Art Cullen.

Tom Vilsack deserves a better exit interview than what he recently gave to Politico’s Jonathan Martin. Vilsack came across as irritated, which is familiar enough. The Democrats lost rural America. That’s a big part of the problem, and he is supposed to be Mr. Rural America.

The former mayor of Mount Pleasant, state senator, governor and current agriculture secretary is a major figure in Iowa history who deserves a better accounting than what he rendered.

Vilsack did a lot for Iowa. For Storm Lake: dredging, King’s Pointe Resort, the Storm Lake Marina. Fantastic work. He got a lot done with a divided legislature. He got on with Senate Republican Leader Jeff Lamberti to create Vision Iowa that revitalized towns like ours across the state. It’s a tremendous legacy.

His service as agriculture secretary to two presidents, Obama and Biden, is also historic. He is steady as she goes, and did as good a job as anyone can managing such a sprawling bureaucracy as USDA. He is straight-forward as a politician can be, and as earnest.

He also can be prickly, as he was in this swan song interview.

He referred to Martin and the press as “you people.” At least not “enemies of the people.” But if “you people” in the press could get it, maybe all the good work he did would get noticed. The elite need to get out here and hoe a row, Vilsack suggested.

We’re out here in the dew of dicamba, and frankly we have a hard time seeing all the good things. We begged for help with our water system, the Linn Grove dam, for cover crops. It wasn’t a messaging problem. We got the message: Don’t call us.

The secretary noted that USDA invested $20 billion in game-changing, climate-smart agriculture. It is hard to see the game changing here on the ground. The view may be different along the federal Mall. The cover crops are not here yet. The money went out but we are waiting for it to germinate. The money was sent to corporations like Tyson and Cargill and was supposed to trickle down to farmers. It hasn’t. Cargill is laying off 8,000 employees. Tyson is shutting down plants. John Deere is slowly kissing Waterloo goodnight.

Vilsack talks about the 50-year squeeze that consolidation put on rural America, no doubt with Iowa in mind. Over two administrations with Vilsack at USDA, consolidation in food processing went along unfettered. Inspections were turned over to the corporations. Lines sped up. Nobody moved to break up the big chemical or food companies. USDA played along like a friendly regulator should. Push some wage-and-hour violations, tag them for child labor here and there, but leave the system intact with labor and independent producers at a permanent disadvantage. The meat lockers and small processors cropping up are the result of Biden incentives.

Voters think: If you’re going to jump in bed with corporate money, you might as well vote Republican and get a tax cut.

When the Democrats were out of power, Vilsack took a job representing the dairy industry. You wonder why things were tough for Harris in rural Wisconsin, where dairy has been under air assault from Corporate America?

With due respect, the wondrous things the Biden Administration has done for my neighborhood are not so readily apparent. Climate-smart takes time, no doubt. Things a half-century in the making, like Chinese ownership of Iowa hogs, are not undone overnight. The problem is that there is a presidential election every four years. It takes awhile for the trickle that sometimes never comes. We’re still waiting on that Reagan Trickle Down to work. Estherville has been in a recession since Moses got the tablets.

It’s not just the economy. There is an underlying angst about how we are wasting our soil and water for the benefit of some company domiciled in Delaware. There is a resentment that we are sacrificing our water for a quarterly return. It makes the likes of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. sound sensible to many people. “Pass it on: Don’t eat the brown acid or the soy oil.”

Vilsack did as good a job as a monied system will allow. Maybe some of his work will take hold in building resiliency and diversity into food production. At least he used his exit interview to talk about how the past 50 years have sucked the life out of agriculture and rural communities. He would have found a more convivial forum back home in Iowa but he chose to speak to the Beltway. And that is the problem.

Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot newspaper, where this column first appeared. It is republished here through the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative. Please consider subscribing to the collaborative at iowawriters.substack.com and the authors’ blogs to support their work.