PLOWED UNDER
Brodner, Steve
Plowed Under AN ART ESSAY BY STEVE BRODNER Beneath the surface, the tales of debt and displacement, the farm crisis has many elements, each a story unto itself. This one is about people still...
...Department of Agriculture, caused their dairy herd to lose its Grade A rating...
...Eventually this practice, viewed as unsanitary by the U.S...
...I've spent more time on the phone trying to get financing than I did on the tractor...
...The only farms that do well are owned by their employees, because they have vested interests...
...Bill's financial plan was thrown off balance by the increased costs of building in the winter...
...Bought cheaper seed...
...So I went ahead and put the crop in myself...
...That spring, with the new facility completed and the crop planted, hog prices collapsed...
...Soon they were paying 17 per cent interest to Thorpe Finance...
...And that brought a significant loss of income for the farm...
...Soon he couldn't afford grain for his hogs and had to take an extremely high-interest loan...
...This year I went to the bank and asked them if they'd put up twenty grand...
...That's all we've ever wanted...
...it's the lender...
...While managing a successful hog farm with his father, Bill was encouraged by the FmHA to find one for himself...
...When times are tough, he can be your worst enemy...
...So the deputy sheriff said, 'Well, Roger, you know that what you're doin' is just gonna cause trouble for yourself...
...You can't make up that kind of interest on a farm even if you had everything paid for...
...And the seed-corn company my Grandpa did business with in 1910...
...The FmHA would tell him that I was ninth in line to get the loan...
...They told me that they didn't have the money...
...Because of his herd's diminishing numbers, he was denied renewal of his annual operating loan...
...I didn't use as much weed killer...
...Without Government assistance, farming today is a nonprofit activity...
...and paid it back...
...A neighbor called and said, 'Roger, they're taking your Dad's cattle and machinery away!' So I called the attorney and he said, 'Okay, peacefully resist...
...he didn't have any court warrants...
...It kind of drains you right out...
...It was all politics...
...So I got the loan from the Federal Land Bank and paid the bank off...
...So you might just as well step out of the way or else you're gonna be in serious trouble.' "And so I said, 'Tom, you do your job, whatever you think that is...
...The strain was great for the Clausings...
...It will just be nine-to-five jobs...
...I had no grain...
...JIM AND FERN CLAUSING Having lost their farm, Jim and Fern Clausing of Carroll County, Missouri, are fighting for their home...
...I sold a couple of cows...
...There's been a lot of hard times here in 135 years and somebody's always stuck with it...
...Put in fewer acres of crops...
...Not to make a million dollars...
...But the balances and rhythms that a farm needs were lost now...
...There's just no jobs...
...But we called Washington—it was an emergency...
...During this time the FmHA never sent them a notice for rescheduling and deferral of their loan, as is legally mandated...
...You can't put them out in weather like this...
...They couldn't do that...
...If you're punching a clock when a cow is calving, you may lose the calf and the cow...
...We are overworked and understaffed...
...work in the frost and snow, hammering with two pairs of gloves on, to build his barn...
...The Leh-mans had nothing to fall back on but Linda's horses...
...The Congressman, he'd call the FmHA office...
...And we retained a lawyer...
...Their stories paint a stark portrait of a way of life betrayed...
...The Federal Land Bank called and asked, 'Did John make his payments?' They started foreclosure action on me...
...He had to start selling cattle to pay his lenders...
...If I'd sold them I'd be out of it...
...A good part of the land that they've repossessed across the river is just weeds...
...They like farming, being out with the animals, a good environment...
...So we ended up calling every Senator, Congressman, the Governor...
...In the early 1980s, production burgeoned, prices fell, and interest rates soared...
...We kept selling more hogs to pay off Thorpe's, till I was down to my breeding stock...
...FmHA must be responding to a policy to get rid of the family farm," says Bill...
...The bank wanted to help...
...In six months, it was up to $ 130,000 and they were charging us interest on interest...
...I mean, it wasn't the fact of whether I was a good farmer or bad farmer, or whether I needed the money or didn't need the money...
...The deputy sheriff was over there...
...What had seemed like a sound investment was now costing him dearly...
...But what they don't understand is that nobody will run it as well as the farmers do...
...JOHN STEVENSON John Stevenson and his family have lived their whole lives on farmland in Dane County, Wisconsin, settled by his great-great-grandfather in 1851...
...They didn't have anything...
...There were farmers all over our area being foreclosed on in 1980...
...I confronted Gunther, but it got to the point where he wouldn't even answer the phone to talk to me...
...In 1982, my Dad, finally, through the appeals process, went to Federal court...
...ROGER ALLISON Roger Allison is a farmer who devotes much of his time to helping other farmers...
...This devastated him...
...If you do stick tough and things do turn around, that's the only chance you got of making back what you lost...
...DENNIS AND LOU ANN SCHEUERMANN Dennis and Lou Ann Scheuermann live in a trailer some fifty yards from a barn that looks ready to fall over...
...So we were paying 21 per cent on $120,000...
...His activism has personal origins...
