Trucks are parading into Dennis Campbell’s farm near DeWitt, Iowa, to dump the season’s harvest into his grain bin. Mountains of corn and soybeans ride up his grain elevator into a towering steel silo.
Storing grain is one way Campbell is hedging against risk, because he can hold it until the price goes up. The Campbell family is also experimenting with a three-crop rotation, squeezing a harvest of winter wheat into the back-and-forth of corn and beans typical in the Midwest.
Iowa farmers have had to adapt to a lot of changes in their industry lately, especially tariffs. But Campbell said he can abide some turbulence.
“I am not a fan of tariffs because they hurt us,” he said. “At the same time, I think most people in flyover country, in corn country or livestock country, would say, ‘We’re willing to take a little bit of short-term challenges if we can truly get our integrity in the market back.’”
Those short-term challenges also include the cost of fertilizer, which spiked after the U.S. and Israel started a war with Iran in February.
“Is today’s war with Iran the right answer? You can ask us here in the Midwest, and we’d say ‘no,’” Campbell said. “You got two political parties … they’re both doing stupid things. Bring it back to the moderation and bring it back to the purple middle. We get tired of people asking, ‘Are you this or are you that?’ We’re for fiscally conservative people that want to see the next generation have opportunities.”
There are opportunities for the next generation of Iowans in agriculture and manufacturing, another pillar of the state’s economy. But with Iowa’s job growth lagging the national average, residents are anxious about the future of the economy.
‘Iowa needs the jobs’
At a rally in Sioux City on Thursday, President Trump touted a $15 billion steel mill planned for a district where the incumbent Republican representative is in a tight race.
“I don’t think of you as a steel plant place. I think of you with a farm and the John Deere tractors and everything,” Trump said to the crowd, “but you’re going to have maybe the biggest steel plant in the entire United States.”
To accommodate one of the country’s biggest steel plants, Iowa will need more housing for workers. The Lee County Economic Development Group had already forecast a housing shortage before Mesabi Metallics, the company behind the planned steel plant, said it would bring more than 1,700 permanent jobs to the region.
State lawmakers convened a one-day special session the same week as Trump’s surprise announcement and approved more than a billion dollars in tax incentives for the company. Some say the deal was rushed through for election season.
“I think with a multi-billion-dollar company like that, they should be able to put up their own plant,” said Pat Stock, president of the United Steelworkers union in Bettendorf. “Hopefully, it’s not [just] a campaign promise. I know southern Iowa needs the jobs. Iowa needs the jobs. We need good paying jobs. Every raise that we’ve gotten over the last 10 years seems to be eaten up by inflation and everything going up.”
The price of American steel is also going up, making it profitable for some manufacturers to expand their American operations, as Mesabi plans to do. That high price is also why the White House says tariffs are working. But Iowa and the U.S. have lost factory jobs since Trump returned to office.
Stock said even if some companies grow, workers are falling behind.
“We do have a lot of business going on, but I feel uneasy here. I don’t have a good feel on where the economy’s going,” he said. “I know what I’m paying for gas, electric, groceries. It’s nuts.”
Data center debate
Workers are uneasy. So are some manufacturing towns.
The Mississippi River town of Clinton was once a powerhouse in the lumber business. Today, it’s home to factories run by the likes of 3M and The Archer-Daniels-Midland Company, which is expanding its plant.
“Clinton is built on the backs of blue-collar workers, and that’s something we’re very proud of,” said Andy Sokolovich, president of the economic development group Grow Clinton.
Some of those companies are also rolling out artificial intelligence. At Nestlé Purina PetCare, a robotic dog patrols the plant for leaky pipes.
But Clinton might get in on the growth of AI in a much bigger way; The company Quality Technology Services wants to build a data center campus on roughly 1,100 acres of farmland that are zoned for heavy industry.
It’s promising $20 million in tax revenue every year in a town with an annual operating budget of $25 million. Sokolovich said it’s a golden opportunity for Clinton to reinvent itself again.
“I don’t see the AI bubble bursting. We don’t have a crystal ball,” he said. “We need to diversify so that we’re planning for a future where things may change. Just like the history of the city of Clinton: we’ll have to pivot.”
Celeste Robbins said data centers are not Iowa’s economic salvation. She’s part of a grassroots group protesting the project in Clinton.
“Will we get $20 million in tax revenue from another business? I doubt that. But I would say that it’s far more fair to the citizens — especially since most of us don’t want it — to try other problem-solving methods,” Robbins said, “[rather] than saying, ‘Too bad, you’re dumb, and you don’t realize how great this is. We’re just going to do what we want anyway.’”
Robbins’ feeling that her town is being swept up in something she can’t control is a bit like Iowa’s economy more generally, said Ben Murrey at the Common Sense Institute in Des Moines.
“Iowa is not going to get an Austin, Texas or a Denver or a Boston or a Silicon Valley. So then the question is, how do you get in on the capital investment, where and how it’s occurring? We don’t get to decide where the investments occur and where the economic growth is occurring,” Murrey said. “It’s almost like Iowa is a little sailboat, just kind of swaying in the wind, just at the mercy of everything going on around it.”
AI, tariffs and inflation: That’s a lot of wind rocking Iowa’s “little sailboat,” two weeks out from midterm elections.
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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