Tolkkinen: You know, greater Minnesota really is mostly rocks and cows

CLITHERALL, Minn. - As Gov. Tim Walz enters the home stretch as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, I have to say I never understood why everybody got mad at him for saying greater Minnesota is “mostly rocks and cows.”

I mean, he’s mostly right.

Farmers know it. You walk your fields in the spring, and what are you doing? Picking rock, right? Moving those chunks of granite or whatnot that have floated to the surface over the past year so they don’t damage your planter or harvest equipment.

Who doesn’t have a few rockpiles along the edges of their farm fields? You can find some pretty nice boulders there, and lake people will actually buy them for their shorelines or maybe as garden statements.

Shoot, we have whole counties and cities named after rocks. Rock County. Big Stone County. Pipestone city and county. Granite Falls. Sandstone. Rockford. Rockville. Rock Creek.

There’s Rollingstone in Winona County (which presumably gathers no moss). There’s Marble in Itasca County. In Pipestone, there’s Jasper, which could be argued is quartz, not rock, but if you were walking over it at twilight you wouldn’t know the difference.

Crow Wing County has Ironton. St. Louis County has Iron Junction and Mountain Iron as well as Biwabik, which comes from the Ojibwe word for iron.

Otter Tail County has Dent, which is what happens if a rock hits your car. (Apologies in advance, my Otter Tail County neighbors!)

Plus, rocks have an illustrious history in greater Minnesota. Iron ore, used to make steel, fed and clothed generations of Iron Rangers. There are agates, beloved by North Shore visitors and the official state gemstone. And then, of course, there’s the world renowned Kensington Runestone, now housed in the Runestone Museum in Alexandria, carved with Norse characters that many believe prove that the Vikings explored Minnesota centuries before Father Hennepin laid eyes on what he named St. Anthony Falls.

Other famous Minnesota rocks include the Jeffers Petroglyphs, which are carvings by native Americans that date back 7,000 years; and the ancient pictographs on rocks in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

If you want to sink into deep geologic time, the rocks of the Minnesota River Valley in southwest and south-central Minnesota are 3.5 billion years old, among the oldest on the planet.

Lotta rocks? Yeah, Walz gets us.

And for the alleged cow insult. Let’s dissect that.

According to the National Agricultural Statistics Service, there were 2.13 million cattle and calves in Minnesota as of Jan. 1. Of the 5.8 million Minnesotans, about 2.6 million live outside the seven-county Twin Cities metropolitan area, so yeah, definitely more people than cows in greater Minnesota. That holds true even when you add in the 16,000 cows in Ruth Klossner’s Cow Moo-seum in Bernadotte just outside New Ulm.

Still, raising beef cattle or dairy cattle is a point of pride for many of this state’s farmers. You may have seen the sleek, well-tended heifers and steers at the Minnesota State Fair. Now, those animals look their absolute best when they visit the Twin Cities because it’s show time; back on the farm, they tend to put on their sweats and leave off the deodorant. That’s not to say that farmers don’t care about their animals. Many work hard to provide fresh pasture and shade and to keep their animals healthy. And just like mining, bovines have put a roof over the heads of generations of Minnesota families.

If rural Minnesotans were ashamed of being known for cows, I doubt anyone would have built Buffy the Cow, a 20-foot-long, 15-foot-tall horned Holstein that stood atop an office building in Austin for four decades before mooooving to the Mower County fairgrounds.

Republicans have never let Walz forget the “rocks and cows” comment. Here’s how it started. He was explaining election maps to a Minneapolis audience following the 2016 election. The maps showed small blue pools of Democratic cities surrounded by huge red seas across greater Minnesota.

“You see those maps,” Walz said. “Red and blue and there’s all that red across there. And Democrats go into depression over it. It’s mostly rocks and cows that are in that red area.”

Strategists pounced. The Republican governors claimed he was “attacking” rural areas, knowing full well that his point was that rural areas are much more sparsely populated than urban.

Rocks and cows? Add in a bunch of lakes and river, and that’s who we are. Let’s own it. All 2.6 million of us humans in greater Minnesota.