lessening demand for grain, the price of farmland
began to falter, slowly at first and then in a free fall.
Some federal officials estimated that land prices
throughout the Midwest dropped by nearly 60 per-
cent between 1981 and 1985. Prices for farmland did
not reach their nadir until 1986.
As farmland’s purchase price declined, its value
as collateral fell as well. American farmers collec-
tively owed an estimated $215 billion in early 1984,
double their debt in 1978. Accordingly, lenders
throughout the United States were called upon to
reduce farmers’ indebtedness so that the value of
their land might serve as sufficient collateral.
Farmers across the United States were struggling
to pay their debt’s interest, let alone repay the princi-
pal. Bankers and lenders, once popular as the source
of cash that would make a farmer’s dreams come
true, became the symbol of personal failure, as they
sought to recoup the losses their banks faced.
The disdain for bankers occasionally resulted in
violence. In Hills, Iowa, farmer Dale Burr killed not
only his banker, John Hughes, but also his neighbor,
his wife, and then himself, once he realized that
there was no way out of the debt he had incurred in
the 1970’s. Near Ruthton, Minnesota, banker Rudy
Blythe fell before the gunfire of James and Steven
Jenkins, a father and son who had lost their farm to
the bank’s foreclosure. In Union County, South Da-
kota, a Farmers Home Administration official killed
his wife, son, daughter, and dog before turning his
gun on himself. According to his suicide note, the
pressures of foreclosing on his friends and neigh-
bors had become too much to bear.
Nongovernmental Responses Farmers did not
face their troubles in isolation. The American Agri-
culture Movement, founded in the 1970’s, briefly
stirred to life to sponsor “tractorcades” on America’s
largest cities, including Washington, D.C., encour-
aging a grassroots response to the crisis. Similarly,
the North American Farm Alliance coalesced in
Ames, Iowa, to raise awareness of agricultural con-
ditions among governmental officials and urban
dwellers. Funds raised by country music star Willie
Nelson in a series of Farm Aid concerts helped the
United Farmer and Rancher Congress. Elsewhere,
farmers protested at bank-required foreclosure sales,
occasionally with violence.
It was not only the farmers themselves who felt
the effect of their economic woes. As farmers had
less and less disposable income, agribusiness felt an
immediate impact: Implement dealers, seed houses,
and elevators closed their doors in the face of the
farmers’ financial difficulties. Following shortly
thereafter, grocery stores, furniture stores, banks,
and hardware stores, among others, closed their
doors, forced out of business by the economic de-
cline of their regions.
Even harder hit were the churches, schools,
homemaker clubs, and other population-based or-
ganizations that dotted the countryside. As more
and more farmers left the countryside for urban oc-
cupations, their children no longer attended rural
schools, their families no longer attended rural
churches, and their wives found jobs in town. Rural
women’s clubs disbanded, and baseball diamonds,
football fields, and 4-H clubs dwindled and then fell
silent, no longer needed in regions with dwindling
populations.Governmental Responses The federal govern-
ment was not idle in the face of the agricultural
crisis. Congress passed some laws designed to aid
the nation’s farmers. Some actions taken by the De-
partment of Agriculture, however, deepened the
disaster. For example, in 1980, the Department of
Agriculture, facing its own budget constraints, de-
termined to cut entitlement programs, including
school breakfast and lunch programs; prenatal nu-
trition programs such as Women, Infants, and
Children (WIC); food stamps; and Commodity Food
Distribution. These cuts hurt not only the recipients
of government aid but also the farmers who pro-
duced the products that the entitlement programs
distributed.
The tight financial policy practiced by the Ronald
Reagan administration did not particularly aid farm-
ers. With 60 percent of the nation’s food and fiber
production consumed within the United States, the
farmers’ welfare depended in large part upon the
purchasing power of American consumers. Tight
money meant less disposable income for all, but as
urbanites trimmed back their meat, breadstuffs, and
vegetable consumption, farmers felt the sting.
Some farmers suffered as a result of being
deemed too small for federal assistance. By the early
1980’s, 17 percent of farmers received 60 percent
of all agricultural subsidies paid by the federal gov-
ernment. Farms receiving subsidies generally were
large-scale operations, and the government’s agri-36 Agriculture in the United States The Eighties in America