Most progressives are supportive of family size farmers, but I’ve learned from a recent blog here and a few other forums some of you have a real ax to grind against farmers. Farmers are a minority like most ethnic and racial minority groups, having chosen against all odds to pursue a career of long hours and short profits. Nobody in the progressive sphere would dare attack jews, muslims, immigrants, gays, etc. and farmers deserve the same respect.

It’s time we quit bashing the farmers that largely gave birth to our progressive movement a century or so ago. So to educate both our farmers allies and the “guilty parties”, I’m gonna set out to debunk some of the myths, falsehoods, and out and out Trump grade lies about farmers. In no particular order…

“They voted for Trump”… Trump lied and told them what they wanted to hear.

“Corn (which gets blamed for a lot) causes diabetes”… Yup, if you eat too much corn or anything you’ll probably get a bunch of diseases, but there’s no good science to back that claim up.

“Ethanol is a waste”… According to the GREET model calculations of “well to wheel” greenhouse gas production of vehicles, ethanol produces less GHG than gasoline. Ethanol plants also produce a feed bi-product known as DDG, which is considered a premium animal feed. 

“Monoculture is the problem”… Partly true, problem is finding other crops that will yield as much profit per acre to pay off the loans on the land.

“Farmers should convert to organic/non GMO production”… Would be great if they could, as organic and non GMO crops bring premium prices. Unfortunately few farmers can afford to quit using chemicals for several years until their land can be certified organic. And if farmers switched en masse to organics, they might saturate the market and drive prices down to unprofitable levels. Meanwhile, the bank still expects their loan payments…

“Farmers abuse farm workers”… Thanks to mechanization, farmers have become so efficient that they have the time and necessity to work off farm jobs to get health insurance and these days make up for some of their farming losses. So most farms have no hired help, and the family farms that have employees are very dependent on them and tend to treat them well. The abuses tend to happen in large scale corporate farms who have smart lawyers.

“Farmers should grow fruit and vegetables instead of corn and soy beans”… Great if you’ve got the market and can pull it off, for example our land grant university reports over thousand dollar an acre profits for strawberries. But fruits and veggies can demand a lot more of a farmer’s time so they don’t work for everyone. You also need enough markets to absorb your crops- If you’re close to a major metro area the land may be too expensive to farm, and out where I live the population is so thin that a couple 500 acre farms would probably saturate the local markets.

And this is by no means an inclusive list…  

Only a century ago fully a third of us lived on farms, and half of us in rural areas. Today only a percent or two of us are farming. What happened and is happening still? Farming never was a business in the conventional sense, it was a way of life that provided a modest standard of living for the farm families and a future for the children. You bought or the government gave your farm family a quarter section, 160 acres more or less, and using basic skills, animals, and a bit of capital you built a home, produced most of your food, and hopefully had a bit left to sell. The same story was repeated in farm after farm, four farms to a section, across the 36 sections excepting the 2 school sections adding up to over 100 farms, enough kids to fill a couple small schools, and a population often pushing a thousand in most townships.

Then came recessions, a depression, mechanization, “get big or get out” farm policies, investors driving up land prices, and monopolized suppliers and processors driving supply prices up and crop and livestock prices down.

So if you want to become an average farmer today you’ll need around 500 acres of land and that’ll cost a couple million $$$ even for scabby land. You’ll need a tractor and a combine, and each of them will set you back several hundred thousand, by the time you get done buying implements and a big truck to haul your grain to market you’ll have at least another million in equipment. If you’ve got any credit left you’ll need working capital, those 500 acres suck up a lot of expensive seed and fertilizer.

So today’s farmer has a at least 3 million dollars and more likely 6 million dollars invested in a business that will annually maybe produce  200 four dollar bushels of corn an acre times 500 acres for a gross revenue of $400,000… That’s about the annual net income you’d get on average from making a 6 million dollar stock market investment instead and you wouldn’t even half to get your hands dirty. It gets worse- 4 dollars a bushel is about what it costs to grow and harvest corn. Yup, farming utterly sucks as a business!

