Election forecasters predict that 54 “battleground” races will determine who controls the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025, with numerous rural and agricultural districts in play. There are 435 seats in the House, which are now occupied by 220 Republicans and 212 Democrats. Three open seats are due to death or resignation. Republicans are expected to retain one of these seats (the Wisconsin 8th), while Democrats are expected to retain two (New Jersey 9th and Texas 18th). Either party needs to win at least 218 seats to control the House.
Cook Political Report rates 11 seats of the 54 battleground races as “Democrat-incumbent tossups” and 12 as “lean Democrat.” Thirteen seats are considered “Republican-incumbent tossups” and 6 districts “lean Republican.” In 2022, Republicans picked up 10 additional seats to win the House majority. This year, Democrats are expected to win back 2 seats, Alabama’s 2nd and New York’s 22nd congressional districts, due to redistricting.
The following table contains information about 10 rural or rural-related districts that Cook considers a “Tossup.” All 10 districts have incumbents who are members of either the Agriculture Committee or Agriculture Appropriations Committee. These committees are important in determining rural-related budgets and the still-stalled farm bill re-authorization process that is likely to be negotiated in the 119th Congress. Third party candidates are not included in the table.
Democrat Incumbent Tossup Races
Republican Incumbent Tossup Races
The Democrat’s hopes for a House majority are based on retaining first-term incumbents Peltola, Caraveo, Davis, Vasquez and Gluesenkamp Perez. Each of these candidates, except Peltola, serve on the House Agriculture Committee.
Jared Golden has won Main’s very-rural 2nd district since 2018 despite the six-point Republican lean of the district’s voters. All 6 Democratic incumbents have tended to express their independence over party loyalty, whether by voting to move the Republican House Agriculture Committee farm bill out of committee or by disagreeing with President Biden on select issues, such as his support for additional U.S. military aid to Israel’s occupation of Palestine or his student loan forgiveness program.
Republican plans for retaining their current House majority are dependent on winning some of the less urban districts, such as those currently held by Gluesenkamp Perez, Davis, and Caraveo, along with retaining less rural but large industrial agricultural districts in California’s Central Valley. The Republicans are defending districts where President Joe Biden won with significant majorities.
Both party campaign committees are investing millions of dollars in each of the 10 rural tossup battleground races.
Control of the U.S. Senate is also in contention. Currently, there are 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans and 3 Independents in the Senate. All 3 Independents caucus with the Democrats, giving the Democrats a small majority. The closest races are expected in Ohio, Montana and Michigan, all with large rural voter constituencies. Cook Political Report rates the open Michigan Senate seat and Sherrod Brown’s (D) Ohio seat as tossups, while Montana’s Jon Tester (D) incumbent seat leans Republican. The Democrats will almost certainly lose another seat in West Virginia, with the retirement of incumbent Joe Manchin (I).
Rural voters are critical in determining the outcome of many elections, though more battleground races are in urban or suburban areas. That said, with elections so close in many House districts and several Senate races, small marginal changes by rural voters can contribute to making significant contributions to election outcomes.
Here’s a brief look at a few House candidates:
Marie Gluesenkamp Perez
In Washington’s 3rd district, incumbent Rep. Marie Gluesenkaamp Perez speaks with a member of Randle Veterans Coffee, which meets monthly. Her website proclaims: “Marie Gluesenkamp Perez’s working class roots run deep in Washington State.” Gluesenkamp Perez, who with her husband owns an auto shop, graduated in 2012 from Reed College in Portland. In 2022 she was elected to Congress in a district that Donald Trump won 51 to 47 in 2020. This year she is again up against Joe Kent, an Army Special Forces veteran who claims the Covid-19 vaccines are an “experimental gene therapy” and who employed the consulting services of a Proud Boy member during his 2022 campaign.
Gabe Vasquez
In New Mexico’s 2nd District, Rep. Gabe Vasquez represents a district that is larger in landmass than the state of Pennsylvania. The Democratic incumbent is seen here kicking off Pride Month with Silver City PFLAG. Vazquez, a first generation Mexican American, is a former member of the Las Cruces city council. He is up against Republican Yvette Herrel, who in 2022 Vazquez ousted from Congress, defeating her by 1,350 votes. Herrel is campaigning to win back her seat by running on two issues: border security and crime. Albuquerque, one quarter of which is in the 2nd district, has a rate of violent crime that is almost double the national average.
Lori Chavez-DeRemer
In Oregon’s 5th District, Republican incumbent Lori Chavez-DeRemer, is outside her party’s mainstream, being one of only six Republican House members to sign a pledge to respect the results of the 2024 presidential election. Politico has identified her as the second-most bipartisan member of Congress. This year Chavez-DeRemer is being challenged by Janelle Bynum, a member of the Oregon House who with her husband Mark owns several McDonald’s franchises in the Portland area. Bynum has twice gone up against Chavez-DeRemer in Oregon State House races, defeating her each time.
Don Davis
In North Carolina's 1st District, Rep. Don Davis has the distinction of being the lone Democrat in Congress to co-sponsor a GOP bill to limit Medicare’s ability to negotiate drug prices. He is seen here taking the mic at the Second Annual Pecan Pickling Film Festival in Bertie County. He is up against former defense contractor Laurie Buckhout. On X (formerly Twitter), Buckhout has voiced support for “the Jan 6ers” and identifies herself as: “Mom. Wife. Combat Commander. Business leader. America First Conservative Fighter.” She moved to North Carolina from Virginia in 2021 after selling her company, Corvus Consulting, described on a website for government contractors as a “cyber, spectrum and electronic warfare organization dedicated to providing defense-related consulting services.”
The Christian Right’s Playbook to Elect Donald Trump in November
For the past half century, the Christian Right has been mastering the tools of electoral democracy in order to erode and end it. The methods and the players have evolved over time, but the goal of societal dominion has not. Today, leaders of the Christian Right have amassed considerable political power in many parts of the country and in the Republican Party.
Paradoxically, they have been remarkably open about their political strategy. This is the story of one key strategic initiative and how to counter it.
In March, Lance Wallnau, a leading strategist on the Christian Right who many consider to be a prophet and an apostle, told an audience of prospective activists at an Arizona church, “there are 3,143 counties in the United States and the Lord showed us that 19 are going to determine the future of America.” (Last year he said it was 14, but apparently the Lord’s plans changed.)
For more than a year, Apostle Wallnau and the America First Policy Institute, a think tank staffed primarily by figures from the Trump administration and his past election campaigns, have targeted these 19 counties, located in nine battleground states. Their “Project 19” campaign has triaged the target states into two tiers.
Their focus is on blue suburban counties where evangelical voter participation was proportionately less than elsewhere in 2020, and where the margin was only a few thousand votes. They are especially focused on ethnic and racial minority outreach to help make up the difference.
This summer, Wallnau organized multi-day events in Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin, that mixed old time summer tent revivalism with political indoctrination and training. Branded The Courage Tour, the events were aimed at making thousands of people at each venue feel part of a political and religious cause far greater than themselves. In Arizona, Wallnau trained activists in early voter engagement and targeted unregistered and infrequent conservative evangelical voters in Spanish-speaking precincts in Maricopa County.
By the time the tour got to Wisconsin in August, Wallnau and his allies had also begun recruiting and training election workers and poll watchers. The tour had also caught the attention of CBS Evening News, which aired a two-part profile of Wallnau in Wisconsin. Matthew D. Taylor, author of the forthcoming book, The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy, reported that 2,500 people attended the Wisconsin event and 50,000 others watched the live stream on Facebook.
“If at the end of the day,” Wallnau said under a circus-sized revival tent, “we haven’t activated you to either be a poll watcher, a poll worker, somebody involved in election integrity, or someone who can help someone else get out a vote—I’m not sure we have done what we have to do.”
The Tour’s election integrity expert, Joshua Caleb Standifer, who founded the 501(c)(4) organization Lion of Judah in January 2024, sounded more ominous. He says he wants “Christian Patriots” to be a “Trojan Horse” in the electoral system and reform “the mountain of government.”
Wallnau told the crowd in Wisconsin “January 6th was not an insurrection. It was an election fraud intervention.”
The Courage Tour moves to Pennsylvania next, with a revival in Monroeville, in Allegheny County near Pittsburgh on September 27-28. The lineup of speakers has not been announced as of this writing. But past events have featured speakers Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), Turning Point USA leader Charlie Kirk, and other Christian Nationalist luminaries.
The American First Policy Institute, which is kind of a silent partner on the tour, publicly claims several dozen “movement partners“ that are also engaged in on the ground election work, including, Early Vote Action, the libertarian Club for Growth, and such well known Christian Right organizations as Turning Point USA (TPUSA), Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition, the Family Research Council, American Principles Project and the Family Policy Alliance.
New Horizons
One religious formation on the cutting edge of contemporary Christian Right politics is the New Apostolic Reformation—of which Apostle Lance Wallnau is one of its leading exponents.
The term “New Apostolic Reformation” was coined in the 1990s by the late C. Peter Wagner, a professor at Fuller Theological Seminary. He observed that Pentecostal and charismatic churches that operate outside of denominational structures, were the fastest growing sector of Christianity in the United States and worldwide. In this movement, Wagner saw an emerging new paradigm that he and his close associates eventually sought to shape, organize and lead.
The movement comprises loosely organized, often international networks of independent or nondenominational churches and ministries. New Apostolic Reformation leaders believe that Christian institutions have mostly gotten it wrong for the last 2,000 years. They have sought to replace historically democratic church governance in Protestant churches with what they call “apostolic governance.”
To achieve this, they seek the restoration of modern-day apostles and prophets and the Church of the First Century, as they imagine it. The New Apostolic Reformation vision also draws on beliefs and practices from earlier religious movements, such as the post-World War II era Latter Rain movement in Pentecostalism—which popularized the idea, drawn from the Book of Ephesians, that the only legitimate church offices were apostle, prophet, evangelist, pastor and teacher, known as the “five-fold ministry”—and Christian Reconstructionism, which emerged from Calvinism and helped shape the theocratic trend of the Christian Right in the 1980s and 1990s.
Pentecostal and charismatic Christians possess a range of what they call spiritual gifts, including speaking in tongues and healing by the laying on of hands. Apostles and prophets are said to be in direct communication with God.
The New Apostolic Reformation is spearheading an increasingly politicized movement that seeks religious and political “dominion“ in a biblically prophesied End Times, in which they believe themselves to be living. Their mission is to overcome the largely Satanically-controlled world via corporate prayer, political action, and very possibly become a supernatural army along with angels to sweep away all things demonic, and emerge as the ruling body in the U.S and the world.
In recent years, this variable movement has become overtly political, epitomized by the “Seven Mountain Mandate.” This is the idea that Christians—of the right sort—are supposed to take dominion over society by conquering “the seven mountains” of influence, or culture: government, religion, the family, education, arts and entertainment, business and the media. The seven mountain metaphor packages a lot of once complicated theology into a religious and political vision easily accessible to wide audiences—many of whom may never have heard of Wagner or the New Apostolic Reformation.
The notion of the seven mountains has, according to one 2024 scholarly poll, been spreading rapidly and “now dominate[s] evangelical Christianity even beyond the portion of evangelicals in the charismatic/pentecostal camp” with 41% of American Christian adults believing “God wants Christians to stand atop the ‘7 mountains of society,’ including the government, education, media, and others.” The Seven Mountain Mandate has thus become a central theme in right-wing political organizing around the nation.
‘By their deeds you will know them’
The New Apostolic Reformation has been in the news this year because of its evident proximity to power. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who flies the movement’s Appeal to Heaven flag featuring a green pine tree outside of his Washington office. The New Apostolic Reformation flag was also flown outside the New Jersey summer home of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Tom Parker, the Republican Alabama Chief Justice who cited biblical texts and Christian thinkers in his February ruling on in vitro fertilization, has publicly discussed his support of the Seven Mountain Mandate.
Another prominent New Apostolic Reformation leader is Donald Trump’s spiritual advisor, televangelist Apostle Paula White-Cain. In 2017, she delivered the invocation at his inauguration and is currently head of the Trump campaign’s National Faith Advisory Board and active in Project 19 as one of the chairs of America First Policy Institute.
In January, at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington, White-Cain claimed to have prophesied his 2016 election in 2011, when he first approached her about running for president. According to White-Cain, Trump asked, “Well, what does God say?” After praying with dozens of pastors, she told him, “Sir, you’re going to be president someday.”
According to the New Apostolic Reformation, standing in the way of Trump’s reelection are demons.
In March, Lance Wallnau said on Flash Point “the left is loaded with demons.” “I don’t think it’s people anymore ... I think you’re dealing with demons talking through people.”
Kamala Harris as Jezebel
Shortly after President Joe Biden announced in July that he would not seek reelection and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, Wallnau posted videos in which he warned that Harris represents “the spirit of Jezebel” and declared she is “the devil’s choice” for president.
The biblical figure Jezebel was the wife of Ahab, King of Israel who, according to the Book of Kings, used her powers to seduce her enemies and had several Hebrew leaders put to death. Casting Harris as a “Jezebel” continues a long history of racist tropes.
