Episcopal Press and News
Part I -- The Crisis in Rural America
Episcopal News Service. December 12, 1990 [90329]
Ariel Miller
The ring of the phone cut through the silence in the still hours before dawn. "The voice was all but inaudible," says Mona Lee Brock of the Oklahoma Conference of Churches (OCC). "I tried to persuade him to stay where he was, and not hurt anyone or himself. He would not promise.
"I called Dr. Glenn Wallace, the director of mental health for the state, and we finally got to the farm after an hour and forty minute drive."
Brock and Wallace found the farmer sitting alone, almost inert with grief. About to lose his farm to foreclosure, with a ten-year-old son and a hospitalized mother to support, he had called the OCC's 24-hour crisis line as a last resort. In his lap was his gun, which he had unsuspectingly lent to another farmer, his best friend, a few months before. His friend had used the gun to kill himself.
The incident was another illustration of the growing despair in rural America. In the Appalachian foothills, a farmer unable to afford health insurance sells his goat herd to make a down payment on surgery that his wife must have.
In Darke County, Ohio, "most farmers have two jobs," reports the Rev. Maurice Kaser, rector of St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Greenville. "There's a lot of stress. They work all day off the farm, then farm at night, under lights."
The stories of families from all over rural America are human reflections of the national statistics: years of falling market prices for grains accompanied by steeply rising costs for chemicals, farm machinery, and gasoline. Farms can no longer provide a decent livelihood. "In Ohio 75 percent of farm family income comes from off the farm," reports economist Carl Zaulauf of Ohio State University.
For parts of the country where off-farm employment is scarce, the prospect is dire. "Every rural community that isn't just a bedroom community is dying," says the Rev. Jerry Sneary, a wheat farmer and vicar of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Alva, Oklahoma.
In his presidential address to the Rural Sociological Society in 1988, Dr. William Heffernan, who had met with farmers in over half of the states in the country, summarized the human fallout of the 1980s: "Many family and individual social and emotional pathologies, including suicide, became evident in rural America. Rural communities lost a crucial portion of their economic base because of the direct loss of farms and farm families, and because of the loss of other local, small businesses heavily dependent on the agricultural sector. The impacts have been so profound that many professionals argue that numerous rural communities cannot be saved. In many communities even the local citizens have given up hope."
The farm crisis of 1985 is not over -- it has simply left the headlines. However, churches continue to witness the impact, every day, of the increasing poverty of rural America -- the stress, the breakdown of relationships, the waning of communities.
"Beginning in the mid-80s, the churches in rural areas were becoming the front-line mental health team, the social service agencies. It's lucky that farmers -- who are very private about their pain -- would even turn to clergy," said David Carter, secretary of the National Farmers Union and an Episcopalian in the Diocese of Colorado who has run training workshops on crisis response for clergy of many denominations.
"We're talking about displacement of human beings, just as we see it in the Third World or in our inner cities. It goes so far beyond family farming -- we're talking about the depopulation of rural America," Carter asserted.
Why? What is happening?
The question has become urgent this winter. In October, as it writhed its way out of budget deadlock, Congress passed a farm bill that continues key federal policies designed to keep many commodities prices low while slashing the funds available to help farmers recover some of the gap between market prices and their costs of production.
"Farmers are going to be paying a significant share of the deficit reduction," predicts Carter. The $13.6-billion cut in farm program funding over the next five years "will reduce net farm income approximately 25 percent through fees and cutbacks in eligibility, according to our estimates," explains David Senter of the American Agriculture Movement, a national farmers' advocacy group.
Farmers and church people are voicing increasingly deep concern that the way we farm in this country is becoming humanly and ecologically unsustainable. And the churches, now facing the profound social consequences, are beginning to call for a new course.
"We must come to grips with the fact that there's a common thread that runs between the farmer, the urban poor, and the poor of the Third World," says the Rev. Allen Brown, staff officer for Rural and Small Town Ministries of the Episcopal Church. "The church -- local, diocesan, national, ecumenical -- has to start to speak more with a prophetic voice for the poor and disenfranchised. We must look at this crisis systemically."
"Food pantries are the growth industry of the church," adds rural sociologist Judy Heffernan, who works with the United Methodist Church's rural crisis response on the Great Plains. "Our farmers, who feed this country better than any other in the world, are in food lines themselves. And it's the same abroad -- the church's mission offices are struggling with a tide of hunger. If the church is going to pay the consequences, we should be at the table making the policy."