The Last Word
Kabat, Paul
THE LAST WORD Paul Kabat The Farmer in the Cell Almost every day, I tell Larry Kolb that he's better off living here in Sandstone Federal Prison than in rural South Dakota, where he was working...
...Larry grew up on his parents' farm about fifty miles northwest of Aberdeen, South Dakota...
...800 acres were tillable, and they rented 2,000 more...
...The farm reverted back to Larry's parents...
...Two years later, however, when Larry approached the new local supervisor of the FmHA office to extend his loan, the man balked, even though Larry was paying the interest up to date and was doing his best on the farm...
...In prison, Larry has already completed a high school equivalency program, and now he is working with automotive equipment and learning to be a better welder...
...Marshals transported him here to Sandstone Federal Correctional Institution...
...Above all, he is beginning to understand more about himself and his relationships to people, to society in general, and to God...
...That was his crime...
...Nine months later, Larry was taken into custody and charged with converting mortgaged livestock without written permission...
...In the spring of 1983, the FmHA foreclosed on his debt and forced Larry to sell his machinery and other goods...
...He expects to spend the next year or more behind bars...
...To develop the farm, Larry decided to make arrangements with the Farm Home Administration (FmHA) to borrow some capital to cover operating costs...
...THE LAST WORD Paul Kabat The Farmer in the Cell Almost every day, I tell Larry Kolb that he's better off living here in Sandstone Federal Prison than in rural South Dakota, where he was working his butt off trying to save his farm from ever-deepening debt...
...After spending ten days in jail, Larry was released on a $1,000 bond, and he decided to leave the United States and try for a new life in Canada...
...When his parents retired in 1977, Larry kept the operation going...
...He will probably never be a farmer again...
...So, with the verbal encouragement of the supervisor, Larry sold some of his own cattle...
...Now he is a prisoner...
...He was convicted on the two charges of conversion and failure to appear...
...In February 1985, he was apprehended by Canadian immigration authorities, deported back to the United States, and locked up again in South Dakota...
...What he will be only God may know...
...His folks owned and operated a grain, cattle, and hog farm of some 1,250 acres...
...As far as farming goes, like so many before him and many more after him, Larry Kolb has been removed from the land by the processes of the Global Corporate State...
...Larry was in a bind...
...Government authorities notified him that he had no right to sell mortgaged livestock without written permission...
...had serious health problems, Larry did not go to high school but stayed home to tend the farm...
...without available cash to pay for the spring planting, the whole operation would grind to a halt...
...By this time, Larry had acquired his own machinery along with 150 head of beef cattle and a hog-feeding program that could handle up to 10,000 feeder hogs at a time...
...That life lasted little more than a year...
...Kolb is a thirty-four-year-old curly redhead with a pleasant, quiet personality...
...Since his parents The Reverend Paul Kabat, one of the Silo Pruning Hooks, is serving a ten-year sentence/or using a jackhammer to disarm a missile silo near Missouri's Whiteman Air Force Base...
...In 1980, he arranged to buy the farm from his parents through a contract for deed...
...when it stuck him $ 155,000 into the red...
...He has been residing here in Sandstone as inmate 04061-073 since last May because a judge in Pierre, South Dakota, sentenced him to two years for conversion of mortgaged livestock and a year-and-a-half for failure to appear in court...
...Larry still doesn't agree with me, but he knows life on the farm is even harder today than it was three years ago...
...The FmHA lent him $155,000—no problem...
Vol. 49 • November 1985 • No. 11
