he moved there with his parents and
seven siblings after their old farm, on
Madison’s west side, was swallowed up
by a shopping center. The new farm sat
on two hundred acres, with a white farm-
house and a stanchion barn for sixty cows.
During high school, Leon apprenticed
with a farmer down the road. After grad-
uating, he enrolled in the University of
Wisconsin-Madison’s “short course,” a
four-month agricultural-training pro-
gram that has been offered since 1886.
In the early eighties, Leon married
Brenda Farber, and they had three chil-
dren. After the middle child was born,
Brenda quit her assembly-line job in
nearby Reedsburg so that she could bring
up the children and help on the farm.
Although they worked constantly, they
had little money, and Leon fell into a
depression. Brenda recalls him saying,
“If I fail, I’m responsible for everybody,
and everybody fails.”
Despite the economic hardship,
Brenda remembers those years as a joy-
ful time. “I loved raising my kids on the
farm, because you get to be with your
kids,” she told me as we sat at her din-
ing-room table. Brenda, who is fifty-
seven, has long beige-blond hair, glasses,
and a soft smile. “We put swings in the
barn so they could be near me when I
milked,” she said. “They get to learn so
much—my kids have seen calves being
born. When my boys were little, we would
put pillows in the tractor, and they’d sleep
in the tractor while I was plowing. We’d
pack a lunch and eat out in the field.”
In 2000, milk prices fell to a new low,
and Brenda, like many people in the
area, found a job at the clothing retailer
Lands’ End, packing orders. She woke
up at four, milked the cows, and then
milked them again when she returned
from work. Leon milked, fed the cattle,
and ran the silos. The children helped,
too, when they were old enough. Most
of the neighbors were going under.
“From here to Reedsburg, there were
probably thirty small dairy farms like
ours,” Brenda told me. “There are two
of those still operating.”
After Scott Walker was elected,
Leon grew more vocal about politics.
“He thought Walker was owned by big
money,” Brenda said. “He would get irate
about everything they were cutting that
was for a farmer.” When Walker intro-
duced Act 10, Leon joined protests at
the state capitol. The law led to teacher
pay cuts of about ten per cent, making
recruitment more difficult for rural areas.
Walker’s cuts to state aid for local gov-
ernments disproportionately hurt rural
communities, which typically have smaller
tax bases. At the same time, Walker’s ag-
ricultural policy favored large farms: for
example, much of a tax cut for manufac-
turers and farmers, passed in 2011, and
which has already cost the state morethan a billion dollars, went to businesses
making more than a million dollars a
year. Walker also pushed a law to allow
foreign corporations to buy more Wis-
consin farmland. (The effort failed.)
In December, 2017, Brenda had a knee
replacement. With Brenda unable to
milk for several weeks and prices in free
fall, the Statzes decided to sell their
dairy cows and switch to beef, corn, and
soybeans. Leon took a job as a meat cut-
ter at a nearby Piggly Wiggly but hated
it. Several weeks later, he took dozens
of antidepressants and drank five beers.
He left a note for Brenda: “Wish I never
sold my (our) cows. I’m a dairy farmer.
I miss going to the barn and seeing cows
in there. Now I hate going to the barn.
I hate living around the farm. I hate
working for someone else. I want my
old life back, but I can’t get it any more.
Everything I do fails. I didn’t plan ahead
for this, I thought everything would be
fine. I wish I could turn the clock back
and start over. I really screwed up. I have
everything that’s worth nothing. Sorry,
good luck, Leon.”
Brenda found Leon semiconscious,
and her pastor helped persuade him to
go to a hospital in Madison. He went to
psychiatrists and tried different medica-
tions, but, a few months later, Ethan, his
youngest child, found him in an outbuild-
ing, tying a noose. Leon underwent eight
rounds of electroconvulsive therapy.
Brenda recalls him crying on the return
trip from the hospital in Madison. “I want
to feel better and I can’t,” he told her.
One weekend in October, 2018, a
neighbor’s land came up for sale. Leon
had always dreamed of buying it for his
sons, who wanted to farm. All week-
end, he studied whether they could afford
it, but it was impossible. “He got real
quiet,” Brenda said. That Sunday, she
asked Leon to help her deliver some ta-
bles and chairs for their grandson’s first-
birthday party, but he declined. “I came
back early and he was already in bed,
and it wasn’t that late,” Brenda recalled.
“He had a really hard time sleeping. He
told me he wanted to talk that night,
but I didn’t ever want to wake him once
he was asleep.” Tears began pouring
down her face. “Oh, I wished I would
have woke him up.”
The next morning, as Brenda was
getting ready for work, Ethan found
Leon hanging from a noose in the shed.“And, in one of life’s cruel twists, you’ll eventually be able
to stay out late but you’ll no longer want to.”