. More Hispanics, too.
There are also many more people employed in manufacturing than farming in Iowa. The manufacturing sector is every bit as vulnerable to trade deals as agriculture, and those workers represent a significant source of Trump support.
Unlike the typical farmer, a blue-collar worker is unlikely to be millionaire and a longstanding Republican, and more likely be a swing voter questioning his or her support of Trump.
But, alas, interviewing a refrigerator assembler in Amana, Iowa, about his or her concerns over trade just doesn't mesh with the rest of the country’s preconceptions of the state.
Who’s up for some cow-tipping?