Donn Teske

You’ve talked about five generations of your family, farming here, and a responsibility you have, that you felt to your great grandpa and your grandpa, to keep this going sir.  Can you talk about the difficulty you’re having in doing that a little bit.

Well, it’s been a real struggle through the 80’s and 90’s to keep a successful presence on the farm.  That’s been very highlighted in, they’ve had tough times in the past too.  My grandpa always told me, he says you know, “the 30’s, that was the rich man’s depression.  It was the 20’s that hit the farm hard.”

But he got through it.  So yeah, we’ve had every generation that’s came here since Germany in 1869 has managed to survive on the farm.  And here, I’m the first generation in our immediate family that’s earning an income off the farm to supplement that.

And I’ll do what’s necessary to maintain ownership of the land and to keep it going but I’m going to have to do it from a different approach than my predecessors have had to do.

What is this thing you have to do off that farm for income?

Well, I’m lucky enough right now that I’m currently the president of Kansas Farmers’ Union, and as so I am supplemented for my work that I do there.

And what’s really blessed in that is I kind of an activist at heart and that give me an outlet for trying to make political change and work for the betterment of farmers around the state and the nation.

You talked a little bit last night about how small farms are more conducive to long term enterprises, more so than the big giant operations.

The comment I was referring to was it seems like you don’t have sustainability in the larger operations, in what I would call a mega-farm corporation because you don’t have the heart to heart issues of it.

You got to be willing to go out there and do some dirty work and to have a passion for what you’re doing in order to stay in there year after year.  And they can be very successful for the short term but you generally don’t see that go through the generation changes.

Generally, there’s going to be an upheaval if nothing else, through the inheritance process and the siblings in it.  And if you get into a corporation of just pure business it’s purely profit and back in the 1930’s this saydee that we’re looking at right here was actually mortgaged to an insurance company and they got it back in the 30’s.  It was of course, during the depression and then my grandfather had the chance to but this saydee for 500 dollars back then, but he didn’t have 500 dollars to buy it.

And so we ended up buying it in the 70’s but that’s been a business and insurance companies get into the farming business and they’ll get into buying hogs or raising hogs and different businesses but it’s profit and loss.

And as soon as that doesn’t do what they want it to do it’s liquidated.  So I don’t see the sustainability of the large seaboard of Southwest Kansas, being in it for the long term.

You’ve talked about the love of farming.  Respect of the land and love for the lifestyle, and the community here, as opposed to a giant corporate operation?

Well, I often tell people I’d rather be milking cows, than walking around Washington, D.C. to lobby and I sincerely mean that.  I felt like when I was dairying, and I was creating new wealth.

And now I think I’m doing a worthwhile thing in what I do off-farm, but I’m recycling someone else’s wealth, that I’m a user instead of a creator.

And I think that’s one of the problems with our country now, is we’re doing to much using and reusing of the wealth and not creating the new wealth.

What do you mean by that? Recycling, rather than creating new wealth?

Well, there’s an organization out there called NORM, National Organization Raw Materials, and they maintain that there are only three entities that actually create new wealth in the world.  And that’s taking what’s given to us by God, and the sun, and the earth, and creating new wealth and that’s agriculture, mining, and the timber industry.  The only thing they actually harvest, nature, turn it into a dollar product.

And we, as farming have become, there’s an old joke that goes around the farming community where the only entity out there that sells everything wholesale and buys everything retail.

And actually, there’s a lot of truth to that.  And so society has managed to take most of the wealth generation and take it away from the actual people who do the production of the wealth.    

What kind of government support or regulations do you think are needed to make it possible to make small family run farms to survive and even to thrive?  What’s missing?

There’s so much political lobbying influence in our political process now that in my interpretation, I think the natural process of evolution of laws that govern are really being jeopardized.

The massive cotton subsidies right now is a great example of that too.  I’ll get some farmers complain to me for that statement but there’s an oftly lot of subsidies going to too few players, the way it is right now.

If we’re going to have subsidies and it was a directionless society that maintains smaller farming sizes, and there’s a lot benefits to that.  Just for bio-security and environmental responsibility.

The distribution of the animals on more of the landscape and more ownership is just going to create a healthier environment but, and safer environment.  But the current process of the consolidation and multi-consolidations and larger cap payments on government subsidies does contribute to larger farm organizations.

Another thing we have to do is give back our markets.  And we as a generation now are mostly taking cash open markets.  And them aren’t the most profitable place to be at.

One of the best things in history though, was done for the individual farmers to get them on the same track, is Cap Repolsta’s Act, which allowed cooperative development.

And that has been very successful in the past and needs to be used again, more.  Largest supplier right now is CHS, it served the state, and that’s a petroleum and input supplier for cooperatives around our region and they were a Farmer’s Union creation.

