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Interview with Delores Swoboda

Interviewed by Margaret Robertson Minnesota Historical Society

Interviewed in January, March, and May, 1989

at the home of Delores and Eugene Swoboda in Renville County, Minnesota MR: Did you grow up on a farm? DS: Yes, I was born and raised on a farm. My father rented land, and by the time I was married, our family had moved twelve times. It seemed something would happen on every place that he rented that would cause us to move. Shortly before I got married, my father quit farming. He lost his farm in 1957, so we lived in town for a couple of years. I was married in '59 and then I was back on the farm again. MR: This was in the Renville County area? DS: No. I was born in Redwood County, and we moved six times within Redwood County. Then we moved up to Morrison County and Todd County. We were right on the Morrison-Todd County line. I went to school in a little town called Swanville. I went to school in Little Falls my last two years of high school. My father and mother were both born and raised in Redwood County. My dad was always seemed to get lost up in the Morrison-Todd area--there are crooked roads and lots of trees--and he was never sure which end of the world the sun came up. So when he lost his farm, he moved back to Redwood Falls. MR: What kind of farming did he do, just general farming? DS: No, he specialized in dairying. He planted various kinds of grain, but he was a dairy farmer. MR: Did your husband, Gene, also come from a farm family? DS: Yes, he was born and raised on the farm. He lived on the same farm until we were married and moved onto this farm. We've been here--it'll be thirty years in April. MR: Did you buy this farm? DS: This was Gene's grandfather's farm. His mother was born and raised here. When his grandmother died, his grandfather moved in with Gene's parents. Gene's folks rented this

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farm for a few years, and Gene started farming the land about 1955--before we were married. At that time, the buildings were rented out. But when we got married, we moved into the house, and we're still here. MR: This was the original farmhouse? DS: Yes. This part that we're sitting in was built in 1903, I think. MR: By his grandfather? DS: By his grandfather's father. His grandfather's father, his great-grandfather, moved here in 1890-something. He didn't homestead this land. We learned from the abstract that other people had lived here first. Then his great-grandfather was second. His great-grandparents had three sons. So the great-grandfather gave this farm to Gene's grandfather, and the farm right east of us to another son, and another farm to the south of us to the third son. They owned all the land around here. Gene's great-grandfather died in 1903, and his grandfather took over this farm. His great-grandmother still lived here. I don't remember what year the great-grandmother died, but we eventually bought this farm from Gene's grandfather. When we wanted to build that trailer court, we needed to mortgage some of the land, so we could borrow money for the electrical and other materials. To get the mortgage, we needed a clear title to the land, but when we went to the bank, the bank told us that Gene's grandfather didn't have a clear title on this farm. We thought, "Holy cow! We're going to have to look into this." This was in 1970. When we talked to his grandfather about it, he said, "What would we have to do to prove that I did pay for the land?" The lawyer told us that the agreement was that Gene's grandfather was supposed to pay his great-grandmother $100 and 100 bushels of wheat a year. But when the great-grandmother died, the title was never cleared. And would you believe, Gene's grandfather went into his safe and got the receipts showing that in 1901 and 1902 and 1903--up until 1910, I think it was--he had paid his mother $100 and 100 bushels of wheat per year? So we gave those receipts to the lawyer, and they cleared the title on this farm. I find it interesting to see how people used to stay in one spot their whole life. Gene's father's place, where they now live, is in the next section, and it's where Gene's father was born. His folks will have been married fifty-eight years this year, and they have lived on that farm all those fifty-eight years. Gene's father is eighty-two years old and has lived on the same section of land his entire life. MR: That's amazing. DS: Yes, it is. Some people stay in one spot and others move all over.

