Barb Kalbach

How long have you been farming?

Well, Jim and I have been married 36 years, so we’ve been farming 36 years. Jim started a little earlier than I did, but I grew up on a farm, so I’m a fourth generation farmer. In Iowa. About fives miles away from here, as a matter of fact, so I didn’t get very far from home when we got married.

What kind of farming do you guys do?

Row crop, corn and soybeans, and a little bit of hay. We used to raise livestock but we don’t anymore. We used to raise cattle, hogs and sheep; had horses for awhile.

The livestock business has been taken over by the large corporations and there isn’t a market, really, for small producers anymore. The infrastructure is just about gone for the small producer to raise just a small number of hogs. There used to be buying stations within 10 miles of most people, if they had 50 head of hogs, maybe butchers ready to sell, they could get a bid from one or the other of the buying stations, a competitive bid, decide where they wanted to sell, take the hogs there, and then the buying station would take them from there to a large facility or meatpacker.

But now, there are no buying stations, and if I had, say, 50 head of hogs to market, I’d have to take them well over 100 miles away to a packing plant for my bid. Well, if you haul 50 head of hogs 100 miles, there’s quite a bit more cost to that per head than there would be to a semi-trailer load. So, you’ve lost your profit in that traveling, and usually the packing plants will take your hogs as a favor to you because they already have bought what they can butcher that day from a large outfit like Iowa Select or Heartland Pork or Swain Graphics.

So, they’ll give you kind of a little bit of a bid, and it just isn’t enough for your bottom line. And so people have quit raising hogs mostly. There are still some small operations, but not nearly like it used to be.

What kinds of changes have you seen over the years?

Well, a big change is the livestock leaving the farm, whether it be the hogs like I just described or, in a lot of cases, cattle. A lot of the cattle have left the farm. That is one area, however, where the smaller producer still is able to compete, to some extent. The competitive market really isn’t there for the fat cattle that you sell, that are ready to be butchered. The last time we sold fat cattle, we had one bidder that was willing to bid on them.

So, that competitive bid is pretty well gone. But still, with the cow/calf industry, the feeder calves have been good money for the guys that have the cows. So there are still cattle left on the land. But the hogs have been a big change. There are no chickens. So, the diversification is gone from the farm, and you’ve got a mono-culture more of soybeans and corn.

And the second thing I’ve seen is the farms getting larger and not many young farmers coming into farming because there’s no way to make a profit for them. It’s too expensive to get into farming now. So, it’s kind of a difficult thing, and some of the guys that are putting up, CAFOs, will say, well, this is the only way to get my son into farming, if I put this CAFO up.

There’s something really wrong with the system that that’s the only way a young man can start farming, is to put up something that is so detrimental to a community as a huge confinement.

How has this movement from livestock to soybeans and corn affected your life, either your bottom line or just your way of living?

Well, you see a lot of people have off-farm jobs, for instance, to carry the bad years a little bit. This past year hasn’t been a bad year, it’s been a good year financially for crop producers, but over the long term, since the 1980s, you’ve seen people go off the farm for their employment and come home at night and on weekends and farm. And that includes the husbands and the wives, generally.

So, you have a lot of traveling into town, you don’t have that cohesiveness that you used to when the wife and and the husband worked together on the farm. And it’s interesting to me that this is such an accepted thing that people should leave the farm to make their living and then come home and farm, because it makes no more sense than if you asked a guy that ran a car dealership to go somewhere else, make his living and then come back and sell cars.

Or a guy that runs a restaurant or a grocery store, they aren’t running down the road to make their living and get their life insurance or health insurance paid for, they are running their business. But a farmer, not a huge farmer, he or his wife are expected to go to town and make their living and then come home and farm. So, this is kind of an interesting thing that’s developed since the ’80s in the neighborhoods. And in order to have a funeral, for instance, in the neighborhood, or a meeting in the afternoon, or to go to our board of supervisors meetings; if you work, you can’t do that.

And most people work. So, you’re less involved in your community and less involved in your local government because you’re not able to be.

Has it had an effect on town life, just in terms of the health and viability of the merchants?

