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[PIANO MUSIC] SPEAKER: It's springtime, springtime in Southwest Minnesota, a time for rural families to turn the fertile Earth and sow the seeds for yet another bountiful harvest. But a centuries-old tradition is in trouble. For many, the bottom is falling out. They are victims of a rural economy bursting at the seams.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

Chanarambie Township section 17, 18, 19, and 20 is a 4 square mile area in Southwest Minnesota's Murray County, an area visited earlier this year by reporter Mark Steil.

Though this report could have been produced in any number of rural townships, this is the story of a group of Minnesotans touched by economic conditions beyond their control.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

This is Chanarambie Township section 17, 18, 19, and 20.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

[CAR APPROACHING]

[BELL TOLLING]

[COW MOOING]

[DOGS BARKING]

MARK STEIL: An afternoon in late winter in Chanarambie Township. To the East, bright sunlight reflects off the snow on Buffalo Ridge, rising more than 400 feet above the surrounding prairie. The gravel roads see only an occasional pickup or car. Some of the less traveled roads are drifted shut for the winter. This is dairy farm country. 400 acres is about the average size. Some of the farmers have new homes. The others have the usual Midwest sow farm home dating from the first 1/3 of this century. Most of the people in this part of Western Murray County have a Dutch or German heritage. They're conservative and known for their perseverance.

This report concerns seven families living in the Western part of Chanarambie Township, a 4 square mile area bordered on the North by highway 30 and on the West by Pipestone County sections 17, 18, 19, and 20. This area was chosen because it roughly centers on the home farm of Marlyn Bootsma who serves as driver and commentator in this report. It was his comments which provided the basic idea for the program, take a definite geographic area, talk to all the farmers living there, and try to gain some understanding of the depth of what's being called the farm crisis.

Instead of randomly interviewing farmers, which tends to focus on extremes in the farm situation, the goal here is to sample an area to average the experiences of those living there.

MARLYN BOOTSMA: My name is Marlyn Bootsma. I live on a farm in Chanarambie Township, Murray County. And we're a mile from Pipestone County here. I was talking to Mark here and I guess I kind of challenged him that around our area, there are no farmers that don't own money. We're all in debt. Some worse than others. Some not very bad at all. But we're all trying to make a living. And I told him that we could go out and take a ride and interview my neighbors.

[CAR DOOR OPENS]

[CAR DOOR CLOSES]

[ENGINE STARTS]

[ENGINE REVS]

Right now, besides being a farmer, I work with a friend of mine. And he has a feed business and I'm one of his salesmen and I service the-- its dairy and hog accounts in this particular area. And he's actually from Pipestone. And I kind of take care of-- he's in Pipestone County, and I'm on this end of Murray County.

As we're driving down this road, we have to the South of me lays a quarter section that I farm and to the North lays an 80 acres that I farm. This was part of the ground that I purchased in 1979. It was a Slinger Estate. It was in the Slinger family for I believe, I'm not exactly sure, but I think 70 some years. And right now we're headed North. And OK, we're going to go to Ed Manderscheid.

Now Ed Manderscheid, he's had farm sale, and his son is now farming in his stead. And I'll tell you the agriculture has changed so much in the last, it's kind of hard for us to keep track of where everybody's gone. We're losing all the people out of this area. If they are staying around, they're getting jobs.

I think the main thing with farmers are is they're almost getting like they're numb. That's a sad deal. We're probably the backbone of America. We're the-- I don't know, I like to say we're the foundation. It started out years ago, this whole country was, especially in our area, was made prosperous by farmers. Our towns grew up around the farm community. And now instead of carrying the thing along like we used to, we're all out of money and slowly all the towns are drying up, and--

Like we have Laverne to the South. And Laverne, I don't know, just had six or seven stores closed again. And it's been that way, Pipestone's had stores closing. And it's rural America on a whole.

OK, now we're going to turn and we're going to turn in a farm place and it's on the West side of the road. And it's Ed and Rose Manderscheid is who lives here, and their son Danny is now farming the farmstead.

[DOG BARKING]

ROSE MANDERSCHEID: Hello.

MARLYN BOOTSMA: Hello, Rose.

ROSE MANDERSCHEID: Kind of cold out today, isn't it?

MARLYN BOOTSMA: Yes, it is. Hello.

MARK STYLE: The Manderscheid farm is on the Western flank of Buffalo Ridge, Chanarambie Township Section 17. And what's becoming a pattern for many farmers strapped with debt, Ed is now a part time farmer. He auctioned off most of his equipment three years ago after reaching a peak of farming 1,100 acres.

