Farming in farmland

The (not-so-shocking) truth about Minnesota’s agriculture.

A while back, some soul searching was done at the Star Tribune, pondering why, outside the Twin Cities metro, so few Minnesotans use the paper for anything other than lining their cat’s litter tray. Some action resulted. Among other things, the paper was renamed The Minnesota Star Tribune, and a “Greater Minnesota columnist” — Karen Tolkkinen — was appointed.

In her July 12 column, Tolkkinen opens: “On a May drive through southern Minnesota I was profoundly disturbed by what I saw.” She continues, “For miles upon miles of country road, black soil stretched as far as I could see, an ocean of land seemingly devoid of life.” The word “seemingly” is doing a lot of work here. Black soil, as even a city slicker like me knows, is generally very fertile owing to its high organic matter content, primarily humus, and the presence of essential nutrients like phosphorus and ammonia. Those fields were probably teeming with life in May. Go back in July and see how “devoid of life” they look.

“No shrubs, no native grasses, no grasses at all,” our correspondent continues, putting one in mind of the post-nuclear wasteland of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” “The land had been worked and sprayed with chemicals and refined to where only two things are allowed to live: Corn or soybeans. No milkweed or coneflower, no big blue-stem or switchgrass, none of the native plants that for millennia fed an array of wildlife and people.” The psychic shock of witnessing modern agriculture in rural Minnesota is examined in minute detail over the next 800 words.

The fact that agricultural techniques are different now from those which supplied a much lower level of nutrition to a much smaller population in centuries past is not, as Tolkkinen seems to think, a horror, but rather an incredible achievement by our species, and one which ought to be celebrated more than it is. One of the results of having enough to eat is that we can idealize a world where we don’t. Our ancestors, for whom gathering the bare minimum of sustenance was a ceaseless, immiserating struggle, could afford no such luxury.

Even more incredible, perhaps, is that the Star Tribune has appointed as “Greater Minnesota columnist” someone so profoundly ignorant of modern agricultural practice. What did she expect to see driving through southern Minnesota? Artisanal coffee shops? Another craft store selling boards with “Live, Laugh, Love” painted on them? One anticipates their religious correspondent writing an article shocked by the Pope’s Catholicism, or their wildlife correspondent filing 800 words exposing what bears are up to in the woods.

Or maybe it isn’t so incredible. In 2023, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting accounted for just 0.1 percent of the gross domestic product of the seven metro counties, the Star Tribune’s market. In all the rest, however, it accounts for 5.7 percent and the share is over 20 percent in 20 counties and above 30 percent in four. As a state, Minnesota is one of the most agriculturally heavy in the country.

“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic,” the great populist William Jennings Bryan said, “but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” As we move away from the subsistence living of countless generations of ancestors, we think less about where our food comes from. Too many people assume that their food just appears on the store shelves as if by magic.

We are not fed by magic, of course, something the citizens of New York City might be about to discover if mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is elected and establishes government-run grocery stores. Rather, we are fed by those working in modern agriculture, who, in large swaths of Greater Minnesota, are a considerable part of the local economy. They deserve a “Greater Minnesota columnist” who is capable of seeing their world from their point of view, not only that of the paper’s urban heartland. The residents of that urban heartland might benefit from that, too.