PROPHETSTOWN – As lifelong farmer Curt Cruse explained his operation to Ameya Pawar, a Democratic candidate for governor from Chicago, in a sense, he was preaching to the choir.

Cruse raises corn, soybeans and livestock. His cattle’s waste gets pumped underground and off to a reservoir that holds more than a million gallons, which is later pumped onto the fields with a manure spreader, then knifed in, to fertilize his crops.

“It makes a complete cycle: You feed it, get the manure back, bring it back to the soil,” Cruse said this afternoon. “Nothing’s wasted that way.”

Though Pawar, 36, calls The Windy City Home, his family owns farmland in India. He went to college at Missouri Valley College in rural Marshall, Missouri.

He gets it.

“What’s grown on this farm ends up on the financial markets in Chicago,” he said. “We’re connected, and we need one another.”

The farm visit was at the tail end of a tour of Whiteside County, and an earnest response to a challenge. Curt and Nancy Cruse’s daughter, Jen Shaffer, a mother of three, lives in Chicago. After hearing the 47th Ward alderman was running for governor, she emailed him a challenge:

Come to Prophetstown and meet my Republican parents.

“I couldn’t believe it,” she said. “He took me up on it.”

Pawar has fielded about 150 such requests. They’re all in the hopper, he said.

“The perception I want to change is that officeholders don’t want to listen. I actually want to come out and hear people – in big towns and small towns – get a sense of where they are, present my ideas, and go from there.”

He sat at the dining room table with Cruse and family friend Jason Zaagman, an Erie plumber, and talked shop. Mostly, he listened, but he also spelled out the four tenets of his Franklin D. Roosevelt-inspired “New Deal for Illinois”: fix the public school funding formula, make childcare available for all who need it, create a capital jobs bill, and reform criminal justice.

About 90 percent of Zaagman’s client base is involved in ag, and he’s on the advisory committee for the upcoming Erie Public Schools referendum, so his finger is firmly on the pulse of what’s going on in western Whiteside County – and rural America, really.

The Erie school district hopes to pass a referendum to overhaul its buildings.

“It’s a good school district, but all the area’s local school districts’ enrollments are dwindling,” Zaagman said. “What people might not realize, is that if you don’t spend to update the buildings, they’re going to fix the buildings. You’re still going to spend the money, one way or another.”

Erie is in a rare position, in terms of rural school districts. With the state recently agreeing to subsidies to keep the nearby Exelon nuclear plant running, the tax base still will be there. The district is debt-free.

For most rural districts, the current formula looks at the tax base, but not income. Pawar wants that changed.

“Everything isn’t broken,” Pawar said. “It’s just the way we collect dollars to pay for things like schools. We’re almost dead-last in public education.”

He sees education as the domino that can fix the state’s economy – in time.

“If you spend money on one end, it helps you somewhere else. There is a downstream effect,” he said. “You create a multiplier by putting someone to work and putting money in their pocket.”

Pawar was elected to the City Council in 2011, and represents about 55,000 Chicago residents. So far, his competition for next spring’s Democratic primary are businessmen Alex Paterakis and Chris Kennedy – son of former U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy – and Bob Daiber, former Madison County regional schools superintendent.

Pawar’s war chest has less than $100,000, compared to the $50-million-plus GOP Gov. Bruce Rauner has earmarked for the 2018 race.

He also visited DeKalb Feeds in Rock Falls, and CGH Medical Center’s childcare center, where he cringed to hear six families were about to lose their childcare.

Reaching across the aisle to create solutions shouldn’t be such a challenge, he said.

“[Former Democratic House Speaker] Tip O’Neill and Ronald Reagan didn’t like each other,” Pawar said, “But they respected each other, and look what got done.”

This is a guy who knows his crowd. He also pointed out that Sterling High’s Roscoe Eades Stadium, the Sterling post office and White Pines Inn & Resort in Mount Morris all were created through FDR’s New Deal.

“I admired FDR,” he said. “All we’re doing right now is fighting each other over scraps: whether you live in Chicago, in Darien, Newton or Sterling. These are all issues related to equity and fighting over scraps.”