The ugly reality behind Tim Walz’s farm-friendly image

Shortly after Vice President Kamala Harris announced Tim Walz as her running mate last month, a photograph of the Minnesota governor with an adorable piglet nestled in his arms at the 2019 Minnesota State Fair went viral, to the delight of Democratic voters, activists, and pundits alike. 

Earlier this month, Walz made a campaign stop at a dairy farm where he bottle-fed a baby cow, tweeting, “Made a new friend.” 

Many politicians come off a bit stiff at obligatory farm visits and state fairs, where they swap their suits for a flannel and a turkey leg. But Walz fits right in, seamlessly blending a genuine affection for farmed animals with a hearty enthusiasm for eating them. 

At this year’s Minnesota State Fair, he declared pork on a stick to be the “breakfast of champions.” In another viral video from last year’s fair, Walz’s daughter tells him she won’t eat turkey because she’s vegetarian. Walz replies that in Minnesota — the nation’s top turkey-producing state — turkey isn’t meat. “Turkey’s special,” he quips.

These images have helped shore up Walz’s wholesome vibes and “Big Dad Energy,” exuding the “Minnesota nice” charm that Democrats hope can help them lock down votes in crucial Midwest and Rust Belt states.

I, too, have been swept up by the Harris-Walz fervor, so I feel like a killjoy poking a hole in Walz’s innocent sheen. But there’s a darker side to the story: Walz has a long history of providing free advertising and public funding to the meat and dairy sectors, industries that trash Minnesota’s treasured waterways, torture animals, and endanger public health and vulnerable workers. 

To be fair to Walz, he’s doing what every other politician, Republican or Democrat, does to survive in farm country. Minnesota is a top producer of turkey, pork, and dairy, as well as corn and soybeans, the main crops fed to livestock. Even though just around 1 percent of Minnesota households make a living from farming, agribusiness has accrued enormous influence over federal and state agricultural policy by showering candidates — including farm-state Democrats like Walz — with campaign contributions. It then uses them to sell a narrative that Big Ag is beyond criticism because it is “feeding the world.” 

As Democrats watch their share of the vote in farm country slip away, characters like Walz — a balance to Harris’s image as a San Francisco liberal — bring an obvious appeal to the party. But in what may ultimately be a quixotic quest to appeal to rural voters in Middle America, Democratic leaders are compromising their commitments elsewhere to environmental protection, labor rights, and public health when they go heavy on promoting the meat industry and light on regulating its harms.

That the Democratic base appears to be celebrating Walz’s farm-friendly image with little scrutiny shows how far factory farming’s opponents have to go in educating the American public about the cruelties of our food system. Much like the misleading cartoons of happy, “humanely raised” pigs and cows on meat packaging — which often mean little on the farm itself — Walz’s photo-ops with baby farmed animals reinforce the false romanticized image that Big Ag has so successfully seared into the public’s consciousness. 

The reality, however, is anything but wholesome.

Dissecting Walz’s viral farm moments — and his voting record

Without context, the photo of Walz holding a piglet at the Minnesota State Fair appears innocent, even endearing. But the pork industry, and that piglet’s life? Not so much. 

The photo was taken at a pavilion sponsored by Christensen Farms, the ninth largest US pork company, and run by the Minnesota Pork Board. Practically all pigs raised for food in the US come from factory farms — including Christensen’s, as seen in this disturbing 2015 investigation by an animal rights group — which use a consistent set of practices. Female breeding pigs — those that give birth to piglets who are then raised for slaughter — are confined in crates so small they can hardly move for their entire lives, suffering through pregnancy after pregnancy to churn out piglets until their productivity wanes and they’re sent to slaughter. The Minnesota Pork Producers Association, a sister organization to the Minnesota Pork Board, lobbies in favor of keeping pregnant pigs in tiny cages and against basic environmental measures.

It’s also common in the US pork industry to feed these breeding pigs ground-up piglet intestines to build immunity against disease. 

Piglets have their teeth clipped and tails chopped off, and the males’ testicles are cut out, all without pain relief. They spend their short lives in dark, unsanitary warehouses before being shipped on a grueling journey to the slaughterhouse and stunned unconscious in a carbon dioxide gas chamber, a practice that can be excruciatingly painful. 

