28. Tom Harkin, small farm supporter, with Ferd Hoefner

Sustainable Agriculture Policy with Ron Kroese

The year was 2002. The idea was to get fresh fruit and vegetables in schools for snacks. Sen. Tom Harkin was chair of the Ag Committee during the farm bill, and pushed through a pilot program to 100 rural schools in four states.

“In all these years, with all these supports of programs, we never supported fruits and vegetables. They were never part of the farm bill.”

That is just one of Sen. Harkin’s stories in this week’s episode. He talks with our host Ron Kroese and guest Ferd Hoefner about his time working as a lawmaker in Washington, D.C. for 41 years.

In 1974, Tom Harkin was elected to Congress from Iowa's 5th Congressional District. His energetic, person-to-person campaign carried the day against an incumbent in a long- standing Republican district.

In 1984, after serving 10 years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Sen. Harkin challenged an incumbent senator and won. Iowans returned him to the Senate in 1990, 1996, and again in 2002. In November 2008, he made history by becoming the first Iowa Democrat to win a fifth term in the U.S. Senate. He retired from the U.S. Senate in January 2015.

Throughout his lengthy tenure, Sen. Harkin served on the House and Senate Agriculture Committees and was a stalwart champion for policies and programs benefiting family-sized farms, conservation, and sustainable agriculture.

As a young senator, Tom was tapped by Sen. Ted Kennedy to craft legislation to protect the civil rights of millions of Americans with physical and mental disabilities. He knew firsthand about the challenges facing people with disabilities from his late brother, Frank, who was deaf from an early age. What emerged from that process would later become his signature legislative achievement—The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The ADA has become known as the "Emancipation Proclamation for people with disabilities." The legislation changed the landscape of America by requiring buildings and transportation to be wheelchair accessible, and to provide workplace accommodations for people with disabilities.

To preserve the intent of the ADA after several court rulings weakened its standards, Sen. Harkin and Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) introduced the ADA Amendments bill to ensure continuing protections from discrimination for all Americans with disabilities. It was signed into law in September 2008. In September 2009, Sen. Harkin became chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee.

Tom Harkin was born in Cumming, Iowa (pop. 150), on Nov. 19, 1939, the son of an Iowa coal miner father and a Slovenian immigrant mother. To this day, he still lives in the house in Cumming where he was born. In 1968, Tom married Ruth Raduenz, the daughter of a farmer and a school teacher from Minnesota. Tom and Ruth have two daughters, Amy and Jenny, and three grandchildren.

The interview was conducted on Oct. 11, 2017.

Links this episode:
National Sustainable Agriculture Oral History Archive (video link)

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