A Kings County, California farmer has taken campaign advocacy to a new level. Ralph Gilkey of Gilkey Farm Inc. in Kings County has turned one of his safflower fields into a giant TRUMP sign — a sign a mile wide by a half-mile high. That's ambitious.

Ralph Gilkey, of Gilkey Farm Inc, created a huge Trump sign in his Kings County, California field!

It’s a mile long by half-mile wide.

An aerial drone captured the giant image.

Amazing! 🇺🇸🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/qHjDm0F7RN

— 🇺🇸ProudArmyBrat (@leslibless) August 10, 2024

Even in California, a state rendered deep-blue in presidential elections because of the massive metropolitan areas, this level of Trump support isn't unusual. A look at the 2020 election results, presented by county, is revealing; yes, Joe Biden won California handily, and yes, there are big expanses of blue in the once-and-former-Golden State, but the Central Valley and northern California remain conservative strongholds. Kings County is in the San Joaquin Valley, and in 2020 went for Trump by 12 points.

Rural communities and small towns across the land tend to be more conservative than their urban counterparts. Here in the Great Land, the Matanuska-Susitna Borough, where we hang our hats, is markedly Republican, and our corner of the Susitna Valley, in particular, is deep Trump country; you see a lot of MAGA, Trump/Vance, and "FJB" signs and flags around. Two of our kids live in a small town in eastern Iowa, and they report much the same thing there.

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This is, of course, part of a larger phenomenon, that being the polarization of our nation. This is happening in part by self-sorting; people with conservative and libertarian tendencies are moving to places like Texas and Florida, where their political beliefs fit in better; presumably, the opposite is taking place as well. But part of it is just the nature of small-town and rural people, who, in broad terms, tend to value self-reliance and wish for less, not more, government interference in their lives.

Back to Ralph Gilkey: According to the video account, the sign took Ralph a "couple of weeks" to plan, layout, and plow. Ralph's son did the disking, and that part of the project was aimed at helping his son recover from an accident that caused "severe brain trauma." Ralph's son, we might note, came out of the accident with a happy ending, now being married with a young son of his own. Good for him.

When I was a young man, my Dad, who farmed for much of his life, cautioned my brother and me away from agriculture. "If you want to work like a slave and never make much money," he said, "then go into farming." Farming has never been a life for the faint of heart; it is a lot of work, and rewards vary from year to year with commodity prices. But it's a way of life that gets in the blood, and farm-country people tend to be tough and single-minded. Ralph Gilkey certainly seems to be, and he has devoted a portion of his energy to advocating for a second Trump presidency.

There are an awful lot more like Ralph out there.

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