Linus Solberg

How long have you guys been farming this land?

Well, my grandfather came from Norway when he was 21 years old, and my dad was born in 1912 and he lives with us. He’s still lives here on the farm with us. He farmed ‘til he was 82 years old and he moved down here from Ringsted, Iowa in 1940, and when I was a month old. So, we’ve been down here farming since 1940.

And how old’s your dad?

My dad will be 95, August 2nd.

Did he teach you how to farm?

I learned learned an awful lot from dad, yeah. He was very good with livestock and back in the days before they had all these confinements and you had to be very astute and intelligent on how to ventilate the old buildings and stuff like that. And I learned a lot from him, farming the land, but also, probably more on raising livestock.

In all the years that you’ve been farming, what kind of changes in agriculture have you seen?

There’s been a lot of changes. And when I started farming with him we had two-row combines. And we bought three row combine and he run one combine that was self-propelled and I run the other one that was power takeoff. And they were one of the first ones around of anybody that had two combines at the same time.

But, my dad liked to trade machinery. That was one of his hobbies, to trade machinery. And now we got a self-propelled combine and when him and I started expanding and new machinery come out, he wanted to trade combines every year, so we have a new combine every year, so everything was guaranteed on the combine. And a few people still do that today.

Those combines have no cabs, it was really pull-type combines and now they’re self-propelled and there’s no limit how big you can get them in wheat country and stuff like that. And even here when they combine beans and stuff, I think our biggest one was like a 24-row combine. But we’re back to just taking like 16 rows.

Aside from the hogs, what else do you raise?

We raise corn and soybeans and oats and a little hay. But basically, that’s the cash crops. And the oats is more for feeding our livestock and having straw for bedding and so mainly it’s just corn and soybeans that our cash crops our.

How come those are the cash crops?

Well, they pencil out to the most return per acre and right now, over the years, we’ve been living off of government subsidies. And you’d have protection if crops were cheap, and if you had disasters, hail or drought. And when we’re speaking now, things have really changed in the last two years; land just went up and corn and soybeans are not at an all time high, but one of the highest since I been alive. You could sell corn for four dollars a bushel because of ethanol plants, and beans, acres are short so they’re eight, nine bushels to the acre.

In ’73, I sold corn for three dollars a bushel and beans for ten dollars a bushel, but that happens once or twice in your lifetime and people are thinking now, this grain for fuel and not importing so much, that the prices will probably stay this high or at least near these record high.

Do you think the subsidy program is pretty good as it is?

No, but I guess, I’m different from other people. I think that they ought to quit subsidizing all these government checks and that’s why my cap is like this. We’re so used to looking in the mailbox for our free checks. I think that we ought to stop all these subsidies.

I think that farmers need some protection when there’s absolute crisis, whether it’s a drought or they’re flooded out or hailed out. That they need some protection there and if the government is subsidizing our crop insurance, then I think that would be enough.

But the way the subsidies are working right now, the biggest farms are squeezing out all the little farms. Some guys are getting as much as a million dollars and I think it’s like ten percent of farmers are getting 90 percent of the crop. And the 1996 Farm Bill, the most you could get was $40,000 and I just think that the government, whether it’s Tom Harkin or Chuck Grassley or the Bush Administration, I think they need to start cutting these subsidies back. I don’t care if they’re cotton farmers or if they’re rice farmers or if they can’t, all they want to do is we have to talk about competing on the world market.

We need to compete in the world market all the time. Well, if they can’t compete in the world market, then they need to do something else and plant something else.

If your son were a farmer, would you want him to keep in corn and soybeans?

Well, we employ a lot of kids from area school here, Amisberg and Ashterville. It’s Iowa Lakes Community College, and a lot of those kids, we employ two, three hundred of them over the years, and ask me what I think about farming in general. My son asked me when he was about 13 or 14 years old if there was room for him to come back and farm, or what I thought he should do. And I told him that I’d like to have, and I tell all those kids that come out here that, I’d like to have them to get in some other line of business. You can go to college and get a good education and now he’s a patent lawyer. But I didn’t suggest that. He done that on his own.

But I told him that I’d recommend, and I do this to a lot of boys that come out here and work, to go get a job doing something else. With this land prices and the price of commodities, it’s changed in the last 18 months. But up until then, you’re working your tail off, trying to make a living and it’s hard to buy more land and more machinery, on the kind of prices that we’ve been getting over the past 30, 40 years.