So it’s something to be taking pride of, our past.

What’s your take on why, given that the policy framework and the support’s not there to help the small farms survive and thrive, why do you think that local and national policy makers are not supporting these measures?

Political influence.  This is the way we’ve always been doing this.  Kansas is a prime example of that.  We seem to be a blast in recent generations with very powerful political figures in the national scene from Kansas. Senator Roberts.  We’ve really been blessed with some really powerful figures here out of Kansas, Senator Dole and Senator Roberts.  My dad just worshipped Senator Dole.  I have a lot respect for Senator Casaba, I thought she was a lady of integrity and character.  But as the political process develops, there’s too much status quo, in that, yeah there’s just going to be fall out.  There’s always going to be 20 percent of the farmers going broke.

And that’s just the way it’s going to be and it has to be that way and go on from there, and how can we best take of the survivors you might say and I consider that a King of the Hill mentality.

It’s like, the last one on top of the hill, wins the game.  But, there’s a game worth winning in that process.  As we look around, in this section here, my neighbors, one’s an uncle, one’s an aunt, ones a first cousin.

And so, if I’m going to expand, who do I take out of business to take over their property.  My goal in life is not to take over all the land and (pull out of the county), my goal is in life is to be part of the community and society and help us all thrive.

We as church entities, and we’re a very strong Lutheran base right here, German and Lutheran. What can you do to help everyone survive?

And make it to the next winter and the next year?  That’s the mentality to be proud of.  And now it’s dog-eat-dog and you need your land so we can get bigger, so we can survive and make that green payment.

And when I mean green payment I don’t mean environmental payment, I mean John Deer Iron Green, I what I like to prefer it to.

How important are small farms to the fabric of life in America?

Well, it’s been the backbone.  I mean, we’re spending millions and millions of dollars, especially in Kansas, and especially in the high plains of the United States, the central plains, on rural repopulation.

How do we do rural development to keep the people out there so we don’t have to close the schools.  The answer is quite simple, it was populated, quite happily with agricultural producers, that was producing new wealth.

But now, they’re paid so little for it, that we have to depopulate, and I have one of my neighbor’s from South Dakota and his father and brother still farm up there, and they’re the only residence in the entire township.

So, one of them has to be the chairman and one of them has to be the trustee of the township while they’re the only two left.  Well that’s not the answer.  That’s not the answer to society.

So I guess if you want a rural population, why do we have to create all this new economic development?  Why don’t we work with the system that has been successful in the past and, tweak it?

Do you have any thoughts on the difficulties in keeping a family together and healthy?

I still think we’re a lot better off than a lot of areas. But, I’ll put it into context here for me, the larger the farm gets, at what age can you put your child on a 150 thousand dollar tractor or combine and send them down through the field. And you have a lot less of the generation involvement of the next youth.  We’re that way.  And then a few years ago my family got into pumpkins and squash and a lot of that was hands on. I may just wonder a rig behind a tractor, I’ll put a funnel on top and a seat on there and I got a kid sitting on there, throwing seed in and you know, it’s the same way.  We all get involved.

I was just really excited by how involved all my children got in that and how they wanted to be involved in it.  And got into the marketing of the pumpkins and the pride of ownership.

And I think that is all valuable.  Valuable lessons in life and when you have responsibilities, that makes a whole different ballgame and that my older two children were raised under, we had the dairy going at that time.

And then the dairy chores that they had responsibilities for and my younger two children haven’t really been involved in that, that much.  They’re all good kids and I’m proud of them all, but I can tell the difference in the responsibility that other ones had.

And I think that’s a segment that’s missing right now.  Another thing about it, is the multi-generations. A lot of the modern socialists claim that this is dead, but I live right down here.  This is my mother’s place.

This is my mother-in-law’s place, my uncle is right over the hill.  I mean, if my kids pulling anything.  I hear about it.  And half the people in the community are my cousins so if my kids pull anything, I hear about it.

And so it isn’t like they have to answer to they system.  The family system, the support system, is one of the things that build society to where it is today.

And it’s really being done away with.  Kids are going to child care earlier.  They’re dissipating after they graduate for better paying jobs all across the United States and the world and I don’t know that that is for the betterment of society.

There’s a movement going on right now out of Nebraska called HTC, and it’s called Home Town Competitive training.  And a third of that focuses bringing the youth back to your community.

Why we taking our most valuable asset and exporting them out of the community.  Lets develop a community where they want to stay in.  And I think that’s the most valuable and viable goal to hit.

You’ve talked about the possibility that you’ve left it to you son, whether he wants to come back here or not.  How is that for you?

