Betting the Farm
ON A COLD Saturday night in November, Pete Buttigieg leaned into his Midwestern roots. The South Bend mayor and Democratic presidential candidate was on the first leg of a tour of northern Iowa. In Decorah, a 7,594-person town, more than 1,000 people had squeezed into the high school gym for a town hall with the candidate. Addressing the people of Winneshiek County, a farming community that flipped from Barack Obama in 2012 to Donald Trump in 2016, he focused on agriculture. Answering a question about climate change, Buttigieg insisted that farmers have a critical role to play in staving off global warming, citing cover crops—beans or buckwheat, for example—grown to prevent weeds and enrich soil quality.
“I was super impressed with what he knew about farming,” Bridgette Hensley, 51, a psychologist, said after the town hall. Deb Tekippe, a 63-year-old retired nurse, agreed. “He’s one of us,” she said.
The next day, Buttigieg hurtled west aboard his blue and yellow campaign bus. As the vehicle passed cornfield after cornfield, he recited for reporters a portion of “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” the famous ode to harvest by the Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley. In Britt — population 1,973—Buttigieg swung by Mary Jo’s Hobo House, a breakfast joint, and asked farmers there about their crops. In Mason City, he toured an ethanol plant and mentioned that it reminded him of the one back in South Bend.
“If he wins, I think that can
