Welcome to Iowa This Week.
I'm Tim Harwood.
Forty years ago, Iowa was mired in the 1980s farm crisis.
That era and the shortcomings of the federal response to the farm crisis
have long-lasting reverberations.
That's the argument Clemson Professor Rebecca Stoyle makes in her new book, Tied to Their Country, the Farm Crisis, Agrarian Activism, and the Rise of Rural Anti-Federalism.
We're joined by Dr. Stoyle.
Now thanks for being with us.
Thank you so much for having me.
The farm crisis obviously a very painful time for a lot of people in this part of the country.
Is there a particular story or incident which represents the period when you think about that era?
There are so many stories in my book and one of my real intentions when I wrote this was even though I'm telling not just a
even a Midwest picture but a national picture was to keep it focused on the individual points of human suffering because there were a lot of them and so keeping it a human scale story I think one of the things that still haunts me not a particular story and there's many stories like this throughout the book
is the internalization of the feeling of personal failure, that people went to bed at night and woke up in the morning with a feeling that they had done something wrong.
And that they, because their farm wasn't working for them or wasn't providing for their family in the way that it used to, that this meant something was wrong with them or they had ruined their family's legacy.
And I think for both the farm community and the non-farming community,
Being open about this that just because something isn't working out right for you doesn't mean you've ruined everything I'm continuously haunted by the very many stories of farmer suicides of Families just leaving overnight leaving their communities leaving their entire support network because they just can't face their neighbors for another day and so
While there's a lot of stories like that, I think what really hits me is the enormity of the scale of individual human suffering during the farm crisis.
So I've got stories in the book from here in Georgia.
I've got stories from Iowa.
One of the interesting things is that Oklahoma, the internalization of the crisis hits a lot later.
So in Iowa, you're seeing people taking very extreme measures in 83, 84.
In Oklahoma,
In 86, 87, you begin to see these horrific stories of murder, suicides, or really kind of terrible things.
And this rolling crisis of human suffering that kind of cuts a swath across world America doesn't really leave my mind, even as I'm done writing the book, even as the book is out.
And I think that's why the end of the book isn't a happy ending.
it reflects back on some of these really extreme stories of individual level suffering.
We're talking with Professor Rebecca Stoyle.
Her recent book is tied to their country, the Farm Crisis Agrarian Activism and the Rise of Rural Anti-Federalism.
And I think we were going to give a quick summary of the Farm Crisis.
Times were pretty good in the 1970s.
That led to a lot of leveraging.
And then when times weren't so good as we got into the 1980s, those loans came due and a lot of reverberations happened from that.
What was going on when it came to the response and identifying these problems in their early stages or maybe more accurately not identifying them on a macro level?
Well, first of all, I'm going to note that my book
is very nonpartisan in spreading the blame across both the Carter and Reagan administration.
So traditionally, when we think about the farm crisis, we think about the 1980s because that's when it tended to grab a lot of headlines.
A lot of the initial farmer mobilization about the struggles of family farmers started in the Carter years.
So farmers were warning about this back in
77, 78, 79.
The situation just kept getting worse.
So why did the situation get worse?
It's a little bit like asking, so what caused World War I?
It can sometimes take one factor to create a great success, but it takes a lot of mess ups to create a great failure.
And that's a lot of what happens during the crisis years.
So yes.
farmers are heavily leveraged.
There's this idea in the 1970s that the world is about to face a Malthusian crisis that everywhere else other than America is going to run out of food.
And so if America can just produce and produce and produce and produce, it's going to give us a tremendous amount of leverage in the world.
And Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butts talks about agri-power as a response to petroleum power, something that we're very acutely aware of today.
Part of what happened was that due to advanced technologies in agriculture, the world didn't run out of food.
Not just America got better at producing, but a lot of other countries frequently with American help got better at producing.
So we ended up in a situation where there was tremendous overproduction.
And as I'm sure we all know, overproduction is going to drive down your farm gate.
prices significantly.
At the same time, there had been a lot of speculative investment in agricultural land.
So it became, and of course, USDA was saying to farmers, you know, get bigger, go home, right?
We want to see, they'd say fence road, offense, all these different terms basically, encouraging farmers to expand their properties.
So farmers were buying at a time where land values were relatively high.
They were leveraging their assets significantly, right?
Taking mortgages out against the holdings that they already had.
And then as many people from the 80s remember,
that's when the interest rate crisis started to hit.
So we already have farm gate sale prices dropping significantly and your interest rates start skyrocketing, right?
A lot of people when I start talking, I think, oh yeah, I remember my mortgage rate hit 20% and things like that.
And now we talk about high interest rates and struggling around high interest rates, but they're 13 points lower than they were.
in kind of peak interest rate crisis in the 1980s.
