U.S. Department of Agriculture via Creative Commons
Just before the holidays, a Wisconsin state news outlet called Up North News carried a sad story: The family dairy farm where Robert M. La Follette, the great progressive politician and founder of this magazine, grew up was shutting down. The farm’s milk cows were put up for auction on December 16.
“When the auctioneer brings down the gavel on Thursday, it will mark the end of the dairying era at the La Follette farm, birthplace of Robert M. ‘Fighting Bob’ La Follette, the father of the Progressive movement,” wrote Susan Lampert Smith.
“Ownership of soil means ownership of home, [and] the government whose people build and own their own homes lays broadest and deepest its foundation.”
John and Joan Judd, only the fourth owners of the hilly, 216-acre farm in Primrose, Wisconsin, still had the paperwork documenting the La Follettes’ 1850 purchase of the land where Fighting Bob was born in a little log cabin.
The death of a family dairy farm is a common event in Wisconsin, and a sign of the times. When the Judds bought the old La Follette place in 1969, there were 60,000 active dairies in Wisconsin, Lampert Smith notes. Today, there are about 6,600. The number keeps shrinking as small dairies go under, their cows sold off to a smaller and smaller number of bigger and bigger farms.
Startling statistics kept by the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that even as the number of dairy herds fell by more than half—from 15,838 in 2004 to 6,774 in 2021—the number of cows has stayed steady at about 1.2 million. There are just fewer herds.
To many people who consider themselves progressives, a large majority of whom now live in urban areas, small family farms are a relic of the horse-and-buggy days. Who cares?
But both the farm crisis and the pain of rural people affect us all. Many rural people who felt abandoned and looked down on by coastal elites expressed their displeasure by electing Donald Trump in 2016, voting for him again in even bigger numbers in 2020.
“The Trump election opened my eyes,” the poet and essayist Wendell Berry, who lives on his family farm in rural Kentucky, tells me. “It revealed to me that I’m not a liberal or a conservative. I’m a rural American and an agrarian.” Berry was appalled by the open contempt expressed by urban liberals for rural people after the 2016 election.
A recent Pew survey shows that, as the political divide between urban and rural voters has grown, both groups have become more convinced that the other group looks down on them. The “politics of resentment”—a term coined by University of Wisconsin political scientist Katherine Cramer to describe rural alienation—remains a driving force in U.S. politics.
There’s more at stake here than preserving quaint, postcard-pretty scenes of red barns and grazing cows (although the disappearance of small farms from Wisconsin’s rural landscape is disturbing, even to urbanites driving through on their way to someplace else). Our whole food system is becoming consolidated, vertically integrated, easily manipulated for profit by giant corporations, and dangerously vulnerable to disruptions in the global supply chain.
The political divide between rural and urban voters was not always so stark. In La Follette’s day, progressives saw the interests of working-class city dwellers and small farmers as closely connected. As governor of Wisconsin and in the U.S. Senate, La Follette pushed for legislation that broke up monopolies, supported unions, protected workers’ rights, and defended small farmers.
Like Thomas Jefferson, La Follette believed that agriculture was the heart and soul of American democracy.
“Almost all of the farmland in this country is held and owned by men who cultivate it,” La Follette said in an 1886 speech to Congress, which Lampert Smith quotes in her piece on the demise of the La Follette family farm. “Ownership of soil means ownership of home, and I tell you that the government whose people build and own their own homes lays broadest and deepest its foundation. Such homes, no matter how humble, are pledges of the perpetuity of the nation.”
Fast forward to our current moment, in which the perpetuity of the nation seems to be in doubt. On the first anniversary of the January 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, the news was full of dark warnings about a new “civil war.” The more we divide ourselves into warring camps, the more violent, intolerant, and hopelessly broken civil society becomes.
We need to find our way back to a politics that unites us around our common interests.
I just finished writing a book about Midwestern dairy farmers and their deep, decades-long relationship with the undocumented Mexican workers who now do most of the work on U.S. dairy farms. Many of these farmers voted for Trump—twice—but also feel a strong sense of kinship with the undocumented Mexicans they have come to rely on.
For me, the most interesting thing about writing the book was discovering how much these two groups of rural people have in common. They have been thrown together by global economic forces beyond their control. They are scrambling to get by in a radically changing landscape as the kind of farming that sustained families and rural communities for generations is disappearing, both in Mexico and in the United States.
The title of my forthcoming book is Milked, and there’s no doubt that both the dairy farmers who are enduring an unprecedented crisis and the undocumented workers who are propping up the entire U.S. agricultural economy are getting squeezed. But what shines through in their stories is their resilience, even in the toughest of circumstances. That’s one of the qualities that draws these hard-working people together.
Farmers who have visited the little villages of Southern Mexico where their workers come from were struck by a familiar sense of community. It reminded them of what life was like in Wisconsin fifty years ago. “It’s about neighbors helping neighbors, and everybody working together,” says dairy farmer Chris Weisenbeck. “Small town U.S.A./small town Mexico. Same thing.”
“It’s an agrarian society,” dairy farmer John Rosenow explains. “They find working on a farm honorable.” Most Americans don’t: “You’d take public assistance before you’d work on a farm.”
One thing I learned talking to Trump voters in rural Wisconsin and Minnesota (Weisenbeck voted for Trump; Rosenow did not), is that many who voted for Trump did so in spite of his anti-immigrant rhetoric, not because of it. Rural people who felt overlooked by both political parties liked what Trump said about taking care of “the forgotten men and women of America.” Trump also won their support by promising to scrap the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which changed the landscape for farmers in both the United States and Mexico.
In the United States, NAFTA accelerated the “get big or get out” trend, turning food into a commodity traded on the global market and setting off wild price fluctuations that ruined small family farms and favored agribusiness giants. It also propelled farmers to start hiring Mexican workers as they increased the size of their herds to try to keep up with low prices and overproduction.
In Mexico, millions of subsistence farmers lost their land as cheap U.S. corn flooded the market under NAFTA, causing prices to collapse. Many of those Mexican farmers migrated to the United States looking for work.
“NAFTA was a disaster,” says John Peck, executive director of Family Farm Defenders in Wisconsin. “U.S. corn dumping basically put two million Mexican farmers out of business and sent them north to survive. In fact, the empty return grain cars sometimes contain Mexican immigrants—even dead ones, as our Iowa members can attest.”
Trump won in 2016, in part, because he promised farmers and factory workers in the Midwest that he would cancel NAFTA and restore the value and dignity of their work. Many dairy farmers voted for him because of that, enlivened by the idea of shaking up an increasingly globalized system that clearly isn’t working for them, while tuning out a lot of Trump’s toxic culture war rhetoric.
Not all dairy farmers are Trump voters, of course. The Wisconsin Farmers Union is a progressive organization that hearkens back to the old La Follette model, seeking to unite dairy farmers around a set of policies that would control volatile prices and keep small family farmers in business.
In an opinion piece for the Wisconsin Examiner that Fighting Bob would have approved of, Danielle Endvick of the Wisconsin Farmers Union cast a skeptical eye on Big Ag and its friends in both political parties, criticizing “monopolization in agriculture, a lack of market transparency, and practices that put profits over people, the environment, and family farms.”
“We as a nation need to decide if we want our food to be grown and produced by a strong network of many farmers or an increasingly consolidated system controlled by a few dominant industry players,” Endvick wrote.
Likewise, we need to decide if we are going to preserve our democracy, in which a diversity of voices come together to lift up our common interests, or dive deeper into the politics of resentment and destruction. A better future will require us to learn more about each other and get outside our insular bubbles.
It will also require fighting to protect and preserve family farms.