Matt Russell is a farmer, political writer, progressive ag and rural leader. He has published work in the New York Times, TIME, AgInsider, Civil Eats, and many state or local publications. He co-owns Coyote Run Farm with his husband Patrick Standley in rural Lacona, Iowa. This essay first appeared on his Substack newsletter, Growing New Leaders: Perspectives from Coyote Run Farm
Democrats have an organizing problem. They think voters need to be educated and convinced. And they think convincing voters that they need to be saved is the path to victory. I’m hearing talk about the need for those who voted for Donald Trump to feel the pain before Democrats make a move. This doubles down on the strategies of the paid consultant class, who failed to win the election, rather than looking at new ways to organize.
We need to stop trying to convince voters that Democrats will save Americans, and instead invest in Americans to do the work of saving our nation.
My friend and writing partner Robert Leonard opens doors and elevates people. It’s just in his DNA. Back in the fall of 2018, I was trying to keep afloat the nonprofit Iowa Interfaith Power and Light, now the Iowa Faith and Climate Network. I shared my idea of bringing farmers together in the basement of churches to empower them to figure out how they were going to help solve the problem of climate change. He offered to help.
My plan was to use the Iowa caucus cycle to engage Democratic campaigns for president—and that national media that followed them—to help change the assumption that farmers wouldn’t talk about climate change.
The theory among Democrats wanting to make progress on climate change was that you could talk to farmers about extreme weather, soil health, water quality, conservation, and anything else, but just don’t mention climate change. I knew as a farmer this was not in our best interest. Trillions of dollars were going to be spent globally to address the climate crisis. Farmers could help solve the problem, but we needed to talk about it directly.
The plan was to recruit a small number of farmers in different communities around Iowa to ask them, “How can farmers help solve the climate crisis?” I had some ideas, but this wasn’t a focus group testing messages. This was a facilitated process, inviting farmers to do the work of figuring out how to talk about farming as a solution to this big problem.
Bob, who writes prolifically and often gets published in big places like the New York Times, said to me, “You need to write that up and I’ll help you get it in front of my editor at the New York Times.”
I said, “I don’t have time, I’ll just tell you and you can write it up for yourself.” Two days later, he called me and said, “Let’s write it together.”
I’d written a lot of op-eds and commentary at that point, but I’d never been published in an outlet beyond a statewide paper. The Kansas City Star published our first piece in February 2019: Small farms in the Midwest can heal the environment and prosper with ‘Green New Deal. The New York Times published our second piece a month later: What Democrats Need to Know to Win in Rural America.
By March of 2019, I’d done meetings in three different churches with about 20 farmers. The farmers had also developed a simple, grounded message about how they could help solve climate change.
Farmers can help reduce emissions, and make our land, neighborhoods, communities, states and our whole world more resilient. When we get good at it, we can actually sequester carbon. But in order for us to do so, we’ve got to get paid to do it.
Now that might seem disingenuous to some. I’ve actually heard people cynically say things like, “Farmers won’t do anything unless they make a buck.”
But it’s more complicated than that. In the two-hour conversations over supper in church basements, time and again the farmers explained that the economics of farming were stacked against the work they could do. If they abused the land and didn’t put any conservation into their operation, they didn’t pay a price for that. In fact, in the short term, that kind of farming might be more profitable, especially on rented land.
On the other hand, if farmers invested in the kinds of practices that reduced emissions, made the land more resilient, and ultimately sequestered carbon, then the cost of doing that put them at an economic disadvantage to farmers who weren’t.
Another way of putting it is that systems in place encouraged farmers to externalize the cost of their pollution—whether it be degraded water quality, soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, or increased greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, the public pays the cost and farmers can take their yields to the bank.
For farmers practicing higher levels of conservation, the benefits of those practices got externalized. The public benefits, but the farmer can’t take that to the bank. To help solve climate change, farmers would need to seriously level up on their investments in environmental stewardship.
So this wasn’t just farmers begging for another subsidy. This was farmers making the case that in order to ramp up the solutions they could provide, there had to be a reversal of the economic forces that worked against the practices that farmers were ready to implement and to further develop.
The economics of our Midwest farming systems were exactly upside down. The bad farmers made more money by externalizing the cost of the pollution. Meanwhile, the good farmers made less money providing the benefits the world needed in addition to the products they produced.
In our work with farmers, we always made sure to ask them, “What would it take to change the system so that you could provide the solutions?” Every group said they needed to be paid to help solve climate change. It was the only way to make the math work for their businesses. We needed to invest in them directly, so they could help solve the problem.