Oh, yeah. Well, in the place where I live, a lot of people can commute to Des Moines. And people will commute for at least 75 miles. There are people that will drive to Des Moines for their job. If you’re in Des Moines at your job, you’re going to stop at the grocery store, or you’re going to stop at Menard’s, or some of the big businesses there, to get the things that you need before you go home at night. So, that’s where you’ll do your shopping.

So, all at once, your little town, where you used to frequent the grocery store and the hardware store, becomes your little stop and go if you need something that you forgot in Des Moines. So, it’s really affected the business in a large way in all of these little towns. With the livestock leaving the farm, you no longer need the large animal veterinarians like you used to. Most of the CAFOs hire their own personal vets, or the corporate hog producers and the corporate chicken producers and turkey producers have their own veterinarians that they use.

So, there is not room to have a veterinarian that used to be in your town. So, those businesses are affected. All the input businesses are affected. The businesses that you used to go to get a little bit of penicillin, a couple of syringes to give your vaccinations for your livestock that you have, the places that you went to get the gates, to get the feeders, to get the rings for their noses, to get the tools that you use for your livestock production, they aren’t there anymore because the livestock isn’t being produced like it once was.

What has that done for the quality of town life?

Well, in your small towns, of course, they’ve struggled a lot, lost a lot of businesses, so they struggle to find ways to fill those storefronts and maybe it isn’t always a store anymore, it might be like a tourist type thing to draw people in. They just struggle to survive and to fill their storefronts again. So, they try to be very innovative.

Another way that the small towns are affected is the next generation doesn’t come home to live, unless they’re close enough to Des Moines or another bigger city to drive back and forth to a job. But generally, they don’t come home because there isn’t that structure anymore, so the people running your little stores that are left in your small towns are older people that will be retiring in not so many years.

So, it’ll be interesting to see what happens then. A lot of the rural counties have seen their income drop and their population drop over the years.

What does this commuting to work and coming home to farm do to the cohesiveness of a family and family values?

Well, teenage life still on some of the farms in Iowa, still like it used to be, though I don’t see it much around here. But I think it still is a lot like it used to be if there are children on the farm. But there are not very many young enough couples on the farm anymore that have children on the farm. I know our neighbors, they’re raising three girls up the road, and they do 4H and the activities we used to do, or how we raised our kids, and the girls are exposed to the livestock that their dad has; he has a cow/calf operation.

So, there is some of that, but the overall picture is that there are not the young parents on the farm that there used to be, so you don’t see a lot of young people on the farm. And the sad part about that is one of the strengths of a family farm is that a family, as a group, they learned to work. And they learned to care for what made their living, and their dads and moms would teach them that you need to take care of these animals, because this is where our living comes from. Or you need to take care of the crop, and everybody worked to get the crop in, or they supported Dad while he was out there at night, made sure that he had his lunch and that kind of thing, or they work in the dairy barn.

So the kids learned to support each other, and it’s kind of like it’s a basic innateness to them when they go out into their life someday, that the importance of work, the importance of working together, the importance of helping one another. And that is something that came from the farm that is hard to replicate in the city. And so that’s something missing that’s going to be missed.

Has farm policy been good for family farmers?

Family farm policy has not been good for family farmers, in my opinion. It was better right after the late ’80s for a while, and then in 1995, they decided to construct what they called the Freedom to Farm Program. And it did away with your loan rate and the underpinnings of price that used to be there for the producer.

And they changed it to the subsidies that we now have, that people are complaining that certain big farmers or even millionaires that live far, far away, receive farm payments because they happen to own some farmland in some distant state. So, they receive farm payments. And the subsidy system is not fair, and what it does is creates more and more opportunity for an already big farmer to get bigger, and then the smaller farmer struggles to maintain his living.

What I’ve seen happen, is we have the large subsidies but generally low prices. A year ago we were getting about two dollars a bushel for corn, and around five fifteen for beans. Now, this year, of course, it’s the complete opposite. But most years have been down in the 1.86 to 2 dollar range for corn, and the rest of your income comes from the subsidies, or the LDPs that we had to apply for. So, as a general rule, the farm programs have not been good for family farms. They are continuing to leave the land and there is no one to take over for them.