If you didn’t have some kind of a niche market yourself to make extra money, you were working a lot of hours. You had to love it and spinning your wheels. And if you go out and get a good job doing something else, you could come back and buy land and be a hobby farmer. Or you could own land, which is probably their goal in the first place. And they could get it quicker, by making more money in some other profession than trying to squeeze it out of farming.

Without the subsidies, could you make a living with corn and soybeans?

Well, I don’t think you could of ‘til the last 18 months or last two years. The problem is that you’d have to run that through livestock, whether it’s lambs or whether it’s cattle or whether it’s pigs. But that’s been one of the problems lately, is we have corporate hog buildings. And they’re competing with the independent pork producer. And our legislature and even Congress has let this happen, packers can own livestock.

And Teddy Roosevelt broke up all those corporations and packing plants way back in the early 1900s and they wrote some antitrust laws and they’re not being enforced. They got these high-priced lawyers in Washington, DC and they manipulate and construe the words that they only apply to the consumer. They don’t apply to the producer. And it’s just been a rat race trying to make a living and support yourself off the land.

So, I think maybe it would be hard for people in the last 20 years without any government checks at all, but you put a limit on it. You don’t just keep handing out, if the bigger you get, the bigger check you get, so it was just squeezing out the smaller ones all the time. The government payment should have had a limit on them and if you wanted to compete on the world market after that, fine.

But you just can’t add another thousand acres that they get a bigger government check.

Is the Farm Bill serving the American public or serving the farmer. Do you have an opinion about that?

Well, that’s a really tough question you just asked because as far as I’m concerned corporate America has wrote the Farm Bill. They haven’t went out and-and asked any individual independent farmers how the Farm Bill should be wrote. Who’s been writing the Farm Bill is ADM, Cargill and they get the national pork producers and national beef producers, the Farm Bureau, to jump onboard with them.

I think that it’s just like right now 25%of the hogs — actually packers shouldn’t ever own livestock. And they’re trying to just get through Congress that 25% of the hogs have to be bought on the open market. And they can’t even get that through.

And why? It’s because of these commodity groups I just told you about and because of corporate America. And I didn’t mention all of them, I just mentioned a couple of them. But you know, they’re writing the Farm Bill. It isn’t any farmer that’s writing that. You know, a small, independent farmers.

I think maybe it has helped the consumer a little bit because we have the cheapest food in the world. I think that’s one thing that they go back and, uh, but their quality of food and you know, importing of all kinds of meat and stuff from other countries. And then they have don’t tell where it’s coming from, no identification, “cool,” country of origin. It’s ridiculous.

Who’s writing the farm bill and who’s interest is it being written in?

Who’s writing the farm bill is corporations. The big corporations are writing the farm bill. It’s [Cargill], it’s ADM, it’s Tyson Foods. I mean, I’m not sure I want to vote for another Clinton because of that. Bill was from Arkansas. Tyson’s from Arkansas. They aren’t going to write any bill that is going to tighten up, the [stop] packers from owning pigs. This whole farm bill in the last 10, 15 years was wrote to plant fencerow to fencerow. And who’s that for? If you’re talking about conservation, you want to take land out of production. You want to control it. If General Motors makes too many cars, what do they do?

They start cutting back. But not the farm bill, no, that’s what the corporations don’t want. So, they want cheap feed for all their hogs. They want to have cheap feed, cheap grain, they want to overproduce so they can sell and make all kinds of money on exports. So, the farm bill wasn’t wrote at all for farmers, they got them planted fencerow to fencerow. And instead of just giving that money to the corporations, it’s like a spin to the farmers, so in turn for raising this cheap feed so the corporations are making millions of dollars. It’s all about money and about greed.

Major manufacturers are recycling their profits back into government.

Well, it’s crazy. All these politicians are bought off, and they’ll say, no, they’re not, it don’t affect them. But, you give them a bunch of money, and those people expect results from giving them all that money. I mean, you send them to Des Moines and you send them to Washington, D.C. They stand out here and talk about what they’re going to do, and what they want to do, and then they get in there and start drinking the water. And the Republican Party, the head of the House Ag Committee, or the head of the Senate Ag Committee says, well we’re not going to give you any money when you run again if you aren’t going to toe the line. And so what do they do? They ought to have term limits right off the bad. And these guys get in there and aren’t in there for life and be professional politicians.

What’s bugging you about hog confinement operations?

