Looking through an anthropological lens at the aftermath of the ’80s farm crisis, Yale professor Kathryn Marie Dudley paints a disturbing portrait in her Debt and Dispossession: Farm Loss in America’s Heartland. Contrary to such popular portrayals of farm life as the movie Country, it turns out that farmers tended to turn on each other rather than organize a protest or help a neighbor in need.

“A pioneering spirit runs deep in the hearts of those who till the land, and these settlers of the prairie have never looked kindly upon those who succumb to adversity, blame their troubles on others, or start crying for help when the going gets tough,’’ Dudley writes.

Dudley returned to her roots for her scholarship, heading to western Minnesota to interview farmers about how they weathered the disastrous agriculture economy of the 1980s. Low interest rates and rising prices in the ’70s lulled many farmers into a false sense of security. They borrowed big, and, when prices collapsed and interest rates soared in the ’80s, the losses were huge. More than 200,000 commercial farmers are estimated to have defaulted on loans by the end of the ’80s, according to Dudley.

She gives the town, which happens to be one where her extended family farmed when she was young, a pseudonym: Star Prairie. But she details real events after interviewing about 50 farm families and such assorted other community members as bankers and loan agents. Anecdotes about the farmer who fled from his family in the face of financial ruin, and the one who got the cold shoulder at church after losing his farm, are true.

“For every news clip of activists protesting the forced sale of a family farm, tens of thousands of farm families avoided the spotlight, settled out of court or suffered for years in silence behind closed doors,’’ Dudley writes.

The local newspaper’s lists of names, those who were delinquent on taxes, bankrupt or facing an auction or foreclosure, drew little sympathy for the troubled. The general consensus among farmers was that if someone lost the family farm they must have done something to deserve it, like getting a big new tractor or a barn worth more than the whole herd. She writes of the farmer who says the first of his neighbors to lose their farms were “hot dogs. ... They had a brand-new four-wheel-drive pickup, and they went to Texas in the wintertime. They lived on credit cards, and I didn’t have too much compassion for them when they went broke.’’

That farmer's assessment was common. When forced to pin down why some farms failed and others did not, “members of this community focused on the moral character of the individuals involved to explain what happened.’’

There is plenty of talk of farmers who play keep-up-with-the-Joneses. But strangely, Dudley notes, no one admits to competing with the Joneses. Nor does anyone admit to being the Joneses.

Farm loss is a trauma, a socially rather than naturally produced one, Dudley asserts. “The erosion of human dignity that accompanies it happens at the hands of those who are your friends.’’

Dudley’s replay of the interviews with the farmers who have lost their land are chilling: “All our neighbors were like flies to honey. They all wanted the land. You know they could hardly wait until it was over so they could pile in and buy the land,’’ says the woman Dudley calls Jane.

The woman’s husband adds, “It’s the same thing when a farmer dies — there’s somebody there to rent the land before the body’s cold, and I’m not kiddin’ ya. I mean, it is that — it’s that tough a game.’’

Tough and devastating for those who must face the loss.

“Every day you work the land,’’ Jane told Dudley through tears. “And when it’s taken away from you, it’s like you lose some part of your life.’’ .

www.uis.edu/~ilissues Illinois Issues October 2000 . 35