Politics & Power Quote by Ike Skelton

Skelton’s sentence wears the calm mask of a civic reminder, but it’s really a pressure point in an old American argument: who gets to police the countryside. By starting in Missouri and widening to “across the country,” he makes a local constituency feel like a national stand-in, a classic move for a politician who wants parochial interests to read as public interest. The verbs are tellingly workmanlike - “comply,” “grow,” “raise” - a vocabulary of duty and labor that frames farmers as disciplined, regulated producers rather than romantic icons or corporate actors.

The subtext is defensive. “Must comply” signals burden without naming the burdens. He doesn’t list environmental rules, labor standards, water use, animal welfare, pesticides, or food safety; he simply piles up “federal, state, and local” until regulation feels omnipresent, almost claustrophobic. That accumulation does rhetorical work: it invites the listener to conclude that the system is overgrown even if no single rule is mentioned.

Then comes the moral lever: “that we depend on.” Skelton turns agriculture into an essential service - not just an industry, but the infrastructure of survival. “Feed the nation and the world” escalates the stakes beyond any county line, implying that regulatory friction isn’t just paperwork; it’s a threat to food security and American leadership. In context, it reads like a preamble to relief: streamline the rules, trust the producers, or at least treat farmers as already carrying their share of the civic load.