Well, Iowa is a big state. And I think that most of these hog confinements are in, like 20, probably 25 counties out of 99. I think they ought to be spread out over the whole state. I don’t think you can have a moratorium. I think hogs are good for Iowa. And if you went and bought fertilizer for 1000 acres, or 500 acres, or 100 acres, a commercial fertilizer costs about $100 an acre. And if you had hog buildings, you own hog buildings, and you got the manure off of that, it’s about $50 an acre, for the same analysis, like, $120, $90, $90. I think that one of the problems that we have in the State of Iowa today is, we’ve been the number one hog-producing state for forever, you know? For the last 50, 60 years. And we raised, like, 25 million hogs 40 years ago. And they were all furrowed here. And 20 years ago, we raised 25 million head of hogs.

And they were butchered here also and furrowed here. Probably 20 years ago, five or ten percent of the hogs come in from Missouri, Minnesota feeder pigs, and right close here, but still 90% of the hogs are feral in here. Today, we got a problem with feeding out like, 35 million hogs, actually, even over that, in the State of Iowa. And we are only furrowing, like, 15 to 18 million hogs in the State of Iowa. So, we’re importing 20 million hogs into the state of Iowa. And they got diseases just like kids, when they go to kindergarten or anything else. They’re bringing them in from Canada. And Illinois, and Missouri, and Nebraska, and all the Minnesota, all the states around us. And so, we’re just deluged with swine diseases, and it’s so hard. The corporations don’t care, because they’re bringing in pigs that already 12, 20, 40 pounds. But if you’re trying to furrow sows, and they abort on you or you can’t get them settled, or they get baby pig diseases like [purrs] and stuff like that, it just runs all the independent producers out.

They’ve been trying some of the real good aggressive Democrats and a couple of Republicans are trying to do something about that in the State of Iowa in the Legislature, to put more distance between furrowing units and that’s what has to happen. Because if a young farmer — and we haven’t talked about that — is going to get started, what a great opportunity for him to have to be more labor-intense and be able to furrow feral pigs for people.

And he just can’t, because there are so many diseases coming in from all over — North Carolina, and all these other states.

What’s your experience dealing with these confinement operations?

If you got individuals — and there’s very few of them putting them up — if you’ve got individuals putting them up, they try to be good neighbors. But I got to tell you that that isn’t who owns the pigs in Iowa, anymore. It’s the corporations. We’re back to Smithfield, Joe [Luder], Tyson, and a lot of big feed companies, and so they don’t care if they’re good neighbors or not. They just plot them down anywhere they want to, and the state legislature and [Wendell, uh, Murphy] come up here and help write legislation from North Carolina and the Iowa Legislature. And [Teri Brandstead], and those people down there went along with it without doing any research at all. And our county has got a good neighbor policy, and you have to be a half a mile from any residence. And it’s worked pretty good, basically in our county. Thank God for the pork producers we had in this state — meaning, our county — they went along with it. The supervisors, the zoning board went along with it. And we’re the only county in the state that has done that, and somebody can come in there and take them to court, or whatever, and still put something. But most of the people have abided by that. We’ve only had two or three instances that they haven’t. And that had protected the residents from having buildings right on top of them. Because I got to tell you, it’s still legal to spread manure if you’re property line or your house is two feet or three feet from somebody else’s. They can spread manure two feet from your house. The legislature does not try to fix that. If you’ve got a well across the road, they can spread manure right on top of the well. It’s just ridiculous.

And our legislature is bought off by the commodity groups, and corporate America, and the farm bill, and you know, stop, and they don’t want to have any crack in the door? All I’m trying to do is make people hogs-friendly. And they’re people-friendly. And that has been my activist role, I guess, is we need hogs in Iowa but there needs to be some common sense, and there isn’t any common sense in Des Moines. And there isn’t any common sense by these commodity groups.

Do you have anything to say about the chemicals getting into the groundwater, just environmentally? What kinds of risks are involved with these operations?

Well, I think there’s a problem with these hog buildings, environmentally. Everybody wants to look the other way. We used to have a whole bunch of lagoons in the State of Iowa, and [Combast] and the other guy from Texas, they passed a law that you could get $400,000 to put up blue tubes. Big manure storage, they’re very good. They need to have a roof on them, some kind of a top on them, which would not cost that much.

So, they would be more people-friendly. But, these lagoons, they leaked. I mean, they knew they leaked when you got frost, like we do here, and it freezes, and then the frost goes out in the spring. The other thing that’s interesting is, more these buildings are being put up, with the manure stored right underneath the pigs. And it’s not real healthy for the pigs to be living right above these big manure pits, that they sit there and ferment for a year and stink like the dickens. But, anyway, when they put those in the ground, eight, ten feet, they have to tile around them. Well, somewhere tile has to run to other tile, and either has to get in a lake drainage district, or a creek drainage district, or a river drainage district. One thing about [Jeff Vonk], our old DNR guy, he thought that they ought to watch how many they have into a drainage district. For a river, even. I can’t think of the right word.