So the section that a century ago was home to four farm families and twenty or more people is now home to only an empty nester 60ish couple as potential famers have been driven from the land by mechanization, high capital needs, and the near impossibility of earning a decent living.   Farming isn’t a business, it’s a way of life, a proud culture with thousand of years of heritage, and we’re losing farmers.

So no surprise that the surviving farmers are getting rather testy to say the least. Being a misunderstood minority of only a percent or so of the population tends to make that minority defensive and defiant, longing for the better days of the past… No wonder farm country reeks of nostalgia and resentment. The party of the past, the GOP, feeds right into that nostalgia- And that’s our challenge as democrats.

CD7 DFL Outreach Officers report for November 2018:

It’s almost over… For a few months at least!

The election is less than a week away and the pollsters and prognosticators predict likely wins for our U.S. Senate and guvernoratorial candidates. Thanks to Collin’s unique appeal to both democrats and independents the republicans have all but given him a bye. That leaves us to concentrate on electing our down ballot state house candidates that the state DFL has darn near forgotten, despite needing to win at least a few rural seats to take back the house majority. So let’s make these state house candidates and our other DFLers running for county, local, and school board seats our top campaigning priority these last few days.

Weather (yup, a concern out here- In 2000 David Minge may have lost that close race due to snow pushing turnout down): Snow and morning temps below freezing are possible in the northern parts of our district satuday, sunday, and election day, adapt your campaigning accordingly.

Election day- This is Minnesota and we’re nice, but no doubt some Trump inspired idiots will be harassing voters. More dangerous is the odd republican election official that will block election day registrations, misdirect voters, etc…. Keep vigilant and report any problems!

Then celebrate election night, because on Wednesday the recount season begins… With so many tight elections the soon to be out of power GOP will be demanding and buying multiple recounts.

And after the holidays, the 2020 campaigns begin, and we have much work to do. For example, we need improved analytics- Checking out social media complaints of disenfranchisement on the White Earth Tribal Nation, I compared census counts of the adult population with voter registration counts in several townships and election turnout and found two townships where less that half the adults are even registered to vote! In this one tribal nation alone it appears that over 1000 adults aren’t even registered to vote, never mind voting. We need better analytics to find these voters and get them registered and voting in native and immigrant communities, especially as these are the communities whose populations are growing in rural america. We also need to spread our message and fundraise online- In just the last few weeks dailykos.com has raised a half million dollars online to stop the disenfranchisement of North Dakota native citizens. We need to nationalize our races, tell our story to the world, and fundraise everywhere… The state DFL ain’t gonna do it for us, so we gotta do it ourselves!

respectfully submitted, Dyna Sluyter

Been seeing signs of stress in my fellow democrats lately, and with us barely a frenzied week away from election day, it’s time to put this election in perspective. Our goal is to turn america into a 21st century progressive democracy with a strong middle class, education and health care for all, equality of opportunity, etc.. Unfortunately we’re not going to be able to accomplish that all this election cycle, and probably not the next either.

So Trump gets a bye, the Senate is constitutionally gerrymandered against us, and the House is just plain gerrymandered to the point we need a 6% majority just to maybe control half the seats in congress. According to prognosticators par excellence 538 we have a 17% chance of winning back the Senate and a much better 85% chance of taking back the House. That means we’re probably stuck with Trump and his GOP sycophants in the Senate for another two years. But winning the House gives us bargaining power, though it will probably take well into next year to seat enough democratic reps to become the majority thanks to prolonged GOP recounting and litigation of numerous close elections. Down ballot it get even better, as we’re favored to pick up several governorships and state houses that will assure us fair redistricting after the 2020 census.

So as we run or wheel down this marathon course we face daily uphills and downhills. Coast on the downhills, conquer the uphills, and no matter the outcome of this election we’ll be gaining and further towards our marathon victory!

 

 

 

The republican have a problem: They’re really a minority party, and if every eligible voter gets to vote and their votes get counted, they lose. That’s why they lost the popular vote in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections. But they’ve managed to gerrymander congress and take advantage of the senates disproportional representation to control both houses despite getting less votes than the democrats.

