WASHINGTON, Jan. 27, 2016 - No period in
the presidential campaign is more important to U.S. agriculture than the run-up
to the Iowa caucuses. But as the caucuses
approach next Monday, the candidates most favored by Iowa’s agribusiness
leadership are likely to come in third at best.
Moreover, the likely top two finishers in
the GOP caucuses, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, have both taken positions on
trade, biofuels and immigration that are giving Iowa aggies a major case of
heartburn.
Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, last
year locked up a Who’s Who list of agribusiness backers,
including Glen Keppy, a former USDA associate administrator and a past
president of the National Pork Producers Council; Thomas Dorr, former president
and CEO of the U.S. Grains Council and USDA under secretary for rural
development; Harry Stine, owner of the country’s largest independent seed
company; Charles Sukup, president of Sukup Manufacturing Corp., a leading
producer of grain bins; and several former National Corn Growers Association
presidents.
Since then, only Marco Rubio has come close
to producing a farm team like Bush’s. Rubio’s list of backers, which was only announced this month,
includes Ray Gaesser, chairman of the American Soybean Association; Kirk Leeds,
CEO of the Iowa Soybean Association; and Gage Kent, chairman and CEO of the
Kent Corp., a Muscatine-based grain processor.
But Rubio, a Florida senator, is running a
distant third in recent Iowa polling and Bush has been lagging further behind.
Trailing among others is Sen. Rand Paul, the libertarian-leaning Kentucky
senator whose most prominent agriculture backer is probably Craig Lang, a former Iowa Farm Bureau president.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got
attention in Iowa in 2014 by vetoing a ban on hog gestation crates, but he has
also struggled to gain traction, despite getting the endorsement last fall of
Bruce Rastetter, a leading entrepreneur in the ethanol and hog industries, who
chairs the Iowa Board of Regents. Rastetter organized and moderated last
March’s Iowa Ag Summit that was expressly designed to force the candidates to
address agricultural issues. Trump and Rubio didn’t appear. Cruz did.
“There’s snippets and pieces of a dozen
candidates” that appeal to Iowa farmers, but “nobody has got the complete
package,” said David Miller, director of research and commodity services for
the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation.
So for many in Iowa agribusiness, the race
has turned into an effort to head off a win by Cruz, the Texas senator who
hasn’t backed off his position that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) should be
phased out. Gov. Terry Branstad called for defeating Cruz, and some in
agriculture are quietly talking about supporting Trump just to make sure Cruz
doesn’t win, according to Iowa Agriculture Secretary Bill Northey. They think
“the one who could well pick (Cruz) off is Trump, even though they recognize he
doesn’t have a very good trade position,” Northey said.
Trump opposes the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, which could boost U.S. meat exports, and threatened a trade war
with China, the biggest U.S. soybean export market. Cruz, in addition to being
an RFS critic, voted against giving President Obama negotiating authority to
finish the TPP, and voted for imposing a crop insurance “means” test. Both
candidates have taken a hard line on immigration, pushing their challengers to
the right on that issue as well.
Nonetheless, Trump is leading the race in
Iowa with the backing of more than 33 percent of likely caucus-goers, followed
by Cruz at 27.5 percent, according to the latest RealClear Politics average of recent polls. Rubio
is running third at 12 percent, trailed by neurosurgeon Ben Carson at 12
percent. Bush is sixth at 3.7 percent, followed by Christie at 3.
Bill Horan, a prominent Iowa corn grower
from Rockwell City, said he started off backing Carly Fiorina but was
disappointed when the former Hewlett-Packard CEO never caught on in the state.
He met with Bush but didn’t think he was strong enough on the RFS.
Horan discussed biofuel policy in person with
Cruz in December but couldn’t convince the senator that biofuels would never be
on a level playing field with fossil fuels without a federal policy like the
RFS. “He just didn’t agree with me,” Horan said.
Cruz’s most prominent backers with
agriculture connections – U.S. Rep. Steve King and Dave VanderGriend, CEO of
Kansas-based ICM Inc., a biofuels technology company – are defending the
argument that he can boost ethanol usage without the RFS by overhauling EPA
regulations.
But a political advocacy group representing
the industry, America’s Renewable Future, announced a new radio ad Tuesday
denouncing Cruz as “paid for by Big Oil.”
Horan worries that the caucus results will
wind up diminishing agriculture’s influence in the presidential race, not enhancing
it, because farmers haven’t been vocal enough. The message that congressional
aides are getting from the race is that the presidential candidates are
“talking down biofuels and they’re talking down trade, and nobody is making a
big fuss about it, except the governor,” Horan said.
Northey and others are already trying to
spin the outcome more optimistically, at least when it comes to biofuels: Even
if Cruz finishes first or second with the GOP, the majority of the caucus
attendees will have gone to pro-RFS candidates.
Moreover,
the RFS will have gotten needed media attention, Northey said. No matter
the outcome Monday, the “issue had visibility, and it mattered, and that’s a
constructive situation,” he said.
On the less-crowded Democratic side, advocates say all of
their candidates support the RFS. The differences between Hillary Clinton, Bernie
Sanders and Martin
O’ Malley are more along the lines of support for issues like
biotechnology, GMO labeling and farm size.
“Bernie Sanders’ policies would increase the cost of food to
all Americans and hurt low income people the worst. He also endorsed Vermont’s
GMO labeling bill, which is good for Vermont politics but bad for America and
global food security,” noted
Marshall Matz, a principal with OFW Law who previously chaired President Obama’s
farm team. “The 2012 Democratic Platform supported agriculture “from the small
farms that feed the community to the large farms that feed the world.”
Hillary Clinton’s most prominent agribusiness supporters in
Iowa are Pam Johnson, a former president of the National Corn Growers
Association, and Bruce Rohwer, a past president of the Iowa Corn Growers
Association. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has an “environmental leadership
team" for Iowa that includes Francis Thicke, a longtime
organic farmer and an outspoken advocate of that sector who once run against
Northey for state agriculture secretary.
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