Patio Pondering: Something Feels Different This Year

I’m settling back into my office after spending the week at Iowa Pork Congress in Des Moines. It was good reconnecting with old friends and talking about the swine industry, my consulting work, and the podcast. Back home, the temperature off the patio is frigid as we prepare for a massive winter storm. And walking that trade show floor this year, something felt different.

I dropped a solo podcast episode yesterday about how dramatically the World Pork Expo trade show has changed over the last 27 years. The decision-makers simply aren’t there anymore. The people who used to walk the aisles, evaluate equipment, and prepare for buying decisions? They’re mostly gone. The pork industry, like it or not, has gone the way of the chicken industry. Those decisions aren’t in the hands of the people who used to make them. Consolidation has shifted where power and direction sit.

That observation was still rattling around in my head when earlier in the day I came across a video and the first wave of reactions on social media. As the responses grew, it quickly became clear this wasn’t going to be a quiet conversation.

Last fall, a large dairy operation in South Dakota went through an immigration audit, and a substantial portion of its workforce had to leave. Given what’s happening with enforcement in Minnesota and elsewhere, the news itself wasn’t surprising. What caught my attention — and what lit up the comment sections — was the response that followed. The framing many people saw was that agriculture needed to rally around this operation, that this was bad for agriculture, and that support was needed.

The pushback was immediate and pointed.

But what struck me was this: the pushback wasn’t really about immigration policy. It was about something deeper.

What I saw online wasn’t a debate about immigration. It was a backlash from people who feel they followed the rules, got left behind, and then were asked to sympathize with systems that only work when the rules aren’t enforced evenly.

The comments were blunt. Pay a living wage. Hire your neighbors. Why do you need to milk that many cows anyway? This isn’t an ag problem — it’s a legal problem. Underneath all of it ran a current of something I can only describe as exhausted frustration: We’ve been told for years we weren’t good enough, and now we’re supposed to feel sorry when large systems hit a wall.

As I drove back across Interstate 80 through the prairies of northern Illinois, I kept thinking about the contrast between the narrative being presented and what I was seeing in those comment sections. I thought about the phrase that has echoed through rural America for decades: Get big or get out.

How many farmers heard that and believed it? How many ran the numbers, tried to figure out how to scale up, and realized they couldn’t make it work — at least not while following every rule and regulation they were told mattered? How many sold out? How many just got out?

And all the while, some of the operations held up as examples of efficiency and modern agriculture appeared, at least from the outside, to be operating under very different pressures and expectations than the farms that disappeared quietly.

I don’t have a dog in this particular hunt. We don’t have full-time employees on our farm. The labor we rely on comes from friends and neighbors. I can’t speak firsthand to the challenges of staffing large, labor-intensive operations. But I can see the disappointment and anger in those comment sections — from people who feel they watched a large portion of rural America get swept aside under the banner of progress and efficiency.

For a moment, something felt exposed. And what people reacted to wasn’t just one farm’s situation. It was a broader question about whether the consolidation that reshaped agriculture delivered on the promises it made — and who paid the price along the way.

I think back to that trade show floor at Iowa Pork Congress. I think about the decision-makers who aren’t there anymore. I think about a comment section erupting over a one-minute video about a dairy farm in South Dakota.

Something is shifting. Rural America is looking at the systems that replaced it and asking questions it didn’t used to ask out loud. And the industries and businesses built around that transformation are discovering that the old narratives don’t land the way they once did.

I don’t know where this goes. But I know what I saw this week — both on that trade show floor and scrolling through those comments on the drive home. The conversation is changing.

And it probably needed to.