What’s more, casting anyone as controlled by demons makes them potential targets of violence. That Wallnau and other Christian Right figures, past and present, have had the gall to characterize Harris as demonic, may not bode well for those who follow her leadership.
After the September 10 debate, Wallnau blamed Trump’s lackluster performance on “witchcraft.” Appearing onFirePower, a Youtube show hosted by his allies Mario Murillo and Todd Coconato, Wallnau said:
She can look presidential, that’s the seduction of what I would say is witchcraft. That’s the manipulation of imagery that creates an impression contrary to the truth, but it seduces you into seeing it. So that spirit, that occult spirit, I believe is operating on her and through her.
‘Chasing the vote’
In some states it is legal for someone to collect absentee ballots from individuals and cast them as a group at election offices or drop boxes. This is sometimes called ballot harvesting. The focus is usually on helping elderly voters or people who live in remote areas ensure their ballot gets in on time. But in some states there is greater flexibility, and ballots may be collected from any group of people.
Since the Covid crisis made in-person voting risky, policies expanding early voting by mail, access to absentee ballots and ballot harvesting have spread widely in the states, even as the pandemic has receded. Twenty-four states and D.C. now allow someone chosen by the voter to return their ballot, and 15 states specify who may return ballots on behalf of voters (such as a family member or caregiver), according to Ballotpedia.
During the 2020 election (and sometimes since) proponents of the Big Lie claimed these methods contributed to voter fraud. Not only was this not true, but Christian Right groups had been using these methods since at least 2020. The Washington Post reported that Christian Right activist Ralph Reed told a meeting of the secretive conservative leadership group Council for National Policy in February 2020, that his Faith and Freedom Coalition “is going to be harvesting ballots in churches.” He said, “We’re going to be specifically going in not only to White evangelical churches, but into Hispanic and Asian churches, and collecting those ballots.”
The folks behind Project 19 call this strategy “chasing the vote” by which they mean organizing voters to vote early and by whatever means the law allows. TPUSA claims to have employed a “ballot chasing army” in 6 states: Arizona, Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. This is significant because, according to the Wall Street Journal and CNN, the Trump campaign appears to have largely outsourced their get out the vote efforts to allied nonprofit organizations like TPUSA. (Concerns have been raised, however, about ineffectiveness and corruption on the part of TPUSA in past elections.)
Opportunity knocking
As disturbing as all this may sound to people who are concerned about the Make America Great Again and New Apostolic Reformation movements, the same electioneering options being deployed by Apostle Wallnau and his allies can be used by everyone else. And while they are not a panacea, they provide potentially powerful and empowering tools for those opposed to the Christian Nationalist political agenda.
While every citizen can use these tools to counter the Christian Right’s 19-county strategy. Such campaigns help citizens build the knowledge and skills needed to participate more fully in our democracy.
Early voting typically means that wait times and lines are shorter, and voters need not worry about extreme weather events that are due to climate change. For community organizers, the longer voting periods provide an opportunity to bank early votes rather than rely on last-minute get-out-the-vote efforts.
To underscore how much of an advantage this can be, let’s look at when early voting begins in just the Tier 1 states.
In Pennsylvania, early voting by way of mail-in ballots, cast in-person or at drop boxes, begins on September 16—50 days before the election. One can apply for absentee or mail in ballots as early as April. However, implementation of when you can receive and cast them, varies greatly by county. In the four counties targeted by the Christian Right, “absentee or mail in” ballots will be available in Bucks County, Montgomery County, Allegheny County early to mid-October. In Chester Country, “Mail-in ballot drop boxes open: October 22.”
Other states are less complicated. In Wisconsin, early voting begins 14 days preceding the election and ends the Sunday before the Tuesday election, but that may also depend on where you live. Nevada early voting, begins Saturday, October 19, and runs through Friday, November 1. In Arizona, early voting begins 27 days before the election, and ends the Friday before the election.
While many nonprofit organizations and government agencies provide generally excellent voter information, those that mention early voting may tell you when it ends, but few say when it begins. New Georgia Project stands out as one that does. Early voting in Georgia begins on October 15 and ends on November 1.
In most states, you may not need an excuse to vote early, although in some states you do and in others you may need to request an absentee or “mail in” ballot well in advance.
Looking ahead, expanded voting options will need to be woven more deeply into our political culture in order to sustain and increase democratic participation and accessibility.
Caveat emptor!
Voting laws, rules and practices sometimes unexpectedly change, and unfortunately, dirty politics can invade even the most basic of civic activities from voter registration to casting a ballot.
Alabama has made ballot harvesting a crime. The law is being challenged in court as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. Voting and disability rights advocates say that the ban is a restriction of free speech and makes the ballot less accessible to those who are unable to visit polling places in person. The state’s GOP officials maintain they are protecting “election integrity.” Moreover, in some states registered voters have been purged from the rolls without their knowledge. It is wise to check your voter registration status from such authoritative sources as Vote411.org or Vote.gov. And if you believe you have been improperly removed from the voter roll, you can file a complaint with the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department.
What’s more, the hacking of personal information has invaded this civic space. One such hack was led by none other than Elon Musk, the owner of the social media site X, formerly known as Twitter. CNBC reported that the Musk-founded America PAC is collecting personal data from people in swing states under the guise of helping them register to vote online. This scheme is under criminal investigation in Michigan. America PAC’s main purpose is to promote the candidacy of Donald Trump.
The opportunity here is that people can do these things without having to wait for permission or leadership from political parties or interest groups. They can educate themselves and their close associates, as well as encourage organizations to figure out how to incorporate these expanded methods of voter engagement into organizational culture.
Swing Left is an activist group with ties to 400 local organizations around the country that seek to have electoral impact in opposition to the MAGA movement.
“We know that the elections up and down ballot will be very close and likely come down to a few thousand votes in a few key states and districts,” Swing Left executive director Yasmin Radjy, told Salon.com in July. “But we have a fighting chance … There is just too much at stake to do anything but lean in as hard as we can to take action.”
The good news is that there is a lot of democratic spirit among us—even among those who disagree on matters of party and policy. And there are many more who believe in the values of a pluralistic society than those who yearn for a more conservative Christian and authoritarian society. It is a historic struggle that will continue to fight on. The Christian Right of the 18th century didn’t like (and actively opposed) the Constitution when it was written. They dislike it even more now, in light of the many advances in civil and human rights we have achieved since then. They lost in the 18th century and there is every reason to believe that they will lose again. But only if we decide to make it so.
Here are some reliable voter resources:
The United States Election Assistance Commission links to official state and county election sites, which in turn provide comprehensive information about such matters as voter eligibility, registration, absentee ballots, and early voting. You can also find out about how to become an election worker.
Vote411.org, a project of the League of Women Voters, has a state by state chart of the rules on voter eligibility, registration, absentee ballots, and early voting. It does not have this information on ballot harvesting—but Ballotpedia does.
NonProfit Votes has the do’s and don’ts for non-profit tax-exempt organizations that want to engage in voter education and mobilization. The National Council of Churches has published a Voting Matters 2024 Empowerment Guide. The guide includes theological grounds for voting, scriptures, critical IRS information for churches, outreach activities and tips for navigating conversations about elections.
This article is part of U.S. Democracy Day, a nationwide collaborative on Sept. 15, the International Day of Democracy, in which news organizations cover how democracy works and the threats it faces. To learn more, visit usdemocracyday.org.
The nomination of Gov. Tim Walz as the Democratic candidate for vice president has put a bounce in the step of almost every rural Democrat. For many years now, the Democratic brand has become toxic in rural America. The party of Jackson and Roosevelt has, with few exceptions, turned its back on voters in the hinterlands. As the Minnesota governor, and native son of Nebraska’s Sandhills, Walz has excited Democrats in the countryside. The question is: Will this be just a rural moment, or does it signal a real, long-term commitment by the Party to compete for and win rural votes?
Several recent books have tried to decode the Democrats’ dilemma by looking at what makes rural and white working-class voters tick. Some have been good; others not so good. With White Rural Rage: The Threat to American Democracy, authors Thomas Schaller and Paul Waldman use stale stereotypes and tired tropes to paint rural whites, as Schaller said on MSNBC, as “the most racist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant, anti-gay geo-demographic group in the country.” The book was widely panned this past spring by a number of critics.
A counterbalance to Schaller and Waldman comes from two political science professors at Colby College in Maine, the nation’s second most rural state. In The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America, Nicholas F. Jacobs and Daniel M. Shea have produced a valuable contribution to understanding why the widening gulf between rural and urban America is becoming the most serious political fault line of our times.
What makes Jacobs and Shea’s work special is their exhaustive research. Over the past four years, they have created of one of the largest historical data sets on voting patterns in the United States, combining census reports and community and economic data dating back to 1824. Moreover, they conducted three of their own polls with the Rural Voter Survey project, which encompassed interviews with more than 10,000 rural voters and 4,000 non-rural voters. The conclusions that Jacobs and Shea draw about rural voters come from data, not anecdotes.
The authors write that “rural Americans are different because they see themselves as different,” and that “increasingly, ruralness matters more and more each election year.” With their new measure of “county ruralness,” combined with their collection on presidential voting data, readers get the first in-depth national measure of partisanship in rural America since the early 19th century.
The authors argue that while place is still important, “place is no longer local or regional.” Instead, rural voters have become nationalized as rural America has become drawn under a unified identity. They show how the “cultivation of this rural identity was part of a deliberate strategy on the part of elected officials within the Republican Party” from 1980 to the present, as the GOP went about manufacturing the myth of rural folks as the “real America.” While this was playing out, Democrats “struggled to react to the GOP’s growing dominance in rural communities throughout the country, as traditional regional or state loyalties succumbed to this new, national message about rural America.”
Jacobs and Shea walk through how the rural voter emerged during Ronald Reagan’s presidency in connection with Republican concerns about big government as well as racial, cultural and economic grievances. A range of factors contributed to this, from the expansion of universities and the baby boom of the 1960s, to the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s that accelerated “the Great Agricultural Transition” (a term coined by sociologists Linda Loabo and Katherine Meyer) as family farms struggled to survive amid increasing farm consolidation and foreclosures.
The exodus of Americans from farming “fundamentally altered rural life,” Jacobs and Shea write, as uneven economic development “exacerbated inequality in rural communities between those who barely survived and those who created farming industrial empires.” Between 1960 and 1980, rural areas lost nearly a quarter of their overall population, as the decline of small-scale farming forced families to take off-farm jobs, kids moved away to attend college, and rural America grew older and less educated.
By associating ruralness with “small town values” and a life of “thrift and hard work,” Reagan found a powerful way to exploit the political precarity of farmers and rural communities. Jacobs and Shea argue that by presenting rural communities as under attack by an out-of-control bureaucratic government, Reagan’s conservative philosophy offered a message that combined cultural war grievances—reactions to feminism, racial equality and immigration—with a sense of powerlessness, distrust of the federal government and a nostalgic return to American “roots” and simpler times.
Bolstered by a newly organized conservative evangelical movement, and with much of rural culture under attack in the media and by Hollywood, Democrats were painted as out of touch with rural denizens, their policies hostile to the rural way of life.
The book has chapters that make for compelling reading. It explores pervasive notions about rural people: whether or not rural Americans are in fact “down and out,” clingers to their guns and religion, “irredeemably racist” and “radicalized by Fox [News].” The picture that emerges is more nuanced and complex than the sensationalized articles reported by pundits from large cities who parachute into “flyover country” and interview “rural rabble-rousers” who make for colorful copy but are not representative of their communities.
For example, the authors take issue with Thomas Frank’s thesis in What’s The Matter With Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America that rural people vote against their own economic interests. According to Jacobs and Shea, “Economic deprivation does very little to explain the lock that the Republican Party has in these communities. They are not voting against their interests, if you understand that their interests are very different from what others may think, especially those who do not live in rural communities.” In contrast, the authors note that “rural voters have developed a sense of shared, place-based destiny” and that “feelings of resentment and anxiety are an extension of rural grievance.”
Jacobs and Shea point out that income inequality (where poverty and economic precarity are much more integrated into rural places than large cities or suburbs) amplifies feelings of rural decline, which Republican politicians have exploited into an “us” versus “them” narrative, especially since the 2016 election of Donald Trump. This anxiety, they write, which is highest in the rustic precincts, has allowed politicians to turn “rural America’s economic vulnerability into a deeply felt grievance toward government, urban elites, intellectuals, and, in a word, Democrats.”
In their final chapter, “Bridges Across the Rural-Urban Divide,” the authors state that their intention is not to “detail a prescription for the ailments” of the Democrats, other than to point out that they need to show up and compete.
Despite outperforming John Kerry’s 2004 numbers with rural voters in 2008, Barack Obama was not fully committed to voter outreach in rural areas. The electoral carnage from the 2010 midterms to the end of his second term was catastrophic for rural Democrats, as well as for candidates up and down the ballot. It will take more than just showing up, however, for Democrats to change the red tide. It will require a robust investment of financial resources to build lasting rural electoral infrastructure on the part of Democratic campaign committees, state parties, super PACs and 501(c)(4) organizations. As Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly said at the August 20 gathering of the Democratic Rural Council meeting at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, “You win in rural America when you decide you want to win in rural America.”
