Leadership Quote by Mike Johanns

“Producers are so much better-educated in issues related to terrorism” lands with the faintly surreal thud of a politician reaching for gravitas and grabbing the nearest available noun. Johanns, a farm-state Republican who served as Secretary of Agriculture, is clearly trying to elevate “producers” (read: farmers, agribusiness, the people who keep the food system running) from the usual economic framing into the national-security register. It’s a bid to say: these aren’t just stakeholders; they’re frontline operators in a world where food can be targeted, disrupted, contaminated, or politicized.

The subtext is a familiar Washington move: if you can link your constituency to terrorism, you can justify attention, funding, regulatory deference, and a seat at the big-kid table. Post-9/11 America trained lawmakers to speak in the language of threat, and “agriculture security” became a real policy niche (biosecurity, supply-chain vulnerability, border controls). Johanns is tapping that zeitgeist, implying that people close to production understand risk better than distant bureaucrats or the general public.

But the line also reveals the rhetorical strain. “Better-educated” is a sweeping comparative that begs: better than whom, and educated how? It flatters a base while skirting specifics, turning expertise into identity. That’s the political intent: elevate credibility by association, without the burden of evidence. The result is a sentence that tries to fuse two anxieties - rural economic precariousness and national-security panic - into one argument for relevance.