THE LAY OF THE LAND
Aufderheide, Pat
The Lay of the Land_ A way of life that once worked no longer does BY PAT AUFDERHEIDE At 4 a.m., the air is crisp and the skies are clear. The moon, almost full, shines on the fields of southern...
...And nothing is in your hands any more—commodity prices fluctuating, dollar overvalued, interest rates...
...Each family rigorously autonomous, sometimes even defensively so, they have also seen themselves as part of a community...
...He's always in the barn or the fields...
...balance of payments, encouraged export crops with big subsidies to large-scale farmers...
...My uncle and his son think it may be time to reassess the megafarm strategy...
...it could be a good life...
...He never worked on Sundays, his sacred day of rest...
...He estimates that 13 per cent of the farmers in the area will go under in the next year, and he knows that many farm banks are in trouble...
...No one in the family has ever bought a new combine, and my uncle was the last Farmer in the township to opt for spraying his fields...
...And you only get the same amount of value," he argues...
...My uncle is fifty-five and must keep working...
...As my aunt cooks homemade sausage, my uncle and I talk business...
...Only the video store is prospering...
...Then we go to breakfast in the two-room farmhouse...
...And maybe he won't cut it...
...I wonder...
...My aunt remembers that the family used to take vacations, even after the two children were born...
...Humiliated by anxiety, they want to be proud of their independence again...
...Big isn't necessarily better," says my uncle...
...The problem is that farming is so risky now," says a man who got off his tractor just long enough to cast a ballot...
...In a deeply religious community like this, a little bit of that kind of gossip goes a long way...
...Now we talk in the farmyard...
...We really have to reduce the deficit," says my uncle, searching for the key to the overall economic crisis...
...Over the last two decades, bankers, farm experts, and corporations have been preaching agribusiness to the conservative farmers whose parents believed credit was nothing less than a sin...
...They don't think easing loan terms would help...
...Well, a lot of people don't know that," he says...
...What worries him is the decline in the do-it-yourself social life—dances, picnics, church parties—that used to make farming a special way of life...
...Stress is now the dominant feature of their daily lives, but answers are far away...
...The last few years have reinforced everything they already thought about Big Government's meddling and especially about the wastefulness of social programs...
...That's a one-year solution," says a grain elevator operator...
...In this heartland of rugged individualism, there is now a crisis hotline for suicidal farmers...
...Only those bred to the work could put up with it, farmers figured, often rightly...
...Today, land and crop prices are plummeting, while loans on machinery, supplies, and land still have to be repaid—not to mention meeting grocery and clothing bills...
...But Reagan at least represents the values he treasures—individualism, creative enterprise, American strength, and traditionalism rather than new ideas that threaten to rock or even sink the boat...
...in any event, his son couldn't handle the work of the larger farm on his own...
...Most of his friends are not farmers...
...She was a "city girl," and for old-style farmers, marrying such a woman used to be considered worse than marrying outside your faith...
...By the dim light of the tube, he projects a rosy picture of the past as future...
...Though he isn't teetering on the edge of bankruptcy—as half the farmers in this once-affluent county are—he doesn't make enough to pay for the replacement costs of his depreciating machinery...
...If he could find a buyer, the tract would sell for $1,800 an acre at most...
...What we need is fair prices, not this manipulation from a few big commodities dealers...
...I can't sleep, that's how it gets to me...
...My dad never worked at night...
...It used to be you worked hard and you saw something for it...
...Your man lost," an official tells me complacently...
...At 6 a.m...
...Big farms with big machinery—you work night and day...
...When they are battling a hailstorm of uncertainty, they don't see why others should be getting a free ride...
...Men make mention of increasing alcoholism and divorce, of kids who take drugs and young women who work in town, but nobody mentions any names...
...They say, 'Tempers are short out there today.' You see husbands and wives fighting with each other—it's the stress...
...betrayed by agronomists and economists, they want to trade in dreams of hi-tech superfarming for a world they can survey without special equipment...
...To these architects of miniature worlds, creators of life in a seasonal cycle, the land has been an investment in rooted values as much as in cash crops...
...In farming, you're independent...
...I'm my own boss," he replies, pointing out that he and his son plan every day's agenda...
...My uncle's father, a stolid German peasant farmer, homesteaded the eighty acres that are now the core of a 300-acre operation...
...I can't say my dad encouraged me to go into farming," he says, taking a break to scrape bugs off the windshield of the tractor cab...
...For these farmers, Reagan means conservatism...
...People talk plowing schedules, and they talk food...
...his son will soon take the "day shift" on the tractor...
...Now the folks send them away while we talk...
...He doesn't blame today's economic crisis, though...
...Every decision is thousands of dollars...
...The moon, almost full, shines on the fields of southern Minnesota...
...The kids used to hang around...
...The way my uncle figures it, the modern farm doesn't provide a better life than the old kind: "Small farms with small machinery—you work night and day...
...My uncle is willing to believe that politicians lie...
