Hillary Clinton Speaks About Farming, and Much More, in Iowa

SIOUX CITY, Iowa — It was a speech intended to introduce her plan to help rural America in one of the most agricultural parts of Iowa. But the framing that Hillary Rodham Clinton took to lay out her plan here drew the agricultural world into the broader messages of her campaign, touching on everything from immigration to drug addiction.

“We have more than 40 million Americans living in small towns in rural America,” Mrs. Clinton told the crowd of more than 275, packed into a tiny meeting room at Morningside College on Wednesday afternoon. “You don’t ignore that, you figure out what we’re going to do to grow together,” she said.

Growing together was a central theme: She said that creating more clean energy would be a boon to agriculture, that expanded broadband and Internet access would help rural communities, that comprehensive immigration reform would help stabilize the agricultural work force, and that a growing agriculture sector would help combat the drug dependency and addiction plaguing the country.

In proclaiming her agricultural bona fides, she recalled her battles as a senator from New York to connect New York City’s lower-income and often hungry population with upstate farmers. The first step, she said, was simply convincing those around her in Washington that New York had farmers at all.

“A lot of my colleagues in the Senate didn’t believe me,” Mrs. Clinton said, noting that she had to show them “we were number two in onions, two or three in dairy.” As part of her efforts, she jokingly displayed a picture of a cow from New York State. A Midwestern colleague, “who shall remain nameless,” she said, retorted, “So you’ve got one cow.”

At the Iowa speech on Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton reiterated plans to expand the use of solar panels by half a billion by the end of her first presidential term and to expand biofuel use and research. She became the most passionate, however, when speaking about a cause she brings up regularly on the campaign trail: drug addiction.

“I want to focus on the people of rural America,” she said, her voice becoming hushed as she listed the devastation that drugs have caused in parts of the country. “Meth, pills, overdoses, lost lives, broken families.”

She pledged to improve treatment of addiction, and especially in making such facilities available in rural areas for addiction and mental health.

“Health is health,” Mrs. Clinton said.

And finally, before making a pledge about her candidacy and willingness to work across the aisle, Mrs. Clinton took a quick jab at some of her Republican rivals, through the frame of immigration and its importance to the agricultural community.

“A lot of the people who are talking so dramatically about the immigration system should spend some time with some farmers who are looking for people to do the hard work to harvest their crops or milk their cows or pick their oranges,” she said, before calling for comprehensive immigration reform to level the field of agricultural workers.

And then she, as many seem to do at this stage of the campaign, addressed the elephant in every room, Donald J. Trump, although not by name.

“The idea that somebody running for president would actually advocate repealing the 14th Amendment, honest to goodness, it’s unbelievable,” she said.