He still owns 240 acres, which he farms, along with his duties as a crop hail and multi-peril insurance adjuster. Rose also works part time. Their son Danny has farmed 480 acres the past three years. But since November has worked in Texas, and Manderscheid says he's encouraged Danny to stay in Texas and get out of farming. He says there's no future for young people in agriculture.

Ed and Rose are in their early 50s. With just a hint of a smile, Ed says he was an old fashioned farmer, one who thought of it as a way of life.

ED MANDERSCHEID: Before the sale, until the last couple of years, we lived a pretty damn good life. Until things got tough. And since the sale, it seems like when you're down and out, it's hard to come back. We live a good life, but financially we're in a bind all the time. This really you're just playing figure you as a failure.

But then at the time it happened to me, I was not the first, but it was kind of the beginning of this thing. Since I've seen a lot of guys having the same problem, you do feel a little more confident in yourself, that it wasn't failure, it was just a-- well, I got a son in the insurance business and he says, dad, you was just caught in the times, you had too much money borrowed at the wrong time. So that's the way I've accepted it, but it's hard to come back.

ROSE MANDERSCHEID: When we were farming wholeheartedly, our whole family worked at it. We have seven kids and at that time, the four oldest ones were all helping us. They'd get up in the morning at 5:30 before they went to school and would milk 80 cows. And we had a herd of stock cows. We also raised a lot of pigs. And the minute they got home from school at night, I had lunch ready for them, and they went upstairs to change their clothes and down here and work until-- We never ate supper before 6:30, 7 o'clock at night.

ED MANDERSCHEID: We had a I would call him a neighbor, they lived eight miles from us, a very good friend of ours that took his life here some time ago. And I understand he visited, or his wife wanted him to visit with his brothers, and he wouldn't discuss this problem. And after the traumatic experience of this type, it makes you think back. When I had my sale, we went back to like I told you hypertension, blood pressure, and tranquilizer pills. And until I really started talking with people, after a year and a half or two years, did I realize that you got to get this stuff out of your system.

ROSE MANDERSCHEID: The first few years that we started losing money, we sat back and thought, hey, maybe we should quit farming. But that's something we've done all our life and it was really hard to just throw that away. But yet you saw how you worked all your life and you saw that every year you was losing like $25,000, so we said, hey, maybe we should quit.

But at that time, Ed was like 47, 48 years old, and he said, well, it's too early to retire, he said, what would I do, I farmed all my life, I have no other occupation. And I guess we found out since then that there is a life after farming, that if you put your mind to it, you can do other things.

ED MANDERSCHEID: I work with a lot of farmers. In fact, that's all I work with. And the economy is a main subject. And there are several farmers I know in Jackson, Murray, and Pipestone County that discuss their financial problems with me, plus neighbors, and I advise them jump out while you're ahead, don't fight it, because you're only going to go backwards more. And I don't think you'll see many guys who've pulled out of a bad situation, you just got to dissolve and start over.

We got a next door neighbor the other day, I gave him a handful of tranquilizer pills. And he's going through this same problem. I told him, take these and try and ease your nerves a little. I guess a lot of them sympathize with me because I was one of the first ones faced with it. You know, you thought maybe you were a failure, you screwed up. And that's about the first thing they all tell me, I know now how you felt. And you tell them, yeah, but how I feel or you feel don't make no difference, you got to put your house in order. And if you can't get money to farm, get the hell out before you lose everything you got.

[CAR DOOR SHUTS]

[CAR ENGINE STARTING]

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

MARLYN BOOTSMA: It seems like every year the ground gets rented. But more and more of it's gone to federal land bank. And like in my own particular case, I don't believe it's worth trying to hang on anymore. I'm going to try to turn my farm back to federal land bank. I'm going to try to rent ground from them. Because at 12.75% interest and the no profit, the way it looks like farming is going to continue to be, no longer am I going to be able to continue to own my own farm. And I'm going to go from being an owner back to a renter.

I look at the ground and how hard I worked on it-- Since I've lived here, there's an old set of buildings that I tore down and we tore the grove out and we pulled all the roots and we rocked it all and we turned some of the ground back into production trying to make it a more profitable scene. And we fixed it up and we worked hard. I just hope federal land bank enjoys all my improvements, because they're the ones that are going to get it back, so.

You know, we love farming. I mean, if anybody denies that, they'd have to be lying. But you get out there and you sit there and you try to just go back to the basic, and that's why you're there. Because you love to put it in the ground and you love to watch it grow and you love to go out and harvest it.

