Senator Charles Grassley reflects on careers in farming, government

Charles Grassley has served in Washington, D.C., for more than half of his 90 years, and he still works to stay close to his roots on the family farm in Butler County, Iowa, northeast of Des Moines.

“Dad bought the farm I was born on in 1926, moved there in 1927, and farmed the 80 acres his entire life,” Grassley told me in an interview in his Washington, D.C., office. “At one time, he could have bought 80 acres north of us for $25 an acre, but he didn’t do it because during the Depression, they had a hard time making the payments to keep the 80 acres, but they made it.”

An inspirational upbringing

Grassley says his parents, Louis and Ruth, had a keen interest in civics. “Both of them were always talking about government and politicians and history in our household,” he says. “Growing up, I was either going to be a government teacher or in politics.” 

Ruth Grassley was one of the first four women in Iowa to cast a vote following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, but Grassley didn’t know about her role in history until a constituent from Iowa shared a newspaper clipping from the August 30, 1920, issue of the Des Moines Register with him after she had passed away. 

“I wonder why she never talked about it,” he says. “I think that was at a school election, and that had to be within 24 hours after Tennessee ratified it.” 

Tennessee’s ratification, Aug. 18, 1920, gave the Nineteenth Amendment the three-fourths majority required to make it part of the U.S. Constitution. Legislator Harry Burn is credited with casting the deciding vote.  “The House,” Grassley says, “passed it by one vote in Tennessee because his mother told this young Tennessee legislator, ‘You should be voting for mothers to be able to vote.’”

Grassley reflected on his mother’s historic vote during a 2019 speech in the Senate marking the 100th anniversary of the amendment’s Senate approval. 

When Grassley was a teenager, an article in the American Legion’s magazine caught his father’s eye. “This must have been about 1948 or ’49,” Grassley says. “They had a story about going to Congress and you could get $10,000 a year salary. [My father] said, ‘You need to read this.’”

After Grassley earned a master’s degree in political science from the University of Northern Iowa, he ran for the Iowa Legislature, and was elected in 1958.

Back on the Farm

Despite growing up on the farm, Grassley didn’t envision a life there. “I lived on the farm and did some farm work, but I had no interest in farming,” he says. “Then, Dad died in 1960, and Mom wanted to stay on the farm. That’s why I became a farmer.” 

Grassley needed some financial help to make that happen. “I wouldn’t have been able to be a farmer if Mother hadn’t left her investment in it,” he relates. “And I had an outside income, and I had a banker that could help me,” he says. “It was the same way when [my son] Robin started farming in 1980. I had a lot of capital in [the farm]. I had more land by then because I bought a 120-acre farm in the 1960s, and I left it in.… Maybe it shouldn’t be, but that’s the way it has been historically in America, if you pass a farming operation on from generation to generation.”

Grassley’s off-farm careers have included sheet metal shearer, assembly line worker, and adjunct professor of government. He was elected to represent Iowa in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1974, and the Senate in 1980.

Off to Washington, D.C.

While farming wasn’t part of Grassley’s original plan, he says the experience helped prepare him for his career in government. “I got 17 years that I was actively engaged in farming to have as a background to be a United States Senator,” he says. 

The uncertainty of farming provided valuable lessons, he says. “You invest all your labor, all your capital for a whole year. You don’t know what you’re going to get at the end of the year. You have to be an optimist. You learn that there is a lot of hard work connected with it, even with the modern machinery we have today. I think that [experience] is necessary to be able to tell the story of farming.”

At 90, Grassley is the oldest and the longest-serving current U.S. Senator. He serves on the Agriculture, Budget, Finance, and Judiciary committees, as well as the Joint Committee on Taxation.

Grassley is known for rarely missing votes, and has the second-longest voting streak in the history of the senate. His 27-year, 8,927-vote streak began after missing a vote due to historic flooding in Iowa in 1993, and lasted until 2020, when the senator was in quarantine pending results of a COVID-19 test.

The senator is still an active partner in the family farm, although Robin and his son, Patrick, handle much of the day-to-day operations. “I used to go home in April and May and run the field cultivator prior to the planting, and then I used to haul grain away from the combine in September and October,” he says. “I hate to tell you, I don’t get dirt under my fingernails like I used to. And if I do, it’s [from] planting flowers in my garden.”

Grassley is one of only two grain farmers, along with Montana’s Jon Tester, in the Senate. “Two percent of the people grow food for the other 98%, and in the United States Senate, there are two of us to tell the story and wake people up to problems of farming,” he says. “But that isn’t enough to tell the story of agriculture. Every family farmer has to defend the family farm.” 

He says farmers need to speak about agriculture and educate the public on where food comes from. “[Some people] think milk comes out of a bottle, not cows, and they think food comes out of a supermarket, not farms,” Grassley says. “We have to tell this story.… That’s one of my goals.”