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MR: So you moved to this farm in 1959. What kind of farming did you do first? DS: Before we were married, Gene had raised some sheep. He was never much for livestock. Gene's father was a dairy person, and Gene never really cared for that. They quit milking cows a few years before, so he had some sheep and we had laying hens--not very many, probably 300 or 400--every year. That was kind of a going rate for farmers at that time. We planted wheat and beans and oats and corn, and usually some hay for the sheep. About the second year we were married, Gene got some brood sows so we could go into the hog business a little bit. We did that for quite a few years. Always kind of the same thing--sheep and hogs. At one point we had 200 head of ewes that lambed every year. We've always had chores--until we built the trailer court. The trailer court got us out of the chore business. Now if you look around, we're back in the chore business again. MR: When did you build the trailer court? DS: In 1970. We had lots of friends in town who lived in mobile home parks, and Gene felt they weren't being treated fairly. For example, many of them weren't allowed to mow their own lawns. When the manager came around to mow the lawn, everything was supposed to be off the lawn, like the garden hose, lawn chairs, or your kid's tricycle. The manager didn't give you a notice or anything; whenever he felt like it, he would mow the lawn. Everything was supposed to be off of the lawn and on the sidewalk. One of our friends was shaking a rug, and the phone rang, so she went into the house. When she came back, he had ground up her brand-new rug, a really beautiful scatter rug, with the lawn mower. So little things like that happened. Gene thought, "Well, out here in the country we could give them a bigger piece of land and treat them as human beings." So he started our court with fourteen lots and hired somebody to do the digging. But the he did the expansion all himself--he dug it with his own backhoe. So that's how we got in the trailer court business. We prefer farming, though. [Laughs] The cows don't call you in the middle of the night and say the water isn't working or things like that. MR: How many tenants are there in the trailer park? DS: At one point we had fifty-one lots that were full. Today, since this crisis has come up in agriculture--the financial problems--we probably have thirty lots with homes on them. People are leaving this area in growing numbers. The last person got a job and moved to the southern part of the Twin Cities. Before that, someone moved to Fargo to repair trucks. There was no job here for him. Most of the people who left didn't go because they

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didn't like Redwood Falls, or didn't like it out here in our court, they left because they needed a job. MR: Most of these people had jobs in the Redwood Falls area? DS: Right. I think only one person, at the time the court was full, didn't work in Redwood Falls. For one reason or another, we've had a lot of teachers. Some of the teachers lost their jobs here because the district was consolidating or merging programs, and so they had to get jobs somewhere else. MR: When did you get involved in rural activism? DS: I guess my first involvement in a public issue was in the early seventies. The Bell Telephone Company was trying to push our rural telephone company out of Redwood Falls. Bell Telephone and Northwestern Bell serve the people within the Redwood city limits. The area outside the city limits belongs to a privately-owned telephone company. I suppose at that time, there were anywhere from seven to fourteen families on a party line. There was a great deal of turmoil on the part of the farmers, demanding better service and private lines. Once the ball got rolling, and we could see that something was going to happen one way or the other. So five families of us started a petition demanding better service. The petition said we wanted a private line at reasonable rates. We didn't care who provided it. We didn't know what was going on in this world; we just thought by this time we shouldn't have to have seven to fourteen families on a party line. After the petition was drawn up, we presented it to both Bell Telephone and to the rural telephone company. Then we found out that since the mobile home park was on our land, we were considered a business. We lived five miles from Redwood Falls, and a business rate with Bell Telephone probably would have cost us anywhere from forty to seventy dollars a month. "Well," we thought, "We don't need that kind of a problem." So we talked to the gentleman who owns the private telephone company. He said that a private line for a farm family would cost seven dollars and a business phone would be twelve dollars. And that was it. No additional costs or anything. If he could get the contract, we all would have a private line. But he needed help. He needed to push so he could borrow funds through the REA [Rural Electrification Administration] in Washington to put in the switchboard to handle the additional lines. One thing led to another, and we called a meeting of all the rural people in the area. Everybody threw in twenty-five dollars, and we hired a lawyer. Bell Telephone Company came to the hearing with their lawyers--they had twenty-five of them in the courthouse that day--and here we farmers stood with one attorney. But that lawyer really helped us. To make a long story short, the hearings lasted about ten days, and we won. Within the next six months, the rural telephone company started to put in the service. And today--

