Fighting for Farmers

Abstract

Like many young North Dakotans, Sarah Vogel left her very rural home state in 1967 in search of new opportunities and the excitement of life in the big city. As Vogel points out, the “rather sad joke” was true: “North Dakota's greatest export was its young people” (19). And like a substantial portion of those human exports, after a few years of pursuing her dreams and climbing career ladders Vogel found herself returning to the Northern Plains, joining the family business, and even (briefly) moving into her parents' basement.But if most North Dakotans' family business was farming, the Vogel family business was fighting for farmers legally and politically. Sarah's grandfather, Frank A. Vogel, was a state tax commissioner, manager of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota (created in 1919 to increase access to credit in order to promote agriculture and commerce in the state), and chief political adviser to Governor William Langer. Her father, Robert Vogel, was a state's attorney during Sarah's childhood, and later served on the North Dakota Supreme Court. Sarah eagerly fled the very small world of North Dakota law and politics after graduating from the University of North Dakota in 1967, attending law school at New York University and launching a career at the Federal Trade Commission. But sympathy for the plight of struggling farmers ultimately brought her back to her home state. She sacrificed her home and career to save North Dakota farmers during the 1980s Farm Crisis. In her riveting memoir The Farmer's Lawyer, Vogel vividly recounts her efforts as a young, broke single mother to defend North Dakota farmers, which she ultimately transformed into a massive class action lawsuit that protected 240,000 family farms from foreclosure nationwide.The Farmer's Lawyer is structured like a legal thriller in the style of a John Grisham novel (indeed, Grisham commented on a draft of Vogel's manuscript).1 It recounts Vogel's legal battle to prevent the federal government from foreclosing on thousands of family farms in North Dakota at the height of the 1980s Farm Crisis. Like her clients, the young single mother found herself drowning in debt and facing foreclosure as she built a national class action lawsuit against the Ronald Reagan administration's Department of Justice. She describes the struggles of individual farmers facing the loss of their livelihoods and homes at the hands of the government agency created to help them in hard times. She shares her personal economic failings and her professional stumbles as she struggled to build her first case—a legal battle with profound implications for struggling family farmers across the country.Throughout her tale of fighting the power of the federal government on behalf of farmers, Vogel intersperses personal memories that reveal why she took on and persisted in this David versus Goliath effort. Vogel's father and grandfather raised her to be sympathetic to the plight of North Dakota farmers. Both men were die-hard Nonpartisan Leaguers—indeed, Vogel calls it her family's religion (17). She also interjects helpful brief histories of farm policy in North Dakota. The Nonpartisan League (NPL) was a progressive movement that sought to protect farmers' interests against the economic and political dominance of railroads, Minnesota millers, and other business interests. The NPL became a dominant force in the Northern Plains, and particularly North Dakota, during and following World War I. Under its influence, North Dakota established the nation's only state-owned flour mill (offered as an alternative to Minneapolis millers whom NPLers accused of undervaluing North Dakota wheat) and the state bank Vogel's grandfather managed. And as the Dust Bowl struck in the 1930s, NPLers fought to defend farmers against land foreclosures and embraced federal New Deal policies that aimed to help those farmers.Sarah Vogel recalls growing up surrounded by “the lessons of the 1930s,” believing that the government had a responsibility to defend farmers' land and other property from foreclosure, and “that lenders who cracked down on farmers during tough times were on the wrong side” (17). Those lessons would transform her professional and personal trajectory, drawing her away from a promising career in federal service in the nation's capital to enter private practice back in North Dakota in the midst of a new farm crisis in the early 1980s, representing farmers who couldn't afford to pay her.The farmers who sought Sarah Vogel's help faced losing land or livestock due to hardships compounded by the loan policies of the Farmers Home Administration (FmHA). FmHA's roots lay in the New Deal's Resettlement Administration (soon rebranded the Farm Security Administration). FmHA provided farm and housing loans to low-income farmers and rural residents who could not qualify for credit from private lenders. According to Vogel, the original loan programs in the 1930s provided hands-on supervision and advice to borrowers about effective management of their crops, livestock, and home production. County supervisors helped farmers develop farming and repayment plans. If a farmer became delinquent on loan repayment, the supervisor would examine the reasons for the delinquency. In cases of drought, flood, or other hardships, the supervisor could choose to carry the loan over until the next crop came in, or to rewrite the loan, folding the missed payments into a new loan. Vogel suggests that these county supervisors were inclined to be lenient toward farmers, working with them to help them get back on their feet (53–54).By the 1970s, Vogel argues, those paternalistic relations between county supervisor and borrowers had faded, but FmHA regulations and procedures persisted in granting county supervisors