The factors and mindsets behind what she calls “place-based partisanship” are the subject of How the Heartland Went Red: Why Local Forces Matter in an Age of Nationalized Politicsby Stephanie Ternullo. I found this book disappointing for several reasons. The author looks at three Midwestern small cities that are blue collar and mostly white to assess how local contexts have increased or decreased their rightward electoral shift.
The first problem is that Ternullo gives each city a made up moniker instead of using their real names. This does not serve the cause of helping the reader better understand and appreciate the political geography of the chosen locations of study. There was no need to do this. In her acclaimed Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right, Arlie Russell Hochschild is right up front about the fact that the area she spent five years leading up to the 2016 election is Lake Charles and the communities of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana. Katherine Cramer’s excellent book The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker does not hide the names of the rural Wisconsin places she visited.
So, using what Ternullo calls “diagnostic frames” to chart the “narratives of community identity,” off we go to “Motorville,” “Lutherton” and “Gravesend.” Motorville is somewhere in Wisconsin and due to its strong labor legacy and the presence of unions, is one of just 4% of U.S. counties that have reliably voted for Democratic presidents since the days of Roosevelt’s New Deal. In Motorville, folks see politics as between the “haves” and the “have-nots.” To redress inequities they push for more support from the federal and state governments.
By contrast, Lutherton, in Indiana, went Republican back in the 1980s as manufacturing left, organized labor died out and the evangelical movement began to power the candidacies of Ronald Reagan and the GOPers who came after the Gipper. Settled by German Lutherans, Lutherton has a church on practically every corner, and folks first size you up by asking what church you attend. Unemployment is not a problem, but many of the jobs in the service sector go unfilled. They also don’t pay that well. In Lutherton, problems such as hunger and food insecurity, homelessness and the ravages of the opioid epidemic are handled by church group volunteers and nonprofits. No need for government to get involved, thank you very much.
Then there is Gravesend, the Minnesota municipality that is divided between the two political parties. Gravesend has never fully recovered from the fire and closure of the Rivervalley Foundries, which was the town’s largest employer. There are some loyal Democrats here but a good chunk of voters have swung to Republicans in the age of Trump.
Ternullo conducted dozens of interviews in the field and online (during the Covid-19 pandemic) in the run up to the 2020 election. But the book reads like the qualitative research findings from a series of focus groups. I found it tedious as she plowed and harrowed over familiar ground. Surprisingly, none of the good burghers of Lutherton get asked how—if they hold Christian and family values so near and dear—they can square their morality with their support for Trump, whose womanizing, misogyny, racial animus, endless lying and cheating violates the Golden Rule. I would have enjoyed hearing why these Hoosiers don’t consider themselves hypocrites.
The conclusion of the book, “The Future of Heartland Politics,” is somewhat of a letdown. If the reader is expecting some recommendations for how this critical region of the country—which includes both battleground states and states that are trending away from Democrats—can be made more competitive for Democrats, or if Republicans will at some point break the night sweats that have kept them in thrall to Trump, they will be disappointed. Ternullo takes the academic way out, suggesting that “future research should examine the extent to which other elements of social context shape partisan attachments; for example do social networks shape partisan ties, do partisan ties shape social networks, or both?”
I wish Ternullo had given readers some insight into how Democrats can better capture the allegiances of rural voters based on her field research besides the now dog-eared mantra of “show up and listen.”
“You see that new building over there with the roof and red barn?” asks Bob Walton as he guides me through the dirt roads of Isabella County in mid-Michigan, where he serves as a trustee for Isabella Township. “I know of at least three new buildings that were put up for agriculture that are being basically paid for by windmill money.”
Walton took a break from compacting soil recently planted with soybeans to show me the tall structures, blades rotating slowly in the breeze, now visible from every angle on his land and neighboring properties. The silver towers look incongruous next to the red barns and outbuildings that would fit perfectly on a postcard from rural America. It feels almost as if you’ve landed on the set of a science fiction movie—or time-traveled into the future.
It took a while to catch up with Walton, a third-generation farmer, working some 400 acres, mostly on land that once belonged to his grandfather. Now in his 70s, he’s turning the business over to his daughter and son-in-law. That does not keep him out of his tractor, which is where I found him one afternoon in May.
“I feel bad for the people that think they’re so ugly,” he says, looking at the wind turbines near his home. “I just think they’re majestic. I love the red lights at night.”
It was not love at first sight. When a private firm called Apex Clean Energy came calling in 2018, Walton recalls, “Our first thought was, how can we stop this?”
Energy developers and utility companies began breaking ground on a significant number of big wind projects in Michigan in 2008, after a bipartisan agreement requiring 10% of the state’s electricity to be generated from carbon-free renewables. A new law passed last year by Democratic majorities in the state legislature boosted that requirement to 60% by 2035.
Most of Michigan’s early wind turbines were located north of Detroit, on the eastern side of the state that Michiganders call “The Thumb” (because it’s shaped like a thumb on a mitten). Walton and his neighbors got in touch with farmers and residents who had been living with—and collecting revenue from—wind farms for several years.
Eventually, they decided they liked what they heard. One piece of advice was to lock down compensation for any impact to productive farmland.
“If 10 years down the road we find out there’s tile damage, they still have to pay for it,” says Walton, referring the underground system of pipes, called drain tile, that protect crops from heavy rains or floods. “That’s the other thing we learned, you got to write everything in.”
‘We need energy!’
Walton, a Republican, does not often agree with Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat. He is skeptical about electric vehicles, is not vaccinated and did not agree with Whitmer’s enforced lockdowns during the Covid-19 pandemic, some of the strictest in the United States. Walton’s family property, in addition to hosting a windmill built by Apex, is also home to an oil derrick.
Oil deposits are dotted throughout Michigan farmland. Decades ago, it was common for land agents to canvass local farmers—as wind and solar developers are doing now—and offer lease payments in exchange for siting an oil or gas well on their property. Many of these wells have been capped, but the one on Bob Walton’s family farm is still active, with the revenue going to his sister.
Walton doesn’t see a new generation of energy projects as a threat to rural life. Instead, he sees a steady stream of wind turbine income—free from drought, flood or fluctuations in crop prices—that will help his daughter and son-in-law create a sustainable 21st century farm.
“I called my grandkids, and they all said, ‘Grandpa I think it’s a good thing,’ ” Walton says. “Because we need energy!”
Lawyering up
Walton was first elected trustee for Isabella Township in 2016. “The reason I got on,” he says, “is I didn’t want somebody moving out from the city telling us farmers what the hell we’re going to do now.”
Apex’s proposal to build wind turbines in Isabella and nearby townships surfaced during Walton’s first term. Opponents of the project, working under the banner of a group called Isabella Wind Watch, accused him of a conflict of interest. Walton signed a lease with Apex as a private landowner and also voted to approve the project as a public official.
Activists who wanted to block the turbines, says Walton, “fought us like crazy.” In 2018, he beat back three recall campaigns. “I lawyered up. We stopped them at the county” where recall petitions must be approved for clarity.
Walton stood for re-election in 2020 and won handily, along with other township officials who had backed the wind farm. “They put somebody up against all of us,” he says, “and we beat them two and three to one.” He was renominated for another term in an August 6 Republican primary and will be re-elected in the fall. Democrats are not contesting any Isabella Township positions, as often happens in rural Michigan.
“I’ve told my friend Albert, who’s a liberal, if it wasn’t for us conservatives in this county, they wouldn’t have got this,” says Walton.
That would be Albert Jongewaard, senior development manager for Apex, who is now based in Minnesota. From 2007 to 2010, Jongewaard raised money and managed campaigns for Democratic candidates in the Deep South. In Michigan, he spent several years working for Apex and burned a lot of shoe leather talking to farmers, landowners, residents and local officials in Isabella and Montcalm Counties.
Jongewaard likes to quote Rich Vander Veen, an early pioneer of wind energy in Michigan: “It takes ten-thousand cups of coffee to build a wind farm.”
Getting off the ground in Gratiot
Years of patient, caffeine-fueled persuasion has paid off for several development companies in Gratiot County, located in mid-Michigan just south of Isabella County. The first wind farm in Gratiot County began operating in 2012; there are now six of them, with over 400 turbines generating more than 900 megawatts of electricity. That’s roughly enough to meet the annual energy needs of 300,000 households.
These big projects pay big taxes on windmills, which cost up to $2 million per turbine. Greater Gratiot Development, Inc., a nonprofit serving Gratiot County, created a spreadsheet showing $93 million in tax revenue collected from wind farms between 2012 and 2023. That’s more than $7 million a year, a significant boost for local governments in a county with just over 40,000 inhabitants.
Jongewaard and the team from Apex also hit paydirt in Isabella County—but not so far in Montcalm County, which sits just south of Isabella and west of Gratiot. In 2022 and 2023, there were 26 successful recall campaigns against local officials who backed solar and wind projects in Michigan. Eleven of them were in Montcalm County, enough to stall a proposed Apex wind project.
“It is true in Michigan there is organized opposition to these projects. That’s a fact,” says Jongewaard. “People are right to ask questions, you should be asking questions.”
The issues raised by Montcalm County Citizens United, a group opposing the project, included a decline in property values, sleep deprivation from turbine noise, “damage to wildlife, domestic and farm animals, bat and bird kills, [and] massive government handouts.”
Jongewaard insists there are solid answers to these and other objections. “These projects aren’t dangerous,” he says. “They don’t have adverse health impacts. We know that through science and lived reality.”
Such arguments carried the day in Isabella County, where Apex won approval to build 136 wind turbines spread across 56,000 acres and seven townships. In 2021, Apex sold the project to DTE for an undisclosed sum. The press release announcing the sale projects $30 million in tax payments to local units of governments over the next 30 years, along with a whopping $100 million in lease payments to some 400 farmers and landowners.
That works out to about $250,000 for each leaseholder over the next three decades, an average of more than $8,000 a year. The actual payment varies, depending on how many turbines and transmission lines are sited on each property. Don Schurr was director of Greater Gratiot while wind farms were being constructed and began operating there. As one farmer told him, the annual lease payment from turbines “pays my taxes, pays my insurance and it [pays for] a nice vacation.”
Thanks to taxes paid by Michigan wind and solar farms, rural police and fire departments are getting new equipment and adding new shifts. Schools are being upgraded, and local roads are finally getting long-needed repairs. Farmers, meanwhile, are driving new pickups, building new barns and repairing and replacing aging farm equipment.
While all households can benefit from increased public spending, private payments to leaseholders are not universally distributed. The 400 farmers and landowners receiving lease payments from the Isabella wind farm, for example, are just a fraction of the more than 4,000 households in the seven townships where the project is located.
Sarah Mills, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, has closely studied the siting of renewable energy projects in rural communities. Energy developers, she says, have started to use “good neighbor” agreements, which provide at least some payments to everyone in the footprint of a project. The compensation, she says, is “for access to wind that blows over your property.”
“There are townships in the Thumb where 85% of the property owners are participants in a wind farm,” says Mills, even if some of them have no turbines or transmission lines on their land.
Big money, big headaches
The recent influx of energy developer dollars—lots of them—into Michigan’s rural communities has real benefits, but also causes real headaches. According to Colleen Stebbins, a longtime official of Winfield Township in Montcalm County, wind farm opponents “were so afraid if I put a turbine on my property, I’d make a million, while they, with a little piece of lake property, would get nothing.”
While serving as township clerk, Stebbins declined to sign a lease with the company on her personal property, seeking to avoid any conflict of interest. Seeing benefits for the township, she voted to approve Apex’s bid to site a wind farm. As a result, opponents of the project organized a recall election and won a majority to remove her from office in November 2022.
Stebbins eventually did sign a lease with Apex, she says, “after I got recalled.”
The politics of energy production in Michigan has played out differently in three adjoining counties. Isabella, Gratiot and Montcalm are all home to hundreds of small farms, averaging a few hundred acres each. The population is overwhelmingly white—88% or more—in all three counties, with a tiny share of foreign-born residents. Donald Trump won all three counties in 2016 and again in 2020.
So why did conservative township voters in Gratiot and Isabella accept renewable energy projects, while Montcalm voters joined a rebellion against them?
Farmers vs. lakers
One factor could be geography. Montcalm has more interior lakes than either Gratiot or Isabella. That means more homeowners own lakeside, non-farm holdings and would not receive the windfall in lease revenue from wind turbines or solar farms, sometimes by choice.
“This is just not a land use they think is appropriate, and it’s not worth it to them,” says the University of Michigan’s Sarah Mills. These homeowners, who often relocated precisely to enjoy a peaceful rural environment, are especially sensitive to disruptions that may be caused by utility-scale energy projects.
Ryan VanSolkema was elected supervisor of Winfield Township in rural Montcalm County in November of 2022, during the heart of the controversy over Apex’s proposed wind project. He won a recall election during the same 2022 campaign which saw Colleen Stebbins lose her position as township clerk. He is running, unopposed, for another term this year.
“I had just moved up here and bought a house on the lake,” says VanSolkema. “I wasn’t looking to lose 30% of the value of the home I just purchased.” Nobody wants to buy a home, he says, that looks out on 600-foot-tall wind turbines—and he’s not convinced there is any need to burn less carbon while generating electricity.
