Down on the Farm
Zwerdling, Daniel
Down on the Farm The seeds of bad policy yield a crop of failure BY DANIEL ZWERDUNG After weeks of travel through America's farm country, from the tumbling wheat hills of eastern Washington to...
...farm exports—and farmers' profits—exploded...
...In Mississippi, farmers face a similar problem...
...And the problems are rooted in the ways U.S...
...The cost of some herbicides quadrupled...
...And it could get worse, because there doesn't seem to be any good herbicide that can really control it...
...More troubling than these tragedies was what I heard in the antiseptic calm of a small-town bank down the road from an International Harvester dealership in Osceola, Iowa...
...In effect, these farmers are refinancing with a second mortgage to prop up their shaky finances for one more year...
...If we kept farming the old way, dryland, we'd never make enough money to pay for Mom and Dad's retirement and support my own family, too," Iverson says...
...These fanners were victims not only of their methods—large-scale, capital-intensive operations—but of a corporate squeeze...
...grain could no longer afford to buy it...
...The cost of everything has gone up for farmers, but the irrigation systems have pushed farmers like Iverson over the brink...
...Though farmers and Carter's political opponents like to blame the farm crisis on the embargo, the export market was bound to turn sour in any case...
...So you're saying this region is only one year away from a situation like the Great Depression...
...Agriculture Secretary John Block told a Senate committee recently that petrochemical fuel and chemical costs are no longer climbing and "may even show a decline" this year, but few analysts expect that the price of a dwindling resource will remain stable over the next two decades...
...Department of Agriculture, for every dollar the American consumer spent on food in 1980, marketing and processing companies took sixty-nine cents, farm suppliers drew twenty-seven cents, and farmers got four cents...
...Daniel Zwerdling is a correspondent for National Public Radio...
...In only two years, the market value of Woolsey's land plunged 30 per cent...
...When he asked his banker for his annual loan last year, the banker refused—so the Iversons have filed for bankruptcy...
...Once seen as the American farmers' salvation, these commandments are now beginning to be recognized as the cause of chronic surpluses and crippling costs...
...Marvin Woolsey was one of the farmers who bought the message...
...At the other end, down on the farm, individuals often have little choice but to deal with a corporate giant...
...Another 20 per cent, Wubbena said, have been taking a dangerous gamble: They've given the bank the deeds to their land in return for new, high-interest loans so they can pay off the old debts that are long overdue...
...Woolsey's experience and that of many other farmers suggests that there's something wrong with the two basic precepts of American agriculture: Produce as much as possible and do it by using expensive, energy-intensive technology...
...In fact, you can pinpoint the day the export market boomed—August 15, 1971...
...Farmers like Marvin Woolsey, flush with cash, started buying land...
...They're considered good farmers, but like many others, the Damrows lost money last year...
...I would say," Wubbena began in his monotone, "that 25 per cent of the farmers, if we had another bad year, will be forced to sell out...
...In 1978, Marvin Woolsey went still deeper into debt and bought another 550 acres, bringing the size of his farm to 1,250 acres...
...What will you do if you lose the farm...
...I'm responsible for it, totally responsible, and I accept that...
...There is a widespread impression that the United States has always supplied the world with enormous amounts of grain, but exports did not become a major market for farmers until the beginning of the last decade...
...In the first half of the decade, these farmers planted forty-two million more acres...
...The current grain surplus, Steadman says, "is not a short-run problem...
...At the Reagan Administration's mid-June agriculture "summit" in Washington, D.C., 100 representatives from farm and agribusiness groups discussed whether the Government should freeze certain crop price subsidies or increase them, whether the Government should extend the crop set-aside program, known as PIK, or take its hands off and let the "free market" control supply and demand...
...They say they must depend on herbicides to farm as much land as they do...
...We've destroyed the economy, we've produced, produced, and produced for the world—so we were educated to produce and now we're being punished for producing...
...About 20 per cent of the farmers have been selling off part of their land and equipment, trying to raise enough cash to save what's left...
