Even in the most agricultural districts of America, farmers are hardly thick on the ground, the result of decades of mechanization and consolidation, which has driven down farm numbers, as well as the United States becoming ever more urban. Nonetheless, the “farm vote,” while small in numbers, is a mighty force in U.S. politics through its cohesion and its many allies.
Farm groups and farm-state lawmakers are commonly described as “punching above their weight” in Congress because they make alliances on outside issues, which builds political capital, and because they fight tenaciously for their priorities. Their blend of social and fiscal conservatism aligns with the attitudes of their rural neighbors and a large part of the rest of the country as well. The head of a large agribusiness shrugged aside agriculture policy questions in the 1980s by saying his company simply followed the Farm Bureau line.
Still, farm and ranch families make up only 2 percent of the U.S. population. In the U.S. House district with the largest number of farms, the vast Third District of Nebraska, the 55,000 farm operators amount to fewer than 1 in 10 of the district’s 609,000 residents, according to USDA and Census Bureau data. In the district with the second-highest number of farms, the Seventh District of Minnesota, the 49,000 farm operators account for just 1 in 13 of the 663,000 residents. Both districts have sweeping stretches of farmland dotted with small towns and medium-size cities.
“The political power is not just in those … farm operators, it’s in the businesses and corporations those farm operators deal with,” explains editor Tim Marema of the Daily Yonder, which covers rural issues. There is, he says, “significant political infrastructure built around that farmer.” Plenty of jobs are connected to agriculture, and lots of rural residents, including non-farmers, have ties to the land.
The agriculture sector often defines itself broadly, to show its influence on the economy. USDA data offers a big-picture view as well. Agriculture, food, and related industries contributed nearly $1 trillion to the economy in 2015, says the USDA, and in 2017, 11 percent of U.S. employment was related to the agriculture and food sectors.
On Capitol Hill, the prominence of the Senate and House Agriculture committees, whose members often show first allegiance to agriculture while having jurisdiction over rural development, too, frequently results in farm and rural policy being considered synonymous. They are actually somewhat divergent. The USDA says that 444 of the 3,100 U.S. counties — nearly 1,100 counties are “metropolitan” — are “farming-dependent,” meaning that at least 16 percent of jobs or 25 percent of earnings come from agriculture. Most farming-dependent counties are in the Plains or the western Corn Belt. Nearly three times as many counties, 1,237, are rated as “non-specialized,” and 501 counties are considered “manufacturing-dependent.”
Looking at the comparatively small number of farming-dependent counties, former USDA chief economist Joe Glauber said, “Surely this has been this way for a long time. We have roughly 2 to 2.1 million farms today but [had] only 50 percent more farms back in 1970 — less than 3 million. And even in 1970, more than half of the farms reported off-farm income.”