...Four years ago, farmland prices soared, and so did lending based on sky-high interest rates...
...My uncle is plowing the land for next spring's crop...
...Now...
...And if the roller-coaster ride of the last few years has taught them anything, it is that the future of farming ought to be conservative...
...His wife, like most farm wives of her generation, works alongside him...
...He bought neighboring land when it was top price—$3,000 an acre—and today pays interest in dollars that aren't nearly as inflated...
...Then why does he cast his vote for the man who increased the Federal deficit to a new and staggering level...
...It was the first week in November, and the next day, seven tractors were in the fields to help me plow it because everyone knew time was short...
...Bigger, newer, better—the push was intensified in the mid-1970s, when the Government, trying to repair the U.S...
...If I did that today," his son says, "I'd see one or two tractors, maybe...
...It hits you where you live," says one 280-acre farmer, a father of five trying to hold on to his enterprise because he thinks his children may want it in better times...
...Pat Aufderheide, based in Washington, D.C., is a contributing editor of In These Times...
...They want to be left alone to run their businesses, and Reagan promises to increase the distance between Government and farmer...
...In the township hall, election officials quietly count paper ballots late into the night, watching the returns on television...
...I never thought it would be this bad," says my cousin's wife...
...It depends on how you measure things...
...It used to be I went out to a farm and was invited in for coffee and cake or pie in the kitchen," recalls a co-op credit manager...
...I don't know...
...Conversations often end on the same note: "Nothing you can do...
...Among these baffled, resourceful families, beset by a crisis bigger than an individual or purely political solution, refuge is taken in nostalgia and in television...
...But that's not what gets to him...
...But even for a penny pincher like my uncle, there's been no money in farming for the last four years...
...No sound can be heard but the grinding gears of a mammoth tractor...
...I see people come in here just to get away from the farm," says a farm machinery salesclerk...
...The farmers are beginning to chafe at the very terms of modern agribusiness...
...We never could take a vacation again—it was always going to be next year...
...They are not looking for higher price supports, many of which have been eliminated anyway...
...On Election Day in Minnesota, unemployed miners and urban Democrats are carrying the state for Walter Mondale, but just barely...
...While the family eats, my cousin wrestles with an antique bulldozer outside...
...The local banker's wife is nervous every time he leaves home to make a farm visit, because a year ago an angry bankrupt farmer shot a banker to death...
...Where was the fun in the first place...
...And he retired at fifty-seven and moved to town, and left the farm to me...
...Stress...
...But then we bought the back forty...
...And it isn't my uncle who's changed...
...And I have to work all day at the clinic...
...Farming was never just a business for my uncle's friends, though they are proud to be combination investors-mechanics-accountants-veterinarians-horticulturalists...
...They don't want the kids to see their parents cry...
...we're in the barn, herding cows into milking stalls and pondering the slushy manure that no one has had time to clear...
...Everyone here votes a straight Republican ticket, and the general wisdom holds that Reagan is the candidate to trust...
...When I bought the land next door, I didn't even tell anyone," says my uncle...
...They don't talk politics, but there's not much need to...
...The farmers are all for a "strong defense," but they don't want their grain to be part of the Government's anticom-munist maneuvering...
...He hasn't forgiven the city council for building a new library, instead of rehabbing existing space, without putting the issue up to a public vote...
...On the town's main street, near-permanent sale banners attempt to lure customers...
...I eat, that's how I deal with it," says another...
...The fun has gone out of farming," my uncle says...
...It is Election Day, and farmers filter in to vote at the local township hall, a fading one-room schoolhouse...
...It is a solution that may work better at the onset of winter than at harvest time...
...But I liked it, and I knew how to do it...
...Her salary, once the fund for home improvements, now sustains the cash flow of the home economy...
...In an ever more uncertain world, one certainty for him is that a way of life that once worked no longer does...
...But these days, the city girl may be the farmer's salvation...
...He has a distrust of representative politics even at the local level...
...That's the big word in "how's-it-going" discussions about the family farm...
...Farmers found themselves rich on paper, even if they were pulling in the same real profits as before...
...We're not doing what we need to for our family...
...My cousin's wife works at a local clinic...
...I look at this house and I think, 'When can we ever have something for ourselves?' Paul never has time even to see the children...
...Still she wants to stay...
...Maybe television ruined it, he thinks...
...The local banker is also asking questions about value...
...Even farm organizing drives raise mostly suspicion in these parts, and foreclosure auctions generate not public indignation but cautious bidding...
...No wonder they vote for Reagan at this perilous juncture...
...Sure, it's hard work...
...The Minnesota farmers don't reap as many Government price-support programs as farmers in the Southwest, and such funds tend to go to the me-gafarms they feel threatened by...
...They always have...
...The trickle of voters increases as the "chores"—the endless tending of cows—get done...
...My cousin's wife tells about welfare clients at her clinic, fueling a well-banked fire...
...One works at the cheese factory in town, one at an implement business, and one is a landscaper...
Vol. 49 • January 1985 • No. 1