It has, however, driven land prices up and cash rents up, which is part of the reason that a young farmer cannot enter farming, because of the high cost. So, what’s needed as far as a farm program goes are loan rates for each individual crop, for the commodities. What that does is to set a floor for your price that you’ll receive on the market, because the market doesn’t generally drop below the loan rate. Or you can put your grain under loan at that point.

So, that’s what’s needed again, and also what’s needed is a farmer-owned reserve for the country, so that if some disaster happens, if some widespread drought happens, somehow there isn’t a crop in one year, we’ll have that reserve for food for our country, that we don’t have that anymore, either.

Who is the farm policy written for, if it’s not benefiting these rural communities and family farmers?

Well, it appears to me, from what I’ve seen on C-SPAN and watching Congress on television, it seems to be being written for the Southern United States. The Southern senators and representatives have a lot of power on the ag committees, and when there seems to be a decent farm bill coming through, these are the guys that want the high subsidies, and they want this Freedom to Farm bill to continue as it has, to get those large subsidies out there to their producers.

Now, how the Southern crop production system is different and the community system is different from here in the Midwest, I don’t know. But I do know that the Southern congressmen have enough power that they have been able to continue this Freedom to Farm Program for the last, now, 12 years. That farm program has also been called “Freedom to Fail.”

Texas, Georgia, Alabama; right in those areas. And I’m not knowledgeable enough to know. Cotton, of course, is a big thing, and they have soybeans, also, as a commodity crop. And so, I’m not sure how their agriculture system works in those areas, which those senators and representatives think that that’s an important way for the Farm Bill to work. But it has not been beneficial for family farmers in the Midwest at all.

Why isn’t there a farm bill that represents your interests?

I remember that the last time they went through the Farm Bill, that Senator Tom Harkin from the state of Iowa, did want a strong conservation measure put in there, and he got it put in there, but he struggled to get it put in there and it still is not funded very well.

And it’s not funded very well, but he tried very hard to get that. There weren’t the votes to push it through; he got it through, and now it’s not funded by the Administration or by the USDA. That was the same time that the COOL legislation was developed; that, too, is not favored by the Administration, I assume, or the USDA, at least, and so you don’t see COOL enforced. It’s been a struggle to get it enforced for people.

So I would say that the politics of the whole thing, why would that be happening, usually boils down to money. And the corporate agriculture is now developing a big influence in the Midwest; I’m sure in the Southern United States also, in California and in the Northwest to the point that fewer and fewer family farmers are raising our produce and our food, and more and more corporations are raising it.

The ethanol industry was developed by family farmers in Iowa through the Iowa Corn Growers, through funding and research through Iowa State. It was all developed over a long period of time, and in the beginning, family farmers were able to buy in and in fact they did, they kicked in money to build an ethanol plant, and so then they were able to reap the benefit of that and make some income from the development of ethanol.

It didn’t take very long once ethanol became a hot product for the ADMs of this world to start owning the ethanol plants and getting very involved. So, corporations don’t take very long to get involved in the food and fiber production in the United States.

Where does that money go, now that they’re dominating the industry?

If there’s a corporation in your county or in your area raising a product, whether it’s chickens or hogs or row crop, when that product is sold, the profit goes out of your county, it goes away from your town. When the family farmers sold that product, the money was circulated in your community and circulated throughout all the stores.

So, that’s a lot of the reason that your small towns are dying, is because of the corporate involvement. There used to be an elevator in every town that you could haul your grain to, and farmers used wagons and they would haul it to, usually the closest one. But, they were all competitive and had their own bids, so you could also go to where the best bid was for your crop. Now, you go further and further away, so now we’re hauling our crops in semis to go further and further away to a cooperative, generally, or an elevator owned by ADM, Cargill, and some of the bigger corporations like that.

So, corporate agriculture has not been good for communities.

Another interviewee who said it’s not so much “get bigger or get out,” it’s “get more efficient or get out.”