...The Reagan Administration, with all its rhetoric about the "free market," has imposed the most expensive and extensive Government controls farmers have seen in decades...
...Grain exports, which had been rising gradually since the end of World War II, suddenly skyrocketed, increasing by 70 per cent between 1970 and 1973, according to a General Accounting Office (GAO) report on the structure of agriculture...
...Department of Agriculture researcher Chester McWhorter...
...In the early 1960s, the regional power companies were swamped with a surplus of cheap hydroelectric power, so they started pushing electricity the way an auto dealer pushes cars...
...Farmers' income fell more than 30 per cent between 1979 and 1982, according to Agriculture Department figures, and the value of farmland shriveled with it...
...I think it was ambition, if you can call it that," he said...
...For two decades, the Government had been encouraging farmers to curtail production and prevent too much surplus from building up...
...Ironically," says Bruce, "weed control, herbicides, were the single biggest cost in my crop production...
...In fact, we thought many times that a successful farmer had to get bigger just to stay even with rising costs and inflation and all those items, and it worked quite well for them for a number of years...
...But participants in the conference, including Block, recognized that the nation can't write its farm program from year to year any more...
...What will happen," I asked Wubbena, "if the farm economy this year doesn't take a dramatic turn for the better...
...In the mid-1970s, Woolsey bought another 270 acres...
...agriculture began collapsing, one by one...
...When they go broke, they lose their homes and their way of life...
...I really resent it...
...Our yields don't look so good," his brother says, "but we don't have to pay all those fertilizer and pesticide bills, either...
...To make matters worse, family farmers increasingly find themselves in competition with farms owned by big agribusiness concerns...
...Some urged Secretary Block to set up a Government-industry task force to act as a traveling salesman, promoting U.S...
...It was a question of me coming from no background—we never had anything— and so we wanted to acquire something...
...Coincidentally, the Soviet Union and other nations were suffering major crop failures...
...And Wubbena says the correspondent bank in Des Moines wanted nothing to do with a farmer in trouble...
...The Federal Government would have to consider shaping subsidies and regulating market prices so that farmers would be penalized, in effect, for producing as much corn and wheat as possible and rewarded for planting crops that promote the national goals of conserving energy, protecting the soil, minimizing the use of pesticides, and providing a stable farm economy...
...There was no limit, Butz told farmers, to what the hungry world wanted to buy and what they could sell...
...Some weed researchers confirm that weeds are getting tougher to control...
...Perhaps 3 to 5 per cent of his client farmers have been trying to sell their farms and go out of business, Wubbena told me, but the economy has been so bad that most of them can't find buyers...
...I resent the dickens out of it," Woolsey says, bitterly now...
...This style of farming would take more labor, so the Federal Government might have to devise a national program to encourage people to stay in the rural areas or even settle there, and farmers would have to scale back the size of their operations...
...Sometimes," Harvey Damrow says, "I begin to think that [chemical costs] are getting the best of us...
...Woolsey has been trying desperately to raise enough cash to save his farm—he's sold most of his machinery and is now trying to sell some of the land, too...
...We were flying high...
...According to the U.S...
...Economist Dennis Steadman of Chase Econometrics predicts that for the next decade, foreign demand for U.S...
...At his bank and others, alarm bells started ringing...
...If a farmer asked his local bank to lend him $ 100,000 to buy 100 acres of land, and he had to pay 8 per cent interest on the loan, he had to earn a profit of $8,000 that year just to pay his interest...
...All the farm protection programs crafted over fifty years—subsidies and target prices and deficiency payments and loans—failed to do what they were supposed to...
...farmers grow food...
...I don't believe your correspondent bank is like dealing with your own banker," Wubbena says...
...Bank President Don Wub-bena ushered me into his motel-modern office and said, "Most of the farmers we service couldn't pay back their loans this year...
...agriculture in the short run...
...But Martin sees no cause to worry...
...Hey, exports looked great...
...He froze wages and prices and, most important for farmers, he devalued the dollar...
