President Trump came to the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines on July 3 ostensibly to set the stage for celebrating the USA’s 250th anniversary next July 4. Trump indicated that the Iowa State Fairgrounds would serve as a kickoff point. We suppose it would be good but we are not betting the farm on it.
Trump also came to sell his bloated spending bill. It’s hard to sell slashing Medicaid spending while rural nursing homes and hospitals teeter on the brink of insolvency. So he riffed for over an hour as he does, saying that he hates Democrats because they hate America, and other stuff like that to bring the nation together heading into our 250th celebration. Thousands of people were enthralled in a pool of perspiration.
Our friend Doug Burns of The Iowa Mercury reported the only real news of the event: Trump said he would not deport farm workers if the farmer vouched for them. It is his way of saying that food processing need not worry about workplace raids. Presumably ICE will not bother Northwest Iowa dairies, poultry barns or meatpackers. These employers have been generally off limits so far.
We don’t know what Trump means by “farmer.” Is Tyson a farmer if it owns and raises chickens? Rembrandt Foods, which feeds laying hens? Workers with papers are rightly worried that they could be deported without hearing to El Salvador or Sudan. It affects productivity, which affects egg prices. Trump is sending a signal that employers don’t have to worry that he will deport their workforce. He is deliberately confusing and vague to allow himself the most leeway, and to keep Latinos in fear.
Trump said immigrants would be in the clear so long as the farmer vouches for them. We don’t know what that means, either, and neither does Trump, precisely. He may be saying that so long as you keep your head down and do what the Boss says, you can stay. If you get injured and are of no use, the rules could be different if you are deemed to be dead weight.
We don’t know what Trump meant. Previously, he offered exemption from deportation to food sector and hospitality workers that was talked down within days. He pledged during his campaign that he would deport all undocumented workers, not just gang-bangers. When you deport vital laborers and good neighbors, the abstract becomes real and opinions change. Slow down processing even a little bit and food prices rise. Trump is acutely aware of it from the pandemic.
So he does this blather where he appears to cut Iowa some slack because it absolutely depends on food processing, from Sioux City to Columbus Junction. They are dominant employers in red counties like Crawford, Sioux and Buena Vista. The entire ag supply chain depends on keeping the kill line running at speed. Three states full of turkeys depend on Storm Lake and the immigrants who turn a gobble into sliced deli meat.
Trump needs Iowa. He cannot lose a House seat. He should be worried about Republican Sen. Joni Ernst. There is an open race for governor, and Democrat Rob Sand is making the right sounds with a ton of cash. It makes Trump nervous. That’s a huge part of why he came to Iowa on the eve of Independence Day. He won here by double digits. It should be terra firma for him. He needs to keep the Senate in his clutches. He needs Iowa. He was telling Iowa that it is okay that we depend on immigrants, so long as the White people here vouch for them. What a strange position.
When you cut Medicaid, you disproportionately affect rural areas because they are poorer and older than cities. When you hack away at food stamps, you likewise put relatively more of the burden on rural places where there are more poor people, like Kentucky. When you cut funds for public broadcasting, you silence an important source of information to rural places. Most lakes in Iowa are in rural counties, so when you cut funding to the DNR you hurt places like Spirit Lake and Lake Park. And on and on.
Politicians from rural places vote for all this stuff in the name of lower taxes. They get re-elected because they don’t campaign on closing the nursing homes in Newell, Albert City and Storm Lake. They campaign against the Woke. They get votes not because they turned over Medicaid to the insurance industry. They attract votes by punching down at cross-dressers. They campaign against renewable energy even though the Pocahontas and Ridge View schools live off wind turbine revenue. They oppose solar when it fuels the bus fleet at Albert City-Truesdale in lieu of property taxes.
They get away with it because Donald Trump can lie as much as he sweats, and people like to hear him bash the things they have been conditioned to fear. Mexicans did not create the opioid tragedy, the likes of Purdue Pharma did. The Mexicans did not hold back your wages or increase your prices, the conglomerate did.
The Mexicans are here to cut your meat and pick your lettuce and lay your sod. There they were, dancing in the Star Spangled Spectacular Big Parade, flying American flags in ethnic garb, celebrating alongside Lao neighbors. They bring vitality to rural communities.
It is hard to understand why Iowa chooses not to cut through the false rhetoric and votes against its interests.
We learned on the Fourth of July that Ashley WolfTornabane of Storm Lake would like to succeed Ryan Melton as the Democratic congressional nominee from the Fourth District. If she does, that could set up a contest with Lynn Evans, an Aurelia Republican currently serving as our state senator. We would like nothing better.
Melton had to drop out when he was laid off from Nationwide Insurance. Rep. Randy Feenstra, R-Hull, intends to run for governor. Evans may face a primary opponent in Iowa House Majority Leader Matt Windschitl of Missouri Valley.
Democrats and Republicans should be grateful to WolfTornabane for seeking the nomination. This is a heavily Republican district. Voters deserve a debate and a choice. It’s not glamorous trudging uphill without money and facing formidable opponents. You have to admire the determination of an underdog.
Egg prices have dropped 64% since January as the federal government imported 10 times the number of shell eggs it did during the same period in 2024. Over half the egg imports came from Turkey, according to Iowa Capital Dispatch. Still, the American Farm Bureau reports that the retail cost for four eggs increased 54% from last summer.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins put over $1 billion into a strategy aimed at combatting avian flu. Part went to subsidizing egg imports while inciting trade wars, and part went to biosecurity inspections of livestock facilities. Another tranche of $70 million has been paid out to producers for destroyed livestock that had been infected since February.
The purchases distort the natural functioning of markets. While stunting an egg producer’s profit, you replace it with an indemnity payment. An old conservative would say that creative destruction is what Adam Smith would prescribe. We are beyond that.
Biosecurity has been the buzzword for many years here. It has taken on added significance with repeated bouts of the flu since the massive depopulation of 2015. Our barns have been locked down and off limits to human and geese alike yet the flu persists. Biosecurity cannot capture all those tiny bugs. We need different systems, but that is a whole different kettle of hens. The consolidated system breeds disease amid a warming climate no matter if you keep the feed truck off premises and swab your boots.
Egg prices remain high because the system is strained. Certainty of disease gets priced in, to a degree, while indemnity payments fill emergent holes.
A more diverse production system might be better at warding off disease and ultimately more efficient than a consolidated system that relies on shell eggs from Turkey. Biosecurity plans are made necessary by the sheer concentration of chickens. If we do not diversify than we should pump a lot more money into research on how to sustain a consolidated system against morphing disease threats. The opposite is true: Research funds have been slashed in the name of government efficiency. People who worked on avian flu in Ames were summarily fired.
Rollins celebrates the drop in egg prices while blissfully unaware of how the flu and other dread diseases work among geese, chickens, hogs and people. The Trump Administration is trying to do away with the scientific funding apparatus.
We used to think that we feed the world. Now Turkey and Korea feed us. Everyone is on corporate welfare nowadays.
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