I say that he’s wrong. I say that most family farmers are very efficient, and of course, there are different ways to be efficient. You can be efficient raising 50 head of hogs. It doesn’t detract from the fact that you still have to haul them 100 to 200 miles. So, he would say, “Well, then, grow more hogs so you have more on your truck, and you’re spreading your transportation costs out over your more head of hogs.”

And I would say to him, well, I don’t want to raise more hogs. I don’t want to make that investment, and I shouldn’t have to take a hit, I should not be able to raise hogs just because I don’t want to raise them five thousand head at a time. There should be a market for the rest of us; it shouldn’t be a forced issue of being forced into raising thousands of head of hogs at a time.

I don’t think that that’s good for my land and I don’t think that it’s good for my farming operation to do that. Also I would say that sometimes you have to give a little bit of efficiency up so that the rest of your community can live. And Wal-Mart’s a good example of that. People drive 25 or 30 miles to go to Wal-Mart; in the meantime, how do you expect your dry goods person in your small town or your grocer to supply your needs when you’re running off to Wal-Mart?

Wal-Mart, in the meantime, is importing most of what they sell you from China. So, who does Wal-Mart help? Wal-Mart’s efficient, no one ever said they weren’t; but how does their efficiency trade off in the growth of your community? How does their efficiency make your community grow? It doesn’t. It makes it die. And the same way with corporate farming.

They might be efficient, but I doubt it. There’s a certain point to where bigness detracts from the efficiency; you are so big you are no longer efficient, especially with livestock.

Iowa has the most productive soil in the world. There isn’t anywhere else to go to get this kind of soil all in one place to raise food. So, what do we do with it? We run people off the land that would take care of their soil and get bigger and bigger and bigger, so that the only expedient way to throw that crop in is to run up and down the hill; you don’t have time to go around at contour like you’re supposed to, you don’t have time to pick your planter up as you go through the waterways or pick the sprayer up as you go through the waterways, and pretty soon your waterways are dead.

He’s absolutely right. There’s not enough time, you’ve got to get over that ground, because you’ve got thousands of acres. You have a small window of opportunity to get it done in the spring and in the fall.

There’s a lot of ways to look at it. And another example is the CAFOs, if you want to talk about livestock production, with animal livestock production in the confined buildings; their manure and their waste goes into a pit and it’s supposed to be either injected on the land with the tines, or spread out on the land every year.

The thing of it is that those hogs, in this case, they poop every day. They don’t quit, and when that pit’s full, it’s got to be emptied. It has to be, there’s no ifs, ands or buts; that pit has to be emptied. Now, let’s say that it’s a wet fall. You’re supposed to empty that pit. Well, it’s pretty hard to contour around those hills in a hilly area of Iowa when the soil’s really wet like that, so guys run up and down the hills.

And I’m not saying that family farmers do that necessarily, but in a big operation, you hire people to come in, and I want that pit emptied, and it goes on farm number 10 down the road there. Okay, the hired guy gets in the tractor and goes. If he has to put it on with the tines, going up and down the hill, well, rain comes, there’s these nice little tine marks going down the hill, and where does the rain go? Right down this hill, carrying the soil with it and some of the manure, into your water systems.

So, in that particular way, that big operation is not efficient, and it’s not good for sustainability, and you’re getting down now to the point that I consider it mining the soil, mining the farms, throwing that seed in there, it doesn’t matter how. And you combine it the next day, or you throw that manure on the land, and use the tines to do it, and, oh, gee whiz, we’ve got to go up and down the hill, but what do you got to do? So, that’s what you do, and you’re not caring for the land. It becomes to a point you’re mining it; taking what you can from it.

How is that efficiency reflected in the quality and food safety?

I have a good example of that, that I learned about last night, a confinement that was put up originally by a farmer, a large confinement building. And he sold it Iowa Select, and then Iowa Select sold it to someone else; it’s been through four or five different ownerships. This last person or corporation that owned it put hogs in it and the pit got full.

Well, I don’t know if the guy didn’t care, if he didn’t come check his hogs or what, but when they were turned in to the DNR, there was three inches of manure and waste that those hogs were spending 24 hours a day in; they were walking in it, they were laying in it. Now, how that taints the meat from those hogs, I can’t tell you. But most consumers would be very suspicious of how healthy those hogs were when they went to market.

