Teresa Griffin

What do you do here?

I run a farm, raise cattle, sheep, wheat, and milo. My family has been ranching and farming for about 5 or 6 generations.

What is the difference between blue and red states?

I think a lot of it is how you were raised, where you were raised, where you come from.  We were raised here for generations, did the same thing for generations, we have a way of looking at things.

I have often wondered why people from California and the blue states think the way they do, but I think it’s the way they were raised and we lack some understanding between us.

I think we have a lot of the same goals, what we want to get out of life for ourselves and for our neighbors. It’s just that we think we’re the only ones who know how to get there, that we’re the only ones who now how.

How do you think the two perspectives can become less polarized?

I think that greater communication between blue and red states, or urban and rural. There needs to be a better communication, there needs to be less assumption of what goes on because I have my assumptions about urban areas and I’m sure they’re not all true and I am absolutely sure that the assumptions of the urban people about our rural area, I know that those aren’t true because I’ve talked to several and they really don’t have much understanding about what goes on out here and what we do.

And my sister, well, she lives in a big city now and she gets asked lots of questions about cowboys and Indians and if you have cars and don’t realize that we buy stuff on the internet and sell things that way and you have to be pretty progressive to stay in business.

What changes have affected people here?

Your bottom line is a lot tighter than it used to be.  Your grandpa could have bought a piece of land and a few years later paid for it just by growing crops off that land.  And you’re not going to be able to do that now.  You’re not going to be able to buy a piece of land and pay for it with that land.  You’re going to have to have another source of income.  Once it’s paid for you’re not going to have a note against it and the interest against it, then it’s going to be closer to self-supporting.

Do you ever feel like the deck is stacked against you?

All the time, all the time.  Anytime you think you’re getting ahead, something else comes up, whether it’s weather change or government policy or them blue-state people thinking we don’t know what we’re doing and they’re going to come out and save us.  I think lobbyists just have more disposable income to get what they want done and where we are out here and we barely have time to get done what we have to do to exist and what we have left over feeds the family and we don’t have the resources to show our side of the story.

Are the crops a problem?

In some ways that’s a worry but in some ways it doesn’t bother me because in the long run they’re trying to help us make money.  They may not go about it they way we want to, but at least I feel like we’re coming from the same side, whereas some of the urban people, they’re trying to send everything back to grass and we all need to move to town and we shouldn’t fence things in and we got to keep cows out of the water. They don’t want cows to walk in a creek or down into the ponds and so to get at some of the federal funding you have to fence off all of the waterways and anyplace that water runs.

California mountain lion story. Like I heard in California a lady was jogging and a mountain lion killed her and so they set up a benefit fund for her children, well someone else set up a benefit fund for the cubs of the mountain lion that got killed and the cubs got more money than the children did.

That was big news here.  That was all the news releases and stuff that we read was that the cubs got a much bigger trust fund set up for them than the children of the jogger.

And we’ve heard lots of stories from California. There seems to be quite unique people in California like there’s these rats or mice or something that they thought were endangered, and so, farmers weren’t allowed to disc or till the soil in certain places because that was the natural habitat of these rats and so when natural things occur that the naturalists want like lightening and fires they get all upset because things burn and then when a farmer goes out and starts dicing his property to save his house he gets arrested and thrown in jail because he diced up the natural habitat of these rats.

How did you vote last time?

Republican.

You voted for George Bush?

Absolutely.  And I voted for him the first time and I voted for his dad and I voted for Bob Dole because I feel that all the Republicans from our area are very approachable. I’ve sat down in Bob Dole’s office in Washington DC over soda pop and cookies, discussed things. I’ve seen and met with Jerry Moran and Pat Roberts, and all of our representatives are very approachable and very easy to talk to. They understand my point of view, they come out here, they were raised here, and they know where we’re from and what we need.

Most, but not all, because I have voted for a democrat, maybe once, but for the majority the democrats want to tell us how to do things because we are not capable of figuring it for ourselves, whereas the republicans want to enable us to take care of ourselves.

Seems like it is harder for farmers to get by these days.

Yeah and it’s getting more so all the time, especially lately with the crisis in Iraq, oil prices have went up which helps a lot of the neighbors who have oil wells but those of us who don’t are paying more for fertilizer, we’re paying more for fuel, so a lot of our inputs are going way up, but the price we’re getting for our commodities, for our wheat and our cattle, haven’t changed near as drastically, so we always feel like we’re scrambling to lower our input costs.  You can do better marketing, you can try innovative ways to make money doing different stuff but you usually just end up wasting your time that could be spent doing something else Friends I have that live in town that don’t pay much taxes, they’ll show me their pay-stubs from work and throw a fit, they can’t wait till they get that tax refund and I say tax refund, what’s that?

