America Can Grow Its Own Food Again

When you think of Iowa, you probably think of agriculture. After all, about 85% of the state’s land is dedicated to farming. The crazy thing is that 90% of the food Iowans eat is shipped in from outside the state. Nationally, we’re importing more beef, vegetables and fruit than we ever have. The U.S. food and agricultural trade deficit reached an unprecedented $49.5 billion in 2025—the largest on record. That means last year we imported $49.5 billion more in food and other agriculture products than we exported to the world.

If you drive to your local grocery store, there’s a decent chance the steak in your cart (if you can afford it) came from Brazil. The American cattle herd has shrunk to its smallest size in 75 years, while the U.S. is on pace to import a record 5.5 billion pounds of beef this year, even as prices at the meat counter hit record highs.

Something doesn’t add up. We’re told free trade and globalization make food cheaper and more abundant. But here we are, with fewer cattle on American land, fewer ranchers to tend that land, higher prices at the store, and more of our beef supply controlled by companies and countries an ocean away. That’s not a market working the way it’s supposed to. That’s a supply chain hollowed out from the inside—squeezed by drought, corporate consolidation among the big meatpackers, and trade policy written for someone else’s benefit.

And it’s not just beef. Walk down the produce aisle and the same story is written on every label. Nearly 60% of the fresh fruit Americans eat today is imported—up from just 30% in the 1980s. More than a third of our fresh vegetables now come from somewhere else too, up from less than 10% a generation ago. Tomatoes, avocados, peppers, cucumbers, berries—crops we can and did grow right here—now arrive by truck from Mexico or by boat from Peru and Chile.

There’s nothing wrong with a strawberry in January. But when the story of American agriculture becomes “we grow less and import more”—even as our farmland doesn’t shrink and our farmers don’t get any less hardworking—that tells you the problem was never about capacity. It’s about who the system was built to serve. It wasn’t built for the person running cattle outside of Sioux City. It was built for the shareholders in São Paulo, Lima, and Bentonville.

And make no mistake, this didn’t happen by accident. It happened by policy. Four companies—JBS (Brazilian), Tyson, Cargill and National Beef—control roughly 80% of the beef packing industry in this country, which means the price a rancher gets paid and the price you pay at the counter are set almost entirely by boardrooms, not by the market. Trade deals from the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) opened the door to cheap imports without ever rebuilding the antitrust guardrails that used to keep that packing power in check. And when herds got tight and prices spiked, Washington’s answer wasn’t to help ranchers rebuild the herd—it was to loosen import quotas even further. That’s a choice, and it’s one we can unmake.

I’m not writing this as an economist or a professor—I’m writing it as someone who’s lived it. I grew up in Iowa, came home after my grandmother, on her deathbed, told me to “take care of our farm,” and ended up running for Congress in Iowa’s 4th district—the 2nd most agriculture-producing district in the country. I’ve kept listening these past four years in the Iowa State House, including as the ranking member on the agriculture committee. What I’m writing about isn’t from some fancy pollster or lobbyist. I’m talking about my neighbors—the packing plant workers I represent, the farmers I grew up around, and the towns I’ve traveled to that are proud, hardworking, and still getting squeezed dry by people who’ve never set foot here.

So how do we turn this around and grow America? We stop treating rural America like a colony to be drained and start treating it like an economy to be built.

First, for pennies on the dollar, we can incentivize local food systems. You’ve got politicians on both sides saying “food security is national security”—let’s treat it that way. Eighty years of federal farm policy has poured subsidies into corn and soybeans for export and feed, while the farmer growing vegetables for the town down the road gets next to nothing. Supporting those farmers means extending grants for regional meat processing plants, so ranchers aren’t handcuffed to one of four monopolistic meatpackers. It means tax incentives for schools and grocers that buy local, and support for farmers’ markets and food hubs that let small farms sell directly to customers. Every dollar that stays local and changes hands a second and third time in town is a dollar doing more work than one that leaves on the first truck out.

Second, we need to treat the food trade deficit like the warning sign it is. A country that can’t feed itself isn’t a strong country—it’s a dependent one. We should set a national target to rebuild our capacity in the products where we’ve become most reliant on imports, starting with beef and fresh produce, and measure our trade policy against whether it moves us toward that target or away from it. That means trade deals that protect and rebuild domestic production capacity as a matter of national security—the same way we treat energy or semiconductors.

Third, bring back mandatory Country of Origin Labeling, and don’t let the corporate lobbyists water it down this time. Americans deserve to know if the beef in their cart was raised in Iowa or shipped in from Brazil, if the tomato came from a farm down the road or a container ship from Peru. That’s not protectionism—that’s transparency. Right now, a company can slap a “Product of USA” label on beef that was born, raised and slaughtered somewhere else, as long as it was repackaged here. That’s a rigged game that lets importers wear the American flag while undercutting the American rancher who actually earned it. Give people the truth and let them decide with their wallet whether they want to keep that money here or send it overseas.

There’s a lot more than just these three things that we need to do, but the bottom line is that for generations the folks who worked this land were told a simple story: grow it, make it, produce it, and prosperity would follow. Put in the work, and the money would trickle back to Main Street.

It’s not happening.

Because here’s the truth nobody wanted to say out loud: rural America isn’t an economy that failed. It’s an economy that succeeded—just not for the people who live there. It’s an extraction machine, plain and simple. Corn, soybeans, livestock and energy all leave. And so do the young people, the minute they get a diploma, because there’s not much left here to keep them.

What comes back is a paycheck, if you’re lucky. What doesn’t come back is the wealth. That gets carried off to Chicago boardrooms, Wall Street trading floors, and corporate headquarters in cities most of us have never set foot in—while the folks doing the actual work are left with the topsoil erosion, the empty storefronts, and the hospital that just shut its doors.

J.D. ScholtenMore by this author →

J.D. Scholten is the Iowa State Representative for District 1 and a professional baseball player.  A sixth-generation Iowan, he lives in Sioux City.