Country Corner

by Steve Fairchild

Wither the farm bloc

The days of farm-state legislative coalitions may well be over

Flip over a couple pages to our UpFront section and you’ll see an excerpt of the Washington Post story that introduced me to the word “agracrat.” The author uses the term to describe farm-state Democrats who have stood behind their agrarian credentials to affect recent legislation—the reappearance of the farm bloc.

Apparently, my reports of the farm bloc’s death have been greatly exaggerated. But it is dying—a victim of specialization in agriculture, biofuels, biotechnology, animal rights activists and a spectacular ignorance among the general population about what it takes to coax life from sun and soil.

History books generally place the farm bloc’s formation in the 1920s.

It began as a set of legislators crossing party lines to vote in a bloc that favored agriculture. And, such a group—at various levels of strength and cohesiveness—has swashbuckled in the halls of Congress ever since, fighting for agriculture through the New Deal, in the aftermath of World War II, through lean times in the 1970s, through a couple major energy shocks and now in the bewildering politics of globalized trade.

That’s not to say the bloc has been harmonious. There always has been a laissez faire side and a price-support/subsidy side, and you can track farm legislation through the years to see just which group had more power at any given time.

Yet, in the past, when an issue arose that affected the millions of farm families across the country, farm-state legislators tended to sort out differences enough to bring their agricultural constituents’ voice to power.

It is the debate on cap-and-trade legislation that has earned the erstwhile farm bloc the moniker of agracrat. We’ll see how they fare. Their efforts so far foreshadow a fractured future.

In fact, it’s legislation like the cap-and-trade bill that fuels my prediction of the farm bloc’s demise. It’s not just the traditional internecine fighting between the agrarian laissez faire and subsidy sets this time. It’s a legion of carbon accountants, global warming believers, climate change deniers and meddling statists eager to control a portion of the economy.

That’s just for cap-and-trade. With increasing tenacity, other outside interests are finding their way into the halls of Congress to lobby on agricultural issues.

Twenty years ago, we were getting the first taste of what has become a siege against agriculture by animal rights activists. But who would have thought there would be an anti-corn lobby? There is, and, regardless of its validity, that lobby is successfully discrediting commodity agriculture as we know it.

The anti-corn lobby knows that if it can convince the electorate that commodity agriculture is a thing of the past, even the agracrats will join in. A politician, after all, spends most waking hours imitating a windsock.

And, while farm-state pols will never admit it, most of them know that if they can hold on just a few more election cycles, the demographic relevance of farmers finally will have gone the way of a spent hen.

Another wrinkle for the farm bloc is that, in earnest moves toward self-preservation, Midwest agriculture has evolved with the biotech revolution and now the biofuel movement.

As beneficial as both may be, big ideas—ones that carry philosophical ramifications—will fracture a voting bloc. Livestock producers and corn-based ethanol producers have gone to great lengths to get along in the past few years, but who could be surprised that an Oklahoma pol and one from Illinois might disagree on ethanol policy?

Like cap-and-trade legislation, biotech and biofuels have brought even more special interests into what used to be more specifically farm policy debates. As we divide ourselves, so shall we be conquered.

Regardless of what happens this session of Congress, a powerful farm bloc is on its way out. There will be battles fought and won on behalf of agriculture, but not solely by the usual suspects.

What’s to be done? It is time for every interest that can be nominally tied to agriculture to deliberate the political landscape. For the Midwest that means understanding that the big tent of agriculture isn’t just ours to pitch.

We may be in for introduction to some strange bedfellows. We’d better look carefully before we discount any potential ally. It’s time to coalesce with anyone who can advance our great industry—or at least protect it from agriculture’s opponents. The farm bloc is dying.

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