ORISKA, N.D. -- As harvest winds down for another year, the stark landscape here turns even more desolate. Most of the fields have been shorn of their wheat and barley. Only the soybeans and the sunflowers, their yellow petals already fallen and their black seed heads drooping, remain to be combed from the ground.
Allen Kunze rushed to harvest his final rows of crops, much as one Kunze or another has done since 1898, when President McKinley deeded 160 acres of this unforgiving land to a German immigrant homesteader named Joseph Kunze.
This, though, would be the last harvest.
With the work done, an auctioneer sold off Kunze's farm equipment, and he became yet another farmer to bail out.
"I'm done fighting," Kunze said.
To farm is to fight, of course -- the weather, the competition, the diseases that can wipe out an entire season's work.
But this year, farmers are facing another obstacle, insurmountable to many: the collapse of international markets.
With half of U.S. grain sold abroad -- 40 percent to Asia -- economic crises in countries such as Japan, Russia and Brazil have sharply reduced demand.
Commodity
prices, as a result, have plummeted. Farmers in some cases are getting less for their crops than it costs to produce them. The price of wheat here, for example, dropped as low as $2.40 a bushel this year, well below the $4.50 economists estimate it cost to produce it.
While farmers across the country are suffering, the crisis is particularly severe in North Dakota because of an added stroke of bad luck -- several years of wet weather and crop diseases that have left many of the state's 30,000 farmers with reduced yields.
The numbers are so grim as to be nearly unbelievable: Farm income in the state has crashed 98 percent, from $764 million in 1996 to $15 million last year.
"We're running into some very serious problems," said Scott Stofferahn, executive director of the federal Farm Service Agency in North Dakota. "It's the worst I've ever seen."
Stofferahn estimates that more than 3,500 North Dakota farmers may quit after this year because they won't be able to pay off their loans and thus could be denied money for next year's crops.
As a result, the farm auction to sell off equipment, and sometimes the land itself, has become a commonplace ritual in communities like this. It is a somber yet oddly festive affair, much like another event that similarly draws a gathering of friends and relatives during a difficult time.
"A wake is about what it is," said Tony Heinze, Kunze's auctioneer. "All the neighbors will show up. They'll talk farming. Lunch will be served."
Heinze has conducted about 70 auctions this year, twice his average. Earlier this year, when farmers would normally return to their warming fields to plant a new season of crops, many instead were getting out.
"This spring," Heinze said, "a close neighbor of mine asked me, 'Well, how many funerals do you have scheduled?' "
Many of the farmers in trouble today survived the crisis of the 1980s -- when farm foreclosures and bankruptcies led to widespread despair, even suicide and murder in some cases -- only to succumb to this year's crunch.
This time around, though, farmers are opting to get out before they lose everything.
"We weren't going to get to the point where we had to sell our land," Kunze said as he drove past his family's original homestead one recent day.
On this land, his father was born. And there, Kunze pointed to a pond, is where a brother drowned at the age of 2. After his mother died this summer, they found a trunk in which she had kept the clothes that the toddler was wearing that spring day 52 years ago.
Kunze and his wife, Marilyn, will continue to live on the farm but rent some of the land to other farmers. Those rent payments should cover the mortgages he has taken out on various parcels over the years.
He also plans to put some land in a federal conservation program that pays farmers to turn fields into grasslands or wildlife refuges. He will turn to trucking full time, having started a small side business 15 years ago of hauling livestock.
Friendly yet taciturn, Kunze maintained a mostly stoic front even as his chosen way of life slipped from his grasp.
"I struggled for the last six, seven years," Kunze said. "You're always thinking next year will be better.
"I should have quit a couple years ago. But it gets in your blood or whatever. You got to get over that psychologically.
"There's life after farming," he said. "It's hard to explain to a nonfarming person. I was born into it. I helped my dad on the farm since the day I could walk."
Now, though, the love that has sustained him through 27 years of farming is tempered by the daily reminders of the intense financial pressures that have forced him out.
On a recent day, when the ground was too wet to harvest, Kunze went into town to run errands. At the farm supply store in Valley City, he chatted with other farmers similarly idled by the weather and pessimistic about the future of their livelihood.