That message made it into nearly every Democratic debate between March 2019 and January 2020. Presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke gave Bob a call and set up a meeting with us. Beto had read our piece in the New York Times and wanted to know more. Paying farmers for environmental services became part of his platform, and it soon migrated to other Democratic candidate platforms, including the Biden, Harris, Buttigieg, and Warren campaigns. Beto, Harris, and Biden visited the farm, and I was able to share the message in person, reinforced by fellow farmers who had shared a meal in a church basement.
Robert Leonard interviewing presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke at Coyote Run Farm in June 2019
During the last national debate at Drake University, ethanol got mentioned only one time. Paying farmers to help solve climate change got mentioned three times including by future President Joe Biden. In part because of our work and the work of Iowa farmers, these Democrats chose to believe in farmers and rural people. They chose to invest in them. The ultimate product was the “climate-smart” agricultural strategy embraced by the Biden-Harris administration, which the second Trump administration is now destroying.
What Bob and I came to realize is that we hadn’t just resourced farmers to develop a values-based proposition to flip a narrative about climate change and farmers. We’d developed a way to think about political organizing that flipped years of strategy the well-paid political consultants had been using to mobilize Democrats.
The formula of the Democratic consultants looks like this.
How? We’ve got policies that will solve the problems.
Who? The person or team that Democrats are trying to sell is the important actor in the equation. The candidate, the Democrats, the strategists, or whoever is in charge or wants to be in charge.
Why? Because the candidate, or Democrats in general, will save the voter from whatever danger or threat exists.
Here’s how that looked in the context of farmers and climate change.
How? Policies will protect farmers, rural communities, and all Americans from the threats of a world on fire.
Who? Democrats will fight for these folks and pass the laws needed.
Why? Because farmers and everyone else are victims of climate change and need help.
We realized the farmers we were working with turned this formula upside down and made a significant change in the “who.”
When Democrats start with policy and center the candidate, elected leader, or the party, they treat the voter as someone to be saved. Democrats are fixated on the notion that if the political operatives and strategists can just convince voters they need to be saved, then they will vote for Democrats. That is a losing strategy.
We invested in farmers to talk with each other. It was a small investment. We fed them. But we also provided the facilitated conversation, and we listened to them.
Here’s what it looked like as they flipped How, Who, Why, on its head.
Why: Climate change is one of the biggest problems facing humankind.
Who: Iowa farmers are problem solvers and we can help solve this problem.
How: Pay us to innovate and implement the solutions needed to solve this problem so that the math works in our budgets.
Not a victim in sight. Just farmers, in their deep identity as problem solvers, ready to roll up their sleeves to do the work that needs to be done, so long as they are empowered to do that work.
As I watch Republicans take a wrecking ball to our nation right now, here’s what I see from National Democrats.
How? Let the Republican policies fail.
Who? Democrats will get them in the midterms.
Why? Because Trump voters will feel the pain and vote for Democrats.
It’s a losing strategy. It’s doubling down on the “Democrats will save us” trope, instead of unleashing the power of Americans right now to stand up for our nation.
Here is the strategy Democrats need:
Why? Republicans are tearing down what 250 years of Americans have built.
Who? Americans are ready to stand up for our country.
How? Invest in ordinary Americans to do all the things–call, protest, donate, show up. And to demand, support, encourage, and fight for our democracy and smart government.
Are there victims of the Republican carnage under Trump? Absolutely. Do the victims need help? Absolutely. But we don’t start by convincing our team that we’re all victims and Democratic elites will save the day. That approach was how we ended up losing on November 5.
When Democrats realize that Americans—both rural and urban—are the center of the action and start investing in that way, the whole world will change. And it can’t happen too soon, because the whole world is waiting on everyday Americans to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
And we are ready to go. Here are a few of us. Amber Gustafson, Laura Belin, Seth Watkins, Denise O’Brien, Justin Stafferahn and J.D. Scholten, and Jess Piper.
In case this isn’t entirely clear to the Democrats with the money and power right now, let me make it clear. Voters are not victims to be saved by your money and power in the midterms. We are the Americans who are needed now. Invest in us now, and we will save our country, and the world.
Elevate local leaders and resource us. We know who we are, and what we can do, while the Beltway consultants haven’t a clue.
They’ve never had shit on their boots. We have. Everything Trump touches turns to shit. We know how to deal with shit. Invest in us, because we’re more than ready to kick some billionaire ass.