...Marvin Woolsey and other farmers started losing money, fast...
...Now we see the promised land of full production," Butz said...
...grain will grow, "but at a sharply reduced rate from the 1970s...
...Except go out of business...
...They don't come to the operation to see what's going on...
...Studies at the Universities of Washington and Idaho suggest that eroded soils produce up to 25 per cent smaller wheat yields than soils that have been protected, so farmers use more fertilizer and other chemicals to boost their yields...
...So Government policymakers, bankers, and agribusiness researchers all agreed: As farmers made less money per acre, they should maintain their total income by farming more acres...
...The irrigation systems, agriculture extension agents told the farmers, would triple their yields and boost their profits...
...Such corporate farms may be part of a vertically integrated company that can make up crop losses in processing or retailing food...
...If things don't change," says Parr, "we'll see a lot more...
...It means we're going to lose our farm if we don't make the payment...
...And I can't do anything about it...
...The world economy was in decline, and the Third World countries that were supposed to consume all the surplus U.S...
...It's the farmers who followed the official line who are at the brink...
...In the past, Woolsey had been a good risk...
...Illinois farm activist and dairy farmer P. L. Parr says rural suicides have increased more than 10 per cent over the past year...
...And besides, I couldn't afford it if there was...
...The Profits Dry Up Some seventy-five miles southwest of Spokane, irrigation rigs spread across the dry, flat landscape, symbolizing the high-tech energy-intensive farming that is destroying once prosperous farmers...
...Their single biggest expense—the item that drained more money per acre than any other—wasn't fertilizer or seeds or tractor fuel...
...When he went to the Osceola State Bank and asked to borrow $500,000 until harvest time, Woolsey says, "the banker told me 'No.'" "Actually, if the decision had been up to me, I might have given him the loan," says banker Don Wubbena...
...If a farmer would agree to install deep-well, electric-powered irrigation systems, the power companies would sell all the power he needed at a discount...
...Simple arithmetic showed why: It paid to borrow...
...Other businesses might try to cut costs by curtailing production, just as a steel company shuts down a factory...
...Everything looked really bright for agriculture—like there'd be an endless market and an endless demand for the food that could be produced...
...I would say yes...
...But farmers can't claim big tax write-offs for land that isn't growing crops...
...Society itself made the wrong decisions...
...The room fills with the smell of hot sugar and dough...
...But while lots of farmers are trying to sell, few are buying...
...D.Z...
...Sure, we've encouraged farmers to get bigger—if the equipment could farm more acres with the same labor, it seemed it should more than pay for itself...
...From the farmer's point of view, he couldn't lose—and neither could the banker, for if worse came to worst and the farmer couldn't repay his loans, the bank would simply seize the land and sell it at a profit...
...it must write a long-term agricultural policy...
...But that would be equivalent to the Great Depression...
...Jolly Green Giants The United States lost 34,000 farms in 1982, according to Government statistics...
...Or they may be part of a nonagricultural company that can reduce its taxes by writing farm losses off against profits from unrelated enterprises...
...The situation is not likely to improve for the rest of this century...
...But I don't feel like I made the wrong decisions...
...It's been a dramatic change," says Rick Barrett, who runs the International Harvester dealership in Osceola...
...The proposals you are least likely to hear, however, may be the only ones that can save American agriculture...
...Overnight, American corn and wheat, as well as other U.S...
...But there's a simpler argument for abandoning the current structure of agriculture in favor of a bold new approach: The modern American way of farming isn't working any more...
...The Woolseys finally got their chance in the early 1970s, when U.S...
...But in recent years something has been going wrong: Huge ugly clumps of the velvet leaf weed have been spreading across his soybean fields, and he has to spray three different herbicides to control them...
...But American farm technology kept working its magic, churning out record harvests...
...Ten years ago, they had hardly heard of a weed called sickle pod, but today it is choking soybean fields across the state...
...I bought 430 acres," Woolsey remembers...
