18 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST17, 2020
according to a study funded in part by
Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Re-
sources. (A farm with twenty-five hun-
dred cows produces as much waste as a
city of four hundred thousand people.)
The E.P.A. recently sampled the ground-
water in a thirty-mile area of Juneau
County that’s dense with dairy cows and
found that sixty-five per cent of the sites
had elevated levels of nitrates, which
have been linked to birth defects, colon
cancer, and “blue-baby syndrome,” a con-
dition that reduces oxygen in an infant’s
blood and can be fatal.
“You’re now looking at three or four
generations of depletion,” Curt Meine,
an environmental historian at the Uni-
versity of Wisconsin-Madison, told me.
“Depletion of rural communities, rural
landscapes, rural soils and water, deple-
tion of the land and local economies.
And you have the brain drain that fol-
lowed it. This is why we have this deep
urban-rural divide. We have concen-
trated and exported the wealth. Every-
one sees it, but neither party has wres-
tled with it. One party exploited it, the
other party has ignored it.”
“It’s hard, because I’ve built my life
around a system that I believe now is
extremely problematic from an environ-
mental, social, even a personal level,”
Volenec said. “It’s not the farming that
I was brought up with. It’s not really
even farming anymore. It’s mining. We’re
extracting resources and shipping them
away, and they’re not coming back.
There’s no cyclical nature to it. It’s a
straight line out.”
Volenec and I walked across the road
to see his great-great-grandfather’s
homestead. The land begins behind his
house. Rolling fields stretched to the
horizon, punctuated by cornstalks and
a few trees. Volenec told me that he will
be the family’s last farmer. “I don’t want
my kids doing what I’m doing,” he said.
He gazed at the snow-covered plot. “The
flip side for me is: Is what I’ve done
worth anything?”
V
olenec’s farm is in the Driftless Area,
a vast region of hills and valleys in
southern and western Wisconsin whose
agricultural and political histories are
deeply entwined. The Driftless Area, with
its steep coulees and sandstone bluffs, is
a geological anomaly in the Midwest. (It
also encompasses smaller portions of Iowa,
Minnesota, and Illinois.) As rural Amer-
ica trended Republican, it remained one
of the few rural regions that still tended
to vote Democratic. The Driftless Area
was where Aldo Leopold, the father
of wildlife ecology and a professor at
the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
worked on soil- and watershed-resto-
ration projects. In 1945, when Wisconsin
had about a hundred and fifty thousand
dairy farms, Leopold wrote an essay called
“The Outlook for Farm Wildlife,” which
warned of the dangers of industrialized
agriculture for soil, animals, and rural
communities. Leopold saw two possi-
bilities for American agriculture: the
farm as a “place-to-live,” where wildlife
could be accommodated, or the farm as
a “food-factory,” whose only goal is to
produce sellable goods. The latter, he be-
lieved, generated “new insecurities, eco-
nomic and ecological, in place of those
it was meant to abolish.”
After the Second World War, Amer-
ican agriculture moved toward Leopold’s
darker possibility. Companies such as
Dow Chemical and DuPont began re-
purposing wartime technology and ma-
terials for agricultural uses. Nitrogen, an
essential element in TNT and other ex-
plosives, was used to make fertilizers that
can vastly improve yields. Such fertiliz-
ers soon became widespread, leading to
the Green Revolution, which brought
an enormous increase in agricultural pro-
duction in the developing world. It helped
reduce hunger, but also diminished bio-
diversity and left lasting environmental
damage—depleting the soil, increasing
greenhouse-gas emissions, and contam-
inating water supplies. In the U.S., syn-
thetic fertilizers were essential to what’s
known as the “cheap food policy,” in
which the U.S.D.A. pursues ever-higher
yields to keep food prices low for con-
sumers, at the expense of farmers’ wages
and the environment.
Decades before Sonny Perdue, Earl
Butz, the Secretary of Agriculture under
Richard Nixon, urged American farm-
ers to “get big or get out.” Butz called
farming “a big business,” and told farm
audiences that they needed to “adapt or
die.” In the summer of 1972, after expe-
riencing crop failure, the Soviet Union
bought eleven million tons of American
grain. The sale wiped out American grain
reserves, helped create a worldwide food
shortage, and contributed to a rise in
global food prices of more than thirty
per cent. Butz implored farmers to plant
“fencerow to fencerow,” promising them
limitless exports. New Deal policies had
encouraged soil-conservation measures,
but Butz’s export-driven focus led to
monoculture farming, which transformed
much of the rural Midwest into endless
fields of corn and soybeans. Agricultural
exports became an instrument of foreign
policy. “Food is a weapon,” Butz told
Time in 1974, as a wave of famines spread
around the world. “It is now one of the
principal tools in our negotiating kit.”
In the early eighties, however, a grain
embargo against the Soviet Union, a
strong dollar, and a global economic re-
cession caused exports to dry up. Many
farmers, who had borrowed heavily to
expand, were foreclosed on. The sign-
ing of NAFTA, in 1993, by Bill Clinton,
promised a revival of exports but ended
up hurting family farmers, encouraging
consolidation with large agribusiness
companies that, like their counterparts
in the auto industry, started moving pro-
duction to Mexico. Since NAFTA’s pas-
sage, more than two hundred thousand
small farms in the U.S. have gone under,
and an agricultural trading surplus with
Canada and Mexico has become a
twelve-billion-dollar deficit.
Because the topography of the Drift-
less Area made large corporate farms
less tenable, the region has until recently
resisted many of these trends. It has
one of the highest concentrations of
organic farms in the country, an endur-
ing culture of local coöperatives estab-
lished by Scandinavian immigrants, and
a tradition of economic populism. The
partisan tilt of the Driftless Area is a
major reason that Wisconsin, prior to
Trump, had not voted for a Republi-
can for President since 1984. In 2008,
Obama won Wisconsin by fourteen
points and carried all the Driftless Area’s
twenty-two counties.
Since the financial crash of 2008,
however, the region’s economic decline
has accelerated, driving political changes
that may determine the next President.
In 2010, Scott Walker, a Republican, won
his first term as governor, capturing al-
most all the Driftless Area. Before his
inauguration, he began appealing to—
and stoking—resentment. “We can no
longer live in a society where the pub-
lic employees are the haves and taxpay-