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and that was many years ago--our rates have not gone up one cent, except for one raise that the Public Utilities Commission demanded. It still costs us twelve dollars a month for our business phone, or seven dollars a month for a private phone. And the service is fantastic. Those guys work on Saturday or Sunday or whenever something needs fixing. So that was my first involvement. We barely had the phone problem settled when the state decided they were going to allow people to bury hazardous waste in the ground here in Minnesota. That decision turned into a project involving waste to be buried in granite, and one of the sites was right over the hill, south of my house. I didn't even know anything about it until a member of our town board came and asked if Gene and I would go to a meeting in Granite Falls that night. They said, "I don't know what they want to bury out here, but it's something." We went to the meeting, and by the time the night was over, I had been appointed temporary secretary for that group--which later became what is now known as MINNFAIR. I was the secretary of the group for six years, and periodically we sent out a newsletter, telling people what was going on. I was also the media contact. So when Groundswell, got going--we'd been in operation for a month or so--I was asked if I would help send out information once every three or four months. And if in the next few months they had a need to call the press, they wanted me to teach somebody else how to do that--for a few weeks. Well, shoot, that was five yeas ago! [Laughs] MR: So you were first contacted in 1983. DS: Yes. Right. MR: What were the early days of Groundswell like? DS: They were frantic days. Nobody knew exactly what they were doing. It was very unorganized. There was talk of trying to get some kind of a demonstration together at the state Capitol. I don't know if people are aware of it or not, but I would like to clarify that that demonstration happened because of the people who were very active in Farmers Union, Farm Bureau, NFO [National Farmers Organization], and especially American Ag [American Agriculture] here in Minnesota. There had been earlier demonstrations, especially by the American Ag people. There was another group that evolved out of all of this before Groundswell--it was called U. Solidarity. Those people had demonstrated in several parts of western Minnesota. They also set up a demonstration with folks from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. The first demonstrations were very good and involved a large number of people, but the last couple of demonstrations were very poorly attended. The people who set it all up became concerned that they were losing support, instead of gaining support. So the head of U.

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Solidarity called some organizational meetings to plan another demonstration, this one to be at the Capitol in Saint Paul. After it was all planned and the day was approaching, the word "groundswell" emerged. At the time, it was just to be a farmer demonstration at the Capitol. On December 29, 1984, a lot of people from various parts of the state got together in the Twin Cities and had a meeting. They thought the project needed a co-chair or a chairman or a director or something. Carmen Fernholz, from Madison [Minnesota], was elected by the group to be the chairman. At the very last minute before the meeting adjourned, someone suggested they would like to nominate a co-chair, and that's when Bobbi Polzine was elected to that position. At that time, we had co-chairs of the group. The demonstration was set for January 21, and it was going to be called "Farmer Day" at the Capitol. Well, suddenly Bobbi dreamed up the idea of using the word "groundswell." Since then, I have learned that the word "groundswell" was used by people in the coal mining demonstrations out in the East years ago, because they were people who worked in the ground. When their organization got together and protested, they called themselves "Groundswell." From that example, Carol Hodne, who is now the director of the North American Farm Alliance, sent out a little informational leaflet as an insert in Farmers Union newspapers and publications from other organizations. She called the little insert Groundswell, because it was grass roots information. She'd go around and interview people who were involved with various issues, and they were grass roots people. So she called that little leaflet Groundswell. That's where Bobbi must have gotten the idea to call this "Groundswell." It wasn't until a couple of days before the demonstration that anyone actually thought of putting the name on a sign or anything, or calling it a "Groundswell" demonstration. Right after the demonstration at the Capitol, the board got together and had another meeting. In fact, for the next three or four months they had a meeting once a week. At one of the first meetings after the demonstration, it was decided to call the group, of which Bobbi Polzine and Carmen Fernholz were the co-chairs, "Groundswell." Sometime during the next couple of months--it wasn't too long--Carmen Fernholz decided he no longer wanted to be involved in Groundswell, so he dropped out. That's really how we all got involved. I laughed when they asked me to do my little part. I was still the secretary of MINNFAIR, and I was very busy and worn out from that involvement. I was also very much involved with church work at the time. So I said, "Well, I don't have much time to spare." They assured me that I'd never have to go to a meeting. [Laughs] The board of directors met once a week, and a lot of concerned, interested people wanted to be there. You didn't have to be a board member or anything to attend. Farmers from all over the state came to the meetings. Of course, I was at those meetings, too. Then they

