June, 2019
Lincoln -- Mitch Daniels, the former governor of Indiana and current president of Purdue University, writes a column in the Washington Post that can only be described as shameful in its pandering and divisiveness.
He extolls the "cultural fiber that an agricultural upbringing once brought to society," and praises "its value and its virtues" as represented in 4-H and FFA youth.
This would be more palatable if Mitch Daniels himself had any claim either to an agricultural upbringing or to its values and virtues. He doesn't.
Mitch Daniels was raised as the privileged son of a drug company executive and educated at Princeton and Georgetown. He will go down in history as the federal OMB director who turned a federal budget surplus of over $200 billion into a deficit of $400 billion, and as the the college administrator who brought predatory for-profit college practices to a land-grant university.
If he has ever been on a tractor, likely it was only for a photo-op.
But Daniels likes to tell shop-worn stories that he thinks resonate in rural America. From his column:
At the Indiana State Fair, held on grounds now surrounded by inner-city Indianapolis neighborhoods, urban kids can witness, in person, the birth of pigs and calves. Once I asked a boy who had arrived at the fair on a school bus from across town, “Do you know where milk comes from?” He said, “Sure. The grocery store.”
That story, governor, is condescending and offensive. First, you should not try to make fun of inner-city kids to try to look good at their expense; second, the story is painful to dairy farmers who have gone out of business or are about to, and who would say the correct answer now is "factories."
In his column, Daniels says he likes to have 4-H and FFA members give him tours. Accordingly, here is my invitation to come to Nebraska and get a first-hand agricultural tour from me, former president of the Rock Creek Ranchers 4-H Club and member of the FFA chapter at Waverly High School.
We will tour dying towns and abandoned farmsteads, a consequence of the "get big or get out" prescription of former Purdue economist and federal Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz. We will look at monocultures of corn and soybeans, planted "fencerow to fencerow," virtually deserts now, compared to their former environmental diversity. We will look, probably in vain, for any remaining pollinators, their habitat destroyed by agri-business monopolies that dictate cropping practices through the creditors of increasingly desperate farmers.
During the tour, we'll reflect on how this dismal picture came about. Where is all that "cultural fiber" and the "values and virtues" of which Daniels writes? I know a couple of places where it still exists, but they are increasingly hard to find, due to destructive policies and actions Daniels has supported over the years. Gone with the topsoil, so to speak.
After the tour, we could adjourn to my barn for a discussion of how our country really doesn't feed the world, and to the extent we do, we feed it rather badly. We'll have to note how the current administration is ruining export markets, in any case.
We might even have a conversation about how rural values and virtues are at total odds with the personal behavior and many policy actions of the incumbent president, and how Mitch Daniels could strike a blow for universal human values and virtues, not divisiveness, by using his bully pulpit at the Washington Post more responsibly.
