For Generations to Come: The Cost of America's Farm Crisis

David Ostendorf is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ. He has worked since 1974 in rural organizing and advocacy and has worked specifically on the U.S. farm crisis since 1982 with Rural America and the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition. Ostendorf is director of Prairiefire Rural Action, a rural education, organizing, and advocacy group based in Des Moines, Iowa, that works with churches and farm organizations in Iowa and throughout the nation. He was interviewed by Danny Collum in June 1986. --The Editors

Sojourners: You've been doing a lot of traveling and meeting with farmers and people in farm communities. What is the impact of the farm crisis on people and families in these communities?

David Ostendorf: There's no question that this economic, social, and political crisis in American agriculture has had the most devastating impact on people and families and communities of anything that we've seen happen in the countryside since the Great Depression. The crisis has most heavily affected about a third to a half of all the farmers, although the balance of farmers are also suffering--with the exception of about the top 20 percent.

The impact has been far-ranging, seen in the personal devastation of losing land and livelihood that have been part of a family for generations. We've seen the disruption that comes with losing that kind of tie to one's land and livelihood: a tremendous amount of family breakdowns, a lot more marriages falling apart, child and spouse abuse, drug and alcohol abuse in the countryside, and more farmer suicides. And in turn we've seen a tremendous amount of conflict arising between people who have historically been neighbors--between farmers and townspeople or businesspeople, because farmers can't pay their debts. The whole fabric of rural society has been very deeply affected by this crisis in a way that none of us ever anticipated.

We've worked with farmers from their 20s to their 70s and everything in between, and perhaps the worst situations are those of older families who have owned their land free and clear and who brought their own children into an operation as co-owners, or put up their land for collateral to help their children get a farm started. Then when the kids went under, they took the parents under also. So we've dealt with families who ought to be retired but who have absolutely nothing left at this point in their lives. They've lost their farms, they've lost their kids' farms, and they've lost anything they ever had to sit back and retire on.

The other end of that spectrum is younger families who have been devastated by the loss or prospective loss of their farm operation. A lot of these parents will not even recommend to their children that they engage in agriculture in the future. It's always very difficult to hear younger and middle-aged parents say that in front of their kids.

The fact is that people are not only losing their livelihoods, they're also losing generational ties to the past and generational possibilities for the future. It's always been a tradition that land and farming are passed on through the generations, and that kind of tradition is rapidly being broken as a result of this crisis. The consequences are very serious, not only for the families but also for American agriculture, because we're losing a strong base of experience. You don't learn farming at the land-grant universities, you learn it by sharing experience directly across the generations. We're now losing a substantial number of the people who have that experience.

How are farmers standing up and fighting back or trying to defend their livelihood and way of life?

Since 1982, in at least a couple of states here in the Midwest, a number of organizations have been doing a tremendous amount of local and countywide organizing with farmers, and much of it has been very heavily church-based. Here in Iowa, for example, through the Iowa Farm Unity Coalition, we've organized what we call Farm Unity Survival Committees in roughly half the counties in the state.

In the last four years, we've seen more organizing in the countryside and among farmers than in the last four or five decades. Many of the groups are built on the basis of providing support and guidance, information, and education to farmers and community people who may be facing problems in their operations or businesses.

Those local organizations and county groups have been very heavily oriented toward state and national policy issues as well. Until and unless we change national policy in this country, the farm situation is going to continue to deteriorate. We have to get a strong price back into the agricultural system.

In 1983 many of us across the country, including the National Save the Family Farm Coalition, began working very hard to develop a 1985 farm bill approach that developed into the Farm Policy Reform Act, also called the Harkin Bill. When we went into Congress in '85 with that bill, we were told by a lot of people in Washington that we ought to be spending our time back home doing a little more work in our own league. They were very patronizing to us, conveying the notion that we'd never get anywhere. The fact is that, while a bill other than ours was passed, we built a base of about 175 representatives and 38 senators who supported the principles we developed. Currently, efforts are under way through the National Save the Family Farm Coalition to reopen the farm bill debate this year.

The organizing has also been oriented toward changing institutional lending policies. Across the country there has been a strong effort to take on the Farmer's Home Administration and the farm credit system in particular. In 1983 many of the folks in the farm movement were involved in a class action lawsuit against FHA that resulted in a two-year injunction against foreclosures by that agency.

At the state level, major breakthroughs have been made, especially in the last two years. Last fall, for example, the Coalition successfully moved the governor of Iowa to declare a state of economic emergency that triggered a selective foreclosure moratorium law which had been on the books since the 1930s. This year, in the state legislature, we won a mandatory mediation bill, which requires that no foreclosures can take place until there has been a 42-day mediation period. That has happened in about five states this year.

Our aim all along has been to do everything we can to keep people out there on the land. Even if it comes to the possibility that they may lose their land through a foreclosure, the goal is to keep them on a piece of their original land of up to 40 acres so they can continue to have a presence there. Perhaps they can then get into a rental position and, when we get this agricultural economy turned around within the next five years, they'll be in a position to repurchase their land.