much broader powers over borrowers' finances than were typical in private commercial lending. As agricultural land prices skyrocketed in the 1970s, FmHA enabled young farmers to get started by providing low-interest loans. But the combination of paternalistic reach and supervisors' increasingly bureaucratic management styles proved dangerous to farmers when hardships struck in the early 1980s. Each year there were farmers who were late or overdue on payments, often due to poor weather. FmHA's delinquency rate rose as more and more farmers struggled in the early 1980s.Vogel argues that the Reagan administration contributed significantly to the growing Farm Crisis by instituting massive budget cuts to the US Department of Agriculture, including FmHA. In its August 1981 Administrative Notice 580, FmHA set goals for each state director to reduce their delinquencies by about 23 percent within seven months. Farmers who were behind on their loan payments could not produce more crops or livestock in winter 1982 to meet the March 31 deadline (62). Farmers had borrowed from FmHA because they faced high land prices, low sale prices, and natural disasters. They now found themselves unable to meet their financial obligations to FmHA—and many who managed to find resources to pay sped-up repayment schedules on their loans were left with no money for food and other essentials, contrary to FmHA policy. Facing threats of foreclosure from the lender of last resort, they had nowhere else to turn. They turned to Sarah Vogel.For example, young farmers Don and Diane McCabe borrowed money from FmHA in 1977 so that they could establish a farmstead near her aging father. FmHA allowed them funds to purchase 320 acres at the decade's high land prices, plus operating expenses such as seed and feed. But FmHA refused to lend them money to construct a pole barn to shelter their cows. As a result, seven froze in one night during their first winter. Natural disasters the next three years—hail in 1978 and drought in 1979 and 1980—prevented them from growing sufficient feed for their cattle. As their cows aged they produced less milk, but the FmHA county director would not let them buy younger cows nor keep heifer calves to raise to milking age. Their herd dropped from fifty-two to twenty-seven, leaving the McCabes unable to produce enough milk to repay their loans. FmHA took 50 percent of their dairy income, leaving them struggling to afford feed and electricity to milk their cows, and nothing for family living expenses. They took out a private bank loan to meet their basic expenses, which took the other half of their milk income. They did not know that they were entitled to prioritize family living expenses, nor that they were entitled to apply for a deferral in loan payments due to circumstances beyond their control. The FmHA office pressured them to sell their land and cows. The McCabes kept their herd alive by cutting grass in ditches and exchanging work with neighbors for hay, but they had nothing left to feed themselves, let alone pay a lawyer. Yet their courage inspired Vogel to persist through her own poverty.Throughout The Farmer's Lawyer Vogel explores tensions and challenges related to her unique status as both an insider and an outsider. She had grown up in North Dakota, and her family's roots in the state dated back to about 1909. But her father was an attorney and her grandfather a politician and bank manager; their family had lived in town. As Vogel observes about some of her first clients, “We spoke different languages. While they'd been learning about agriculture and self-reliance since they were young, I'd been studying political science, history, and English, and my family got all our food from the grocery store. I knew more about conditions for farmers during the 1930s than I did about what farmers were facing in the early '80s” (51). Vogel learned about agriculture from her clients; she taught herself legal bases for challenging the FmHA's foreclosures and loan accelerations through frantic legal research. The plight of her lead plaintiffs—whom the judge in her case dubbed the North Dakota Nine—stood in for 8,400 farmers in North Dakota, and eventually 240,000 nationwide in the lawsuit that became known as Coleman v. Block.Vogel's memoir offers important insights into the realities of the 1980s Farm Crisis. The Farmer's Lawyer paints an intimate portrait of the Farm Crisis by recounting in detail the struggles of farming families that became her clients. Through their stories, Vogel reveals the conjunction of factors contributing to that crisis: droughts, hailstorms, rising land and production costs, and falling agricultural prices. She details their individual strategies to survive in the face of the worst conditions since the Dust Bowl.Vogel clients Russel and Anna Mae Folmer had initially been a success story. FmHA loans enabled them to start out in the 1950s, and thanks to their hard work and high prices for agricultural products, they were able to move their growing family from a three-room shack into a “real” house and pay off their FmHA loans by the early 1970s. Russel even won a county Soil Conservation Award. But new loans taken in 1978 to modernize the dairy proved disastrous, because those modernization efforts were followed by three years of drought: “‘In '79, I didn't even take the combine out of the shed,’ Russel said” (106). Meanwhile, milk prices dropped. Their income decreased due to the cost-price squeeze all farmers faced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, leaving them unable to repay their debts. Meanwhile, ranching families in western North Dakota and Montana faced a similar collision of rising costs, falling prices, and natural disasters that destroyed their cattle or hogs. FmHA policies and procedures exacerbated these