...The Farmers Home Administration wants it in the settlement of a large debt going back several years during which the Clausings, known as excellent managers, had some extremely bad luck...
...The FmHA] just looks at the spread sheet...
...Ninety-nine per cent of farmers work their butts off to be out on the farms...
...When Dennis moved his family and dairy herd to the Mondovi, Wisconsin, farm in 1971, he realized he had to make a decision...
...We're losing our equity...
...Jim wound up in the hospital with the effects of chronic depression...
...The same Farmers Home Administration (FmHA) that invited farmers to expand in the 1970s now worked overtime to get families off their farms...
...These abrupt shifts in the rules left farmers confused and hurt...
...Now, under the pressure of what Linda calls the roughest month of her life, the Lehmans plunged into a horse-selling marathon, just meeting the thirty-day deadline...
...They couldn't foreclose until they wrote the rules and regulations...
...Now I owe the fertilizer company and I owe the seed company...
...This is what happens when you get in trouble...
...Farmer and lender worked out a plan to replace the old barn with a new one, and also put up a facility for young calves, which they needed to retain a Grade A rating for their milk...
...Through this period of conflict, Bill and Linda, with the help of farm mediators, have become articulate technical warriors in a battle against a formidable adversary...
...As interest rates skyrocketed in the early 1980s, the Brattrudes changed banks repeatedly in a search for affordable loans...
...Who the hell was I fighting for...
...And when you get, say, Occidental Petroleum running the farms, then you'll get the dumb bunnies like us to be farm workers...
...One person finds out you're in trouble, then two, then everybody's right on you...
...Farmers didn't know there was an appeals system through the Farmers Home Administration...
...Lenders] start calling around...
...and why...
...We have 260 cases," said county supervisor Kenneth Telgemeir (at right in the drawing on the facing page) at their appeals hearing...
...WAYNE BRATTRUDE When Wayne Brattrude got out of the Army in the early 1970s, he decided to settle on his 130-year-old family farm in Wisconsin where he now lives with his father and sister...
...going down every year...
...The fields are alive with grasshoppers...
...So they sent a letter to Gunther [the FmHA county supervisor...
...When FmHA said, 'Get out,' you just got out...
...They'll view this as a voluntary foreclosure if there's nobody there to say, "Hell no, don't take it...
...First there was the contractor who sent a hog-breeding facility they were building into huge cost overruns...
...We can do it if we keep employed...
...Needing financial help, he applied for a low-interest operating loan from the FmHA...
...It was the pressure of people calling...
...A top-rated manager, Bill was recognized in a memo by the FmHA's county supervisor: "If Bill Lehman can't make it, nobody can...
...We've deteriorated quite a bit," says Dennis...
...The FmHA] said that Bill had thirty days to come up with his complete debt of $ 17,500, plus an additional $ 15,000 [an unwarranted advance payment] before he could ask for a hay-planting loan...
...So I sent it to my lawyer and said, 'Check this out, maybe it could be helpful.' That formed the basis for the national class action suit [Coleman v. Block, 1983...
...Truckers were running through it, spreading disease and all kinds of crap, running the hogs around...
...So that started activating me...
...I got a 5 per cent loan for forty years...
...Despite farmers' repeated calls for a Government policy endorsing greater cost-price parity, the FmHA—originally set up to aid farmers—now acted more like a collection agency...
...I'm doin' what I gotta do.' And so the county supervisor said to me, 'Anything you do against me or my assistant you're doin' against the United States of America.' I'd been in Vietnam...
...They couldn't understand particulars...
...Having expanded his farmland in the 1970s from 280 to 440 acres, he got caught when grain prices and land values plummeted...
...Well, I held them off a little bit and told them that my Dad was coming...
...The last three years, I've only taken one operating loan...
...Bureaucratic foot-dragging and foul-ups delayed Bill's moving in for five crucial months, preventing him from planting crops and building vitally needed facilities for the hogs...
...They had the cattle up in a dry lot...
...After it was built, they foreclosed on him...
...It's not being used at all...
...we were being foreclosed on— and a guy there said that there was a fund, a slush fund, kind of, for this type of situation...
...He was eventually forced to Steve Brodner is a free-lance artist and writer in New York City...
...Running the Missouri Rural Crisis Center in Columbia, he works with those who are in trouble, advising them of legal options and accompanying them to appeals hearings...
...My Dad was in the appeals process [at the time...
...I ask my son if he's gonna want to farm...
...And so we had our own little support group...
...This operation is a joke...
...We're just treading water...
...He now depends on his corn crop to fight off his debt...
...BILL AND LINDA LEHMAN Bill and Linda Lehman live and breed horses on an idyllic hilltop farm in Wisconsin...
...Into the hard winter months, with only a wait-and-see message from the bank, Dennis and Lou Ann had to keep young calves in their only barn with the other cattle...
...In 1980, in the worst drought we ever had, my Dad was at the doctor's with my mother...
...and who cares...
...The court found the FmHA's actions 'arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion that was unwarranted by the facts.' Fifteen days later, I received a letter from the FmHA to come into the county office and bring all my records with me...