In the past four or five years, the organizing has taken a very strong profile in terms of public protest, direct action, and demonstrations, ranging from efforts to shut down unjust machinery sales to efforts to stop foreclosures. This has been a fundamental part of the effort to organize and build the strength of people at the grassroots level.

One of the things that finally began to shake the rest of the country about the farm crisis was when ordinary and mostly white rural people took those kinds of direct actions. That kind of action and protest hasn't happened in the countryside in recent years.

There is a strong progressive populist and agrarian activist tradition in the United States that ebbs and flows through the years. We've been able to pick up on that tradition in some very positive ways. We have a fundamental and abiding commitment to nonviolent social change that has led us to a lot of work during the last two years countering the extremist groups that have emerged and attempted to take advantage of the farm situation.

One tremendous problem we're confronting right now is the radical Right, whose members are trying to sink roots among people with their anti-Semitic and racist philosophies. They're trying to blame the problem on some kind of international Jewish conspiracy and convince people that there ought to be a white supremacist region within the United States. It's a very insidious situation because they have actually led some people away from the constructive and progressive approaches developing in the last five years. We're very concerned about that, but there's no question among organizations such as Prairiefire and the Farm Unity Coalition and every other farm group I know of that the bottom-line commitment is to nonviolent change.

How do you work to counter those right-wing extremist groups, and have you experienced threats or violence from them?

Yes, we have faced threats, and we are continually facing the prospect that these people are keeping a very close eye on us. But our fundamental task is to be out there with the people, helping them understand the nature of this problem--the institutional, financial, and political forces in this country that are in large part responsible for it--and to try to help them change those institutional structures in a progressive and nonviolent manner. And we're going to maintain our commitment to our work and also to confronting those forces.

What are the long-term prospects for the kind of change you're describing?

I think we have a tremendous amount of strength in the American countryside right now, and it's growing, although it has not yet jelled in some respects. But quite frankly the long-term picture for American agriculture is grim. We have just a few years left in this decade to make a massive policy and structural turnaround. The Office of Technology Assessment [OTA] came out with a report this year saving that by the year 2000 half the farms in this country will be out of business. That kind of major shift in American agriculture will have devastating ramifications across the entire national economy.

It's already assumed that within the 1986-87 period there will be about a $25 billion loss in agriculture in this country. That kind of loss will have a very serious impact on jobs, tax revenues, and business revenues. As the agricultural economy continues to deteriorate, it will continue to take down a lot of other sectors of the economy-small businesses will be affected, and even larger businesses.

The agricultural implements manufacturing industry has obviously been very heavily damaged as a result of this crisis. In turn, both blue-collar and white-collar jobs have been lost at an extraordinary rate. Unemployment in Iowa among factory workers at the implement plants is incredibly high. Also a dramatic concentration of control over the food production sector in the United States is emerging. The fact is that we face the loss of control by individual and family owners over land and other resources in this nation.

The issue we face in the heartland is essentially the "Central Americanization" of America. The same framework of land and resource control that was constructed in many Third World countries--high levels of concentration of control by corporate and financial interests--is being constructed here in the United States. We face the continuing concentration of control over our land base to the point that, as the OTA report predicts, 50,000 "superfarms" may produce 75 percent of the food needs of this nation.

We're moving toward a two-tier structure of agriculture in which a few own and control much of the land and a lot of people able to remain on the land will have control of very little of it. In effect, we're moving full circle backward to a structure of agriculture in which there are going to be a few owners and a lot of tenants. That's going to have a very devastating impact for this country and for the global community in the next generation.

The farm crisis of the '80s is going to be the food crisis of the '90s. As that kind of concentration is manifested, a handful of corporate interests in this country will be able to overtake the food production and distribution system, which is already beginning. Major corporations are locking up control over key sectors of the food economy, and as that continues the possibility for those interests to get control of food from the ground to the grocery store is very strong.

And the consumer and the poor are going to pay the price for it in the next 10 to 20 years. Some of the most productive agricultural counties in the country have poverty levels of 70 percent.

Where are the churches in all of this?

The churches have been actively involved in a number of places, especially during the last two or three years. In some places the churches have been slow to come on board. I think the churches as institutions were caught off guard by this Crisis, as were a lot of other institutions and organizations in the countryside. But we've seen a very strong response in terms of meeting human needs and providing food and shelter to families, as well as in the work of policy and institutional change.

At the national level and through their state adjudicatories, the churches have very clearly been the financial backbone of efforts to organize people. They've also been very involved in state and national policy issues, including the '85 farm bill fight. Without the churches being heavily involved in providing moral and ethical leadership to this issue, we're not going to see the kind of fundamental change we need.

Historically, Western Christianity has to take a fundamental responsibility for attitudes about land and the relationship of people to the land. When this continent was first settled by Europeans, there were ambiguous notions about the role the land played. On one hand was the notion that the Europeans had come to God's promised land and that this was the new Garden of Eden. On the other hand was the notion that the wilderness and westward expansion were a function of God's manifest destiny for white Europeans. They assumed they had a God-given right to clear the land both of the trees and of the people. So Native Americans were pushed into reservations. Then black slaves were brought for plantation agriculture, and then eventually they, too, were displaced from the South. And that process has essentially continued over the course of two centuries to the point that now there is another massive wave of displacement, this time including a lot of white farmers.