And other confinements, when hogs are thrown in together, they get real aggressive towards each other, and if their tails aren’t docked, they start biting each other’s tails, and then they get cannibalistic towards the weakest one and they’ll eat on them. And if that little pig dies, they still are rough with each other, so that there’ll be growths and abscesses on the hog when they go to market.

Well, an abscess has bacteria in it, and how do you keep that away from the meat? I mean, how is that a healthy hog that’s gone to market and people. If the people saw that hog that was going to make their pork chop, they wouldn’t be very interested in eating it. So, there’s that health aspect. There’s a health aspect of antibiotics that are given to chickens and hogs that I can speak to a little bit, and beef, too, are given implants that help them to grow faster, has low levels of antibiotic in it.

Generally, livestock are given a low level of antibiotic because it’s a growth enhancer, and kind of protects them from diseases that are spread when you’re too close together, as they are in a confinement situation. Chickens are fed arsenic, and the reason they’re fed arsenic is because there’s a type of bacteria in the chicken gut that arsenic can kill.

And what Tyson Foods found out, for example, is that a chicken, from the time it’s a little bird to the time that it’s a fryer and ready to go to market, takes 37 days. But if you feed them arsenic, it’ll take 35 days. Now, that’s two days difference; to a family farmer, he’d say, well, what’s a couple of days. It’s not worth it. To Tyson Foods, when you spread that out, those two days out over millions of chickens, it’s important to the bottom line, so those chickens are fed arsenic.

The arsenic ends up in people’s water systems, as has been proven in Oklahoma, where there was a lot of arsenic in the Oklahoma Watershed which prompted a lawsuit against Tyson by the state of Oklahoma. So, those are all important health issues to the consumer that are created by that type of livestock production.

How about water quality?

Well, there’s just no doubt about it. You simply cannot put millions and millions of gallons of manure on land. In my case, there was going to be one up the hill from our house, and that one would have produced around 10 million gallons of manure every year, not just a one-time shot. Every year, that much manure was going to be coming off of this facility.

Well, it has to go on the land. In this area, the bigger slopes, between 9 and 21 percent slope, are called D-slopes, E-slopes, and F-slopes. So, they’re fairly steep hills. When the manure goes on, whether it’s spread, whether it’s put in by injection, it’s going to follow the trail of water down a hill somewhere into your water supply.

So, there’s really no way to avoid the fact that there’s high fecal bacteria in the Raccoon River from which a lot of people draw water, a lot of cities and a lot of towns. The latest story by the Farm Bureau is that this is human sewage that gets in this river, and that’s why the fecal bacteria’s high. Well, I would say to them, that most towns treat their sewage and that doesn’t detract from 16 million hogs in the state of Iowa that are raised; most of whom are raised under confinement conditions, and their manure is going on the land.

So, it only stands to reason that it’s going to end up in our water supply. It’s very dangerous for water.

In confinements, you see big fans on them, and they suck all the air out of the confinement, they’re an exhaust fan. And what they are exhausting is hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, mostly, and that is what becomes very offensive to the neighbors in terms of odor. But also, both of those things can make people sick, especially the hydrogen sulfide.

Hydrogen sulfide, in low levels, is very toxic to the neurosystem of human beings. And so if you happen to be a neighbor to one of these operations, you are being exposed to low levels of hydrogen sulfide, which is not healthy for people in general, but especially for the very old and the very young. So, that’s another health issue.

Do you see farm policy equals food policy equals health policy? Why should anyone care about the Farm Bill who lives in Los Angeles or New York?

Well, I think that people have a vested interest in keeping a family farm structure in the United States. If they stop and think about it, I don’t think that anyone wants to be at the mercy of a corporation as to whether or not they buy a gallon of milk tomorrow, and they don’t want to be at the mercy of a corporation on whether or not they have a loaf of bread on the shelf tomorrow. The family farmer continues to produce and produce generally in a healthy way, whereas a corporation is going to, as we all know, produce it in a way to make the most profit, whether it is selling it to you or cutting corners in the production area.

