By Mark Trainer
Staff Writer
Washington — To many Americans, the state of Iowa represents the truest, most enduring part of the country’s identity, calling to mind images of small-town life, hard-working families, rolling farmland and cornfields. Iowa is among the states that make up the Midwest region of the United States. Collectively, the Midwest is known as America’s Heartland because of the prominent part its farms and manufacturing play in the U.S. economy.
Iowa’s big business is food. The state is the nation’s top producer of maize and soybeans and also leads the nation in pork and egg production. Beef, dairy, sheep and turkeys are also major farm products. Iowa ranks second in total agricultural exports after California. China is its top export customer. In 2011, China bought more than $4 billion of soybeans from what is known as the “Hawkeye” state.
“If Iowa was a company, it would be America’s 92nd largest,” said Dan Piller, who writes about business for the Des Moines Register. It takes in $45 billion in farm product sales. Then there are the industries that support agriculture. Farm machinery maker John Deere has several manufacturing plants in Iowa, and its products are fitted with Iowa-produced tires.
Des Moines, Iowa’s capital, is home to the foundation that awards the World Food Prize, since 1986 the foremost international award recognizing the achievements of people who have improved the quality, quantity or availability of food in the world. Forty-eight kilometers away in Ames, Iowa, are the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Veterinary Services Laboratories, which screen livestock for suspected diseases. The Obama administration’s secretary of agriculture, Tom Vilsack, is a former governor of the state, which has 99 counties and more than 92,800 farms.
In addition to Iowa’s role as a leading agricultural provider, the decades since the 1980s have seen biotechnology, finance and insurance services, and government services join farming and manufacturing as important elements of the Iowa economy. With 41 production plants, Iowa is the nation’s largest producer of ethanol and second-largest producer of wind energy. Churning out biodiesel at 13 plants, Iowa is the nation’s top renewable fuels production state.
Iowa also has an important role in the country’s presidential election every four years. The Iowa caucus involves all 1,774 of the state’s precincts and ends up choosing delegates for the nominating conventions that select candidates for the presidency for each political party. Although other states have similar electoral events, Iowa’s has been the earliest for the past 40 years. Because of this, the caucus attracts enormous attention in the national media.