Case in point: College campuses, especially in rural areas. Here in western Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District we’ve got a bunch of them, and they’re often islands of democratic voters in a sea of red. Let’s focus in on Morris, where a University of Minnesota campus is pretty much half the town. Long ago the city wisely set up one of their polling places on campus, and turnout was great.

Again, democrats voting is a problem for republicans, so the chief election official of this red county told the city of Morris that they had too many polling places and should close some. Said election official even said that less people would be voting in the future… Not sure if she was proposing to speed the depopulation of this rural county or disenfranchise more voters. The city went along with the plan and cancelled the campus polling place.

While we old timers show up at the polls when they open, young college students aren’t usually so dedicated. Put the polling place where they’ll have to walk by it anyway and they’ll probably find time by poll closing to vote. But they moved the polling place to a National Guard Armory on the northern outskirts of town, up to a mile away from campus. This being the flat prairies with bare fields after the corn has been picked, there ain’t much to block November’s arctic blasts on that mile walk to the polls. And walking will be most students only option, given that the many students don’t have cars and the tiny transit system’s scheduled service doesn’t go to the new polling place and keeps banker’s hours.

And did I mention that 20% of the students are Native Americans…

We democrats brought ourselves to the brink of permanent minority party status by competing in politics without first reading the rulebook. In politics the rulebook is the constitution, which grants inordinate power to sparsely populated rural states. The republicans read the rulebook and built a rural powerbase, buying up “obsolete” AM stations on the cheap and linking them by newly cheap satellite time. They built a whole culture of resentment out of rural america’s losses. And in a manner reminiscent of the Nazis and the worlds other totalitarians they built and weaponized intolerance. We even helped the republicans by labeling center left democrats that could win in rural areas as “Democrats In Name Only (DINOs)” and abandoned them to defeat.

Thus we now find ourselves with a pretender president who lost the popular vote and not by a little, a house so gerrymandered that we need at least a 6% lead in the generic ballot to win a majority, and less than 10,000 North Dakotans will probably decide control of the senate in a nation of over 300 million. Clearly our democratic party needs to reinvent itself before we can become a majority party. That means welcoming and supporting moderate rural democrats and investing the same efforts and $$$ in rural areas as we do in the big cities.

Some of the big D democratic institutions are with us- The DNC is funding organizers in Indian Country in South Dakota and D-Trip is strongly supporting our candidates in even “lean republican” districts like Kansas 2. But some of the Democratic Party establishment still hasn’t gotten the message… Here in Minnesota our Democratic Farmer Labor (DFL) party leadership seems to be perfectly happy to lose the rural democrat held 1st and 8th congressional districts while celebrating flipping the suburban 2nd and 3rd districts. Same with the state house races, where the DFL needs to flip a dozen or so republican held districts to win back the majority… They’re seriously targeting only 16 or so while the republicans are targeting the few surviving rural democratic representatives.

We complain, and rightfully so. The party leadership responds by paying part of the rent of a cheap campaign office and maybe a grant or three in the thousand dollar range. The party officials from the cities pay us a few more visits. But it takes six figure campaign spending and paid staffers to flip a state house district, and any thing less is tokenism.

OK, I’m gonna break my rules and get emotional. I own property in Florida, in the 3rd most likely to get hit by a hurricane county in the country. It’s 10 miles inland but only 10 feet above current sea level, and it’s a 28 year old mobile home only rated for 100 MPH winds. I inherited it, and the developers never disclosed that it was likely to get by a major hurricane every 17 years on average. Big oil has yet to disclose to us that their product would cause global warming which causes more and more intense storms. Mom and dad trusted the oil companies and the developers and probably put over a hundred thousand dollars into their Florida retirement home, and a global warming fed hurricane will ultimately turn it into scrap wood and mold…

We were lied to, cheated, swindled, robbed, etc. and there’s no point in denying it.

My cynical side says that an honest politician will never be re-elected, never mind elected in the first place. But while the hurricane survivors deserve all the help we can give them, they deserve honesty too…

We have to rebuild safely way from the flood plains to withstand the strongest winds and then some. We have to stop dumping carbon into our atmosphere, creating a greenhouse that will ultimately be too hot for us to survive. Period.