What has happened is that the church has never gone back to an understanding of the covenant between the people and God as lived out on the land. That concept of a covenant relationship with the land has been lost. We've got to get back to the notion that, as the book of Leviticus says, the land belongs to God and we're strangers and guests on it.

The church has got to be a fundamental part of helping recreate that understanding, so that we can move into a renewed structure of agriculture based on widely dispersed land ownership by individuals and families. The church's involvement is also needed for a more sustainable and regenerative kind of agriculture in the future, instead of maintaining the current chemical- and industrial-based agriculture. Also the church needs to take some responsibility for having neglected both people and the land over the past two centuries and for helping create the mindset and the political framework for the crisis we're experiencing right now.

Do you find that farm people are receptive to a covenantal understanding of the land?

I think they are. The vast majority of the farm families we work with do not want to be locked into the existing industrial agricultural system. Many of them are locked into it because they feel they have no other choice. I've talked with countless farmers who say, "I know I should never have plowed that 80 acres of marginal land and put it into production. I know I shouldn't have put all those chemicals on the land. But because I was getting such low prices, I had no other choice but to put more land into production." At least that's their perception of the choices.

We're locked into a production agriculture system in this country. But this crisis has helped us understand that massive political and structural changes have to take place.

We're living in a very different situation now in the 1980s, and it's going to continue into the '90s because the United States is no longer the agricultural supplier of the world. Many countries that were reliant on U.S. exports are becoming more self-sufficient, and that's lessened the export market. This country is not going to export its way out of this crisis. It's very clear from our perspective that there will have to be very strong production controls in exchange for higher prices. That's the only way family-farm agriculture in the United States is going to survive.

Most of the readers of this magazine are city people, and we connect with agriculture mostly via the prices at the grocery store, which are pretty good these days. Sometimes, even among progressive folks, there's a reaction against accepting higher prices.

If the farm bill we proposed in 1985 had passed, prices at the grocery store would have increased by about 3 percent. And built into our bill were provisions ensuring that the poor would be covered for any increased prices at the grocery store.

The fact of the matter is that consumers are going to pay as a result of the farm bill that was finally passed last year. The cost of that farm bill is going to be roughly $20 billion, the most expensive farm bill in this country's history. Our proposal would have cost the taxpayers roughly $1 billion. If people aren't going to pay it at the grocery store, they're going to pay it in their taxes. Our approach has been to oppose that kind of subsidization through federal tax dollars.

In the United States, we've developed a strong, cheap food policy that actually subsidizes consumers. Middle-class American consumers pay roughly 16 to 17 percent of their income for food, one of the lowest proportions of any industrialized country in the world. That's because those in power recognize where the votes are--in the metropolitan areas. It's a fundamental issue of the distribution of power and votes.

Therefore we've been working to build stronger links with urban people, and we're making some headway. Our farm bill in '85 had the unanimous support of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has a heavily urban base. But we still need to do a lot more political and educational work to help our urban friends and people in the churches understand that this is not just a matter of saving a few family farms.

It's not just a matter of nostalgia for the bucolic scenes of the American countryside. It's not a matter of party politics or anything like that. It is a matter of providing a food supply that is of good quality and affordable cost to the American public and to the global community for the long-term future. If five companies control the major portion of the American consumer's grocery bag in 1995, those companies are going to set the prices however they please. Then the American consumer, urban or otherwise, will pay.

How do you think urban people who are already involved in other justice and peace issues should respond to this crisis?

First they need to recognize that all people in this country have very direct links to the land and to the people on the land through the food they eat. Second, they need to understand that they have their own vested interest in thinking about the availability of food. And they need to understand that the farm crisis is a fundamental issue of social and economic justice, and it will continue to be one for many years to come.

The way farm people are being treated through the institutional and political power that is being exerted over their lives constitutes one of the key issues of economic justice at this point in time. People need to understand that this is not just an issue with consequences for the present but for decades and generations to come.

We need to understand that regardless of what issues people are working on--nuclear war, homelessness, poverty, racism--this farm crisis cuts across all of them. And we as people of faith have a responsibility to rebuild the notion of a community of people committed to the creation of a just society for all people. I happen to be working with people in the countryside. But I'm also trying to help people understand that their linkages with homeless people in Washington, D.C., or New York City or Chicago are very strong and that what they are experiencing is in some ways akin to the structural problems experienced by people in Central America or Africa.

We all have to continue to draw on the prophetic tradition of the Old Testament, which continues to guide us in understanding what the covenant relationship is supposed to be and reminds us that when the people on the land violated the covenant with God, there was judgment. And we have to draw on the New Testament understanding that a sense of community comes from a very real commitment to sharing of resources.

These are the sources of the mandate to be about this work of empowering people and helping them understand and live out the notion of covenant. And these are the traditions that bind all of us and that must continue to bind us as we seek our way in this chaotic world.