“Climate change is a hoax,” he says. “It’s just a way for government to spend money and regulate. Almost 50 years I’ve been alive, what has changed? Literally nothing.”
The intense opposition to wind and solar farms that developed in Montcalm County is far from unique. “We’ve had projects blocked all over the state,” says Ed Rivet, executive director of the Michigan Conservative Energy Forum, a group that supports an “all-of-the-above” free market approach. The group receives backing from foundations and energy developers through the nationwide Conservative Energy Network. Rivet estimates that in the past five years, as much as two gigawatts of solar energy production in Michigan has been blocked by local activists. That’s the equivalent of two nuclear power plants worth of energy.
Pushback is by no means confined to the state of Michigan. Researchers at Columbia Law School have found nearly 400 “laws and regulations to block or restrict renewable energy facilities” in 41 different states, with hundreds of projects encountering “significant opposition.”
Turning the tide
In Michigan, players on all sides of the controversy are recognizing the changed reality created by Public Act 233, part of a package of clean energy laws passed by Democrats and signed by Gov. Whitmer last November. It puts final siting authority for large-scale solar and wind projects in the hands of the three-member statewide Public Service Commission (PSC).
“Local authorities don’t have any impact,” says Kevon Martis. “You’ll see fewer recalls of local officials.” A home remodeler and county commissioner in Lenawee County, Martis has been involved in campaigns against renewables since he blocked a wind project in his community of Riga Township back in 2009.
After an unsuccessful petition drive this year to overturn P.A. 233 by statewide referendum, Martis is ready to try again in 2026.
On August 6, he was renominated by GOP voters for a second term as county commissioner and will face no Democratic opposition in the fall. Martis’s primary opponent, Palmyra Township Supervisor David Pixley, was endorsed by Private Property Rights PAC (PPR PAC) a new independent expenditure committee, or Super PAC.
This summer in Michigan, PPR PAC endorsed 20 local candidates in Republican primaries in Montcalm, Ionia and other counties where there has been controversy over siting solar and wind projects. Nine of their endorsed candidates won their primary elections, some by small margins.
The PPR PAC website makes no mention of solar, wind or renewable energy. The group backs candidates, it says, who support “policies that reduce excessive regulation and oppose broad governmental overreach into property rights.”
Apex PAC’s election filings show contributions to Republican and Democratic candidates, a $2,500 donation to the Pennsylvania Solar PAC in 2021 and a $5,000 donation to the D.C.-based Community Solar Action Fund in 2024. There is no record of disbursements in Michigan.
Apex’s Albert Jongewaard says he is not familiar with PPR PAC, nor are his colleagues currently working on the company’s Michigan projects. An email to PPR PAC resulted in an automatic reply from Rural Economic Development PAC (R.E.D. PAC), a Texas-based super PAC which also touts protecting private property among its top priorities.
R.E.D. PAC, where Cabell Hobbs is also treasurer, has received over $1 million from Conservatives for a Clean Energy Future (CCEF). Larry Ward, CCEF’s president and CEO, is a former political director of the Michigan Republican Party. The group was formed, he says, as the advocacy arm of the Conservative Energy Network.
“We like a whole list of energy sources,” he says, including advanced wind, solar and nuclear technologies. What his organization doesn’t like, he says, is government—or angry neighbors—“telling farmers what they can and can’t do with their property.”
CCEF is organized as a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Donations to the group are not tax deductible, and it is not required to disclose its donors. “Everyone who contributes to us,” says Ward, “would rather it be that way.”
This is the topsy-turvy world of renewable energy in Michigan. Republicans backing the conservative cause of private property rights are using a dark money loophole to help farmers and landowners participate in green energy projects, a liberal priority supported by Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. These strange bedfellows, plus a few others, may now be finding a way to live together.
Although the state’s PSC has the final say to site renewable projects, utility and energy developers still have the option of trying first to work directly with local authorities. That’s taking place now—in Montcalm County, of all places. DTE Energy broke ground there in June on a 554-acre solar farm.
At a public hearing on the project last December, Evergreen Township Supervisor Andy Ross observed that with P.A. 233 in place, local governments are better off getting involved with renewable projects to make sure local concerns are addressed. These include issues like setbacks from adjacent properties, noise limits and a $5 million bond secured by DTE, which guarantees funding to decommission the project.
“If we were to deny their [DTE’s] application and they went through the state siting process, our restrictions are tighter than the state’s,” he told the Montcalm/Ionia Daily News. “What we’re working together on is way better than what the state siting would be.”
“I think there is a path forward for developers to work with local governments,” says PSC chair Dan Scripps, an energy attorney and former Democratic state representative from Northern Michigan. He was appointed to the commission in 2019 by Whitmer, who named him chair in 2020.
“I’m not going to be disappointed,” he says, “if we never get a case.”
Can Tim Walz Help the Democrats Win Back Rural America?
“I’m not talking about, you know, behind the Walmart,” said Jennifer Garner, describing her visits to rural communities on behalf of Save the Children, the global charity that supports families in need. “I’m talking about the town behind the town behind the town, [folks] who can get to Walmart with a group of people maybe once a month because that’s how often they can afford gas.”
Garner, the veteran actress who most recently appeared in this summer’s Hollywood blockbuster Deadpool vs. Wolverine, grew up in Charleston, West Virginia. In previous campaigns, she’s raised funds for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. This year, she brought her star power to an August 6 “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom call.
The two-hour online session, which drew over 2,000 participants and raised some $20,000, did not have the high profile of other affinity groups that have emerged in recent weeks to back Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president. Initiatives like “Win with Black Women,” “Black Men for Harris,” “White Women Answer the Call” and “White Dudes for Harris” have attracted hundreds of thousands of supporters and added millions to campaign coffers.
But rural Democrats insist the party can’t afford to bypass their communities, which account for 15-to-20% of the U.S. electorate, or some 25 to 30 million voters. According to data from the Pew Research Center, Donald Trump won a whopping 59% of the vote in rural areas in 2016, and he did even better in 2020 with 65%. Joe Biden won in 2020 by flipping the script in the suburbs. Trump narrowly defeated Hillary Clinton among suburban voters in 2016; Biden won them by an 11-point margin in 2020.
Opportunity knocks
Still, there are rich opportunities outside of cities and suburbs—for instance, leaders like Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic Party, one of the organizers of the “Rural Americans” call. Her husband is a cattle rancher and she’s delighted with the choice of Tim Walz; he grew up in rural Nebraska and taught high school in Mankato, a small city in Minnesota. But Democrats first have to break what she calls “the cycle of mutual neglect.”
“We neglect to invest in rural America,” says Kleeb. “So [rural Americans] don’t hear our message, they don’t see our faces, they don’t know our platform. So they don’t vote for us—so we don’t invest in rural America.”
Walz was scheduled to headline Tuesday’s event but was named as Harris’s running mate that same day and made his first public appearance as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee with Harris at a rally in Philadelphia. In his stead was Peggy Flanagan, Minnesota’s Lieutenant Governor, a member of the White Eart Band of Ojibwe, who could take over for Walz as the state’s governor if he is elected in November.
During the Zoom session, Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat and chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, who is retiring this year, pointed to her party’s record of accomplishments for rural America. She ticked off increased broadband access, funds to support rural hospitals and nursing homes, and “the largest investment in rural electricity since the New Deal,” to back renewable energy projects.
The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to an email query from Barn Raiser for information about Republican priorities for rural America. The GOP platform, approved at the party’s July convention, includes “Protect American Workers and Farmers from Unfair Trade” as a chapter heading—but the bullet points beneath make no mention of either farmers or rural communities.
Voting for values
By itself, a list of policy priorities or legislative accomplishments is not likely to move the needle for rural voters, says Dan Shea, professor of government at Colby College in Maine. He is the co-author, with fellow Colby faculty member Nicholas Jacobs, of The Rural Voter: The Politics of Place and the Disuniting of America. The book is based on a 200-question survey completed by more than 10,000 rural residents, the largest and most detailed research ever conducted among this population.
Rural residents, he says, are looking for empathy from political leaders, and a sense of shared values. “A common assumption,” Shea says, “is that rural communities are withering away, a wasteland of alienation. We find the opposite: Rural Americans are proud of their communities. They are connected and they want to stay in the community.”
Rural communities, he says, are typically more integrated than suburbs or cities, with well-to-do families living nearby those who are less well off, often attending the same schools and churches. As a result, although rural residents have a strong belief in hard work and self-reliance, they are also highly attuned to how well—or how badly—their community is doing as a whole.
Over the past decades, rural families have suffered severe economic shocks, first from the farm crisis of the 1970s and 1980s, then from manufacturing job loss connected to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and unrestricted imports from China. As more family farms disappeared, rural factory jobs became an important source of income—until they weren’t.
“In many communities,” Shea observes, “there was just one factory, and it defined the identity of the town.” When that plant closed “NAFTA ghost towns” were left behind.
Even prior to the collapse of rural manufacturing, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s sweeping victory in 1980, the prairie populists who could once win over the heartland electorate began to lose steam. Democratic senators like Idaho’s Frank Church, Iowa’s John Culver and South Dakota’s George McGovern lost their seats, and rural voters are now “overwhelmingly conservative.”
His students are shocked, says Shea, when he tells them that probably the most liberal Democratic presidential nominee ever—McGovern—was from South Dakota.
“My best guess,” he says, “is that the worry and anxiety that all Americans have about the future is dramatically heightened in rural parts. Rural Americans are anxious for something different.” He’s not surprised to see the Harris-Walz ticket focused on a forward-looking message. “It’s by design they’re saying, ‘We’re not going back.’ “
Neighbor-to-neighbor
Several speakers on the “Rural Americans for Harris” Zoom event warmly remembered time-tested values of mutual support that are still a source of strength for rural communities. Jennifer Garner recalled how her mother, a schoolteacher, was often not around when she came home from school.
“I would go right down the street to Marge,” she said, “and I would know that she would have a key for me. And Mrs. Moore would have a snack for me, and I knew I was taken care of in my community.”
Trae Crowder, a comedian from Celina, Tennessee, and co-author of The Liberal Redneck Manifesto: Draggin’ Dixie Outta the Dark,” remembered what happened after the death of his father 10 years ago. “I had two babies, and I was living paycheck to paycheck,” he said. “After the funeral is over, I go back to the office to check how am I going make these payments. And the guy goes, ‘Oh you don’t owe us anything. Everybody in town chipped in … so it’s covered.’ ”
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez, a Democrat who represents northern New Mexico in Congress, talked about the irrigation channels—acequias—that are vital to farmers in her district. The acequias “make sure that the snow that falls on the mountains in the winter can flow down to nourish our fields in the summer.”
Shared ownership of a vital resource, she explained, is a unique feature of this centuries-old system “The farmers each own a little share of the water,” she said, “and we protect and take care of those ditches together because without them we would not survive.”
“The acequias are older than America,” said Fernandez, “but there is something American about them, that shared belief and commitment to something that’s bigger than each of us.”
Tough losses, tough fights ahead
Several speakers acknowledged that running for office as a Democrat in rural communities—and in states with a significant rural population—isn’t easy.
Brandon Presley, who is the cousin of Elvis Presley, nearly pulled off an upset during a run for Mississippi governor in 2023, winning 47% of the vote. Mandela Barnes lost a U.S. Senate race in Wisconsin in 2022 by just 26,000 votes. Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, pointed out that Biden lost North Carolina by 74,000 votes—“42 votes for every precinct in every county in the state of North Carolina.”
Rural Democrats are also focused on the need to run candidates in as many races as possible. One goal is to erase GOP supermajorities in all-red state legislatures, which allows the party to write its most extreme policy planks into law. And in swing states, said Ezra Levin, a co-founder of the pro-democracy activist group Indivisible, down ballot races can make a big difference.
“I know some of you are thinking, hey Ezra I’m in the heart of Trump country we can’t elect a dog catcher,” he said. “That might be true. You might not be able to elect a dog catcher. But you sure as hell can run a dog catcher; you sure as hell can get votes out for that dog catcher, and get votes out for the state rep, state senator, U.S. rep, city council person.”
“You can get votes out for those candidates. They might win, they might not win. But regardless they’re going to get votes out for themselves and the top of the ticket for Harris for Walz, for Democrats running statewide. We need those votes.”
“When I ran [for state legislator] in 2022, 40% of the seats in Missouri were uncontested,” says Jess Piper, a teacher with a large social media following, and currently chair of Blue Missouri. “Because of all the work we’ve been doing, 18% of the seats are going uncontested. So we are making progress.”
“I was running in a district that hadn’t elected a Democrat in 32 years,” Piper said. “Because I was raising money, that Republican had to stay in his district. I forced him to talk about abortion bans and the fact that we don’t have shoulders on our roads and that 30 percent of the schools in Missouri are on a four-day week. I forced him to talk about that when he was wanting to talk about Hunter Biden’s laptop.”
“The road to democracy,” Piper said, “is going right through rural America.”
Fertilizer from human waste faces scrutiny but remains a profitable industry
The cool morning spring breeze hit Saundra Traywick “like a punch to the face.”
Walking through her wooded 38-acre donkey farm in central Oklahoma, Traywick suddenly found it hard to breathe as the air smelled “toxic” and “like death.”