And if you thought real deeply about this while you were doing it and kept thinking to yourself, you know, I'm doing this at a loss, and I probably won't make no money, and maybe I can't even make the combine payment on the combine that I'm sitting in, it's so depressing, you can't hardly stand it. So after a while, it's like you do it like you're kind of like you're automatic, you just do it-- You get up in the morning and you try just to forget the financial end.

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

Right now, we're pulling up to Eugene Schuld.

MARK STYLE: The next stop is the dairy farm of Eugene and Carla Schuld and their three children, Chanarambie Township Section 19. The Schulds' blue dairy barn houses 80 head. Eugene also farms 480 acres, which supplies most of the feed for the herd. Carla works in the nearby community of Chandler at a meat processing business. Eugene is in his mid 30s. A congenial host, he sits at the dining room table and puffs occasionally on a cigarette as he talks about his life in farming.

EUGENE SCHULD: I've got cows here. And I enjoy going out and working with my cows, I enjoy working with crops, I enjoy the fresh air. It's getting to be a hassle when you've got to go talk to your banker once a month or once a week trying to get your loans renewed. He's pressuring you to cut corners. There's no way that you can see to cut corners anymore, you try.

My wife's gone to town and taken on a job. It's an uphill battle. And well, I probably noticed it more than anything else in November this year when it was time to go in and renew my notes and my banker said, hey, this don't look good. What are you going to do? What are we going to do? A year ago, me and my wife sat down and I says, if my banker ever said that we should sell out, I said we're going to sell out and we're not going to keep fighting it. But it came a little quick and I ain't going to quit that easy. [CHUCKLES]

I'm working with my banker, and hopefully we'll get this renewed for one year and then after one year, if things don't look any better, then we'll have to sit down and re-analyze the whole situation. I guess probably the biggest thing that would make you change your mind and I'd get up and walk away is when you sit down and you say to yourself and you go in and you give the banker the facts, you've got x number of dollars worth of equity out there. And he says, yeah, but we can only secure you for this much. And you sit down and you

say to yourself, well, hey, there's $100,000 that they're not going to give me security on, what is the purpose of this? Are they trying to rip me off, are they trying to push me out of agriculture, or are they just trying to cover their own mistakes somewhere else in their organization?

If they sell me out and I can pay off my note and have, let's say, $50,000, am I willing to accept $50,000 from my banker for the purposes of quitting farming and walking away, or should I'd stick with this and make him stick with me and try and work this out. Maybe next year if this whole market situation turns around, if we can get the federal government aware of the fact that farmers are suffering, I can maybe walk away with 100,000 next year.

You just decide, I guess, in your own mind that something ain't right here, and I ain't willing to accept the fact that my banker says I'm worth less than I am.

Sure, you've had a living over the years as long as you were farming. But in my case, I've been farming now for 10 years on my own, me and my wife here. If I could walk away with $50,000, that's $5,000 a year. We aren't an extravagant people. We don't have a lot of furnishings, a lot of clothes. We drive an older car, an older pickup. It wouldn't be worth it to have suffered for 10 years to walk away with that.

I enjoy agriculture. I love it. If I didn't, I wouldn't be farming today. I mean, it's been tough the last two, three years. I know a few guys that got out three years ago, they got out in good shape.

I'm an optimist. I think things are going to get better. But the worst part of agriculture today is going to talk to your bankers and they say, hey, cash flow, cash flow, generate more income, we've got to cut corners, we've got to cut corners. As the farmer, we cut the corners, we generate more cash flow to repay our bankers who don't even have the courtesy a lot of times say thank you. It just the farmer's suffering through this whole ordeal alone right now, and farming is a hassle that I wouldn't advise any young person to get involved with right now. If it straightens out in the next few years and they're really interested, they can still get in.

MARLYN BOOTSMA: I used to work for Terrace Park Dairy and we used to work in the morning, we'd start at 5:00, and we'd work till about 6:00 at night. And then we had a shop, me and my cousin, Harland, and we'd take in overhaul car motors and this kind of stuff until about 1 o'clock at night. And it's almost sounds like a guys bragging, but when I was young, I'd just--

My grandpa always said you work hard, you make money. And I did. I honestly did. I made money. I made money in town, and when I started farming on the rented farm, I also made money. And I guess maybe I kind of almost assumed that I was doing a few things right, because my net worth was pretty decent and things were going pretty good and I thought now it's a decent opportune time to buy a farm. So I thought I'll do it before it gets any higher where I can't afford it.