We’ve talked with many farmers here in Kansas who think there’s a lot of influence peddling in government, do you?

Oh I don’t know if there’s any more corruption than there ever has been, but there’s always been too much corruption, you know if people would just be honest and go do an honest job and do the job they’re supposed to do then we wouldn’t have to have lobbyists and we wouldn’t have to have police and we wouldn’t have to have all kinds of things.  But people are what they are and we just have to try to keep the ones that we can keep honest, the best we can.

And so when I see something in Washington that I don’t like, that I don’t think is going to benefit the rural areas of Kansas, I’m not afraid to call, I’ll call and talk to my congressman.  I’ve been to Washington DC, I’ve visited with them, I’ve even visited with your congressman.

If you don’t take an active position, if you don’t call and make your voice heard then I better not see you down at the coffee shop complaining because you can’t get anything done down there complaining about things you got to go out and you got to take care of it.

We see a lot of abandoned farmhouses in Kansas… can speak more about the changes you’ve seen?

You can just look down the road here and there used to be a family farm with 5 to 10 kids on every quarter section and now there might be one family farm with two or three kids.  Between here and 10 miles away y to town I can only think only think one farm that has kids.  Now if you go in the other direction there might be one or two more, but before there was someone very half a mile.

We used to have a school, in Natoma, a school six miles down the road at Paradise and a school six miles down the road from there at Waldo and each school averaged about 20 kids per class or more and eventually Waldo closed and joined with Paradise, then Paradise closed and joined with Natoma, and now all three of them together all of those kids attend Natoma, and we average about 15 kids per class.

The majority of farmers are older, their kids have left, had to go to the city to find a job, to raise their kids and so they haven’t come back and when they do come back it’s to retire.  We don’t necessarily need people from the big city to move out and bring their big city ways with them; we need the rural people who were raised here to move back home.  We need jobs for them.

Given the shaft toward very large farms, often corporate-owned farms, what need to happened to help smaller, family farms?

The corporate thing is a really complicated issue because you know back in the fifties when there was the larger middle class and everybody was comfortable everyone was happy to come to their little job and come to their little house and then they started seeing that the corporation was making am little more money than them and then they to keep up with their neighbors and they want another car and they want a bigger house, so “let’s make the corporation pay us more, they need to give us bigger dividends, we need more healthcare, we need something else…”

I’ve always had trouble understanding how someone could get paid several hundred thousand dollars a year for sitting in an office, when I’m out here in the snow and the manure and the heat and the bugs and everything else and it’s up to my own judgment how much I make and I’m also at the mercy of the markets and everything else, so life just isn’t fair and we just got too keep working together to work things out it’s not fair that people live in million dollar houses, one or two people have 20 bedrooms in a house.  It’s not right but I don’t think it’s up to me to take that away from them if they’ve earned it.

People look and say the corporations have too much power and have too much money and say we’re going to pass this law and that all trickles down and because I’m a business owner, it effects me the same as a billion dollar, trillion dollar corporation and I don’t think that’s right so that’s why a lot of Republicans and the rural communities end up fighting for the corporations, it’s because the laws effect us the same way they do them.  We’re not so much fighting for them as trying to keep our heads above water.

I’ve spent the last 20 years fighting stuff fighting for personal property rights, fighting for tax relief for farmers, fighting for better income.  I’m tired, and I’m only 40.

Are your kids going to farm?

I don’t know.  I’m not going to push them to.  I’m not going to say you know, the farm’s here and if you don’t take it over you’re going to let down six generations. I’m not going to do that to them because this is a hard way of life.  You know we’ve given up everything for this farm.  We’ve given up fancy trips, and going and doing things and taking time off as a family, we’ve had two vacations in the last 20 years and a year ago my husband gave his life for this farm in a cattle-feeding accident, so the boys and I have given everything for this, so I just don’t know if I’m ready to give everything else.

Define a liberal.

Well, we like to use it like a four-letter word around here and I’m sure you’ve run across that before too.  You know in a rural area it’s just kind of a catch-all phrase that going to catch anybody that disagrees with you and does not see things your way.

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