The 1970s often are viewed as a decade of
misplaced expectations.
Who can blame lenders for putting their money
to work in such productive ways?
And who can blame farmers for trying to become
more competitive?
Yet the sad truth is that agriculture, like
any endeavor, will always have some who fail.
And their numbers were magnified during the
farm crisis.
Mark Pearson: There were periods in the 80s
where nothing worked.
I mean, if it was cattle they weren't making
any money.
The hogs weren't making any money.
Hogs were disastrously low in 1980.
Wheat, corn and beans were disastrously low
in the marketplace.
Everything at some points weren't working,
everything that we produced was at a loss.
You can't do that for very long.
Paul Lasley: And I think that was one of the
problems we had in the 1980s is we were slow
to respond because of resistance that some
of these people deserved to fail because after
all they were, they were high rollers, they
were land hogs, they were big wheels, they
got too big for their britches.
I've heard all of those stories and indeed
there was some of that.
But for the vast majority of people they were
just like you and I, they were trying to make
a living, they did the best, made the best
decisions they could based on the advice they
got.
The farm crisis of the 1980s accelerated a
long established trend of farmers leaving
the land and farms being consolidated.
In 1935 the number of farms in the U.S. reached
an all-time high of 6.8 million.
By 1990 there were only 2.1 million farms.
Mike Rossman: There has been a rapid increase
in the number of acres operated by a single
farm enterprise.
That trend toward very large farms was initiated
during the 1980s and it continues unabated
up to the present day.
Now, there is a concurrent, ongoing trend
also for the development of small family farming
enterprises, mostly organic, that is producing
many new farm people.
So we would probably not have these changes
had not the farm crisis of the 80s ushered
in some of the shifts in the demographics
of farming.