...Despite warnings from environmentalists, farmers like Woolsey were using more pesticides than ever, for petroleum-based chemicals, like machinery, made it possible for farmers to expand...
...In this firm alone," realtor Don Ramsey of Osceola told me, "we have close to fifty farms for sale right now, and we're just not finding buyers...
...The animal feed business is dominated by two companies: Ralston Purina and Cargill (which also trades in fertilizer and seed, and owns grain elevators, flour companies, steel manufacturers, and an insurance company...
...There's no question it's hurting yields," says U.S...
...Since World War II, and especially since the mid-1960s, the nation's bankers, Government researchers, agribusiness executives, and farmers have built agriculture on four assumptions that have turned out to be unfounded...
...The oven buzzes, the coffee cake is ready, and his wife takes it out...
...America's farmers are only one bad season away from a collapse comparable to the Great Depression...
...And they must produce only as many bushels per acre as the soil can support while still sustaining or even increasing its productivity...
...Martin and other researchers have reported finding fields of weeds that are actually genetically resistant to weed-killers, just as some insects have become immune to pesticides...
...These assumptions were critical...
...By using the same kinds of herbicides year after year, says University of Nebraska researcher Alex Martin, farmers have wiped out the weeds that were easy to kill and now tougher weeds are filling the ecological vacuum...
...Wo idea...
...Now we see the promised land of the dead hand of government coming off our farmers—and letting them farm the way they want to...
...D.Z...
...agricultural export, provide a clear example of how the squeeze works...
...That," he says, starting to laugh, "is a great question...
...The High Cost of Weeding Harvey Damrow and his son Bruce call their grain and hog farm near Lincoln, Nebraska, "Ham Home...
...We had every incentive to expand...
...But OPEC, the oil embargo, and the decontrol of oil and some gas prices changed the equation...
...I'm asking you to look not two or three years ahead," the Secretary told the conference, "but decades ahead...
...And that forced them to abandon most of the consuming mechanical weed controls and depend instead on herbicides, which demand only half the labor...
...Farmers will still face fundamental long-term problems that threaten the future of agriculture in America...
...Cargill, Continental, and three others account for 90 per cent of the activity on world grain markets...
...But now Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, turned public policy upside down: He stumped the nation urging farmers to plant "fence row to fence row...
...A sound economic system doesn't flirt with collapse just because interest rates and prices temporarily go out of whack, any more than a healthy person hovers near death after a brief bout with the flu...
...He went deeper into debt and invested in new machinery—bigger, more powerful, more expensive tractors, planters, and harvesters that could work as many acres in half a day as his old equipment could work in one...
...The psychology of the day was you better buy everything you could buy," he recalls...
...As farm production expanded, agriculture land prices surged...
...And we had every expectation of the thing continuing, too...
...The story is almost over now, and Woolsey stares blankly at his kitchen table...
...With 1,400 acres and two new blue silos, Woolsey would seem to be the model of a prosperous cornbelt farmer...
...I have no idea," Woolsey says...
...Twenty years ago we didn't even know what chemicals were, really," Harvey says...
...The more herbicides farmers use, the worse their crop problems get, and the more pesticides they use," Altieri says...
...As aluminum refineries and other industries flocked to the Northwest, hungry for cheap power, the surplus disappeared, and power companies began building expensive coal-fired plants and nuclear reactors...
...I have so much to do every day that I have to cut time corners somewhere," Bruce says...
...As the GAO report on agriculture suggests, years of Federal farm programs, tax code provisions, and research have been skewed toward rewarding farmers for specializing in such big cash crops as corn, soybeans, and wheat...
...But now the Woolsey farm was so big that the family couldn't handle all the work...
...And for the first time since the export boom of the early 1970s, Woolsey's profits per acre declined...
...The basic motives and methods of farmers must be drastically revised...
...Regions that have seen only corn and soybeans for twenty years would be covered with a patchwork of corn and soybeans, barley and alfalfa, wheat and clover, oats, and perhaps even vegetable and fruit crops...