So we end up with a tremendous shortage of cash.
We end up with farmers who have borrowed in the hopes that agriculture is going to be facing increasing demand in ways that it didn't end up facing.
And we end up then as a result with plummeting agricultural land values.
So that property that you leveraged in order to take out another loan is now worth less than it was.
when you took out the loan.
So in housing crisis terms, you end up with a lot of folks who are, I think they said upside down and underwater, right?
Where you're in spiraling debt and also the properties that you've leveraged against your loans actually aren't even worth the value of your loans anymore.
So this creates, and I want to emphasize this, this creates a crisis for farmers across many different.
modes of production across many regions in the United States all at once.
And I think that's something that makes the farm crisis unique and significant is that we tend to think of Iowa, we think of Nebraska, perhaps we think of Minnesota.
Here in Georgia, there was a significant farm crisis as well, right?
And when we see the collapse of small holdings of family farms in a lot of places, we see it across the country all at once because these are giant economic factors that impact farmers regardless of your weather patterns, regardless of what it is you're producing.
Rebecca Stoyle is a professor at Clemson University her recent book tied to their country the farm crisis agrarian activism and the rise of rural Anti-Federalism so you've talked about the individual desperation that Farmers are feeling at this time you talked about some of the failures that led to this moment What's the reaction when it comes to sizing up how farmers in the 1980s?
had to respond or felt that their only response was what?
There's a couple of different responses.
I think that, first of all, I'd note that with the exception of myself, Dr. Reine Kerberg at Iowa State, there's not a lot of historians who are kind of looking back and saying, so what happened here?
What was the response?
How did this play out?
I think at the time,
when you think about kind of the range of emotional responses, people were literally going through what you might identify as different stages of grief.
There were people who were desperate, who were sad.
There were people who were in denial and thought, well, you know, it's going okay for me, which means the other guy must have done something really wrong for it not to be going okay for him.
And then there's anger.
And there is a lot of anger.
And the anger, I'd say it increases, but in fact, it kind of works like a sine wave.
So there's a really high level of anger at the tractorcade protest in Washington, DC in 1979.
It's really notably different from previous tractorcades.
So there had been tractorcades in previous years.
And the 1979 tractorcade, it's very, very angry.
And by that point, they're angry because...
Many farmers have come to Washington where they thought that their representatives and the president to himself marketed himself as a farmer was going to listen to their concerns and when year after year passed and the Farm Bill came through and it didn't meet a lot of the concerns particularly of smaller scale farmers that
concern that mobilization toward political activism turned into anger and frustration.
And I think when we talk about this kind of anger response to the farm crisis, the reason that agrarian mobilization is the first set of words in my subtitle is because to my mind, all of the responses stem from
the failure of agrarian mobilization to move the dial in ways that were meaningful for the average farmer.
So it's not that folks didn't try other things before they got mad and frustrated.
It's they did.
The level of grassroots mobilization was incredible.
We have a ton of farm organizations that start up during the late 70s, whether it's
AM or wife, right?
They're all kind of emerging during this period as a grassroots mobilization to try to alleviate some of the concerns.
And then when they discover that for various reasons, they're not having the political efficacy that they had hoped for.
That's when you begin to see anger and frustration and distrust and all of these other kind of real negative emotional
reactions to farm policy that we see in the late 70s and early to mid 80s.
I'm curious what you see as the impact of this anger, this distrust on later generations who are now the ones who are in rural communities and leading farm operations.
Well, I think that part of it is that there is a well-earned cynicism toward the desire or the capacity
of the federal government to help you when you need it most.
And so I think that there is this feeling that historically farmers aren't listened to.
Farm operators are kind of pushed to the margins of political society.
I think that sense of alienation has only gotten worse, not necessarily better.
And of course, the fact that farmers are single digit percentages of the American workforce.
neither helps farmers own perception of their political potential nor does it help the degree to which they're listened to outside of those districts where farming is truly a big deal.
And I'm cognizant that I'm talking to folks in Iowa where there are still congressional districts where farming is the big story.
But it used to be the big story and almost
every state.
And that has ceased to exist.
So the number of, say, members of Congress whose districts are really dependent on agriculture for their daily lives has declined as a result.
The voices that farmers are able to present in Congress have become more and more and more limited.
So I do think that for the current generation, if there's a perception that it's sometimes hard to get your message heard or message across,
I think that in this case, the perception is not out of sync with reality.
Rebecca Stoyle is the author of a recent book tied to their country, the Farm Crisis Agrarian Activism and the Rise of Rural Anti-Federalism.
She's a professor at Clemson University, Dr. Stoyle.
Thank you for being with us.
Thank you so much.
And that's all for today's edition of Iowa This Week.
Thank you for listening.
I'm Tim Harwood.