So, that’s one reason they should be very interested in how their food is raised. If a corporation can’t make the bottom line work here in Iowa, for instance, say a corporation’s now raising maybe ADM’s going to raise all the corn now. Family farmers are pretty well gone, didn’t get enough young guys in there, so ADM will just hire some people and will throw that corn in the ground and we’re going to raise it now.

ADM, if they raised all the corn in Iowa, what if they couldn’t do it as cheap as they could in Mexico? Or China, where already we’re starting to see deficit products come in from China that are dangerous to the public health. They come in at such a rate that FDA can’t really inspect them at the ports, so it’s getting a little bit dangerous. Some people are starting to pay attention to that.

That’s an example of why people in Los Angeles have a vested interest in keeping family farmers on the land, and paying enough for their food that family farmers can make a living on the land.

What would you say to Sedrick?

Well, I would say to him that to bring that kind of operation into a neighborhood where people live. There was a man named Gary Weiss that wanted to put 5,600 hogs right up here on the hill, right up here, and he lives 70 miles away. And he said to me, he said, “But Barb,” he said, “I’m building my new house, my brand-new house, right by my hog confinements here in Shelby County.”

And I said to him, I said, “Well, that’s fine, Gary. If you want to build your house by your hog confinements, then you go right ahead. But this is my house that you’re building your hog confinements from; it would be my house that would get all the flies, my house that would get all the rats that come from it, my house that would get the odor, my water that would be impacted, my property values that would be decimated.” And I would like that Mr. Sedrick to tell me how that’s right.

How is that a right thing, to treat your neighbor that way, to bring a large, industrial-scale animal factory next door to someone who’s lived there for 70 years, and lot of times these are century farms, a lot of times these have retired farmers living there in their elderly years. How is that right to perpetrate that kind of industry right beside their home, right beside their farm, not without one wit of interest in their particular health issues, whether or not they’re going to retire, and this farm and this home, as what they planned to sell for their retirement, now has no value; who in their right mind would buy it?

With not one wit of concern for the water that people drink in that community, how is that right? I would ask Sedrick that. Explain that to me, how’s that right? It doesn’t matter whether or not they’ve come out and built a new home on acreage, really, because they were there first, number one. And number two; you have just destroyed the value of that place that they’ve just built.

And why is it right for you to be able to do that to them? They’re not receiving any kind of monetary gain. When we used to raise hogs, we chose to raise them by our house or nearby our house. There was some odor issues sometimes, although I don’t think they were as bad as are created by the CAFOs, but I put up with that, and we all did because we knew that at some point we would sell the pigs and it would enhance our income and our farm revenue.

Your 5,600 hogs next to my house does not enhance my farm revenue whatsoever, nor does it enhance my health, my quality of life, the value of my property at all. And you tell me how that’s right that you can perpetrate on others that way to make your living.

Of all the people that have a problem with these things, how many of them are urban?

The people that I’ve worked with, because I have been active in trying to stop more CAFOs from being built, in this particular county, there isn’t one person that comes from an urban setting that came out here that works on this issue with us. Most of them are farmers or work on the farm in some capacity. And that amounts to approximately 150 people from this area.

What’s your sense on the welfare of the animals and how happy they are in confinement?

Well, I can’t think that “happy” would be a word to describe it. They exist, and they’re all in their little pens and they eat their food and drink their water, they fight because they’re in too close of quarters. As they grow up, they chew on the bars because in their natural habitat would be out rooting for grubs and busy.

And they have nothing there but to bite on each other or bite on the bars, so I can’t think that they’d be happy or content in any way. They just are there, existing. That’s the part of the industry that makes it a factory, because they’re a widget. They’re a widget in the pen there, and their purpose is to grow and not be sick, and we do everything we can to make sure that that happens, and then that widget is sent to slaughter and there’s nothing about a happy pig there.

How does that mesh with the whole 4H thing, having the kids take care of the animals on the family farm? What happened to the Farm Bureau?

But the Farm Bureau advertises. You see Farm Bureau cops; they’re always at the fairs and stuff promoting the fair. People say that when Farm Bureau was first started, it was for family farmers. And I don’t know when it changed; as it grew or maybe as there were more products offered, like insurance, that it turned away from supporting family farmers to more of a business model.