Less than a mile away, a truck was spreading a chunky dark fertilizer on a hay farm, a familiar ritual in this rural community just beyond Oklahoma City’s northeast suburbs.
But this fertilizer was putting off a smell that Traywick had never encountered. She soon discovered the fertilizer was made from processed sewage.
Converting sewage to fertilizer saves cities money on landfill costs, is a cheaper nutrient-rich fertilizer for farmers, and has become a billion-dollar industry for a handful of companies. However, biosolid fertilizer has been shown to contain chemicals that can harm the environment and human health.
“Essentially anything that goes down the drain ends up on these fields,” said Traywick, who, months after first learning about biosolid fertilizer, urged the nearby town of Luther to ban it, which city leaders did in 2020.
Scientific studies are increasingly warning about the PFAS chemicals found biosolid fertilizers. PFAS — short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called “forever chemicals” — can be found in many water- and heat-resistant products, personal hygiene materials, medication and industrial waste.
But while some states have recently restricted or banned biosolid fertilizer entirely after finding it contaminated farmland and groundwater, Oklahoma lawmakers and environmental officials attempted to take steps this year to protect cities and corporations from liability if new health problems are found.
The EPA estimates that as much as 3.5 million dry metric tons of treated sewage waste is spread as fertilizer across the country yearly — enough to cover the entire state of Missouri.
Oklahoma has one of the most extensive biosolid fertilizer programs in the nation, as more than 80% of the state’s wastewater sludge ends up on crop fields, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis of state records.
Synagro, a Goldman Sachs-owned company that spreads most of the biosolid fertilizer in Oklahoma and across the country, has lobbied against new regulations over “forever chemicals” in its fertilizer, even as it faces lawsuits from farmers claiming its product has devalued their land and created numerous health problems. “Biosolids are a nutrient-rich end-product of the wastewater solids treatment process that have been treated to ensure safe use in agricultural land application,” the company said in a statement.
The issue has also taken center stage in an Oklahoma state House race, as a longtime lawmaker who uses biosolid fertilizer on his land risks losing to a challenger who wants to end the practice.
“I’d say it's one of the main issues,” Traywick said about the upcoming state House election.
While scientists have discovered PFAS chemicals already exist in the blood of nearly every living person and animal on the planet, recent studies have raised concerns about increased PFAS exposure through its presence in biosolid fertilizers, which impacts the air, water and food.
Air: UCLA researchers found that microplastics in biosolid fertilizer are highly suitable to wind, “thereby increasing … inhalation health risks,” such as lung tissue damage, according to a study published in January.
“The scientific community has put a lot more focus (recently) on PFAS and how dangerous they can be even at low levels,” said Jared Hayes, a policy analyst with the Environmental Working Group who specializes in “forever chemicals.”
In response to growing health concerns, the Environmental Protection Agency recently announced it will require municipal water systems to remove nearly all PFAS substances. These regulations, some predict, could cost as much as $3 billion in new equipment nationwide.
However, the new rules don’t change the current standards of PFAS exposure in fertilizer.
“There are a lot of unknowns of what we are going to do with the biosolids,” Hayes said.
Biosolid fertilizer rankled a town and a state House election
Driving down a rolling two-lane road in central Oklahoma, Jenni White lifted her right hand off the steering wheel of her silver Honda CRV to point to another field that uses biosolid fertilizer.
“That field is one of the worst; I mean, I was hacking up a lung when it was spread, I could not catch my breath, it’s so strong,” said White, pointing through her bug-splattered windshield.
As she passed the next field, White recalled that the farmer had recently stopped using biosolid fertilizer when his neighbors complained. “I think he just thought it wasn’t worth the hassle,” White said.
White was mayor of Luther in 2020 when Traywick, the area donkey farmer, approached the town with concerns over biosolid fertilizers. White was already aware of its use but believed Traywick’s activism warranted discussion among Luther’s five elected trustees.
A ban in Luther wouldn’t impact many farmers, as the town is less than five square miles and most of the area farms are outside its boundaries. But the discussion drew a visit from two officials from Synagro.
One of the officials, identified as Layne Baroldi by the Luther Register, gave a presentation on the benefits of biosolid fertilizer.
Baroldi said California had some of the strictest environmental regulations in the country — you “can’t cough without getting cited,” so the fact that biosolid fertilizer is allowed there should be reassuring to folks in Oklahoma. “Putting it on the ground was (the) best practice,” Baroldi told the trustees.
But the presentation wasn’t enough, as the trustees voted to enact the ban.
(Investigate Midwest spoke to five Oklahoma farmers who use biosolid fertilizers but none would speak on the record due to local opposition. Most said their fertilizer costs would increase significantly if biosolid fertilizer were unavailable. “I got an extra hay cutting this year after using it,” one Oklahoma farmer said. )
While the Luther ban only impacted a few farmers, White, whose term as mayor ended in 2021, believes it was an important message from a community where agriculture remains a vital part of the local identity.
“We’ve been called a bunch of crazy environmental activists, but I don’t know how it’s crazy to make sure your food and water aren’t contaminated for your kids,” said White, a Republican who drinks from a Donald Trump-themed thermos while driving.
“A Democrat or a liberal is going to drink the same tainted water that a Republican or conservative is. Everybody is screwed, it’s not a selective screwing,” she added.
But biosolid fertilizer is rankling local Republican politics as it’s become a central issue in the race for House District 32, which is near Luther.
Incumbent State Rep. Kevin Wallace appeared to be a lock for reelection. He has represented the heavily conservative seat for five two-year terms and has risen up the ranks of Republican politics, including as chair of the high-profile House budget committee.
However, Wallace’s use of biosolid fertilizer on his land has drawn criticism from voters. During a June 4 candidate forum, Wallace was confronted by some constituents who asked why he wouldn’t come out against the fertilizer, what they called “humanure.”
“The biosolids sludge is regulated by the Department of Environmental Quality, I have used it twice … it has been legal to use in this state for eight years now,” Wallace said at the forum.
Wallace acknowledged he had received complaints from his neighbors, but “property rights is what I’m for … (and) I’m not breaking the law,” he told the audience.
Two weeks later, Wallace finished second in the Republican primary, advancing to an Aug. 27 runoff against challenger Jim Shaw, who opposes the use of biosolid fertilizer.
Wallace declined an interview request but in an emailed statement said biosolid fertilizer was “heavily” regulated at the state and federal levels.
"I have had the Department of Environmental Quality into the district in the past to answer questions at a forum and the state of Oklahoma has worked directly with top administrators at the EPA in Dallas on this issue to ensure environmental standards are met,” Wallace said in his statement. “The bottom line is, the only alternative to current disposal of biosolids is for more of it to be dumped in landfills, which will create more landfills in rural Oklahoma."
More than 44,000 metric tons of biosolids were applied on Oklahoma fields in 2023, according to records from the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, which issues permits to apply biosolid fertilizer. Around 40% of all biosolid fertilizer in the state was processed by Oklahoma City waste.
Oklahoma has limits for 10 pollutants in fertilizer, including mercury and arsenic. State laws also require fertilizer to have a solid consistency of greater than 50%, be tested for viruses and to raise the pH level, which is most often achieved through the use of lime.
But Shaw, the District 32 challenger who finished first in the June Republican primary, said if he were elected it would send a message that “the majority of people out here are saying no to this practice.”
“I would say the awareness of (biosolid fertilizer) has significantly increased in recent months, especially during the campaign,” Shaw said. “I’m all for property rights but my right to swing my fist stops where it hits your nose, … and once (the fertilizer) is applied it does reach beyond the four corners of your property.”
Federal regulations spurred a biosolid industry controlled by a few companies
When Congress passed the Clean Water Act in 1974, cities and towns faced stricter rules on how to process sewage. New biosolid materials needed to be disposed of and a handful of companies launched in an effort to fill the need.
Business picked up over the years as new rules were set, including a federal ban on dumping biosolid material in the ocean.
Established in 1986 in Texas, Synagro contracted with hundreds of cities to handle its biosolid waste, including land application as fertilizer. In 2000, the company purchased BioGro, another large biosolid firm, becoming the largest biosolid handler in the nation.
Synagro is a privately held company, so its valuation isn’t publicly available. However, in 2013 a European investment firm purchased the company for $480 million.
Since then, Synagro has acquired several other companies, entered the Canadian market and nearly doubled the number of municipal and industrial wastewater facilities it contracts with.
In 2020, Syangro was sold for an undisclosed price to West Street Infrastructure Partners III, an investment fund managed by Goldman Sachs.
Today, the company operates 24 facilities in the U.S. and Canada and handles 6.5 million tons of biosolid material annually, according to a 2023 company report.
“Biosolids provide multiple benefits to overall soil quality and health, including improved moisture absorption ability, recycling of micro and macro nutrients, carbon avoidance, reduced nutrient leaching, and lower use of industrially produced chemical fertilizers," a company spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement to Investigate Midwest. "U.S. EPA and state environmental agencies have approved and regulated biosolids for decades and multiple risk assessments and scientific studies have found that biosolids recycling presents little to no risk to human health and the environment.”
Synagro handles much of the biosolid material produced by Oklahoma City’s wastewater system, although it doesn’t contract directly with the city.
Oklahoma City contracts with Inframark to manage its wastewater system. Inframark then sells the biosolid material to Synagro.
“The City of Oklahoma City (does not) have a direct contract with Synagro,” said Jasmine Morris, a spokesperson for the city, when asked why Investigate Midwest was unable to get a Synagro contract through an open records request. “Under contract with (Oklahoma City), Inframark is responsible for the disposal of biosolids. Under said contract, what Inframark self-performs, or who they subcontract to, is at their discretion. Currently, they are using Synagro South LLC for this activity, but the terms of their contract with Synagro are not disclosed to (the Oklahoma City Water Utilities Trust).”
Amid the increased focus on PFAS chemicals in waste and fertilizer, Synagro has also lobbied to ensure cities and companies are not held liable.
In 2022, the company created a nonprofit business association called the Coalition of Recyclers of Residual Organics by Practitioners of Sustainability(CRROPS). Synagro’s CEO, Bob Preston, serves as chairman of the organization, which has spent $220,000 on federal lobbying since its founding, according to lobbying disclosure forms.
Last year, as the EPA considered new rules on PFAS levels in drinking water, the coalition urged lawmakers to shield companies and cities from legal liability.
“We write to urge that any legislation … include a specific provision to ensure that the organizations we represent are explicitly recognized as ‘passive receivers’ of PFAS and afford these essential public services a narrow exemption from liability under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA),” CRROPS wrote in an Aug. 24, 2023 letter.
But as Synagro attempts to someday prevent lawsuits, legal challenges have already arrived.
Earlier this year, five Texas farmers sued Synagro, claiming their properties were “poisoned by toxic chemicals” in the biosolid fertilizer the company spread on nearby farms. Some of the plaintiffs also claim they began suffering from respiratory problems and skin irritation when the biosolid fertilizer was spread.
Many of the plaintiffs also claim their groundwater has elevated levels of PFAS, with one farmer stating that a serving of one fish from his pond would exceed the EPA's recommended PFAS exposure by 30,000 times.
For the past five years, Synagro has contracted with the city of Fort Worth to manage its biosolids programs and has spread the processed waste in 12 north Texas counties. The lawsuit claims Synagro should have issued stronger warnings about its fertilizer product.
“Synagro knew, or reasonably should have known, of the foreseeable risks and defects of its biosolids fertilizer,” the lawsuit states, which was filed in Maryland, where Synagro is based. “Synagro nonetheless failed to provide adequate warnings of the known and foreseeable risk or hazard related to the way Synagro (Granulite) was designed, including pollution of properties and water supplies with PFAS.”
In a statement to Investigate Midwest, Synagro denied the allegations, calling them “unproven and novel.”
“As a matter of fact, without any response from Synagro, the plaintiffs have already amended the complaint to drastically reduce the concentrations of PFAS alleged in the complaint when it was originally filed,” the company said in an emailed statement. “The biosolids applied by a farmer working with Synagro met all U.S. EPA and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) requirements. U.S. EPA continues to support land application of biosolids as a valuable practice that recycles nutrients to farmland and has not suggested that any changes in biosolids management is required.”
Some push for nationwide regulations
As Synagro lobbies for federal liability protections, lawmakers in Oklahoma recently considered a similar proposal that would protect cities and companies from lawsuits if the biosolids they produce and convert into fertilizer were later found to be harmful.
Oklahoma House Bill 2305 stated that a waste management or disposal company, along with a public wastewater treatment facility, “shall not be liable … for costs arising from a release to the environment of a PFAS substance” as long as state laws are followed.
The bill received overwhelming bipartisan support in both the House and Senate but failed to receive final approval before the legislative session ended in May.
During an April 4 Senate committee hearing, Sen. Dave Rader, a Tulsa Republican, presented the bill and said he wanted to ensure cities were protected from liability since they were not responsible for producing the chemicals found in biosolid fertilizers.
But one lawmaker asked if the bill would still protect polluters.
“Does this create an alibi for the person who pollutes a water source and says, ‘I followed the state procedure, so it's not my fault?’ ” asked Sen. Dusty Deevers, an Elgin Republican.
“I suppose it could,” Rader answered.