...By 1980, the assumptions that had propped up modern U.S...
...And that, of course, is the irony: The Government has essentially controlled American agriculture for fifty years, shaping the kinds of farms we have and the crops that are grown on them...
...And they grew a wide variety of crops, planting a different one on each field year to year, so that weeds attracted to a single crop couldn't sweep across the farm like locusts...
...The basic structure of the farm economy would have to change...
...But during the booming 1970s, the Damrows tripled the amount of land they farm...
...This push toward high-technology farming was, as the GAO report on agriculture said, "a wise choice...
...Along with the new machinery came new pesticides...
...Studies in the United States and Canada suggest, for instance, that some best-selling herbicides weaken major crops and make them more susceptible to insects and disease...
...The Damrows controlled weeds back then by almost the same methods farmers have used for centuries: They dug up weeds with a tractor, or "cultivated" their fields, five or six times each year...
...The economies of entire regions have become dependent on those crops...
...But Woolsey had dreams: He had been raised in a children's home in Omaha and later by foster parents, and he wanted something he could call his own...
...The question that would immediately be asked is whether we want Government control of agriculture...
...These are the farmers who refused to expand and invest heavily in new machinery and go deep into debt...
...But it would be a grave mistake if the nation's leaders and farmers were to confuse remission for recovery...
...products, could be purchased at much lower prices by foreign countries...
...As soil erosion saps the productivity of the land, major farmers will be forced to depend even more on energy-intensive technology...
...The banks, meanwhile, determine the cost and availability of credit...
...The Aetna Life Insurance Company and Farmers Home Administration both have foreclosed on us...
...Within just a few years, the cost of fertilizer and tractor fuel doubled...
...Costs are likely to keep growing...
...because the individual farmer is small in relation to the market, it is the buyer, not the seller, who sets prices...
...Family farmers have no such ability to ride out the crunch, of course...
...We started producing the heck out of stuff," Woolsey says...
...The equipment that would replace them—nimble machinery, powered by renewable fuels, that can plant and harvest a variety of crops—hasn't been developed yet...
...These two credos have dictated most agriculture research, shaped most agribusiness marketing strategies and Federal policies, and dominated the thinking of most farmers for thirty-five years...
...But the Damrows say they can't turn back unless they sell off some of their land...
...Ironically, there are farmers still making a profit today—farmers who ignored what the bankers and Government policymakers and researchers told them...
...Dave Iverson was one of the farmers who were persuaded...
...Local bankers told me that many irrigation farmers like Iverson are being forced out of business...
...In that case, farmers will be yanked back from the brink...
...Two U.S...
...Down on the Farm The seeds of bad policy yield a crop of failure BY DANIEL ZWERDUNG After weeks of travel through America's farm country, from the tumbling wheat hills of eastern Washington to the tedious flat cornfields of Indiana, I'm convinced and scared: Convinced that America's farmers are in deep trouble, and scared because most Americans and their politicians don't realize how deep it is...
...surplus grains...
...So Woolsey took the route recommended by agribusiness and the U.S...
...Yeah, I think every banker has got some guilt," says Ward Kilgore, president of the Decatur County State Bank near Weldon...
...With no loans to prop him up, Woolsey couldn't make his $ 113,000 mortgage payments last year—and the Aetna Life Insurance Company and Farmers Home Administration, which own the mortgage, foreclosed...
...I feel that society itself has made the wrong decisions...
...Cost: $46 per acre, three times what he used to spend...
...Researchers are constantly coming up with new herbicides," he says...
...Government farm programs this year, not including PIK, will cost about $22 billion—the highest total in U.S...
...Marvin Woolsey's cost of drying corn in his soaring silos, using propane gas, shot up 130 per cent...
...It appeared then that the one who would remain in agriculture and be most effective would be growing and enlarging," says Harold Laures at the Farmers Home Administration...
...In January 1980, after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, President Carter embargoed grain sales to the Soviet Union, confirming what many economists had already feared: In a world of volatile international politics, farmers could never count on foreign markets to gobble up their production and support them...
