Investing in Rural America

By Eunice Biel

Harmony, MN

On Sunday evening, October 29, I received an email from the White House inviting me to attend remarks by President of the United States, Joseph R. Biden Jr. on November 1 at a family farm in Northfield, Minn. I hesitated for about five seconds before I sent in my RSVP.

In his comments, President  Biden explained his economic vision to rural Americans. “Over the past 40 years or so, we’ve had a practice in America – an economic practice called trickle-down economics, and it hit rural America especially hard,” he said. “It hollowed out Main Street, telling farmers the only path to success was to get big or get out.”

At the same time, he said, “Tax cuts for big corporations encouraged companies to grow bigger and bigger, more jobs and production overseas for cheaper labor, and undercut local small businesses. Meat-producing companies and the retail grocery chains consolidated, leaving farmers [and] ranchers with few choices about where to sell their products, reducing their bargaining power. Corporations that sell seed, fertilizer, and farm suppliers used their outsized market power to charge farmers and ranchers unfair prices.”

Biden noted that the U.S. has lost more than 400,000 family farms in the past 40 years, an area of more than 140 million acres of farmland, equivalent to an area the size of Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota combined. Family farms have failed, and as they did so, small businesses, hospitals, schools, and communities also suffered.

Biden explained that his plan to invest in America would create new and better markets and new income streams to help rural areas thrive. He noted that $20 billion of the Inflation Reduction Act will go to paying farmers and ranchers a fair value for voluntary agricultural stewardship such as cover crops, managing nutrients and grazing.

Biden emphasized that the administration is promoting competition in agricultural markets, noting that just four big corporations control more than half the market in beef, pork, and poultry. If just one of their processing plants goes offline, it can cause massive supply chain disruptions (as the closing of a baby formula plant did in 2022). “There’s something wrong,” he said, “when just 7% of the American farms get nearly 90% of the farm income.”

In addition to the existing national investments in power grids and broadband that will help rural communities, Biden announced $1 billion to fix aging rural infrastructure systems like electricity, water, and waste water systems that haven’t been updated in decades since President Eisenhower; $2 billion to help farmers using climate smart agriculture; $145 million for clean energy technologies like solar panels and heat pumps that will help lower electric bills; and $274 million for rural high-speed internet expansion.

President Biden is growing the economy from the middle out and the bottom up.

“When the middle class does well, the poor have a way up, and the wealthy still do very well… Everybody does better.”

The administration’s vision for rural America appears to be part of a larger vision for restoring competition to the U.S. economy and thus is closely tied to the administration’s push to break up monopolies. Biden vowed to return to the traditional understanding of antitrust principles championed by presidents all the way back to Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the last century, arguing that protecting economic competition protects workers, promotes innovation, and keeps consumer prices down. To that, the coronavirus pandemic added an awareness of the need to protect supply chains.

“Bidenomics is just another way of saying ‘the American Dream,’” Biden said. “Forty years ago, trickle-down economics limited the dream to those at the top. But I believe every American willing to work hard should be able to get a job, no matter where they live – in the heartland, in small towns – to raise their kids on a good paycheck and keep their roots where they grew up.”