Sure, but I do want to say not just my son, I have two sons and two daughters.  The way it looks right now, could be one of my daughters, might be the one that comes back and works the farm.

And time will tell, but like said, in the past I’ve done a lot of economic work with the farmers around the state of Kansas and I’d help them do their cash flows and their balance sheets. I work with a lot of farms that build up their anticipation of the next generation coming around back to work it.  They actually created a place for the next generation before the next generation was ready to take it over.

Well, then they all find out that that generation has different interests, or that doesn’t work out personally, to farm together and this generation that’s actually at retirement age has to deal with a whole new set of debts and a scale of farming that they’re not really comfortable doing.

And I told my children I says “You go out and you gets yourself an education.  Go out and see the world a little bit, but if you decide farming is what you want to do and you want to come back to farm, I’ll do everything I can to help you get started.”

“But I’m not going to build up a situation that you’re obligated to come back to”  And I’m comfortable where I’m at right now, with what I’m doing with my wife, Cathy and I, and I got good kids that seem to be going out into the world and good directions and I kind of hope they end up back in the community.

I can’t imagine my oldest daughter.  She’s just a student teaching now, and I can’t imagine her in an urban landscape at all.  And with any luck, maybe she’ll be back around here. But that’ll be their decision.

Do you still think we have a government of the people, for the people, by the people?  The type of government that Thomas Jefferson and our forbearers had in mind?

I’m pretty cynical about that.  And I’m an officer in a national organization.  And so I get to view the politics in more states than just in Kansas.

And I know that was a general United States question, but I want to start in Kansas. Not in Kansas any longer.

What I am referring to in that is we’re so dominated by one party, that we don’t have a political competitive system any longer in Kansas.  And I think that’s the detriment of Kansas.

It’s hard to get much social change going on, when you can maintain that trend through generations of dominance with a party.  And I’m saying that like a true democrat but I’m not a democrat, I’m an independent and I came from a republican background, raised around a republican background.

But I don’t think anytime you have a complete monopoly on anything, is it healthy for society.  I think that competition is good.  And we don’t have it.  I mean, it’s not even close.

I know when I vote for a presidential election, it isn’t going to matter what I vote for.  Because it’s so red in the state that, that’s just he way it’s going to be.

And there don’t seem to be any changes on the horizon, and it’s really surprising because as we lose that traditional rural vote over most of Kansas, we start to gain in the Wichita, Kansas, Topeka, Kansas area and what has traditionally been looked at as democrat areas, you’d think that shift would be happening but it doesn’t.

What’s happening in Kansas more than that, is we’re having a fractionalization of the republican party, where we have the most conservative republicans and the moderate republicans and so we basically have a three party system.

Then you start to have some parity so, maybe things will equalize out.  But, we don’t in Kansas.  And what we have in, nationally, is, and I referred to it earlier, is it’s just, people have realized that dollars talk and that you can influence the system.

And it does.  And every time I’m in Washington, D.C. I could see that.  I’m out there three or four times a year.  And you can tell dollars talk, and you can tell by the results.  I mean when in President Bush’s first election campaign his top contributor was MBNA America.

A credit card company and what was the first thing that happened was bankruptcy reform and so, pretty obvious result.  And that happens all through the system.  Dollars talk and people realize it.

The more dollars thrown at it can work.  And its messing up the political process.  I don’t have the faith in it, I had in the past.

In terms of agriculture, this theme of dollars talk, and policies that are favoring larger operations, corporate agriculture, where are those dollars being made?

Sure, my expertise is agriculture and that’s where I’m kind of comfortable talking about.  When you get beyond that, I like to talk about what other people say and then I’m just spreading rumors but in agriculture, it’s pretty obvious.

Money’s being made, in the sectors between production and consumer.  And so it’s a process at retailer’s sections. Ant that’s where the influence is happening.

And there’s no way that you could say that the success of Walmart has been good for agriculture, as we know it, in the United States.

Because the more concentration that’s going on in the retail sector, they put demand on the processing sector for orders,  and specifications, and it gets reflected back, so how do you take a group of isolated producers, of dependant producers and merge a product of consistency to that demands.

It gets back to what I said earlier.  Competition is good and when you don’t have competition then you a less successful society in my opinion.

And I was working with the county in Western Kansas and there was only one grocery store in the entire county.  And that was a Walmart grocery store.

And they did 11 million dollars in grocery sales that year before, but there’s no competition.  In the long run, I don’t think that’s good for that county and the society in that area.

The dollar influence that goes into lobbying and agricultural policy in Washington, D.C. is very obviously being heavily influenced by the entities that are between the producers and the consumers.

The International Green-Handlers, the beef industry, it’s very obvious.

