Luckily I don't have to dig very deep to get in touch with
my family farming roots. Fact I don't
have to look before my own generation.
My maternal grandfather came from a steady line of farmers. My grandfather Henry Doyle Lewis grew up in
the Oxford Idaho area and was a farm boy threw and threw. When he was older he had his own farm
raising hay, corn, sugar beets and cattle.
In 1983 my parents and grandparents decided to be co-owners of a dairy
farm in Petersboro Ut. After struggling
to find financing for the dairy and the cows, the only option was ridiculously
high interest loans. Taking the gamble
they borrowed the money and went to work to build the dairy. Because
of the high interest rates and the and economic challenges, the payments
were getting hard to make. My dad, a
cabinet maker and my grandpa a postman, both were working full time plus the
dairy on the side. This was becoming
more and more taxing. They decided to have someone step in and run the
dairy for a while. When that didn't work
out my grandpa returned to the dairy to
find out the cows had mastitis and were not producing milk. This is not very good for a dairy farm. Another struggle came when they bought a new herd
of cows only to find out that they too had mastitis. By 1989 the bank was tired of the empty
promises and reclaimed the dairy along with taking our home and my grandparents
home to recoup their investment. This
was a very trying time for our family.
In looking at the timeline ( http://www.agclassroom.org/gan/timeline/1980.htm
), the economic factors played a big part of the struggles of the farm. The interest rates on the loans in the
1980's were really high. For starting or
small scale farmers, this was a big hurdle to get over. Many farms like my family's, never really
recovered. The droughts may have played
a part in the costs of feed for the cows.
I don't think our area was really effected by the drought but it may
have been. When I was born in 1986, the
farm values had reached the bottom of the economic slump. I wish this was a success story about how
the small farmer made it through rough times but it is not. The reality is that farming is a gamble. Some years you win and some you lose. We had just lost to many in a row.