Scott Thompson, then the director of the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, was also in the room supporting the bill.
“(Cities and towns) are receiving this PFAS in the waste stream … what we are concerned about is the future liability under the federal law as they get passed,” Thompson told lawmakers. “(The EPA) is going to very tiny numbers that we have to measure and essentially creating potential liability for everyone that has to receive this and manage it.”
Asked about Thompson’s comments, Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality officials reiterated their support.
"DEQ would support some version of federal legislation that provides protection for certain passive receivers who provide critical, public health services,” said Erin Hatfield, the agency’s director of communications and education. “As for increased PFAS standards, DEQ would like to see additional research done to further determine health impacts related to PFAS and standards based on scientific findings."
Other states have said the health impacts are already apparent and biosolid fertilizer should be banned or severely restricted.
In 2022, the Maine legislature banned the use of biosolid fertilizer and allocated $60 million to help contaminated farms, including many dairy farms that were forced to shut down.
In Michigan, where cattle farms have been forced to shut down due to tainted beef, biosolid PFAS standards are stricter than in most states. The state also has an aggressive investigation program to try to identify the specific source of PFAS contaminants.
However, some environmental watch groups have scoffed at a state-by-state approach, calling for nationwide regulations instead.
Earlier this year, the Maryland-based environmental nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, or PEER, sued the EPA over the lack of biosolid fertilizer standards.
“EPA has deemed it acceptable for biosolids containing PFAS and other known toxic chemicals to be applied directly to soil as fertilizer, where these man-made contaminants then build up in the environment, exacerbating the PFAS contamination crisis,” Tim Whitehouse, PEER executive director, wrote in a Feb. 22, 2024 letter to the EPA. “This is not protective of human health or the environment.”
The EPA declined to comment on pending litigation.
While the EPA has made progress on congressionally-mandated PFAS rules related to drinking water, it has yet to complete a risk assessment of PFAS in biosolid, according to tracking by the Environmental Working Group nonprofit.
“We are really hoping to see them finish that up by the end of the year and to really get a good picture of just how much of our overall exposures to PFAS is the result of PFAS in biosolid potentially contaminating our food supply and our environment,” said Hayes, the policy analyst with EWG. “In the meantime, states have been leading the charge and taking action.”
GRAPHIC: Hiring foreign visa workers skyrockets at meatpacking plants
The H-2B temporary visa has traditionally been used to fill labor shortages in seasonal industries, such landscaping, hospitality and food service. But the meatpacking industry has started to hire more and more workers through the program, according to U.S. Department of Labor data.
The H-2B’s sister program, the H-2A visa, is reserved for seasonal agriculture work, such as picking fruits and vegetables. Some agricultural industries, such as meatpacking plants and dairy farms, are not eligible for the H-2A visa because the work is year-round.
In 2015, just six meatpacking plants were granted H-2B visas by the federal government. Last year, the number was 44 — a six-fold increase.
Tyson Foods and Smithfield Foods, two of the largest meat processing companies in the U.S., hired workers through the H-2B program last year, according to the latest data available. Seaboard Foods, which owns one of the largest meatpacking plants in the country and is based in Oklahoma, has used the program for several years, the data shows.
As investors pay top-dollar for land, farmers are often priced out
As Jess Bray pulled up to a 21-acre farm nestled in an eastern Oklahoma valley, she instantly got a warm feeling. “This is the place,” she thought.
After attempting to buy two other properties before being outbid by cash buyers, Bray and her husband Jon began to wonder whether their dream of owning and operating their own farm would become a reality.
“We always wanted to farm, but we aren’t trust fund kids, we didn’t grow up in agriculture … we didn’t have a farm handed down to us, so it wasn’t something that was very accessible to us,” Bray said. “This was a dream come true … but it wasn’t without challenges.”
In 2022, Bray, then 39, purchased the valley property, which they now operate under the name Blue Mountain Farm, growing a variety of vegetables, and raising pigs and a dairy cow near the town of McCurtin.
While Bray eventually realized her dream, the rising cost of farmland has priced out many other would-be farmers and ranchers or forced others into early retirement. The parts of the country where farmland prices have seen the largest increase have also been where the number of agriculture producers has declined the most.
From 2017 to 2022, the average value per acre of all American farmland grew from $4,368 to $5,354, an increase of nearly 23%, according to USDA data on the market value of farmland and its buildings.
But in the 409 counties across the country that saw a producer decline of 15% or greater over the past five years, average farmland values increased by 31%, according to Investigate Midwest’s analysis of USDA reports, land value records and other property data.
In reviewing property records and speaking with more than a dozen officials who closely track farmland values, Investigate Midwest found there are multiple causes for the decline in producers in counties that saw the most significant increase in value:
Population growth expanding into rural communities has increased prices and reduced farmland as 11 million acres of agricultural land were converted into residential properties from 2001 to 2016, according to the American Farmland Trust.
The push towards wind and solar energy, often backed by government subsidies, has also raised land rents much higher than for traditional agricultural use.
Large investment firms, such as Farmland Partners, PGIM and Gladstone Land, are paying top dollar for land and reselling some property at amounts as much as five times higher than the regional average.
The move towards industrial farms has also meant more corporate land buyers who can pay cash and beat many local offers.
“The biggest competition (for farmland) used to be from the person who wanted a hobby farm but maybe wasn’t farming full time,” said Vanessa Garcia Polanco, a policy campaign director with the National Young Farmers Coalition. “Today, the biggest threat we see is from corporations and hedge funds.”
The increase in competition for farmland has been especially detrimental for young and would-be farmers. According to a 2022 National Young Farmers Coalition survey, 59% of farmers under 40 said finding affordable land was “very or extremely challenging.”
Farmland ownership has received increased attention from lawmakers in recent years, especially concerning foreign-owned companies. Lawmakers in dozens of states have pushed laws limiting foreign land ownership, including from countries like Iran and China, often claiming these buyers drive up costs that push out family farms.
However, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack recently called that focus misguided and said the growth in American investment firms buying farmland is a more pressing concern.
“Do you know roughly a third of all the farming operations that generate more than $500,000 in sales are owned by investment outfits? Are you concerned about Wall Street owning farmland?” Vilsack said in response to a question about foreign-owned land while speaking at the North American Agricultural Journalists conference in April.
But Paul Pittman, the executive chairman of the investment firm Farmland Partners, said companies like his were not to blame for rising prices and were keeping many farms in production.
“That’s populist B.S. and nothing less,” Pittman told Investigate Midwest when asked about Vilsack’s comments. “And remember, for every farmer who is whining about being outbid, there’s a farm family that owned that farm for 100 years and deserves to get the highest price possible.”
In the spring of 2023, the Farmland Partners investment firm spent $8.85 million in cash on 1,840 acres of farmland in Haskell County, Oklahoma. The land was a highly productive swath of soybean, corn and wheat fields with an irrigation system pulling water from the nearby Canadian River.
The Denver-based firm had grown in recent years to become the nation’s largest farmland investor, with a valuation of more than half a billion dollars and a portfolio of more than 180,000 acres across the country.
One of the firm’s land buys in Oklahoma was a 174-acre property for $3 million. At $17,232 an acre, the Oklahoma purchase was five times more than the median for comp sales in the area, based on data from the land value tracking site AcreValue.
However, the firm had shown that its high purchase prices were likely to pay off. It had recently sold nearly 2,500 acres of farmland in central Nebraska and South Carolina for a combined $16.2 million, a transaction that netted Farmland Partners a 24% return on investment, the company announced.
Most farmland investment firms lease the land back to producers who operate the entire farming business. In a recent SEC filing, Gladstone Land, which owns 111,836 acres of farmland across 15 states, said it rents most of its land to farmers on a “triple-net basis,” which means the tenant pays the related taxes, insurance costs, maintenance, and other operating costs in addition to rent.
However, Pittman, the chairman of Farmland Partners’ board of directors, said there are signs that more farmers are struggling to afford rents.
“There’s a little more trouble out there than there was 12 months ago ... and we’re seeing it in having an occasional farmer come to us and say, ‘Hey, can you re-rent this farm to someone else?’ ”Pittman said on a May 1 investor call, according to a transcript. “When we’ve had that occur, we’ve been able to (re-rent) the farms at the same price or in some cases, a little bit higher.”
Asked about Vilsack’s comments, Pittman said declining commodity prices are pinching some farmers.
“Starting in about 2019, commodity prices started to go up pretty fast, but here we are in 2024, and commodity prices have pulled back,” Pittman told Investigate Midwest. “This is a low margin business … so when you see a little bit of a drop in commodity price, it can challenge (a farmer) financially.”
However, Pittman said his firm’s investments remain solid because, in the agriculture sector, “bankruptcies are minuscule.” The 2022 farm bankruptcy rate was 0.84 per 10,000 farms, its lowest rate in nearly 20 years.
While most farmland is rented to producers, there are times when an alternative use can fetch even more money. Wind farms can attract lucrative rents and often allow the land to remain agricultural. However, the growth in solar farms, which also attract high rental rates, usually means the land can no longer be used to grow crops or raise livestock because of the large solar panels near the ground.
“In Illinois, for example, a farm that may rent for $400 to $500 an acre a year for agriculture, rents for $1,250 to $1,500 a year for solar, and the farmer cannot compete with that,” Pittman said. “To be honest, (when I’m wearing) my fiduciary obligation to my investor's hat, if somebody offers us $1,500 an acre, it's going to go to solar. But wearing my Paul the citizen hat, I'm not sure that's a great thing.”
Industrial farm growth led to a ‘hollowing out of the middle’
In most counties that lost producers, agriculture production actually increased as the remaining farms often grew larger or were converted to industrial operations.
Wisconsin’s Douglas County, located in the state’s northwest corner, lost 31% of its producers from 2017 to 2022 but saw net cash farm incomes more than double and sales from agriculture products increase by 45% during that same period.
Across the state, five counties saw a producer decline of at least 15% yet also saw agriculture production sales increase.
“Many operators continued to exit, and this happened rapidly among Wisconsin dairy farms,” said Jeff Hadachek, an agriculture professor at the University of Wisconsin. “At the same time, the farms that remained were increasing in size.”
Hadachek said the increase in farm production means the local economy may still be growing even with a loss of producers.
“I think economists would typically say that just looking at the number of farms is not the best way to consider economic health in a community,” Hadachek said. “Certainly, for the people who own land, the increase in value is a great thing … so there are two sides of the issue for sure.”
Like most types of farming, Wisconsin’s dairy industry has seen a move towards more industrial operations to improve efficiency, which can increase profits in a sector with tight margins for smaller dairy farmers.
In 1997, the average Wisconsin dairy farm had 55.6 cows, while the 2022 average topped 203 per farm, according to research from the University of Wisconsin.
Some farmland investors see profit opportunities in the transition to larger farms and are predicting a continued shift toward industrial agriculture.
“An aging farmer generation, fractional family ownership structure and technological advances requiring sizable capital investment will naturally transition farmland holdings from individuals to institutions,” stated a report from PGIM, the $10 billion property asset management company run by Prudential Financial that has increased its farmland holdings in recent years.
Hadachek said the growth in larger operations has led to a decrease in medium-sized farms, what he calls a “hollowing out of the middle.”
“The growth in the larger end reflects consolidation and the economies of scale and size associated with large farms, while the growth in the smaller end reflects growth in specialty foods, farms targeting the ‘local foods’ market, and hobby farming,” Hadachek said.
But Pittman, the executive chairman of the investment firm Farmland Partners, said data on the decline in the number of farms across the country can be deceiving.
From 2017 to 2022, America lost 141,733 farms, but 80% of those lost farms had less than $2,500 in annual sales.
“You and I know those aren't really farms, I don't know why they're called farms,” Pittman said. “If you're talking about supporting a family or two families on a farm, you are talking about at least a million dollars in annual sales, which would give you about $50,000 in distributable household income to send your kids to school and pay for food and all that.”
USDA data shows the nation lost 10,537 farms with annual sales of $100,000 to $499,999, but farms making more than $500,000 grew by more than 26,000.
Some states, nonprofits work to protect farmland from development
Construction sounds have become a constant echo in McCurtin County, Oklahoma, where cabins and resorts are being built in the pastures and forests between the Ouachita Mountains and Red River. Tourism growth, especially visitors from the Dallas metro, which is within a two-hour drive, has increased local farmland prices much faster than the state average.
From 2017 to 2022, McCurtin County lost nearly one out of every five producers while the average value per acre soared from $1,901 to $2,601 as investors, second-home buyers, and some private equity firms snatched up land to build vacation homes or sit on the land while its value grew.
“When someone’s waving that kind of money at grandpa’s farm, they let ’em have it,” said Brent Bolin, a poultry producer in McCurtin County, who is also a state agriculture commissioner.
In a recent report titled “Farms Under Threat,” the American Farmland Trust found that between 2001 and 2016, more than 11 million acres of farmland was converted to urban and residential use, with Texas, California, Arizona, and Georgia topping the list.
To stall the urbanization of farmland, the American Farmland Trust, a nonprofit that says it wants to expand the “conservation agriculture movement,” has facilitated the purchase of more than 78,000 acres to protect it from nonagricultural uses.
