Guebert is an Illinois-based agricultural columnist.
If conventional leadership and bureaucratic competency had a face, it would look exactly like Thomas J. Vilsack: round as an apple pie, chin disappearing under sagging cheeks, greying (and amply present) hair.
U.S. president Barack Obama’s selection of Vilsack, the two-term (1998-2006) Iowa governor, to lead the U.S. Department of Agriculture is as safe and sound as betting an Illinois governor might be corrupt.
Vilsack is the third non-farming Midwestern governor in a row. He is a trial lawyer by training who came to Iowa for love, then got into politics.
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As a born-and-baptized middle-of-the-roader, he backed just about every idea Big Agriculture brought to Iowa’s golden-domed statehouse even as he publicly worried about rural sustainability, global warming and natural resource conservation.
He was an all-in supporter of big biotech, big pig, big biofuels and often offered big state money to underwrite bioventures. His gung-ho boosterism of “pharming” earned him the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s Governor of the Year award in 2001.
To organic farm and food backers, that was akin to Attila the Hun anointing Vilsack “Pillager of the Year.” To the then-growing movement, it was, and remains, an unforgivable wrong step.
It wasn’t the wrong step, however, if you had bigger political ambitions, and Vilsack clearly did. He now faces two paths to posterity. If he still burns with ambition, he’ll take the smooth, well-marked path paved by Big Ag, Big Bio and Big Money because it favours a higher profile and higher office.
If, however, he views his tenure as the climax of his political career, he might see farmers and food as equals and place both ahead of agbiz’s ceaseless quest for profit and unending drive to use government to undermine competition and quality.
That’s the path 90 percent of all food producers want and need Vilsack to take. What remains to be seen is if he is an independent leader or another agbiz chicken.
