John Deere’s latest decision to pull hundreds of positions out of Iowa plants lands like a body blow in a state where green-and-yellow machinery has long been shorthand for middle class stability. The cuts arrive just as a broader retreat in U.S. manufacturing investment accelerates, raising the stakes for workers who once assumed that a job on the line was as solid as the steel they welded. I see the Iowa layoffs not as an isolated corporate move, but as a sharp snapshot of how global cost pressures and a soft farm economy are reshaping industrial work across the Midwest.
The new wave of Iowa cuts
The most recent announcement from John Deere strips “hundreds” of roles from two Iowa factories, a move that crystallizes how quickly a manufacturing footprint can shrink once a company decides to reconfigure its network. The company’s decision to remove those jobs from the state comes amid what has been described as a $200 billion pullback in U.S. factory investment, a figure that captures not just one company’s retrenchment but a broader recalibration of where industrial capital is deployed. For workers on those lines, the macroeconomic framing offers little comfort, because the immediate reality is that paychecks and health insurance are tied to a plant that suddenly has fewer shifts to offer.
Earlier rounds of cuts had already signaled that the company was willing to chip away at its Iowa presence, but the latest move is more sweeping in scope and symbolism. The same report detailing the hundreds of positions being removed also notes that John Deere previously eliminated 141 jobs at its Waterloo and Ankeny plants, underscoring how the company has been methodically trimming headcount in the state rather than making a one-off adjustment. When a manufacturer with deep roots in Iowa starts to treat local plants as interchangeable pieces in a global cost puzzle, it sends a clear message about where strategic priorities now lie.
Ottumwa and Des Moines feel the squeeze
The pain is particularly acute in communities built around single large employers, and John Deere’s footprint in Ottumwa and the Des Moines metro is a prime example. At the Ottumwa Works facility, the company has already notified workers that 75 positions will be cut, according to a notice filed under the Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification system. That figure may look modest on a national spreadsheet, but in a city the size of Ottumwa it represents a meaningful share of the industrial workforce and a direct hit to local tax bases and small businesses that rely on plant wages.
In the capital region, John Deere has also begun shifting production away from facilities in and around Des Moines, moving several production jobs from the Ottumwa and Des Moines plants to other locations in Iowa and Illinois. A video report on the restructuring notes that Deer is reallocating work from the Atom and De Moines plants to facilities in Iowa and Ill, a reminder that even when jobs stay within the company, they do not necessarily stay within commuting distance for the workers who currently hold them. I read that as a quiet but consequential reshaping of where industrial opportunity sits within the state, with some towns gaining at the direct expense of others.
A decade of steady cuts
To understand the scale of what is happening now, it helps to zoom out over the past decade of headcount decisions. Reporting on John Deere’s workforce shows that the company has eliminated more than 4,500 jobs since 2015, a figure that reflects a long pattern of trimming rather than a sudden pivot. In Iowa alone, nearly 200 workers saw their employment end in the first few days of 2025, with notices going out on Jan. 3 that their roles were being eliminated. When I look at those numbers, the current wave of cuts reads less like an aberration and more like the continuation of a long, grinding downsizing cycle…