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thought maybe they should put me on the executive board, so they would have some input into what I was doing, and so they could help me. The executive board also met at least once a week during those months, so all of a sudden I was going to two meetings a week. Then, if we had to go to the Capitol or demonstrate someplace, it became a seven-days-a-week involvement. MR: To get back to the demonstration, there's been a lot of talk about how big the demonstration actually was. Do you have any idea how many people were there? DS: We had lots of reports about it, too. Those of us in Groundswell have no way of knowing, so we accept what the Saint Paul police estimated. I don't know how they figured it. We've talked to the Saint Paul police about it since, and they said they figured it this way: They knew how many square feet were out in front of the Capitol. Then they took a little area there and figure it would hold X number of people. They kind of laughed when they said this, because it was a beastly cold day and everybody had on four layers of clothes. So how many people really were there? It was the Saint Paul police who came up with the first statements that appeared on television and in the papers--that there were seventeen thousand people there. Since that time, we have heard that there were twenty thousand people there. Sometimes we've heard there were ten thousand people. We have the newspaper clippings which say, like I told you, that there were seventeen thousand people. So that's the number we're going with. MR: What was the effect of that demonstration? DS: I think it was very unproductive, as far as the state legislature is concerned. It didn't solve one-hundredth as much as people thought it would. Of course, some people haven't done another thing since that time, because they did their one thing that day. That was it, and they thought it should solve all the problems. I guess what it did do was make people aware of each other. It made them realize that neighbors might be having the same kinds of problems as their own. That's one of our biggest concerns, and one of the things we're most pleased to have accomplished. Before this, so many people were sitting at home, going through financial troubles, having nervous breakdowns, blaming themselves, and causing problems in their families. But they never talked to anybody else. They had no idea that seven neighbors in the next four miles were having the same problem. That's one thing it did. It brought to the forefront the issue that this wasn't happening to only one poor manager here and there, that there were more problems. I think another good thing the demonstration did was it got all the rural people to work together. Maybe someday that will make us more effective. Some towns closed their schools, some stores closed. I'm really sad that we weren't able to help that cooperation reach further. Over the past several years since the demonstration, we have seen a

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division between the people in the small towns and the farmers. And this should not be. One thing that Groundswell has been trying to do ever since is to make people realize that whatever happens to the farmer is going to affect the small town, and whatever affects the small town is certainly going to affect the farmer. We have tried to get these two groups to work together, and maybe together half of us can survive out here. Outside of that, I guess the demonstration did bring Groundswell into being. It also caused some terrible divisions among organizations that had done a great deal of work to bring the demonstration into being. It brought a division between those organizations and the folks in Groundswell--which never should have happened. Some of the people were involved with U. Solidarity--like Paul Sobicinski, who was on the board. He was not aware of how much some people had been offended. They felt that all of a sudden it was a Groundswell demonstration, and it looked like the few people on the Groundswell executive board were solely responsible for everything that happened at the Capitol that day. And that was sad. That was the fault of some people on the Groundswell board. When some of us learned how people felt, we tried to correct that impression, but those wounds are still very slow in healing. They are better now. We're all on speaking terms, but it's sad that the people who were so active and so capable in doing what they did, didn't continue right on with Groundswell. We would have been ten times more successful than we've been. But different people doing things makes a difference on the outcome of things. MR: How much was Groundswell a product of things like American Ag and NFO demonstrations in the seventies? DS: Groundswell didn't start by itself, it came into existence solely because of several other organizations. It was not the organizations themselves as much as it was the people in those organizations, who saw what was happening and made a decision to do something. They thought the time called for all groups to work together. I don't know. Some of those other organizations did such hard work. For example, I have an uncle who was one of the original people to join the NFO in Minnesota. He was one of the top leading organizers in Redwood County. Redwood County was a very, very strong NFO county. My uncle should have been congratulated for his efforts, and he was. When it came to trying to make the demonstration at the Capitol work, and to get things together, my uncle was very instrumental in the Marshall-Ryan County area to get buses and people lined up to go to the demonstration. So yes, it had something to do with that. The NFO organization itself was not really supportive. Sometimes, I think, in the early years of Groundswell, the other farm organizations were afraid that if we did anything right and got credit for it, we would replace them. We didn't start out with any ambitions to destroy those organizations or to take their place. In fact, what we're telling people--whether they're Farmers Union or Farm Bureau or NFO members--is that what they