We’re beginning to meet more and more people who are sort of grumbling about the influence of lobbyists and money talking and feeling like the policy making decisions that effect their everyday lives, they don’t have much say over.

People need to start speaking out.  It’s just, it’s amazing what five to ten letters to a congressman will do.  I mean, they’re just not used to getting mail.  And people bitch, and they’re going to be heard.

There’s a really neat old saying that I can’t put the original source to that but it was “we need to raise more hell and less corn.”  And it’s a good simple statement.

And that’s all we need to do.  We are so indoctrinated into our two political parties in Kansas and in the United States, that I’m really ashamed of them.  I’ really are.

And if the candidates that we are getting, especially in my opinion on the presidential scene, are the best we have to offer the united states, there’s something wrong with the United States.

I can’t remember the last time that I looked at a presidential election and went “man, them are good people.  We can’t do better than that.”  And they’re representing us worldwide!

It’s a cynical statement, isn’t it? But, that’s all we need to do, we need to, I’m an old populist by heart, and the populist part started in Kansas.  We need to have a re-emergence of the populist party.

We just need to raise more hell.

The corporations are not paying their share in a lot of people’s view.  What’s your take on that?

Oh, it doesn’t surprise me either and I agree that influence on the tax bases have radically changed and the primary one that I was in, Farmers Union, was outspoken about was the death tax.

Out there, state tax that was done away with by President Bush, I mean almost all of Kansas was violently outspoken about eliminating that tax.  And yet there was like three farmers in the state of Kansas that would be affected by that, so we’re voting, all the rest of us to raise our taxes.

In order to offset that, that would be safe for those three families.  And so I think that how an item is addressed to the American public can greatly influence how their vote happens.  And their passions, and they have to understand it.

And so I think that, earlier I spoke to the problems of our import imbalance, and our trade imbalance and how that has to reflect the needed society, living within the country that we are talking about.

And you know the United States funded themselves entirely on a tariff tax, until the 1911’s, somewhere in there you know.  And except for a low income tax during the civil war to pay for that, they funded dozens. The United States grew to the power it was on import taxes and tariffs.

So, lets say, we’re looking at the trade imbalance we’re looking at now and we was all looking at a tariff tax to fund the United of States.  How would that change America.

My first thought is, that’d probably change it to the positive.  We’d be keeping more industry in the United States.  We’d be creating more wealth from within.  I can see a lot of positive benefits to that.

I’m not a smart enough person to sit here in front and intelligently talk about the tax issues down to the nit, little parts of it.

But I would have to say that I think the way it is right now is certainly supporting the consolidation of the industries as we see it in the United States.

To what degree do you think people tend to unwittingly vote against their best interest.  

I think that the American public is easily influenced.  I think we’re easily influenced.  You know media access, television access is so there right now that a little bit of a dollar campaign there can change a whole public perception of an issue.  And I think that’s dangerous.  I think too many people are voting from passion and heart and not enough from research and careful thought, and moral thought to it.

There’s a lot of monopolization going on in media. To what degree are your neighbors forming their opinions on Fox News, anything you want to talk about in that regard?

The concentration in the media is extremely dangerous to America. I have no doubt about that.  And both ways. I mean, we’ve all dealt with the Rush Limbaughs and with Fox News being such a republican party but this past news cycle, we had the democrats kicking their own out.

And it’s really gets to concern me.  Where do you find a valuable source of information.  You know, I’m listening less and less to Farm broadcast stations and more and more to NPR stations and that’s too bad.

I miss out on some of the issues that I need to do that’s in my job and in my profession.  But I’m not saying they are the source, but they’re the best source I can find at this time for at least some third party review of the situation the best that I can tell.

And I think that’s a real concern and people don’t read the way they used to read, even if they do read, even the papers are getting as concentrated as the others, so everything has political innuendos and maybe that isn’t anything new, I mean every small town newspaper and every town every seven miles apart had an outspoken paper that had an agenda.

And so it becomes us as citizens, we have to read, and worry what we’re reading.  I mean, William Allen White got a Pulitzer Prize.  He was the editor of a small paper here in Emporia, Kansas.

Just what’s the matter with Kansas, the original?  And so I, we all have agendas and everything in life is political in agenda but we have to have the ability to critique it and weigh out the solutions.

And we’ve become a reaction society, we see something, we’re influenced by it, vote that way, or buy that way and respond.  And I guess if it ever reacts to the oppositions to the current trends that maybe we have some change, but we’re not having any change right now.

It’s just for their consolidation and that’s scary.  Our fore fathers just did all kinds of effort in our constitution to keep from happening in the United States what happened in England, and a lot of that was a corporate and concentrate issue.

And I think it was successful for a good long time.  But I think it’s went to the way side now.

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