A watershed?

A watershed. Yeah, we need to have so many — only so many of them in a watershed. So, nitrogen, nitrates, and phosphorous isn’t getting into them. But the reason I’m telling you this is that I had a confinement — and we had it tile around it — and, uh, it was in there for about six years. And we could smell sewage coming up in our garage, and it was run out in a tile out in a field.

And every once in a while, after rain or something, we could smell it. One night I just laid awake at night wondering what in the world we’d hooked up wrong in our new house that we’d built. And finally one night, I was laying there and I decided, you know, we need to cut that tile up on our slatted building, our confinement shed. And we cut that, and after six years, was half full, six-inch tile that was half full of manure. So we cut that, and that was the end of it. So this cement, it isn’t if it’ll break, it’s just a matter of when they’ll crack and leak.

What should average citizens do?

Boy, I wish I knew. That is a tough question. One of the problems is, if you decide you’re going to run for office, it’s money. And if you’ve been like me, an activist, I’m not sure I have a lot of friends. It would be very hard to get elected. One of the things that comes to my mind is that in the State of Iowa, they’re having all kinds of trouble — different places in the State of Iowa — with hog buildings, and we tried to get the DNR to get the pork producers. So, all of us could get together and band together and just have a meeting and talk about stuff like that.

And we got stopped at every road block, that we couldn’t find out what the rest, they wanted to conquer and divide us. That’s what it ended up to be. And then, the good Farm Bureau’s spin is to label you. You’re a terrorist, or you’re a radical, or whatever. And that’s what they do down at the legislature. They can go in there and just label you, if you’re trying to make the world better, or the state better, or your community better. If they don’t like it, corporate America’s got all kinds of money. It’s all about money. And they can throw that around. And the people just don’t have a voice anymore. And it’s just so hard to get people together. And another thing, there’s a lot of apathy out here, you know? A lot of people are struggling to make a living. The husband works, the wife works, they got kids in lots of activities. They don’t even know some of these issues are going on.

What’s the future for the small farm?

If they can get into some kind of niche marketing to make a living, but are they making a lot of money? Or, are they just making a living to scrape by, to live on a farm. Something needs to be done. And you get these powerful Senators in Congress, like [Grassley] and [Harkin] and these guys, they know what needs to be done, stop packing plants from owning livestock.

Go back to the independent farmer. I guess I’ve been a pessimist. I don’t see a lot of future in it, except that right now corn prices are high, soy bean prices are high, and if that can keep a lot of people, they need to make money. Not the corporations because of subsidies. The farmer needs to make money, and with these ethanol and biodiesel popping up, there’s no middle man. The corporation isn’t in there. So, I think that’s good. That gives some optimism towards the small farmer. If I took you up and down the road here, there’s so many farm places that were here that are all gone now, and there are some real, good, sharp farmers that are farming, but they’re getting older all the time. And, you know, to bring young farmers in, and it’s tough. Because land’s so high machinery is high, inputs are high, cash rent’s high. It’s hard for them to get started.

Are there fewer people out here farming?

There’s a lot of kids that worked for me that went home and did very successful farming/farmers. But it seems to me like most of those had help either from their dad, or from an uncle, or something, to get them started.

I just wanted to quote my, uh, my son, that I told him that there was an easier way than working 24 hours a day, or like, 14 hours a day, 7 days a week. If you go to town or other places, usually you’ll get the weekends off. And holidays off. And if you’re farming and got livestock, milking cows, [flocking] pigs, there’s a lot of labor-intense stuff. And you don’t have those days off. It’s hard to get away. Especially, it affects wives, probably more than men.

The farm bill hasn’t been good for farming communities?

They’ve been terrible. They’ve been a disaster. They’ve been good for corporation America. They haven’t been, you know, they need to quit giving all this money to all the big farms, and they need to go back to the 1990′s -1996 farm bill. Back in the ’60s and ’70s, when prices went high, you took land out of production. [Earl Botsun], we took land out of production to save it for future generations. And then, the corporations got in there to help write the farm bill, and I mean, they were called at the last minute at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. Should we do this? Should we do that? With Bob Dole. And that is just ridiculous, because they wrote the farm bill, and it hasn’t helped farmers at all.

Well, I don’t want to say, helped at all. It’s helped small — that’s one of the reasons the farm bill, we have less and less people out in the farm. And they need to quit giving millions of dollars to the biggest farmers.

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