With the 2012 election heating up, political surrogates across the country are scrambling to form last minute political coalitions in vital swing states. In Missouri, Republican Senator Roy Blunt is reaching out to the agricultural community to throw their weight behind Republican candidate Mitt Romney.

For the past several years, Missouri appears to have undergone a political transformation of sorts. While George W. Bush easily carried the state in 2000 and 2004, the 2006 midterm elections saw Republican incumbent Jim Talent ousted in a close race by Democrat Claire McCaskill. In the 2008 election, Republican John McCain carried the state by just 0.1% of the vote, the closest statewide contest in the entire nation.

The closeness of the last two statewide elections in Missouri has put the state in the sights of both the Romney and Obama campaigns. Blunt’s efforts on behalf of the Romney campaign are focused on criticizing the president’s agricultural policies in order to drum up rural support. “Missouri has more than 100,000 individual farms — the second highest number of any state in the nation,” Blunt said. “Agriculture is a key economic driver in our state and nationwide, but unfortunately, the Obama administration’s reckless policies have created more uncertainty for farm families in Missouri and across America.”

In particular, Blunt focused on the Obama administration’s aborted efforts to implement new agricultural child labor regulations earlier this year (a proposal that was met with a tidal wave of opposition across rural America) and efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up polluted waterways by regulating agricultural runoff.

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Written by: Justin Ellison / Farm Plus Staff Writer