The land at that time, this was in 1979 when I bought, land was going extremely high. So we went out and bought it and I'll tell you in 1980, everything changed. It was like a 180 degree turn. It's the hogs got cheap and the grain got cheap. And some of it is timing, I'll have to say that. The biggest mistake I would have to say is the fact that in trying to be modern, maybe that I did--

And I will say this, that I spent money. I invested it. I invested in a finishing house. There was no place to finish hogs on that place, so I invested in a finishing house. And the farrowing house I remodeled, the gestation house I remodeled, I moved the nursery in to my place, we put a furnace in the house, because it's a large, old house and it's quite cold, and we put new shingles on the house because the roof leaks so bad. So we did do that. And I really think that I pretty well was pretty practical with my investments. I didn't overdo it. I tried to do it right without spending very much money.

I used to believe that in America, this was the land of opportunity, that the government kept their nose clean and they were honest and fair. And now I believe that you can work as hard as you want to or do whatever you want to and if the government decides to ball it up, it'll get balled up and you're going to take it on the chin and it does not matter what you do. And now I look back and you say, what would I have done different, I think a guy could have sat in the house and looked out the window and made just about as much money as we did working hard.

Right now we've stopped at and Ed and Brenda Heard. And Ed is a dairy farmer. And he's third in Murray County for DHIA, which is our way of measuring the amounts and the quality of cows.

[CAR DOOR SHUTS]

[WALKING ON GRAVEL]

[KNOCKING ON DOOR]

MARK STYLE: It sounds like they're out in the barn.

MARLYN BOOTSMA: It sounds like the whole crew is out in the barn doing chores. We'll walk over to check it out.

[WALKING ON GRAVEL]

Hello, Ed.

BRENDA HEARD: This is our Reagan pump. It's kind of like his monetary policy and his foreign policy. It just pumps a bunch of manure out under the ground and puts it in somebody else's backyard. We'd like to give him a ride in this.

MARK STYLE: Ed and Brenda Heard live in section 18 of Chanarambie Township. They farm 400 acres and milk 50 head. The politics of agriculture is a major discussion subject at the Heard farm. Brenda is active with the LaRouche Democrats. Ed says he's more aligned with the traditional Democrats. Their farm's identifier is the deep blue of their tall harvester silos. Ed and Brenda work together in handling the farm chores, and they're ready friendly adversaries when politics is a subject. In their early 30s, the Heards have three children.

ED HEARD: I'm in the same situation as a lot of guys, that if we don't knuckle down and pay our interest plus a little principle, the whole thing is just going to keep snowballing. And the miracle of compound interest, how that works, it just keeps snowballing until you're worth nothing and you still got the debt besides.

BRENDA HEARD: There's a lot of farmers around here on food stamps. And for people who grow the food, that's kind of ridiculous. And a lot of the households and stuff around here, they've just had to live almost in poverty just to keep going, keep paying the bank. I got an 18-year-old couch that's sitting on two legs and I can't afford to buy a new one, you know.

ED HEARD: There isn't a woman in town that would live under the circumstances my wife does. If the chief of staff Don Regan came out here, he'd have to bring I think three Marines, the best Marines he's got, to get my work done. Because I know he couldn't do it.

Just to do chores it takes about 10 hours a day. Now that's not figuring any time for the guy that during the time of year that we spend in the field, time that you would spend grinding feed or other odd chores, I'm just talking about just the milking, the feeding, things we do every day that we have to do, you know. If we get a couple hours off on a Sunday afternoon, that's considered a vacation. [LAUGHS]

It's been three years, four years since we had a vacation I think. And that would be a two day trip up to visit a friend of ours.

BRENDA HEARD: I'm with Lyndon LaRouche Democrats, National Democratic Policy committee. What I like is he's the only one that has a policy, a plan of what it's going to take this country to get out of the depression that it's in. His back to production just like they did when they had war, they started producing, and that's put people back to work. If people are back to work, they can pay their taxes, that's how we could pay our national debt.

ED HEARD: I do follow the LaRouche program. And I think it's a good program. It's just that I think it leaks a little water here and there. For one thing, he claims that when you put this money out at 2% to 4%, that it's not going to be inflationary. And I human greed and capitalism well enough to know that it's going to be inflationary.