Minnesota’s mammoth turkey industry — virtually all of the birds are raised on factory farms — is similarly abusive. Last year, an animal rights group found stomach-churning conditions at the state’s top turkey producer, Jennie-O: birds too weak and sick to even walk, along with live birds pecking at dead and rotting ones and birds with visible wounds — signs of cannibalism, a common problem in poultry farming (at the time, Jennie-O told Vox that it “takes the welfare of the animals under our care seriously and has robust animal care standards throughout our supply chain”). 

Jennie-O’s parent company, Hormel Foods, is headquartered in the congressional district Walz held before he ran for governor; Walz has promoted the company’s products and appointed its former CEO to a state economic council.

And remember Walz’s photo op with the dairy calf earlier this month? It masked the dismal reality behind dairy farming, where cows have been selectively bred to pump out more and more milk, leading to more frequent leg and metabolic issues, as well as higher rates of painful udder inflammation.

The campaign stop took place at a relatively small dairy farm, the kind that makes up an increasingly tiny share of the milk Americans buy at the grocery store. Most dairy cows today will never set foot on open pasture, and farms typically separate babies from mothers shortly after birth, housing them alone and feeding them through a bottle so that farmers can take their mothers’ milk. 

In Minnesota — the Land of 10,000 Lakes — livestock and the synthetic fertilizer used to grow the corn they eat account for most of the state’s water nitrate pollution; 4 in 10 bodies of water are so polluted that they fail to meet basic health standards. Last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency directed Minnesota state agencies to immediately address the high nitrate levels in drinking water, which can cause a range of serious health issues, that thousands of Minnesotans had been exposed to. The EPA also encouraged the state to better monitor pollution from livestock manure.

Minnesota state government is limited in its ability to crack down on these businesses because court decisions have largely exempted factory farms from Clean Water Act regulation. And Walz, of course, can’t bear the blame for a problem that began decades ago due to the unsavory realities of farm state politics. But environmental groups and even some state lawmakers argue Minnesota could be doing much more. Instead, Walz seems to have little to say about factory farming dirtying the state’s waterways.

Prior to serving as Minnesota’s governor, Walz represented Minnesota in the US House of Representatives for six terms, in which he voted against two important agricultural pollution measures. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, he played a large role in negotiating the Farm Bill — a multiyear legislative package that sets federal agricultural policy — and during his tenure, the legislation shoveled more and more money to farmers growing livestock feed. 

Walz has championed federal and state “conservation” funding for farmers to implement more sustainable practices, but they’ve ultimately made little to no progress in fixing the problem. And some of the federal conservation funding goes to large meat and dairy operations for environmentally dubious practices. 

Gov. Walz’s office declined to comment for this story and instead shared a comment from the Minnesota Department of Agriculture. “The Governor has consistently advocated for and implemented programs that ensure agriculture benefits the environment while remaining profitable,” the statement reads, and points to Walz’s support for conservation funding and a rule that sets some limits on fertilizer application.  

What Walz in the White House might mean for the future of farming

If Harris wins the presidency, Walz could be influential in setting the administration’s agricultural agenda. That would likely mean more of the same bipartisan, pro-factory farming consensus. 

On the other hand, Harris has a surprisingly strong track record on the environment and animal welfare, having defended California’s bans on foie gras and confining egg-laying hens in tiny cages during her time as the state’s attorney general.

Walz’s rural bona fides could make him an effective messenger for reforms that a Harris administration might pursue — if he’s willing to buck Big Ag. But there’s little evidence so far that he would be ready to take that role.

To call out the meat industry for its misdeeds and advocate for meaningful regulations would require courage few farm state politicians have been willing to show. Doing so in the middle of a tightly contested presidential campaign, where several of the battleground states have major agricultural sectors, could be politically disastrous. 

So, instead, we get photos of candidates with cute piglets and baby calves caught up in the factory farm system — images that fortify the very mythologies that make it so difficult for elected officials to stand up to Big Ag. But that political calculation has gotten us to where we are today: poisoned waters, injured workers, and abused animals.

While a second Trump term would likely be even friendlier to Big Ag than a Harris-Walz administration, there’s less daylight between Republicans and Democrats on agricultural policy than you might think. 

“We’re not going back” has become the de facto Harris-Walz campaign slogan. But in the fight against factory farming, their administration probably wouldn’t move us forward, either.