“Disappointing the Prairie-State Democrats”: The Fight for and Failure of Progressive Farm Policy in the Farm Crisis, 1985–96

Amid the 1980s Farm Crisis, Midwestern “prairie populists” like Sens. Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Kent Conrad (DNPL-ND) won elections with a well-defined, progressive platform on agriculture that attacked corporate farming, opposed free trade, and sought to reform national farm policy with the input of grassroots activists outside traditional agricultural interest groups. Drawing on regional populist traditions like the North Dakota Nonpartisan League and Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party, progressive Democratic legislators fought for raised price floors, supply management, and environmental regulations to help family farmers push the national Democratic Party and Congress to back the 1985 Harkin Farm Policy Reform Act and 1987 “Harkin-Gephardt Bill”. But both bills failed; by 1996 Congress had, with support of Southern Democrats, eliminated farm subsidies in the market-oriented Freedom to Farm Act and joined the North American Free Trade Agreement in a rebuke to Midwestern progressives.

While these progressive farm policies floundered, they offer a clear vision of how, in times of crisis, progressive farm activists and representatives articulated a historically-rooted defense of the family farm against corporate interests. Left-wing farm activist groups like the North American Farm Alliance (NAFA), state-level officials like North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Sarah Vogel, and farm policy leaders like Harkin and South Dakota Sen. Tom Daschle fought national Democrats like Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman and revealed how the national Democratic Party drifted away from Midwestern liberalism on farm policy, where Midwestern Democrats had historically led. Tracing agricultural reform efforts through the doomed 1996 fight against Freedom to Farm, it offers a historical approach to the Farm Crisis suggesting populist actors at the Midwestern and federal level did, in fact, offer concrete policy solutions stifled by national Democratic interests.