I don’t know where that changed, but I’ve never known a Farm Bureau that was not working against my interests as a family farmer. I learned in the ’80s, during the farm crisis, that if Farm Bureau thought the Farm Bill wasn’t going to work for me, it would probably do more harm to me than good. If Farm Bureau was for it, I’d better be against it, because it was going to really hurt me financially.

What is CSIF?

It stands for Coalition to Support Iowa Farmers. CSIF. It’s a coalition of the commodity groups and Farm Bureau, and they are not, again, supporting Iowa farmers. What they are doing is using their economic strength and the strength of their membership, to continue to push the industrial scale of agriculture into Iowa, and promote it.

How are we going to get out of this mess?

Well, when we as people from the rural areas go to our legislators for some reason, they can’t implement any kind of legislation that helps slow down, for instance, the industrial-scale livestock model; won’t even slow it down. They say, there’s no way; they don’t have the votes. Well, I’ve been there long enough to be suspicious that the reason they don’t have the votes is that I don’t have the money. I can give them 100 dollars where some other lobbyist can give them 100 thousand.

And pretty soon, that permeates the whole lawmaking process. So, there are kind of two answers to your question. The first answer is to have a voter-owned process of election that takes the money completely out of the elections so that someone who’s running for an office doesn’t have to kowtow to a large corporation or to a corporate donation that was given at some point along the line when he’s making his decisions, that hopefully would be for me when he’s in his position.

So, that would be one prong of what you’re asking for. The second one would be, when that person is there, trying to actually make decisions that are going to be beneficial for the people as a whole. As far as agriculture goes, we need the equivalent of a Marshall Plan for rural America, and we really do. Because the family farm system has been allowed to deteriorate to the point that it will take a plan from government to reconstruct that whole system.

Much like in the 1860s, with the land rush, where everyone who staked out 160 acres and wanted to stay there for five years, they’d own that 160 acres. That’s how the United States government populated the middle and western part of the United States. And so you can see that government can do good things if they want to, but the process has to be there to elect people who want to do good things, and once they get there, are able to do good things without being impacted by large amounts of money.

Is there anything you want to add?

The little people like us out here, that are being ignored by government at this point, can’t give up and just think, well, it’s not going to do any good to fight and struggle and demand that our needs be met here, instead of maybe two or three corporations that are giving you a whole bunch of money.

We have to remember that it’s a long fight, but we have to stand together and stick together, and then we have to stand up. And if you don’t want to stand up because you’re too shy, support the people who are standing up and be with them; write the letters, do what has to be done, because that’s the only way that we’re going to get change. There’s a lot of money working against all of us, and we need to demand change.

Well, you can just see that farming is a lot different now. The fields are all bigger, it’s all more of a monoculture. I said before that my grandparents raised alfalfa, oats, and corn, and now mostly you see corn and soybeans, occasionally some alfalfa and occasionally some pasture, but it’s more of a monoculture with the corn and soybeans.

It supports a lot fewer families, but mostly because the net profit in agriculture isn’t high enough to maintain families, and in another respect, it creates kind of the Wal-Marting of agriculture in that the profit margin is so thin that you have to have many, many, many acres. Whatever you do, you have to do it in a big way.

You either have to have a lot of crop acres or you have to have not just a few head of livestock, but concentrated great big buildings full of thousands of head of livestock. So, that’s the big changes in agriculture, then as now. Back then you’d have chickens and dairy cows. You wouldn’t have 16,000 dairy cows; you’d have maybe a dozen at the most dairy cows that you milked every day.

And you’d have a henhouse with chickens and you’d have pigs and sows that you raised in addition to your varied crops. Whereas now, you just raise a lot of one thing, because that’s all one person has time for. Everything has to be in such big amounts. If you’re going to do it yourself, you can’t raise 20,000 head of hogs and farm 10,000 acres of ground.

So therefore, there are not as many families, there are not as many children, there’s not as much activity for these little towns.

The business is gone because people are gone, except for the people who live in the town.

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