The corporations have everything tied up that we use. They've got the price of the parts, they've got the price of the tires, the gas, the fertilizer. You name it, they control it. The price of the groceries is controlled at the other end, because they own general foods, you name it, down on that end. And you look at a box of Cheerios, how much a box of Cheerios costs. You should be getting $60, $70 a bushel for your oats [LAUGHS] at the price of food.

One of the farm magazines claimed that when they changed the value of the dollar, like they did in September, that it takes a year for that shockwave to go through the economy. I don't buy that. So they're projecting a turnaround in grain prices within a year of like this coming September, in that amount of time. I can't see any movement that direction and I don't think there will be unless the government changes its position on the trade deficit and its budget deficit. Well, it's going to have to happen or they're just going to keep playing this ball game until they break it like they did in the '30s.

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

MARLYN BOOTSMA: We used to be so terrible proud. And nowadays we have some farmers who are living on food stamps. And can you imagine how that would feel to supply the world's food and then have to have to give you groceries back. And we got some of the people get fuel assistance. And it's to the stage in the game right now where we can't even-- if we had to have them bring out fuel without fuel assistance, some of the people in the neighborhood and in our farm community wouldn't even get fuel because of the fact that it's cash on the barrelhead and we don't have the cash to buy it. So I guess our pride is getting pretty well shot.

Well, for myself, personally, I was terrible proud. When I had a farm sale, I had a farm sale, June 14, that's when your Pride's got to stop. My wife was crying and I guess I had to sit there and watch how sad she was, and in myself, I was terrible sad. And that was hard. Because I stood on my farm place and I watched the equipment that I had been paying on and working to get for 10 years, I watched it all go down the driveway. And I watched other people hook onto it and put a pin in it knowing that it was going to go to all different parts of the country. And I guess from that day on, I figured my pride was pretty well gone, because it was stripped from me.

Maybe it was evil that a man had pride in the thing that he worked for. But we had goals and things that we worked for. And through no choice of our own, we got them taken away from us.

Right now we're driving up to Ossefort's. This is my closest neighbor. Bob is a hardworking person. I say that because the first couple years, I don't know if it was a year or two years, he worked in IBP and Laverne full time and he farmed. And he done this just so that he could get his feet on the ground a little bit. And Bob's trying hard to make a life for him and his family on the farm.

MARK STYLE: Bob and Bonnie Ossefort are awaiting the birth of their second child. Bonnie has been working in Chandler at the meat processor. Bob is the only farmer raising sheep in this 4 square mile section of Chanarambie Township. He has 40 head. He also milks 30 cows and raises crops on 160 acres of land in Section 20. He began full time farming after his parents retired in 1982. He and Bonnie live in a mobile home next to the main house.

Bob is in his early 30s. He says the only time he and Bonnie thought of leaving farming was in April of last year after two consecutive days of tornadoes. The first hit the Ossefort farm, tearing off the top of the barn, overturning sheds, and turning some buildings sideways. The next day, 40 friends and neighbors helped clean up. That night, a second tornado blew through. Ossefort watched the funnel pass just to the East of the farm. After four days of consideration, they decided to stay in farming. His face framed by a wispy beard, Ossefort says he's not regretted that decision.

BOB: As a whole, the last two years for sure have been fairly decent. We're surviving, and that's about it right now, but it's for payments to bank. And so we've met our payments and we're more or less just surviving without coming ahead a whole lot. The two main important moneymakers is my sheep business the last two years, and my wife has had to take a job off the farm to help make ends meet. They're the real two big factors.

My dad always says that sheep were mortgage lifters. You get two crops, you figure often you get the lambs and then you get the wool. I've got 40 head of Suffolk and Suffolk cross ewes. Last year, for instance, I had 180% lamb crop off and the ewes and the market last year was extremely good. And any time you can get $75 or $80 a head for a fat lamb, with your initial costs that you've got stuck into it, you can come up with a pretty good profit. Which last year I did. I cleared just about $50 a head profit above my ewe cost and feed cost on the sheep.

I enjoy it out here. A farming life is the best place I've seen growing up and the best place to raise a family. And I enjoy farming. I always have. Really the main thing is the birth of life on the farm, you know, cow calves, sheep has lambs or [INAUDIBLE]. It's always a wonder you bring in new life into the world more or less. Kind of makes you forget what is happening in the world and sit back and put a smile on your face once again.

I worked in town for several years before I started farming because there was no way that I could get started on my own. And my folks have helped out, and I've watched what I've bought, and got good deals, and I'm still surviving so far. I'd like to continue to keep this a family farm.