...We wanted to make the transition from hogs to horses," says Linda, "but we couldn't get any financial assistance whatsoever...
...I put my crop in with a refund check from my taxes...
...When times are good," says Bill, "the lender is your best friend...
...It's gonna have to change...
...This one is about people still living on farms, people I met on a recent trip through four Middle Western states...
...As soon as we got behind on the interest," says Wayne, "it went up to 21 per cent...
...That wasn't good enough...
...The farmland will eventually go to the FmHA and they'll probably let it go just like it's going now...
...Meanwhile the old barn isn't usable...
...In some situations," says Bill, "it's not the farmer's fault at all...
...But I'd done business with the fertilizer company since they've been there...
...Neither did the agency advise them not to pay the feed company for the tainted product...
...And if my Dad wasn't a strong-willed person, by God, he just might have...
...He says, 'Dad, if I have to put up with what you had to put up with, why do it?' "Last year, I slackened on a few things...
...While waiting for word, he resorted to private lenders...
...Within a few months, the same official wrote, "I recommend liquidation at the earliest possible date...
...They'll work overtime to make sure something is done right...
...Finally current with the FmHA, they were denied the new loan...
...It was my first borrowing in seven years...
...They'll get large corporate farms in...
...And our crops show it now...
...Got the Purple Heart...
...We have to borrow each year but we got no operating loan last spring...
...After a full year of being current in their loans, they saw their farm poised for liquidation...
...The letter sat in his office for three months...
...So they've written them now...
...So I brought them in and six months later they foreclosed on my farm...
...I didn't use as much nitrogen for corn...
...An expert cattleman, he once had 800 head in his herd...
...Some people work with you and some work against you...
...I could continue milking in the old barn till it couldn't be done any more, build a new building, or get an off-the-farm job...
...They were going to move those hogs anyhow...
...They'd just tell him stuff to pacify him...
...I chose to build the barn," he says...
...We've got the new barn," says Lou Ann, "but there's no place for the baby calves...
...I got into the loading chute and told them that I wasn't letting them move anything else out of here...
...The bank was charging me 21 per cent interest on $200,000," says John...
...The hearing was held at the Carrollton FmHA office, where a sign calls farmers The Greatest People on Earth...
...So now we're negotiating with the Farmers Home Administration and the bank, which will probably foreclose on us...
...In ten years' time, the money for the young-stock facility never came...
...In this area, employment is really bad...
...I rented part of the farm for three years to a guy who didn't pay me on time...
...With the first building complete, the economy quaked under the Scheuermanns...
...Here the doors were all open in this big, long building...
...There were delinquent notes, and he needed more time to finish paying up...
...To be able to turn on the lights, that's all we want...
...And I had to get an FmHA-approved lawyer and give him a thousand dollars...
...Bought less fertilizer...
...They had opened up this farrowing complex and nursery, that never had anybody in it except for the family, that used real sanitation procedures—boot cleaning, changing your clothes, not to spread disease...
...In 1980, my Dad, who was an FmHA borrower, who had done everything the FmHA told him to do, had finished building a great big new hog-farrowing house and nursery," Roger says...
...Then, for several months, their feed company delivered rotten grain, creating a state of gradual malnutrition in the hogs...
...I was reading an article one night that said that, due to the 1978 Agriculture Act, there's some people who think that FmHA borrowers have more due process...
...I was the first farmer that won, all the way to the Court of Appeals, a decision that the FmHA couldn't foreclose on a farmer until it offered, by due process, the opportunity to ask for a deferral of his interest and his loan principals...
...What I learned from them—about the loss of history and tradition, the deterioration of trust between farmers and lenders, the profound poverty, and the broken human spirit it engenders—changed my thinking about the crisis...
...They found themselves seeking new ways to deal with new realities: learning the law, organizing politically, taking up arms against authorities (and, in some cases, themselves...
...I finally got my FmHA loan...
...The Clausings' former farm is now overgrown with weeds that obscure the weathered hog-farrowing houses...
...It's an inevitable thing...
...I told him I've been trying to get a loan for years and years and now if we don't get it we'll lose the farm...
...I just don't think they know, in Washington, really what it's all about...
...But it was all through politics...
...The main thing now is to keep the home," says Fern...
...Dairy prices and land values began to decline, as did the bank's commitment to the plan for the second building...
...I'm not doing all this for nothing...
...And I was working on a combine—my farm adjoins his—and the cattle were bawling in the morning...
...But this guy, well, I sort of had a flashback, and I'm thinking, Jesus, here is this guy doing an illegal seizure representing the Government...
...So now I'm back in the appeals process...
...We'd go to the loan officer, and all he'd say is, 'Just sit tight, just sit tight.' I'll hear those words as long as I'm here, and beyond maybe...
...It was 100 or some-odd degrees...
...Jim and Fern caught and vaccinated 250 baby pigs and saved a good number of them...
...I was decorated a couple of times...
...In addition, it let the darnings' application for a special debt set-aside program sit unprocessed for nine months...
...Meanwhile, he continued his other duties at his father's farm...
Vol. 51 • May 1987 • No. 5
