Leo Oliva

It’s been apparent to us that farming communities here are struggling, yet some of farmers we’ve talked to tend to vote for maintaining current policies.  What’s your take on that?

People are voting against their own best interest and they are doing so because the politicians are avoiding the kind of issues and focusing on hot-button issues that turn people into this state into rather rabid political people and so that abortion and gay marriage that have absolutely nothing to do with the economy become the focal point and they miss the economy which has been taken over as far as I am concerned by a few giant corporations and the Farm Bill is not written for farmers it’s written for corporations like Cargill.

The drug laws are written by the drug companies.  I think, it doesn’t matter where you are, what state you’re in our government has been pretty much turned over to a few giant global corporations. They’re calling all the shots.  They want to divert our attention away from these ideas to focus on hot-button issues and get people all excited about these things that as far as I am concerned have little to do with politics.

I think a lot of these people are true believers, so they like to believe the government is going to get prayer back in schools, well prayer was never taken out of schools as far as I know anyone can pray any place they want to anytime, it’s just the fact that you can’t impose it on everyone. They don’t understand the difference so it just becomes a hot-button issue.

Have higher prices been an issue with the local economy?

All farm prices are set by corporations, so it has nothing to do really with cost of production.  The farm bill is written to keep farmers producing so that the prices for food are kept fairly low.  People talk about the farmers being subsidized, but really the subsidies are going to provide cheap food and benefits are going to the few corporations that control al of that.

The equipment that we buy, the repairs we have to buy, everything is designed for corporate profit.  I’ve been going through some of my father’s records from the 1960s, and in the 1960s his operating expenses for this farm averaged about $4000 a year and today we farm about three times as much as he did in the early 1960s but our farm expenses run about $300,000 a year.  But the price of wheat in 2005 is just about what it was in the 1960s.

It was either get big or get out as far as farming goes and I think that’s the trend and I think it continues. There are small farms but those people on small farms make their living by having a job some place, usually it’s husband and wife both working (says he had to become a rural mail carrier for health insurance.)

Do you see any immediate hope for small family farms?

I think the wheat farms in rural Kansas are just going to become larger and larger over time.  Someone has predicted that at about one point there will be about one farmer in every county, and the trend is that way because as the farmers die off, other farmers buy up their land and increase the size of their operation, so my father has about 960 acres and we’re farming 3500 acres today and he probably lived better than we do.

There have been a couple of times in our history since the Civil War when farming has actually been profitable.  One was just prior to WWI and the other was during and after WWII and my father started farming in the depression when things were really tight but he went through that period of WWII and after and was able to buy the land that he wanted and the equipment that he wanted and did very well.

You seem to have a lot of spirit…and a point of view that’s different from many of your neighbors.

The populist parties of the 1890s, I consider myself a populist today, it’s the only party that I see that I could belong to, it was a plan for agriculture and also for labor.  They were ahead of their time, but they were very much concerned about the economy and at that time it was the railroads that were the dominant corporation that controlled everything with freight rates and process for warehousing and therefore for what crops were worth and the populists wanted to nationalize the railroad and they wanted to create a new banking system.  Many of the things the populists were advocating came into being during the Progressive Era in the early 20th century and that’s when that period of prosperity for agriculture all of that went by the wayside in the 20s with the return to conservatism and then the Depression, that changed things again.

The populists were angry and they were pretty radical in that time period, but at the same time they ignited fires that the major political parties had to consider of how to deal with the economy and I think a revival of that today would be great but I’m sure I’m in a minority on that.

How is that many people here don’t readily see a connection between what’s happened to their way of life here and farm policy being made in Washington DC?

I think that a lot of people are not aware of it and some of those that are aware of it think that they’re making a sacrifice for the cause they don’t mind that they are suffering economically because they are working for higher goals or something like that and it becomes sort of irrational when you get out in that fringe area but I think that that’s fairly widespread.

I think that most people would say that big government is the problem, but I think the government is going to have to be the solution rather than seeing it as a problem, people complain all the time about tax and spend and tax and spend, and to me that’s part of the job of the government. If capitalism is not restrained you soon have a few people controlling everything and this is how a few corporations ended up controlling everything in the 1890s and again today, the government needs to be stronger than those corporations and not controlled by them in order to bring about some sort of justice and economic development for all people and not just a few people.

My view is that it’s the job of government to tax and spend and I certainly don’t like a government that cuts taxes and then borrows all that money and spends it, that to me, that’s like a family making a living off of their credit cards at some point the cards all become due and we’re a credit card government today.

Can you speak about changes you’ve seen right here in Woodston?

Farms are growing and the number of people required for agriculture is decreasing, so small towns dry up my home town here, 50 years ago there were three grocery stores there, and a hardware store, an implement dealer and all of that, and today there’s no business left, there’s a post-office, there’s a rain elevator that’s open as needed, there’s a cooperative coffee shop where guys sit around and talk about how bad things are everyday and that’s it.  There’s not anything left of this town.  When the school left, it sort of took the identity away from that town and it’s happening to many of these towns.

Why is that Kansas in particular is known for it’s extreme conservatism?

I think the propaganda machine is cranked up so high. The talk radio programs (that I don’t listen to) are telling these people things that, they’re believing it without giving it any critical thought whatsoever.

So what changes, in your view, needs to happen to make life better in rural Kansas?

We need a new political movement that’s similar to the populist movement people that are willing to speak out and take positions and defend them and not buckle under, but the money is so powerful, everybody wonders how they can get into office without that money.

I think until we have some really good campaign finance reform, we’re facing the problem that we’re going to have the best politicians that the corporations can buy, it’s almost impossible for someone to run for office successfully today without taking some of that money and once you take it you have some obligation to it. I mean they’re expecting a payback, so, and that’s what happens.

Thomas Jefferson had quite a vision for this country and he thought that small farmers would be a key to keeping a democracy, what he didn’t envision was the technological changes that have taken place that have made the country that was 90% farmers is now 2% farmers. Jefferson was very fearful of what would happen if all the wealth in the population was concentrated in cities.

What Jefferson envisioned never happened, the small farm, the small self-sufficient farm died a century ago, people started to produce for a cash market and that changed everything, became part of a cash economy and the self-sufficient farmer just disappeared from the scene over a period of about two generations.

So Jefferson’s ideal also went by the wayside and whether it’s possible to have a government of the people, by the people and for the people with a large urban population. I think it s possible but we’ve got to get an education system that makes people aware of what’s happening.

Somebody said that you should look at George W’s boots and notice that they’ve never had any manure on them and that shows you that he really is a phony rancher, so I think that probably sums it up.  It’s all image, but it sells too.

Will your kids take over the family farm?

My wife and I between us have 5 children, there all grown and located from Florida to Oregon.  They’re not interested in farming and I wouldn’t encourage people today probably to look at farming as a way of life because it is difficult, it’s hard to make ends meet and extremely difficult for someone to get started. I wouldn’t be here today unless my father was a farmer and able to take over that operation and expand it.

Part of the problem in agriculture today is absentee ownership of land, this was one of the things the populists were concerned about and it concerns me to, I would favor a law that you couldn’t own farmland unless you yourself farmed it, and it would stop corporate agriculture and it would stop a lot of absentee ownership.

We will have more and more concentration in the ownership of land, I think, as this continues and I would go the other way, I would be like the populist, that you can’t own land for speculative purposes and you can’t own land and live in California and own a Kansas farm and expect someone else to look after it. If you farm land in Kansas, it’s your land.

We have been so taken over by the chemical companies and fertilizer, I mean, we’re working for these companies today.

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