Leaving, Kunze was called in by a store manager for a closed-door talk. It turns out he is several weeks late on a $10,000 bill for seeds.
His accountant, Arlie Braunberger, had more bad news.
Even if his auction netted the expected $89,000 to $90,000 -- which Kunze said would go straight to the bank to pay off loans -- he still faces taxes on that gain. Braunberger estimates Kunze could end up owing as much as $22,000 in taxes.
"I still have some land that hasn't been mortgaged," Kunze mused later.
The constant scrounging for money has consumed much of his energy in recent years.
"Having to work up a budget and try to convince your bank to let you farm another year," he said, "I won't miss that."
He hopes to clear his debts next year -- some creditors have accepted installment payments or agreed to forgive some finance charges.
Still, the loss of one more farmer is a loss for the community. It's hard to escape the undercurrent of despair that pervades these small towns.
Many farmers don't talk openly about their financial problems. Rumors circulate, of course, but they're passed in low voices and with averted eyes, the way people used to speak about cancer.
"A farmer is proud," said Ray Berntson, who farms with his son Mike in the Valley City area. "It's taken me five years to admit things are not going good on the farm.
"Everyone thinks they're a failure if they're not making money. But I don't think anyone is making money now."
"It's pretty desperate out there. A lot of farmers have lost hope," said Dave Meyer, an implement dealer in Lisbon, N.D., who has seen his sales drop by 20 percent to 30 percent in the past two years.
"We can't afford to lose any more farmers. In the last 10 years, I'm doing business with half the number of customers I used to have."
Some of his potential customers are going instead to the auctions, where equipment can sometimes be had at fire sale prices.
"This spring, there would be three, four, five auction sales a day," Meyer said. "There have been as many as 12 a day. The market has become flooded with machinery."
In the 1980s, farmers held rallies and staged protests to capture the attention of the rest of the country. Entertainers such as Willie Nelson organized concerts to raise money for the beleaguered farmers.
This year, there have been a few isolated outbursts. Some
Northern Plains farmers blockaded Canadian trucks and trains to prevent them from bringing competing imports into the United States.
The acts have been mostly symbolic, though, an isolated cry barely heard in a once agrarian country where now just 3 percent of the population still farms.
"People think their food comes from a grocery store," said Jerry Burns, who got out of farming during the '80s crisis and was hired to work on Kunze's farm.
Struggling farmers will benefit from the $6 billion in emergency farm relief approved by Congress recently, but some say even that won't do much to change the real problem: Prices are simply too low.
"As things are right now, you could have a bumper crop," Kunze said, "and still go broke."
As part of the sweeping movement toward deregulation, Congress passed the so-called "Freedom to Farm" bill in 1996 to begin weaning farmers off the price supports that used to provide protection from market vagaries.
"The concept is to let the market decide who survives," said Andrew Swenson, an agricultural economist with the North Dakota State University Extension Service. "That's fine if you have a level playing field.
"But you have other countries, like the European Economic Community, that do subsidize their farmers, so it's very difficult for Americans to compete against that on the export market.
"Europe has taken the view that they believe having farms in the countryside is valuable," he said. "If we don't think that's a value, so be it. Everybody pays lip service to family farms, but I don't know how much we put that out as a goal for the country."
The ripple effects of farmers' troubles have been quickly felt in North Dakota, where 40 percent of the economy comes from agriculture. Some retail stores have closed as the farmers that they depend on as customers find themselves with little extra cash.
"In parts of North Dakota, it's already too late," Swenson said of the drain created by the loss of farms. "You have whole townships with no school-age children. There are only one or two farms left."
The week before last, another farm disappeared as auctioneer Heinze completed his now well-practiced routine, this time for the equipment that Kunze had accumulated over a lifetime of farming. Kunze made about $89,000.
For Heinze, though the increase in his business is welcome, sometimes the auctions hit close to home.
Heinze is Kunze's cousin. Both descend from the Kunze siblings who left their native Germany in the 19th century to farm this land.
The Kunze family tradition is to hand the original homestead down to the oldest son to farm. But though Kunze is keeping the land, the tradition of farming it ends now, after four generations.
"My boy is 20. I asked him if he wanted to farm," Kunze said. "And he said, 'Dad, are you crazy?' "
Pub Date: 11/08/98