...With this sudden demand for American crops, the price of corn doubled, the price of wheat tripled, and U.S...
...There was too much to do in a single day," Woolsey says...
...Powerful agribusiness oligopolies decide how much farmers pay for seed, feed, chemicals, and equipment...
...The boom psychology provoked a major change in Federal farm policy...
...For a while, he adds, the herbicides worked like magic...
...But during that same year, the value of his new land would increase by $15,000 or more...
...Such proposals have a Utopian ring, and most politicians and farmers would probably dismiss them as unrealistic, naive, or worse...
...Assumption 1: World demand for American crops was insatiable, and farmers would sell all the crops they could grow...
...Assumption 3: The cost of borrowing money would keep lagging behind...
...But individual farmers can't control the price they get for what they grow...
...four tractor companies share 83 per cent of the implement market...
...I don't see how we can go through another year like this and actually save the farmer...
...Thus the basis for the next assumption: Assumption 4: The costs of high-technology farming would stay about the same while crop yields and farm profits would keep rising...
...He can't just rip out the pipes and go back to dryland methods, because the dryland methods can't produce the large yields he needs to pay off the irrigation debt...
...Glancing at his wife, who was putting a coffee-cake batter in the oven, Woolsey added, "That's the all-American way, it looked like to me...
...The agriculture system in the United States—blessed with the richest farmland on earth, worked by the most sophisticated technology ever invented—is so fragile that it has come close to breaking down...
...Every year we're going to pay a little bit more because the land has been damaged and is not capable of producing quite as efficiently," says erosion researcher Neil Sampson, director of the National Association of Conservation Districts...
...Sure, I've got some guilt, and got to take a look and say, 'Hey, you know, I encouraged this guy to go a little too far.'" "Why couldn't you and other bankers back then see what you see now...
...Irrigation boosted his yields, but bigger yields mean more fertilizer and pesticides and machinery—so Iverson has gone heavily into debt to finance the system...
...Irrigation looked like it would pay off in five years...
...Kilgore raises his eyebrows and smiles...
...Then he began ticking off dull statistics which, like the technical jargon on a hospital chart, tell you the patient is seriously ill and may be dying...
...But it's all veneer...
...The moments that frightened me most were not the painful human dramas I encountered—the plight of Washington wheat farmers like Dave Iverson, who's going broke because he can't afford the quadrupling electric bills for his irrigation equipment, or of Nebraska farmers like Bruce Damrow, whose herbicide bills tripled on some fields last year, or of Iowa farmers like Eldon and Linda Starmer, who couldn't pay their debts and auctioned off their farm...
...Exports actually dropped by more than 10 per cent last year, the first decline since 1970...
...I really resent it, and I can't do anything about it except go out of business/ almost twenty-five years ago, just after he left military service...
...These changes would be so sweeping that the consequences are difficult to visualize...
...Woolsey and his wife started farming <l doitt feel like I made the wrong decisions...
...grain sales overseas...
...If energy prices keep rising, a Federal report predicts, Northwest farmers working up to 800,000 acres could go under...
...Bankers prodded farmers to go heavily into debt to buy land...
...As farmers divided their land into smaller parcels planted with diverse crops, they would find little use for their current equipment-tractors, planters, and harvesters that operate economically only on huge stretches of territory...
...That gave rise to two more assumptions: Assumption 2: Land prices would keep rising...
...Grains, the largest U.S...
...Such proposals might provide a crutch, propping up U.S...
...If farmers were to shift back toward greater variety in what they plant, existing economic networks would have to be rebuilt...
...He's trapped...
...In Iowa, for example, prices began climbing 15 per cent and more every year...
...But now, without the value of his land to prop him up, his liabilities were beginning to outweigh his assets, and that meant Woolsey, once worth a small fortune on paper, was no longer a safe bet...
...For instance, two seed companies sell more than half the seed corn in the country...
...his total worth was always greater than his debts...