My grandfather moved here in 1914, and my dad, he took over in the early '40s, and I've took over now in the early '80s, and I'm hoping down the road that my son will be able to take over for me here too, continuation of keeping the farm in the family. But you hear a lot of family farms that are being lost anyhow. But I'm going to give it my best shot. I'm not going to give up.

[CAR ZOOMING PAST]

MARLYN BOOTSMA: You know, they badmouthed a lot of people for giving up. But boy, I'll tell you what, we're just like I guess, like a small dog, if you walk up to the master so many times and every time you go there, you're going to get kicked, after a while, you won't even go up there because you'll realize that they ain't calling you to pet you. And that's just what it boils down to.

Farming has been so bad that everything that we've done, we got kicked for doing it. And pretty soon, I guess I see farmers are becoming more and more bitter all the time. I guess maybe we look with almost a little jealousy. We see people in town drive new four wheel drive pickups, and we got old beaters. I mean, they're shot. They rattle and they shake.

And somebody says, well, what are farmers doing about it, what are the farmers doing about it. Well, I guess it boils down to-- I told the story once, I said, you know, a farmer's like a prostitute in the cities, we know regardless of what we do we're going to end up, pardon the expression, but we're going to get screwed doing it.

And you know, I don't think a prostitute always enjoys sex. But it's just like she has to do it because she's got two choices, either she's not going to do it and her pimp will beat her up and she'll end up doing it anyway, so after a while, she quits complaining and she just kind of does it just like it's an automatic thing. And I think maybe we as farmers have been-- we realize that everything we've tried, we've been beat up, and pretty soon, we just go about our daily lives and hope for the best. And after a while, we quit complaining, we quit yelping, because we got a deaf ear. Nobody seems to listen to us anymore.

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

The next stop that we're going to be making up here will be Schulds. This is Earl and Pat Schuld.

[DOG BARKING]

MARK STYLE: The dairy farm of Earl and Pat Schuld and their two children is in Section 19 of Chanarambie Township, about one mile West of Earl's brother, Eugene. Earl farms 440 acres, raising most of the feed he needs for his 80 milk cows.

Pat works three 10-hour nights in Chandler at the meat processor. This is her schedule on workdays, she's at the job from 7:00 in the evening until 5:30 the next morning. Following the nearly 10 mile drive home, she sleeps an hour and a half, then it's time to get her daughter off to school, followed by an hour and a half of farm chores.

The rest of the day is spent catching some sleep as possible in between the farm and House work which needs to be done. The Schulds in their mid 30s both say their religion has been a source of strength in their effort to remain farmers.

EARL SCHULD: I think this is the greatest occupation there is in my book, you know, but.

PAT SCHULD: It takes the fun out of you know. When it's hard to meet the bills, it just takes the fun out of having to, Oh, I'm going to go out and milk the cows for the feed man, we got to go out there and milk the cows for the tax guy or for the land payments or to meet our other payments. It's not any fun anymore. I mean, whereas when we first started farming, we had enough to live on in the house. And there's just not enough to live on. Like we used to go on different times, we'd go away on a little vacation. Last year my husband had two days off from the whole farm the whole year.

EARL SCHULD: If we keep going like we are now, we're going to be burned out in another 10, 15 years, you know. I mean, it just can't keep going the way it is.

PAT SCHULD: Each day you wake up, you pray a little bit, this is going to-- come on, Lord, help me through each day. If we keep busy and we don't think about it, we seem to keep up our up our strength around here. I mean, not that we're totally depressed. I think we were more depressed last year at this time about this whole farming situation. Now it just seems, hey, if we haven't got the money, people are going to understand, we're just going to keep hanging in here.

EARL SCHULD: We never really thought about discontinuing, but I mean, it gets so bad sometimes, you feel like pulling all your hair out, and where am I going to get money for this and that.

PAT SCHULD: We are behind on some of our land payments, and we are behind on our taxes. And we'll just have them when the money comes, we'll just pay them off, or we'll just pay them a little bit by little bit until we've got enough to keep up the taxes and the farm payment for each year.

EARL SCHULD: I don't know, it seems if you try hard enough, it's going to be there. We really expanded here back in '81 and '82, and we spent a lot of money, which I wish we had back in my pocket. But I mean, like, we wouldn't be having these big milk checks either if we wouldn't be having twice as many cows either, so I mean, it kind of one offsets the other one. But I mean, I think we can be further ahead if we wouldn't have done anything, just stayed where we would have been, like, say, milk one string of cows, you know, or about 40 head you might say, and raise all the stock, and just would have been happy with that, but.