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should do is to go back and rejoin those organizations they used to be so active in and find out what's going on in them. Who's running the show? And who's making the decisions? And are they being as strongly supportive of farmers as they should be? But to begin with, I don't think the organizations were a bit supportive. One of the gentlemen from the state office of the Farmers Union was at every one of those first meetings, and tried to do the best he could. I don't know if it was the way he was handled or what happened, but all of a sudden he wouldn't come anymore. For about a year or two some of us didn't know what had happened, and felt that either he personally had his feelings hurt, or something happened--that somebody, with the proper authority, told him that he shouldn't be involved anymore. We never did know what the trouble was. But we have since mended those fences, and good people like F. B. Daniel once again come to some of our events and have gone to press conferences with us. But for a period of time, things weren't good. What really happened, I don't know. MR: How many of the people who were working for Groundswell in the beginning were people like yourself, who had been involved in other issues? Or were a lot of them people for whom this was the first issue in which they'd been involved? DS: It was kind of a mixture. I would say half of the beginning executive board had strong leadership capabilities. One of the gals has been the president of Brown County NFO maybe five or six times. Before she got involved with Groundswell, she had been to national NFO conventions. Another person was quite active in politics, not just on a countywide basis but on some state committees. So it was probably fifty-fifty, but it ended up as a statewide public thing. And when it hit the national networks, it became even more public. Now, for me with my MINNFAIR involvement, yes, it was a big issue, and that was also on statewide television. But it didn't end up being such a public issue as Groundswell did. I think even for those of us who had a little or considerable background, other involvements were incidental to what Groundswell turned out to be. MR: What were some of Groundswell's goals in the first six months or year that it was formed? DS: I don't know. We started as a movement, and I guess I personally was not too aware of how it all got put together at first. I look now at the beginning bylaws. They didn't say very much. To start with, everybody knew there was a problem and a big issue--that foreclosures were going like crazy, and the numbers were growing. I think we just grabbed the bull by the horns and ran! Some people thought they should demand a moratorium on foreclosures. Shortly after I was involved, we found out that a moratorium on foreclosures is not really legal. If you tell a lender, "You cannot foreclose on this person,"--well, what if the person hasn't paid anything for two years? Does that lender

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have to sit around and wait forever? I mean, when you looked at it from both sides of the fence, the moratorium issue was really not ever going to be a winner. I really don't know what the goals were, except the group was very strongly oriented towards organizing farmers in Minnesota. I wasn't there at the very beginning, so I don't know of other goals other than organizing farmers. I think that was their basic and probably singular goal. We didn't worry about putting our goals down on a real good piece of paper, with very good English, until I started writing for grant funds. I mean, all of a sudden, that was part of the grant-writing requirements. You have to put down a very good list of short-term and long-term goals. So I think, in the beginning, there was a problem and an issue. There was concern, and the organization just grabbed it and ran. Finally, we realized that if the group was ever going to survive, it had to be better organized. We had to have a better set of bylaws. And along with those bylaws, we had to sit down and figure out what we expected to do in the future. That's what I think it was in the beginning, just people getting together and trying to fight the issue. MR: Do you think that providing information for farmers was the most pressing need in the beginning--giving farmers information about how to deal with lenders and that sort of thing? DS: Well, I don't know if that's any better now. There is a great lack of knowledge on what's really happening--what the legal loan rates are, what the law really says. I've noticed this again in the last month or two, with the FmHA [Farmers Home Administration] foreclosure notices that are going out. If you were to sit in the coffee shop some morning, you would probably hear ten different opinions about what's right and what's wrong, what you can do and what you can't do, and what the law really says and doesn't say. The trouble is, if I were someone who really knew exactly what the law is today, I probably would be sorry to have to tell you that there isn't any truth in any of those ten things. So maybe back in that time, yes, information was important. When I look back to some of the people who had problems at that time, and knowing what I've learned and what I know today, I think much of it was just being frantic. People didn't know what to do. We'd gone through the seventies, where money just flowed in and credit was free and easy. All of a sudden, people couldn't make their payments. They not only couldn't make their payments, they didn't have any food. So why was this happening to people who had been very good operators, who could have borrowed two million dollars five years ago and now didn't have a crust of bread in their house, and didn't know where to get it? Part of the big reason for needing to get together, for becoming a movement at all, was just a frantic feeling of, "What in God's name?" People were calling out for help, you know. MR: You also spent a lot of time, in the beginning, anyway, at the state legislature. How much success did you really have?

