ST. JAMES — A whirlwind campaign tour brought itself through a farm in St. James on Thursday.
DFL candidate Jake Johnson, who is running for Minnesota’s 1st Congressional District against Republican incumbent Brad Finstad, teamed up with local farmer Harold Wooley to host a roundtable on agriculture.
“Anytime I can have face-to-face time with a political candidate, regardless of party, I like to do that,” Wooley said.
The roundtable focused mostly on the problems facing farmers and agricultural workers, and how they can be eased in Washington. For many in attendance, that’s where a lot of the changes have to start.
“I was in a farmers’ union meeting, and some old boy from southwest Minnesota stood up and said, ‘The prices you get are determined in Washington, D.C.,’” Wooley said. “There is some truth in that statement.”
Input and upkeep costs were among some of the biggest barriers for these workers, especially for those looking to get started in the agriculture industry.
Those costs played into what Johnson said was his big takeaway from the talk.
“People absolutely are hanging on by a thread here in rural Minnesota. I mean, we heard it on the input side, things are too expensive for a lot of different reasons, and then export markets continue to evaporate, and our farmers, they have control over their yields, they’re incredible at doing what they are trained to do, what they know how to do, what they’ve grown up doing, and there are so many forces outside of their control that they just don’t have control over,” Johnson said.
Some specific costs were the rise in steel and aluminum, leading to an explosion in the cost of tractors, and the increasing costs of hog pens.
“My dad built his first finishing site in 2003 (and) I want to say it was like $170 (per) pig space. When I built mine in 2018, it was $350, and now, if you price it out, it’s close to $450 or more expensive, so it’s gotten a lot higher,” Stephan Nelson, a local farmer, said. “(There will be) plenty of hog barn for sale in the next 20 years.”
After a while, the conversation turned to other issues impacting the group, and recent decisions in D.C. that are sending ripples all the way to southern Minnesota. One of them was H.R. 1, sometimes called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
“There was some tweaking that happened, that is going to make those safety net programs better for us. And then to pay for that was these SNAP reductions and the SNAP administrative costs being pushed out to the state. Well then, in Minnesota, those costs get shoved down to the county,” Wooley said. “(In) Watonwan County 85% of the tax base is agriculture. So on the one hand we helped agriculture, but on the other hand we are going to pay for it, so I don’t know how well that’s going.”
Johnson himself was quiet for most of the roundtable, opting to listen to the concerns and then provide his thoughts afterwards. He described the conversation as “awesome” and says it’s important for him to get out to events like these to reach people who, he says, Democrats can sometimes forget about.
“I think one mistake that the Democratic party has made before is forsaking places like this, just focusing on urban centers, just focusing on certain cities. That’s not what we’re doing on our campaign,” Johnson said. “Folks absolutely love their rural communities and they are doing everything that they can to hang on to their way of life right now.”