PAT SCHULD: We both enjoyed milking. And we thought, well, we'll get more cows. Like everybody, yeah, you wanted to have more money, it looks good, so we expanded.

EARL SCHULD: Things are really tight. And we try to jiggle the bills around a little bit and see if you can get one guy to hold off for a little while or something like that, but.

PAT SCHULD: It used to really bother us when we had a check bounce. And if a check bounces now, well, we'll say, well, we're sorry, just ship it through again, nothing we can do about it just until the money comes in.

EARL SCHULD: See, the other day I went down to Slayton and applied for an FHA crop input loan. And I hope I get that. If that can come through, we'll be sitting pretty good for this spring. And I hope we get a good crop where we can pay the FHA off this fall.

PAT SCHULD: We had some neighbors up the road here too that they had been having a tough time, and when things started getting rough here, we had coffee bought and we sat and talked and, Oh, you're just sitting in the same seat as what you are, well, welcome to the game, we're just going to struggle through this, and this is just how our neighbors have all felt about it.

We had some friends of ours that-- this farmer went to drastic means and he shot himself. And before it gets bad enough here, that we're going to really let the farm get down and really depressed, we're just going to say, hey, you can have the farm, we're going to walk away. But this is sometimes how you feel when everything just keeps piling up on you and piling up on you and piling up on you, that you get depressed and you think, well, we want to get out of it. And that's not always the easiest way out is to get rid of yourself. But before we do it, we're just going to say, hey, have the farm back. There's more to living than just for this farm.

[CAR DOOR CLOSES]

[CAR ENGINE STARTING]

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

MARLYN BOOTSMA: You know, you asked me a while back about pride. There comes a time when you either you lose your pride or you can't take it. And I think some of the-- I really feel sorry for the people that committed suicide, because I'm going to be real honest, I don't think some of them could cope with the way things have went so terrible. And they really have. And I feel for them, because I know how low you can get, because I've been low. I've been lower in the snake's belly.

And I think the biggest thing that personally keeps me going is the fact that, first of all, I guess-- you know what somebody told me once, you got to learn how to put your priorities. First, there's God, then there's your family, and then there's everything else. And I guess we have to take farming from number one and put it to three where it really belongs. Because first of all, there is God. And I know that really this life that we live here is only for a short while and eternity is forever. And I believe in heaven. And I believe that someday I'll be there and me and my family with me. So I guess I put that in part.

And then the next thing is my family. My family's always stuck behind me. They've supported me. And I guess we have the love and the family that keeps us going. And then there's third, there's the farm. And I do love to farm, and I hope that I'll continue to farm. But I guess that I've put it in the third position, and that's where it always belonged. And if only the one thing that was good about these tough times was that we got our priorities straightened out, then maybe that would be the only good point I can see from all these tough times, is that I think most farmers have got their priorities in order.

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

[CAR DOOR CLOSING]

MARK STYLE: The final stop is the farm of Merle and Sharon Heard, Chanarambie Township Section 17. Like his neighbor to the North, Ed Manderscheid, Herd has left full time farming. Faced with mounting losses, he sold most of his farm equipment one year ago. Despite his trials, he's not bitter, he doesn't hold a grudge against anyone, candidly admitting he spent a little too much money on farm equipment and land. He still owns land. His son, Pat, farms it now.

MARLYN BOOTSMA: Hello, Merle.

MERLE HERD: How are you doing, Marlyn?

MARLYN BOOTSMA: Pretty good.

MARK STYLE: Herd is in his mid 50s. He has two children, and he has the muscular build of a man who spent a lifetime as a farmer. Herd was a full time farmer for 30 years starting in 1954.

MERLE HERD: Pretty good years until '82. And then when that interest went up, well, then I had to pay that 18%, 19% interest. And after that, then I lost money. From then on, the next three years, first year, about $30,000 a year that year, and then the next year, it was 41,000, and then in '84, it was 51,000.

I've done things wrong like a lot of guys did. I bought a little more machinery because my son wanted to farm, my son-in-law wanted to farm. And every time you buy that machinery, it has to be paid for and there's interest on it. I used to have an old friend in Pipestone, I worked for him when I was a kid, I was carrying out grocery for this old Jewish fellow. And he always told me, he says, if you get a dead horse, you get off. And that's just what I felt I had with this farm after those three years. So before I lost everything, I had a farm sale, and this way I can hang on to the land.

