Around the Country in 17 Hours With Michael Bloomberg

[brooklynite]

New York Times

WELLS, Minn. — Michael R. Bloomberg walked among the silos, bundled and reddening in the nine-degree air, negotiating the icy path that delivers a billionaire presidential candidate past the grain bins and the cameras and the tractor — straight into the middle of somewhere his advisers decided he should be.

That place, at approximately 2 p.m. on Wednesday, was the cavernous maintenance space of a soybean farm in rural southern Minnesota, a state that does not vote until March, where a dozen reporters and a handful of locals had gathered to watch Mr. Bloomberg hold forth on the majesty of agriculture.

“You’re the backbone of America,” he told his hosts, who wore microphones for the occasion.

“I eat what you grow,” Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, observed at one point. They thanked him for his business.

“It’s easy for us living in big cities to forget about the rest of the world,” he remarked before he left. “You don’t see it every day.”