the Sunday dcfily Number 7 Night Editor: Daniel Zwerdling September 7, 1969 + - . t : . ; , , , r..-a . - gl]irnse from Bay County T ntr vanishing American At the same time Americans walked on the moon this summer, other Americans were threshing wheat with their hands and feet the way Babylonians did 3,000 years before. Hippies are moving back to the land on communes where they farm primitively and naturally. The return to nature could move America into a new folk-agricultural society. But the movement has opposing forces. The farmer, especially the small general farmer, faces extinction. This is the first of this year's "sunday daily" features, a weekly tradition on the editorial page. HARDLY HAD the beans dried in their pods when the tornado winds attacked. We scrambled into the old Ford pickup to survey the damage. The bean plants had been pulled out by the roots early in the morning and lined the field in windrow strips. Suddenly swirling pockets of air picked them up and blanketed them against the fence. In less than an hour the beans were rolled into knitted piles and the crop ruined. This was nine years ago, in September, 1960. I1ANY BEAVER, Township farmers, who walk a narrow ledge along the poverty divide, were toppled by the winds of 1960. To recoup losses from the bean crop failure, they went to work at Monitor Sugar Beet Factory, the largest sugar re- text by finery in the Midwesth Beaver Township is in Bay howard kohn County, a top farming district photos by in Michigan. The U.S. Navy andrew sacks buys most of its beans from Bay County. Several parttime farmers and former farmers work at the sugar beet factory, despite the working conditions-- like the 110-degree boiling rooms with no ventilation. Some of them are Beaver Township farmers, who stayed on after 1960 and put their farms in the soil bank program. Beaver Township farmers are small general farmers. unlike the -big bean and beet farmers in other townships. Though Monitor pays little more than minimum wage, it offers them security. Their farm incomes can become simply supplemental. IN THE PAST decade the number of farm residents in the United States has dropped from 15.6 million to 8.7 million--a 50 per cent plunge. Price controls on crops haven't offset burgeoning costs. If you want to farm today, you have to be either a capitalist or a communist. Business farms, dealing in produce rather than crops, are $100,000-750,000 operations. As an alternative to them, existentialist hippies grub for their board on farm communes. But the individual farmer has no future. Fred Kohn, my father, is one of the last Beaver Township farmers. He owns 120 acres and rents 40 more. He raises wheat, oats. rye, white beans. soybeans, corn and alfalfa. He runs a dairy earns less than $7.000 a year. "Nobody can fire me." he] can tell me when to quit." herd of 16 cows. And he likes to say. "And nobody EVERY MORNING he's awake by 5:30 a.m. milking the cows. He and two of my brothers milk them by hand. They squirt the milk into shiny stainless steel pails and then pour it through strainers into old metal milkeans. A truck comes by every day to pick up the cans. Grade-A processors won't buy the milk because the cows drink, and sometimes sit, in a dry-gut creek which runs through the farm. The Michigan Dairy Association frowns on this for sanitation reasons. So he sells to a nearby cheese factory. Beaver Township has a network of creeks which help drain the fields. As a kid I'd go moonlighting with my friends and brothers-- using long-handled, double-spiked spears to stab suckers, carp and an occasional pike as they spawned in the muddy waters. The creeks are tributaries to the Kawkawlin River. But the dairy association wants farmers to dig in huge tiles and cover up the creeks. My father doesn't like the dairy association. But, he doesn't like farming unions either. TJWO YEARS AGO the National Farmers Organization (NFO) organized a strike against the dairy associa- tion. Dairy farmers dumped their milk into creeks rather than sell it. The strike called for more money for Grade-A dairy farmers, none for milk-cheese farmers. But when the Teamsters joined in. truck delivery for my father's milk stopped. He couldn't haul the milk him- self because the Teamsters had thrown up picket lines around the cheese factory. So two weeks worth of milk curdled and spoiled (though my mother used some for cottage cheese which she likes). After the strike my father (vent back to selling his milk at the same price. "When factory workers co on strike they can stop working," he points out. "But a farmer can't stop milking the cows. He has to work ,just as hard." Because my father couldn't afford migrant labor. we did all the work ourselves--my parents. my grandparents. my four brothers, my sister and me. Work is hard on a small general farm. We couldn't afford chemical spraying, so we hoed the crops. We couldn't afford a baler or a corn picker either. So we slung the loose hay into the mow and shocked the corn for husking. The inbaled hay and the corn husks were favorite nes ing places for racoons, who stole into the barn through the hole cut for the dog. Now my father owns a baler. a corn picker and a grain-bin combine- -an investment he had to make be- cause his children were growing up and going to college. SLY FATHER and mother attended only eight years of school. My father worked two years in the sugar beet factory and five years in the military, and my mother worked seven years as a nursing aide, so they could buy the farm from the grandparents. My great-grandparents moved to Beaver Township in the 1870's after the lumber barons had cleared the forests. They were part of the Middle European immi- gration into the Midwest farm belt. They used groundaxes to hack off brush. In some of the woodland pockets they left, the second growth of hardwoods is just reaching maturity. My father has been cutting down maples, oaks and elms with an old cross-cut saw and selling them to be made into cheeseboxes. He should have them cleared off in another 10 years. SOME OF THE nearby farms have been bought by speculators who are waiting for the inevitable sub- division ticky-tacky to jack up land prices. Small ash and willow clumps are starting to grow back on these farms. Most are deserted, though a few retired farmers live in the old houses and attend tidy gardens-on a lease-option which lets them live there until they die. When they do die, the barns and sheds are torn down and sold for scrap lumber. I don't know what will happen to our fatm. I don't know if my brothers or I can preserve it. I visited the farm a couple weeks ago. My father had just finished combining wheat and baling wheat straw. He was taking a short break before bean harvest. We talked about the beans. The summer has been dry and the pods didn't fill out. He said he was thinking of geing back to the sugar beet factory parttime. He worked there two years ago when the strike and bad weather put him in a financial bind. "A couple more years and I'll probably sell the cows, too," he added. "Working at the factory isn't so bad." He was mad because the cows had just broken into the cornfield and stomped down some stalks. But he was serious, too. My youngest brother will be starting high school in two years. And one man can't run a farm alone.