Nobody told me I had to quit farming. I could have kept right on. But I was afraid that eventually my lender would say, we need a mortgage on the farm. And I did not want that. So before he ever got any idea of doing that, I quit. My banker and the old banker that was before him sat in a room for four hours they tried to convince me not to quit farming. But when I got done and I switched to this old retired banker, what would you do if you was in my place, he says, I'd do the same thing you're doing. He says, I'd quit too.

Best decision I've made in my life is to quit farming. Because I still have the home place which my dad bought in 1938, and that'll still stay in the family this way. Drove truck last year and then after that kind of let up and along in August, why then I took my old D8 caterpillar that I still have with the dozer and I went and done some work in this disaster area where the tornado went through.

After that, the neighbors down here were going to build a new dairy barn, I helped work on that. And then I done their plowing and cutting their silage, and I picked their corn when they ground it in the silo. Easiest year I ever had working for somebody else. Lots of times I drove trucks clear to Philadelphia and back, but that's easier on the constitution than farming. Get out quick while you got what you got left. If you can salvage anything, get out of it. Because there's no future in it the way this new farm program.

I always figured anybody who borrowed money should pay it back. Regardless of how you done it, you should pay it back. And I still feel that. But there are so many of these young farmers that got caught in this squeeze. They bought this land when it was a little too high. And it looked good at the time. The bankers told them go ahead and do it, all the lending agents told them to go ahead and do it. But then when this high interest come along, why, if they raised--

Say a man had a half section and he'd bought it around $1,000 an acre and they raised that interest 2% on him, that would raise his interest payments $7,000 on that deal. Well, that was his living. And they just utterly took his living away from him. Those kind of cases where I feel they should be helped some way a little bit, you know, because I don't think we're at the bottom yet. Until these farmers get lower interest and better prices, there's no future for any of them. The ones that are in fairly decent shape will get in worse shape, and the ones that are in worse shape, well, they're gone eventually with these prices, and that these churches, schools, and even the whole little towns are going to be gone because there's going to be no kids.

MARLYN BOOTSMA: I'm looking at a place where a guy moved on to this place, and he took and he fixed it up, and he worked real hard on this place. He took and he moved an old barn in. And he tried not to spend too much money on it. He's got the bottom half painted. He ran out of money, so he didn't get the peak painted. But the bottom is white. The top don't have any paint, but one of these days he'll get that done, I know he will.

And over there is a gestation house. And I know for a fact that it was 16 degrees below zero he tend that gestation house. And he got that fixed up pretty decent. Over to the South here there's a farrowing house. He spent one winter of his spare time working in there and he fixed that up the best he could.

Straight ahead there's a little-- well, it's a shop now it used to be a little barn. And he took that and he drug it over on a bunch of telephone poles and he sat it on a cement slab and he threw his-- The roof's got holes in it. It looks like when it was a barn, the squirrels must have chewed holes in the shingles. But I know the guy pretty good and he's going to get that shingled someday.

And to the North here there's a house. And it needs paint bad, but it's got a new shingles job on it. Him and the neighbors and his brother-in-law, they shingled that so it didn't leak so bad. But it's got good shingles but it sure could use a paint job.

That old barn I was telling you about, that was kind of a neighborhood project when he moved that in there. The neighbors all came down and-- The cows were sitting in the yard in horse trailers and he didn't even have the stanchions in the barn yet. But the neighbors all came down and pitched in and they put the stanchions in the barn. And they was milking on one side and still building stanchions on the other side.

And this guy here, I know him real good, because this is me. And I look at this and I see six years of my life invested and I don't know what tomorrow will bring. I don't know whether I'll be here in a year, I don't know if I'll be here in two years. And I look back and I see the memories of all the work I've done and I guess it makes me feel kind of bad because of the fact that my life don't hold no certainty to it whatsoever.

[CAR ZOOMING PAST]

MARK STYLE: Winter is a time of assessment. In Sections 17, 18, 19, and 20 of Chanarambie Township, families review their year and sit down with lenders and creditors to plan for the upcoming growing season. Spring is the season of fresh starts. The farmers in Chanarambie Township watch for it with the same optimism as people everywhere.

For most of us, the green grass means we've survived another winter. For the Chanarambie farmers who watched the last snow melt off Buffalo Ridge, spring means they've made it through another difficult economic year, and as with thousands of other family farmers in Minnesota, that it's time for the real work to begin.

[CAR ENGINE RUNNING]

[THEME TUNE PLAYING]

SPEAKER: Chanarambie Township Section 17, 18, 19, and 20. Written and produced by Mark Style. Production of this program was made possible by a grant from the Otto Bremer Foundation.