South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem Tuesday panned former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg's past comments on farmers and factory workers as "incredibly insulting" and showed "nothing but pompous ignorance."
“Who does Mike Bloomberg think he is?” Noem asked on Fox News' "Fox and Friends." “Every single day farmers work long hours, but they don't just have to deal with the labor side, they understand genetics and engineering, biology, chemistry. It is incredibly difficult for farmers every day to feed the world and I'm just so proud my entire family is farmers. I’ve been a farmer my entire life."
Bloomberg, now a front-runner for the Democrats' presidential nomination, said in a 2016 appearance that with farmers, "you dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn. You could learn that. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, now it's 2 percent in the United States."
Noem, a Republican, noted she grew up farming and she'd challenge the New York billionaire to come to spend a day with a farmer and "ride horses, rope steers, go out there and drive GPS controlled tractors, computer program grain handling systems and then internationally market your commodities to pay your bills and continue to do what they do best."
"It's incredibly difficult work, long hours," the governor said. "(It's) incredibly insulting for him to make a comment like that...I don't even know if Mike Bloomberg would be able to turn on our corn planter, it's just so incredibly difficult to run modern equipment and do what farmers do every day."
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