natural and economic disasters.Perhaps the greatest contribution The Farmer's Lawyer makes to scholarship on the Farm Crisis is what Vogel's cases reveal about the ways that government policies and practices helped transform the intersection of high costs, low prices, and weather challenges into a nationwide Farm Crisis. Vogel uncovers the disastrous effects of federal policies that aggravated those conditions and undermined farmers' survival strategies. Through the legal arguments and individual narratives she recounts in this book, Vogel makes a compelling case that the US Department of Agriculture's budget cuts and FmHA administrators' failure to fairly respond to farmers' struggles to repay loans amid mounting hardships substantially worsened those struggles. Indeed, The Farmer's Lawyer points to federal policy and state and local bureaucratic failures as key causes of the growing Farm Crisis. Vogel argues that Administrative Notice 580—the so-called Foreclosure Quota Memo, which directed state FmHA offices to significantly reduce the number of delinquent loans on their books in winter 1981–82—“triggered the '80s farm crisis in the same way the stock market crash in 1929 triggered the Great Depression” (63).Vogel also demonstrates that harmful and unfair FmHA practices at the state and county level made a bad situation even worse. County directors delayed disbursing funds, preventing dairy farmers from replacing elderly cows, as we have seen, and refusing to allow ranchers to purchase livestock in time to fatten them for slaughter during the summer months. County offices ignored FmHA policies that were supposed to prioritize family living expenses. “FmHA's playbook for getting farmers to ‘voluntarily liquidate’ was to first take away the farmer's means of earning a living by forcing the sale of livestock and machinery, and then—after the farmer was stripped of earning potential—to force a sale of the land” (177). They denied farmers due process through a “deeply flawed appeals system” (147) in which county supervisors both decided to accelerate debts and served as appeal officers if borrowers appealed their debt acceleration (266).Perhaps not surprisingly, Vogel's memoir focuses on the plight of white family farmers. Only late in the process of building those individual farmers' stories into a class-action lawsuit did Vogel recognize that Native American farmers also were falling victim to unfair FmHA practices and seek out a Native couple to serve as named plaintiffs. That Indigenous farmers did not reach out to Vogel as white farmers did highlights persistent racial divisions in the state and significant barriers to peoples of color seeking legal redress. Vogel eventually recognized that Native farmers were more likely to seek help from their tribal government than from a white lawyer. They were not members of the farm organizations nor did they frequent the coffee shops where word spread about Vogel's advocacy.Native people's limited role in Vogel's case and in her memoir highlights the persistent divisions between settler-descended and Indigenous North Dakotans. Vogel points out the racism of Odell Ottmar, the white FmHA district director responsible for lands of the Turtle Mountain Indian Reservation who insisted on calling himself a district “chief” (119). She recounts compellingly the devastation wrought by the construction of Garrison Dam, which formed Lake Sakakawea and flooded one quarter of the Fort Berthold Reservation, destroying 94 percent of the fertile bottomlands and producing a legacy of unemployment, poverty, and health crises for the Three Affiliated Tribes—the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara, who had farmed those bottomlands for centuries (195–96). And she rightly calls out FmHA's North Dakota state director who insisted that his Norwegian homesteading ancestors succeeded through hard work and frugality while ignoring that they had received their land as a handout from the federal government. But Vogel could have done more to highlight that the federal government had taken those lands from Indigenous peoples—and then pressured Native Americans to adopt Euro-American farming practices on lands it deemed inadequate to support white farmers. Here and elsewhere she misses opportunities to explore more fully the legacies of settler colonialism that allowed and continue to allow white farmers to claim sections of the North Dakota landscape as theirs to lose. Her focus on attitudes toward and policies about federal largesse downplays the dispossession of Indigenous persons on which American farm culture was built.Vogel offers convincing evidence of her clients' hard work and good-willed efforts to do right by their livestock and their land. Her career since that 1984 lawsuit bears witness to her commitment to promoting greater government efforts to shore up family farms in the face of great hardships. Vogel frames her tale of the 1980s Farm Crisis with brief discussions of contemporary conditions for farming that, as she points out, bear striking resemblance to these earlier crises. In fact, she characterizes conditions today as even worse than those of the 1930s or 1980s, coexisting with climate change, food insecurity, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that farmers like the North Dakota Nine would not have a prayer in today's economy, but that we need farmers like them to combat global warming, provide healthy food, and improve land and communities. Scholars such as Shane Hamilton, Monica Gisolfi, Margaret Weber, David Vail, and many others have demonstrated the devastating effects of agribusiness on the environment and rural communities. The Farmer's Lawyer makes an emotional case for better government policies and practices to protect American family farms for the good of us all.