Some states have taken similar measures, including Oregon, where counties must protect some farmland through specific zoning restrictions.
Bolin said zoning restrictions might be worth considering, although he’s hesitant to suggest them.
“It’s something that would be super controversial and I don't know where I stand on it,” Bolin said. “I know there are some states that help protect farmland, but that is more regulation and we don’t like that here in Oklahoma. But I don’t know what the answer is.”
Even if farmland is protected from being converted into another use, young farmers still struggle to compete with cash buyers. While many of those cash-buyers, including investment firms, rent the land to farmers, critics say that creates a system that lacks stability for farmers and ranchers, especially those looking to start a business for the first time.
“The contract could be a three-year lease or a five-year lease, but that’s not much long-term security for a farmer,” said Polanco with the National Young Farmers Coalition.
Bray, the Oklahoma farmer, said owning land was crucial for her to have the kind of control she wanted over her business. It also allowed her to make more environmentally focused decisions about land use.
But when Bray was looking to buy land, competing with cash buyers was even more difficult because her own financial options took a long time to fulfill.
“Not only did we have to finance but we were kind of forced into a commercial funding route instead of the state program route because the government programs take too long,” Bray said.
The National Young Farmers Coalition has advocated for the Farm Service Agency to be made a loan-making institution with pre-approval and pre-qualification processes to give farmers needing financing a better chance at competing for land.
“This would allow farmers to show they are eligible, especially if the seller wants an offer right away and has a cash offer from a corporation,” Polanco said.
Even when Bray was able to purchase her current property, complications arose from the land’s previous owner, a cash buyer who made a quick purchase.
“Moving in, it took us months and months and months to get in our property because of how it was handled before,” Bray said. “The title had never been transferred, so we had to wait for that to be transferred to the prior owner before it could be transferred to us. And there was official paper that they had run out of stock on, somebody forgot to order the official state paper for the licenses and titles and all of that, so that was another waiting game.”
During the delays, Bray’s Realtor warned them they might have to move on to another property.
“He said, ‘Honey, if you don't get this, don't feel bad, we'll keep looking,’ ” Bray recalled. “But I said, ‘No, we will wait,’ because … I had that feeling when we got here that this was the place. This was our dream, but you know, high interest rates, the prices of the properties and the margins as a farmer, those three things don’t go together, they just don’t.”
Standing knee-deep in an emerald expanse, a row of trees offering respite from the sweltering heat, Rosa Morales diligently relocates chipilín, a Central American legume, from one bed of soil to another. The 34-year-old has been coming to the Campesinos’ Garden run by the Farmworker Association of Florida in Apopka for the last six months, taking home a bit of produce each time she visits. The small plot that hugs a soccer field and community center is an increasingly vital source of food to feed her family.
It also makes her think of Guatemala, where she grew up surrounded by plants. “It reminds me of working the earth there,” Morales said in Spanish.
Tending to the peaceful community garden is a far cry from the harvesting Morales does for her livelihood. Ever since moving to the United States 16 years ago, Morales has been a farmworker at local nurseries and farms. She takes seasonal jobs that allow her the flexibility and income to care for her five children, who range from 18 months to 15 years old.
This year, she picked blueberries until the season ended in May, earning $1 for every pound she gathered. On a good day, she earned about two-thirds of the state’s minimum hourly wage of $12. For that, Morales toiled in brutal heat, with little in the way of protection from the sun, pesticides, or herbicides. With scant water available, the risk of dehydration or heat stroke was never far from her mind. But these are the sorts of things she must endure to ensure her family is fed. “I don’t really have many options,” she said.
“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s really, really hot … the heat is increasing, but the salaries aren’t.” The Campesinos’ Garden helps fill in the gap between her wages and the cost of food.
The 2.4 million or so farmworkers who are the backbone of America’s agricultural industry earn among the lowest wages in the country. The average American household spends more than $1,000 a month on groceries, an almost unimaginable sum for families bringing home as little as $20,000 a year, especially when food prices have jumped more than 25 percent since 2019. Grappling with these escalating costs is not a challenge limited to farmworkers, of course — the Department of Agriculture says getting enough to eat is a financial struggle for more than 44 million people. But farmworkers are particularly vulnerable because they are largely invisible in the American political system.
“When we talk about supply chains and food prices going up, we are not thinking about the people who are producing that food, or getting it off the fields and onto our plates,” said Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli.
Xiuhtecutli works with the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to protect farmworkers from the occupational risks and exploitation they face. Few people beyond the workers themselves recognize that hunger is a problem for the community, he said — or that it’s exacerbated by climate change. The diminished yields that can follow periods of extreme heat and the disruptions caused by floods, hurricanes, and the like inevitably lead to less work, further exacerbating the crisis.
There isn’t a lot of aid available, either. Enrolling in federal assistance programs is out of the question for the roughly 40% of farmworkers without work authorization or for those who fear reprisals or sanctions. Even those who are entitled to such help may be reluctant to seek it. In lieu of these resources, a rising number of advocacy organizations are filling the gaps left by government programs by way of food pantries, collaborative food systems, and community gardens across America.
“Even though (farmworkers) are doing this job with food, they still have little access to it,” said Xiuhtecutli. “And now they have to choose between paying rent, paying gas to and from work, and utilities, or any of those things. And food? It’s not at the top of that list.”
In September, torrential rain caused heavy flooding across western Massachusetts. The inundation decimated farmland already ravaged by a series of storms. “It impacted people’s ability to make money and then be able to support their families,” Claudia Rosales said in Spanish. “People do not have access to basic food.”
As executive director of the Pioneer Valley Workers Center, Rosales fights to expand protections for farmworkers, a community she knows intimately. After immigrating from El Salvador, she spent six years working in vegetable farms, flower nurseries, and tobacco fields across Connecticut and Massachusetts, and knows what it’s like to experience food insecurity. She also understands how other exploitative conditions, such as a lack of protective gear or accessible bathrooms, can add to the stress of simply trying to feed a family. Rosales remembershow, when her kids got sick, she was afraid she’d get fired if she took them to the doctor instead of going to work. (Employers harassed her and threatened to deport her if she tried to do anything about it, she said.) The need to put food on the table left her feeling like she had no choice but to tolerate the abuse.
“I know what it’s like, how much my people suffer,” said Rosales. “We’re not recognized as essential … but without us, there would not be food on the tables across this country.”
The floodwaters have long since receded and many farms are once again producing crops, but labor advocates like Rosales say the region’s farmworkers still have not recovered. Federal and state disaster assistance helps those with damaged homes, businesses, or personal property, but does not typically support workers. Under federal law, if agricultural workers with a temporary visa lose their job when a flood or storm wipes out a harvest, they are owed up to 75 percent of the wages they were entitled to before the disaster, alongside other expenses. They aren’t always paid, however. “Last year, there were emergency funds because of the flooding here in Massachusetts that never actually made it to the pockets of workers,” Rosales said.
The heat wave that recently scorched parts of Massachusetts likely reduced worker productivity and is poised to trigger more crop loss, further limiting workers’ ability to make ends meet. “Climate-related events impact people economically, and so that then means limited access to food and being able to afford basic needs,” said Rosales, forcing workers to make difficult decisions on what they spend their money on — and what they don’t.
The impossible choice between buying food or paying other bills is something that social scientists have been studying for years. Research has shown, for example, that low-income families often buy less food during cold weather to keep the heat on. But climate change has given rise to a new area to examine: how extreme heat can trigger caloric and nutritional deficits. A 2023 study of 150 countries revealed that unusually hot weather can, within days, create higher risks of food insecurity by limiting the ability to earn enough money to pay for groceries.
It’s a trend Parker Gilkesson Davis, a senior policy analyst studying economic inequities at the nonprofit Center for Law and Social Policy, is seeing escalate nationwide, particularly as utility bills surge. “Families are definitely having to grapple with ‘What am I going to pay for?’” she said. “People, at the end of the month, are not eating as much, having makeshift meals, and not what we consider a full meal.”
Federal programs like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, are designed to help at times like these. More than 41 million people nationwide rely on the monthly grocery stipends, which are based on income, family size, and some expenses. But one national survey of nearly 3,700 farmworkers found just 12.2 percent used SNAP. Many farmworkers and migrant workers do not qualify because of their immigration status, and those who do often hesitate to use the program out of fear that enrolling could jeopardize their status. Even workers with temporary legal status like a working visa, or those considered a “qualified immigrant,” typically must wait five years before they can begin receiving SNAP benefits. Just six states provide nutrition assistance to populations, like undocumented farmworkers, ineligible for the federal program.
The expiration of COVID-era benefit programs, surging food costs, and international conflicts last year forced millions more Americans into a state of food insecurity, but no one can say just how many are farmworkers. That’s because such data is almost nonexistent — even though the Agriculture Department tracks annual national statistics on the issue. Lisa Ramirez, the director of the USDA’s Office of Partnerships and Public Engagement, acknowledged that the lack of data on hunger rates for farmworkers should be addressed on a federal level and said there is a “desire” to do something about it internally. But she didn’t clarify what specifically is being done. “We know that food insecurity is a problem,” said Ramirez, who is a former farmworker herself. “I wouldn’t be able to point to statistics directly, because I don’t have [that] data.”
Without that insight, little progress can be made to address the crisis, leaving the bulk of the problem to be tackled by labor and hunger relief organizations nationwide.
“My guess is it would be the lack of interest or will — sort of like a willful ignorance — to better understand and protect these populations,” said social scientist Miranda Carver Martin, who studies food justice and farmworkers at the University of Florida. “Part of it is just a lack of awareness on the part of the general public about the conditions that farmworkers are actually working in. And that correlates to a lack of existing interest or resources available to build an evidence base that reflects those concerns.”
The lack of empirical information prevented Martin and her colleagues Amr Abd-Elrahman and Paul Monaghan from creating a tool that would identify the vulnerabilities local farmworkers experience before and after a disaster. “What we’ve found is that the tool that we dreamed of, that would sort of comprehensively provide all this data and mapping, is not feasible right now, given the dearth of data,” she noted.
However, Martin and her colleagues did find, in a forthcoming report she shared with Grist, that language barriers often keep farmworkers from getting aid after an extreme weather event. Examining the aftermath of Hurricane Idalia, they found cases of farmworkers in Florida trying, and failing, to get food at emergency stations because so many workers spoke Spanish and instructions were written only in English. She suspects the same impediments may hinder post-disaster hunger relief efforts nationwide.
Martin also believes there is too little focus on the issue, in part because some politicians demonize immigrants and the agriculture industry depends upon cheap labor. It is easier “to pretend that these populations don’t exist,” she said. “These inequities need to be addressed at the federal level. Farmworkers are human beings and our society is treating them like they’re not.”
III.
Tackling hunger has emerged as one of the biggest priorities for the Pioneer Valley Workers Center that Claudia Rosales leads. Her team feeds farmworker families in Massachusetts through La Despensa del Pueblo, a food pantry that distributes food to roughly 780 people each month.
The nonprofit launched the pantry in the winter of 2017. When the pandemic struck, it rapidly evolved from a makeshift food bank into a larger operation. But the program ran out of money last month when a key state grant expired, sharply curtailing the amount of food it can distribute. The growing need to feed people also has limited the organization’s ability to focus on its primary goal of community organizing. Rosales wants to see the food bank give way to a more entrepreneurial model that offers farmworkers greater autonomy.
“For the long term, I’d like to create our own network of cooperatives owned by immigrants, where people can go and grow and harvest their own food and products and really have access to producing their own food and then selling their food to folks within the network,” she said.
Mónica Ramírez, founder of the national advocacy organization Justice for Migrant Women, is developing something very much like that in Ohio. Ramírez herself hails from a farmworker family. “Both of my parents started working in the fields as children,” she said. “My dad was eight, my mom was five.” Growing up in rural Ohio, Ramírez remembers visiting the one-room shack her father lived in while picking cotton in Mississippi, and spending time with her grandparents who would “pile on a truck” each year and drive from Texas to Ohio to harvest tomatoes and cucumbers all summer.
The challenges the Ramírez family faced then persist for others today. Food security has grown so tenuous for farmworkers in Fremont, Ohio, where Justice for Migrant Women is based, that the organization has gone beyond collaborating with organizations like Feeding America to design its own hyperlocal food system. These hunger relief efforts are focused on women in the community, who Ramírez says usually face the biggest burdens when a household does not have enough money for food.
Migrant women, she said, “bear the stress of economic insecurity and food insecurity, because they are the ones who are organizing their families and making sure their families have food in the house.”
Later this month, Ramírez and her team will launch a pilot program out of their office that mimics a farmers market — one in which farmworkers and migrant workers will be encouraged to pick up food provided by a local farmer, at no charge. That allows those visiting the food bank to feel empowered by choice instead of being handed a box with preselected goods, and they hope it will alleviate hunger in a way that preserves a sense of agency for families in need.
Although federal lawmakers have begun at least considering protecting workers from heat exposure and regulators are making progress on a national heat standard, so far there’s been no targeted legislative or regulatory effort to address food insecurity among farmworkers.
In fact, legislators may be on the verge of making things worse.
