A wolf in farmer’s clothing

Belle Plaine farmer Zach Lahn caught the nation’s attention last week talking up conservation agriculture with none other than Tucker Carlson, who was too far over the line for Fox News and is an earworm inside RFK2’s head.

Lahn says we need to break up Big Ag, that we are poisoning the water, and that we have lost our way. He’s the son of a preacherman with a certain charisma and an engaging knowledge of Iowa history. Some rural Democrats actually sat through the Carlson yackfest that lasted nearly as long as Trump’s Rant of the Union. They could imagine voting for Lahn for governor.

This woke old White dude tuned out when Lahn opened by talking about culture with the leading nabob in the USA holding onto a microphone and a huge audience of potential small-cash single-minded donors. 

Carlson intimated that German immigrant farmers were best in class. 

Echoes of Steve King everywhere. You think, yeah, I can roll with that until you find out that there are no gays in Heaven or that Latina soccer moms are drug runners. 

Lahn did talk up conservation, anyhow. Well they should. Our way of making a living is killing us. Even Republicans acknowledge it when forced to, like when they want to hang onto RFK2’s MAHA base.

That is a sea change in Iowa. If Lahn is earnest, it could reshape our politics and economics to the core.

But he launched his campaign with a screening of the smash hit movie “Melania” and used to work for the Koch Brothers. He claims to have a lot of money (he founded a home-schooling business) and swore off PAC cash. He vows to self-fund.

If a Democrat with money talked that way he could flip Terrace Hill. Anti-trust. Farm at scale. Rebuild rural by putting people first and hooves on grass.

That could be Chris Jones talking in his Democratic campaign for secretary of agriculture. He has very little money. The ag establishment calls him “anti-farmer.” The no-till guys may agree with Jones down in their bones, but he is a Democrat from Iowa City, after all.

This Lahn guy comes from good German stock. Sixth-generation on the farm. He values “our culture.” That is code for White Anglo Saxon Christian where Wednesday is Church Night and queers are queer. Like an old pair of boots and soft overalls. Sure, and he doesn’t work for anybody in Wichita anymore. That Koch stuff is nitrate under the bridge. You bet.

This is how Rob Sand loses.

And that is how Iowa continues to tread backwards in a rut built up over the past decade of decline. Single-party government selling you a line that we have to return to the culture that formed to wipe out Native people and keep Mexicans on the move. That same culture keeps the trailer parks full.

If you hang with Tucker Carlson and find Melania Trump to be a luminary, then we have cause for concern.

Randy Feenstra, the congressman of almost no note from Hull whose turn it is to be governor, is in trouble. Lahn got on the tube with Tucker the same week a DC publication reminded the Beltway that the Chinese invested heavily in the Dordt College swingman. Adam Steen can whip up religious fervor but Lahn appears to have one-upped him by chatting culture with America’s leading xenophobe.

Sand responded to Jones’s appeal and criticism by picking up with one toe the water-quality mantle. Sand is realizing quickly that not only are pollution and cancer leading issues with the Democratic base, they also worry 72% of Republicans and even more independents.

We always knew Sand favors clean water because he is an outdoorsman reared in tree-hugging Decorah. He was closeted in his views for some time, afraid to offend the Farm Bureau and the Iowa Renewable Fuels crowd. Lately, the state auditor has let the word nitrate pass his lips as the science piles up against it along with the polls. It is not exactly his reason to exist. He is getting there.

Lahn puts agriculture’s suspected contribution to cancer right behind restoring our culture. A lot of women in Ankeny worry about breast cancer and the water they drink. The men worry about prostate cancer but don’t talk about it. They boast they would drink a frosted mug full of Roundup if it tasted like Busch Lite, but they shower after lounging in Storm Lake.

Sand needs to ratchet up his rhetoric on Iowa Toxic.

In the dregs of February you can despair that Sand will get flushed like those before despite his pile of money and attempts to be Switzerland, neutral in most things. Lahn gets out there on a limb and finds the fans cheering him on. We in rural Iowa are desperate to believe that the Republicans are on our side even though they have presided over the consolidation of the state and the worst water pollution in America.

Terry Branstad could have told IBPs Bob Peterson where to get off, but he was afraid to. Not Lahn. He sees ag oligopolies being at the root of the problem. Democrats like Tom Harkin used to talk that way. Chris Jones still does. Rob Sand is learning. He needs no tutor, just the green light that Lahn gives him.