...With supply up and demand down, crop prices began to fall...
...Faced with a cost squeeze of this kind,some businesses would simply raise the price of their products, just as the auto makers boost the price of their cars...
...The price of electricity soared: Farmers who were paying $10,000 a year to power their irrigation rigs only six years ago are paying more than $50,000 today...
...history...
...And there are predictions that the price will double again within the next three years...
...Others, like Miguel Altieri of the University of California, say these weed problems are warning signs that herbicides are beginning to trap farmers on the same chemical treadmill that insecticides did twenty years ago...
...That evening, President Nixon announced what he called "the most comprehensive new economic policy to be undertaken by this nation in four decades...
...After all, the cost of farm labor had risen steadily for three decades after World War II, but the price of petroleum-based chemicals and fuels had remained almost stable...
...I couldn't hire outside labor to help me, because around here there wasn't really any labor available...
...The same dilemma is squeezing irrigation farmers in Nebraska, Colorado, and Texas—and as the farmers fold, they drag down some of the business that expanded with them during the irrigation boom...
...Instead of devoting vast acreage to a single crop—a practice that promotes erosion, pest attacks, and overproduction, according to Agriculture Department reports—farmers would plant a variety of crops on a single farm...
...companies, Continental Grain and Cargill, Inc., control more than half the world's grain transactions...
...Democratic and Republican Administrations alike have used subsidies, taxes, set-aside programs, and agricultural research for these purposes...
...But the Osceola State Bank, like a growing number of rural banks, has been forced to turn to bigger "correspondent" banks in the cities to back major loans...
...Sure, we encouraged our farmers to expand," says Harold Laures, chief of the Iowa farm loan division for the Farmers Home Administration, the Federal bank that lends money to farmers who can't borrow it anywhere else...
...We're familiar with [a farmer's] operation...
...Ironically, bankers said, many of the farmers who resisted the irrigation fad and continued farming dryland—like Dave Iverson's brother—are breaking even in this crisis or even making a profit...
...We've been foreclosed on," Woolsey told me as we sat sipping coffee at his kitchen table...
...Like half the nation's farmers at the time, the Woolseys couldn't afford to buy land, so they started renting...
...It didn't...
...We had no choice but to get on or stay static and take a chance of being put out of business by another aggressive farmer coming in and buying the land up so we didn't have access to it, to rent it or buy it...
...Department of Agriculture: He replaced labor with capital...
...Between now and the next election, politicians are sure to debate various proposals for restoring the farm economy...
...So that's how close we are to being out of farming...
...Farmers must use the least expensive, least energy-intensive methods of growing crops...
...Perhaps it won't happen: The widely publicized "economic recovery" may continue to cut interest rates, and the Reagan Administration's payment-in-kind (PIK) land-set-aside program may continue to push crop prices up...
...Isolated and largely unorganized, farmers are being ripped off by corporations at almost every step of the process—on the farm, at the market, and in the lending institution...
...First, the export boom went bust...
...I signed that contract," he says...
...The world market won't grow fast enough to gobble up U.S...
...I would say that's correct," Wubbena nodded...
...If the Reagan Administration gets its way and decontrols the price of natural gas, farmers' fertilizer bills could rise 20 per cent after inflation in just the next few years...
...farmers scored their biggest profits ever...
...The experience of Marvin Woolsey, who lives in a peeling white clapboard house down a gravel road from an Iowa town called Weldon, illustrates how those assumptions have affected many farmers' lives...
...I'm not bitter against the lenders...
...I ask...
...We have twenty days to answer this foreclosure," he says...
...Farmers couldn't afford to buy land, just as teachers and steelworkers couldn't afford to buy houses...
...Matthew Meighan (Matthew Meighan is the editor of Hard Times, a monthly tabloid in southern Illinois...
...A few multinational marketing companies determine the return farmers receive for their products...
...At the same time, interest rates were climbing to record levels—21.5 per cent in 1981...
Vol. 47 • September 1983 • No. 9