In May, the Republican-controlled U.S. House of Representatives Agriculture Committee passed a draft farm bill that would gut SNAP and do little to promote food security. It also would bar state and local governments from adopting farmworker protection standards regulating agricultural production and pesticide use, echoing legislation Florida recently passed. The inclusion of such a provision is “disappointing,” said DeShawn Blanding, a senior Washington representative at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit advocacy organization. He hopes to see the version that eventually emerges from the Democrat-controlled Senate, where it remains stalled, incorporate several other proposed bills aimed at protecting farmworkers and providing a measure of food security.
These bills, introduced by Democratic Senator Alex Padilla of California, would give lawmakers and policymakers greater visibility into the needs and experiences of farmworkers. But the greatest benefit could come from a third proposal Padilla reintroduced, the Fairness for Farm Workers Act. It would reform the 1938 law that governs the minimum wage and overtime policies for farmworkers while exempting them from labor protections.
“As food prices increase, low-income workers are facing greater rates of food insecurity,” Padilla told Grist. “But roughly half of our nation’s farmworkers are undocumented and unable to access these benefits.” He’d like to see an expedited pathway to citizenship for the over 5 million essential workers, including farmworkers, who lack access to permanent legal status and social safety benefits. “More can be done to address rising food insecurity rates for farmworkers.”
Still, none of these bills squarely addresses farmworker hunger. Without a concerted approach, these efforts, though important, kind of miss the point, Mónica Ramírez said.
“I just don’t think there’s been a fine point on this issue with food and farmworkers,” she said. “To me it’s kind of ironic. You would think that would be a starting point. What will it take to make sure that the people who are feeding us, who literally sustain us, are not themselves starving?”
IV.
For 68-year-old Jesús Morales, the Campesinos’ Garden in Apopka is a second home. Drawing on his background studying alternative medicine in Jalisco, Mexico, he’s been helping tend the land for the last three years. He particularly likes growing and harvesting moringa, which is used in Mexico to treat a range of ailments. Regular visitors know him as the “plant doctor.”
“Look around. This is the gift of God,” Morales said in Spanish. “This is a meadow of hospitals, a meadow of medicines. Everything that God has given us for our health and well-being and for our happiness is here, and that’s the most important thing that we have here.”
He came across the headquarters of the state farmworker organization when it hosted free English classes, then learned about its garden. Although it started a decade ago, its purpose has expanded over the years to become a source of food security and sovereignty for local farmworkers.
The half-acre garden teems with a staggering assortment of produce. Tomatoes, lemons, jalapeños. Nearby trees offer dragonfruit and limes, and there’s even a smattering of papaya plants. The air is thick with the smell of freshly dug soil and hints of herbs like mint and rosemary. Two compost piles sit side by side, and a greenhouse bursts with still more produce. Anyone who visits during bi-monthly public gardening days is encouraged to plant their own seeds and take home anything they care to harvest.
“The people who come to our community garden, they take buckets with them when they can,” said Ernesto Ruiz, a research coordinator at the Farmworker Association of Florida who oversees the garden. “These are families with six kids, and they work poverty wages. … They love working the land and they love being out there, but food is a huge incentive for them, too.”
Throughout the week, the nonprofit distributes what Ruiz harvests. The produce it so readily shares is supplemented by regular donations from local supermarkets, which Ruiz often distributes himself.
But some of the same factors driving farmworkers to hunger have begun to encroach on the garden. Blistering summer heat and earlier, warmer springs have wiped out crops, including several plots of tomatoes, peppers, and cantaloupes. “A lot of plants are dying because it’s so hot, and we’re not getting rains,” said Ruiz. The garden could also use new equipment — the irrigation system is manual while the weed whacker is third-rate, often swapped out for a machete — and funding to hire another person to help Ruiz increase the amount of food grown and expand when the garden is open to the public.
Demand is rising, and with it, pressure to deliver. Federal legislation addressing the low wages that lead to hunger for many farmworkers across the country is a big part of the solution, but so are community-based initiatives like the Campesinos’ Garden, according to Ruiz. “You do the right thing because it’s the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s always the right thing to feed somebody. Always.”
Thundering equipment, pulverized terrain littered with the dismembered and dying. D-Day? Mariupol? Game of Thrones? No, it’s a sunny day in the American West, and a pair of Bureau of Land Management bulldozers are ripping pinyon and juniper trees out of the ground. To do this, they’re dragging a 20,000-pound Navy anchor chain across the forested landscape.
The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is the powerful Interior Department agency that administers 245 million publicly owned acres, or one-tenth of the nation’s land, as well as 700 million acres of subsurface mineral rights. It describes its mission as sustaining “the health, diversity and productivity of public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.”
In pursuit of this lofty goal, the BLM has obliterated pinyon-juniper forests since the 1950s, “chaining” millions of acres throughout the West. The agency’s fire program tells Barn Raiser that over just seven recent years—2017 through 2023—it removed more than 1.7 million acres’ worth of trees. In doing that, the agency spent just over $151 million in taxpayer money on chaining and on followup activities intended to encourage replacement plants. The BLM calls the latter “treatments,” a mild-sounding term that encompasses harrowing, plowing, mowing, fire, herbicides and more. Eventually, 38.5 million acres of pinyon-juniper forest will be on the chopping block, says the BLM.
Next up are 380,000 acres of eastern Nevada’s ecologically rich pinyon-juniper forest in South Spring and Hamlin Valleys, near Great Basin National Park. To save the forest, the Center for Biological Diversity and Western Watersheds Project have brought a federal lawsuit against the Bureau of Land Management as a whole, two of its local Nevada offices and its parent agency, the Department of the Interior. Nevada’s United States District Court is expected to hear arguments in the suit this fall.
Western Shoshone elder and systems engineer Rick Spilsbury, who joined the litigation, called the BLM’s plan “ecocide” and “a scorched earth attack on … the natural world that has supported my people for tens of thousands of years.” The Western Watersheds Project describes the BLM plan as “heavy-handed,” with “woefully inadequate” analysis to back it up. The high cost is no surprise, says Scott Lake, attorney for the environmental nonprofits. “The government is hiring contractors who are running heavy equipment for hours a day and weeks at a time.”
The BLM calls the suit the result of a “policy disagreement” rather than a matter of law. The agency has justified the practice of chaining with reasons that have morphed over the years, claiming, for example, that the ancient indigenous pinyon-juniper forests are “encroaching” into grasslands, thereby posing a wildfire hazard as well as a risk to the habitats of native species.
Others say that the BLM’s justifications are based on bad science and incomplete analysis. A 2019 review of more than 200 scientific studies by wildlife biologist Allison Jones and colleagues found that “what we see today in many cases is simply [pinyon and juniper trees] recolonizing places where they were dominant but then chained.” The recolonization “is mistaken for encroachment,” wrote Jones et al. The scientists concluded with a warning: “The pace of activity on the ground may be outstripping our understanding of the long-term effects of these treatments and our ability to plan better restoration projects.”
Checking what boxes?
The BLM must consult with tribal nations when projects affect their interests. The agency says it respects “the ties that native and traditional communities have to the land” and the way “strong communication is fundamental to a constructive relationship.” According to the agency, “This means going beyond just checking the box to say we talked to Tribal Nations when we take actions that may affect Native American communities.”
As an example of that “strong communication,” the BLM’s Environmental Assessment for the chaining project describes the agency mailing letters describing it to 5 out of 21 Nevada tribes, along with one in Utah. The document then reveals the agency has had no back-and-forth communication with any of them.
This anemic form of consultation “has been happening for years,” says Western Shoshone elder and healer Reggie Sope from Duck Valley Indian Reservation, which straddles Nevada and Idaho. “That’s the way they put it. ‘We sent them letters, that was our consultation.’ ” His tribe was among the 16 in Nevada that were not consulted, according to the list in the BLM’s Environmental Assessment.
Nor was the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, a four-Band consortium headquartered in Elko, Nevada. Putting a letter in the post is not consultation, says Julius Holley, a council member of both the Te-Moak Tribe and one of its constituents, the Battle Mountain Band. “In our opinion, consultation is a face-to-face meeting,” he says.
The Te-Moak Tribe gets some 40 letters a week from the BLM, Holley says. These may involve matters ranging from minor, such as a mining company’s discovery of an isolated flake (a chip knocked off a piece of stone while creating an arrowhead or other tool), to major, like chaining 380,000 acres. The council continually goes through the letters to determine the important ones, Holley says, then asks for tours and/or meetings concerning them. Citing the ongoing lawsuit, the BLM did not answer questions about how the contacted tribes were chosen and whether any actual interaction had taken place since the Environmental Assessment was written.
Ancient knowledge undercuts BLM claims
The BLM’s crusade against the pinyon-juniper forests recalls the decimation of the continent’s great buffalo herds and salmon runs, undertaken in the 1800s to cripple the tribes that relied on them. For millennia, the pinyon-juniper forests have been vital to tribal nations in Nevada and other Western states. They shelter myriad animal and plant species and are the source of pine nuts—a sweet, creamy, protein- and nutrient-rich staple that was once a mainstay of tribal diets and traditions.
When rabbitbrush in Nevada’s lower elevations turns yellow in the fall, tribal members know the nuts are ripe. It’s time to trek to the mountains and harvest them. While some use long poles to knock the pinecones off the trees, others engage in an age-old tribal fire-prevention practice: removing and chopping up fallen timber and brush that could act as tinder and feed a wildfire.
The cut wood is put to use roasting the cones and making meals for the group. The roasted pine nuts are removed from the cones and eaten out of hand or stored for future use. Ground up, cooked pine nuts are used in preparations ranging from bread to porridge to soup. They can be formed into patties with berries and ground meat—usually venison or elk, says Sope: “Like a quick snack but all natural. Very delicious and nutritious.”
When Sope was a boy, he says, he learned from his elders that long ago the Creator guided his people to a place where they would find all the food and medicine plants they’d need. “So here we remained,” Sope says. “We survived for a long time. They had ceremonies and blessings to honor the Root Nation and ensure it would be plentiful for generations to come.”
The BLM creates a serious challenge to that abundance. After its bulldozers have demolished South Spring and Hamlin Valleys, the agency plans to “treat” whatever’s left. This involves choosing among fire, herbicides and other alternatives. The agency calls this process “adaptive management,” which seems to imply benign creativity. The BLM’s court documents also instruct Nevada’s U.S. District Court to be “highly deferential” to this type of decision-making.
Not so fast, says Lake, the environmental groups’ attorney. He notes that federal courts have repeatedly directed agencies to provide site-specific, landscape-level analysis for immediate and indirect effects of such actions before moving forward. Broad guesswork and ongoing improvisation are not enough, federal courts have held. The National Environmental Protection Act specifically requires this, so it’s not just common sense, but a matter of law, argues Lake.
The BLM’s continually changing assortment of reasons for razing the trees started in the 1950s with the need to create additional grazing land for cattle. That reason has become less acceptable though, according to Lake. “The idea that we should be deforesting [to provide] cattle forage is not really that popular these days, so the rationales have been shifting.” Creating livestock range hasn’t stopped; it’s just no longer widely acknowledged.
Citing the ongoing lawsuit, the BLM did not respond to questions about its past and present goals of creating grazing land. The agency does, however, still support grazing; it offers livestock grazing permits at less than $1.50 per animal per month on 155 million of its managed public acres.
For the birds
One new BLM reason for deforestation that sounds ecologically benevolent is creating habitat for the sage-grouse, an increasingly scarce bird—and in the process demolishing the habitats of many more animal and plant species. “You have to look at the whole picture before you draw up a plan,” chides Sope.
Further, the shrubs in which the sage-grouse likes to breed, nest, forage and over-winter may take decades to establish themselves in devastated terrain. During that time, the BLM has to fend off competing weeds with fire, mowing, herbicides and other destructive methods.
One wonders how any birds will cope. The BLM’s Environmental Assessment assures us that leveling a forest is a “negligible” issue for migratory birds. While the chaining is underway, they simply fly away, the document says; when the noise is over and the forest is gone, the birds will “likely return.”
“To what?” asks Sope.
Meanwhile, tree-dwelling bats are on their own. Under the law, the BLM claims, it need only “consider” effects on them. In preparing the BLM’s court document, someone looked up “consider” in the dictionary and discovered it means “reflect on.” The BLM, according to the document, will contemplate the fate of the bats as it uproots trees, sets fires and applies herbicide.
Fire prevention is another BLM goal. We can all understand that eliminating a forest means it can’t catch fire. However, the extensive surface disturbance the bulldozers create while razing the trees has long encouraged vast swaths of highly flammable, fiercely invasive cheatgrass to spread throughout the West. Overgrazing, motorized recreation and mining have contributed to the spread of the invasive grass, unintentionally imported from Europe in the 1800s as a contaminant of straw packing material and other plant items, according to the US Geological Survey.
As a result, fires that historically occurred centuries apart in the pinyon-juniper forests, cared for by attentive tribal citizens, are now far more frequent. The BLM decries this frequency but does not acknowledge its own culpability for it. Nor does the agency appear to be pursuing multifaceted, systemic and continuously monitored remedies. Simply laying waste to the environment here and there is not supported by science, federal law or tradition.
“The Root Nation is in jeopardy,” warns Sope. “How long are we going to suffer? How long is the Earth Mother going to suffer?”