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DS: None. Absolutely none. MR: Why do you think Groundswell failed? You spent a lot of time lobbying, a lot of time sleeping on the marble floors at the Capitol. DS: Nothing happened. It takes a complete package to have any wins and success at the Capitol. I'm very sorry to say that half of the package wasn't there. The demonstration was good. It brought awareness that there was a problem out here, that there were seventeen thousand people--or whatever the number was--concerned enough to go to the Capitol in Saint Paul in that beastly cold weather and stand together. It did bring some awareness. But the following year, we went back to the Capitol again. There were about six thousand farmers and rural people at the demonstration that year. At that point in time, on January 21, 1986, we had not won one thing! Nothing had gone forward. In fact, the problem, and the reason we went there the second year, was that we could not get any of the farm issues on the calendar in front of the House of Representatives. Now, some people who don't know what went on would say, "The reason for that, or the fault, was because we had the Republicans in control of the House in Minnesota." That isn't what the problem was. The problem was that the leadership of Groundswell was taking the position that all of the people who were standing out there were Democrats and they didn't like the Republican people who were running the show at the Capitol. And I'm very proud to say that I was a part of re-establishing and reaffirming the position that Groundswell had taken in early 1985--that Groundswell was going to be a nonpartisan organization. But that is not what the people who were leading the demonstration at the Capitol were doing. I can remember going with the Groundswell executive board for my very first visit to the Capitol on the farm issue. And there wasn't a crowd of people. The leadership of Groundswell made a statement to the press that day, saying that Mr. [David] Jennings, who was Speaker of the House, was no good, was rotten, had made all kinds of mistakes, had lied, and blah, blah, blah. I knew a lot of the press people there from my involvement with MINNFAIR. I was never so embarrassed in my entire life. I wanted to crawl out of there on my hands and knees. Afterwards, I talked to some of the press people. They said that it wasn't right for a group of Democrats be so verbal in its opposition to Mr. Jennings. I said, "A group of Democrats? I don't care what we are as individuals, but as a group we are not Democrats. We are a nonpartisan organization." So in the next couple of weeks, I kept calling Mr. Jennings' office. Even though I had always been treated very well there before, I couldn't get an appointment in that office with anybody. I persisted and finally got an appointment for Paul and me to meet with Mr. Jennings. They gave us fifteen minutes, and we were with him for an hour and a half.

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This was at the time when Bobbi was being removed from the board, so that gave the rest of us on the board a little more authority to go to the Capitol and make some appointments. I'm very happy to say that we got what we wanted on the calendar within a few days. We had people with us who had worked with Groundswell right from the beginning, who were very definitely Republicans, and we had them go around and speak to people. We went door to door in the Capitol, meeting with legislators from urban and rural communities, and passed out lots of pieces of paper with our opinions and statements. We had several quick board of directors meetings which resulted in some decent statements. That year we had some big wins in the Capitol, with very few of our people attending. Some days we'd have 100 farmers there, some days there would be five of us. So while the big numbers really brought the issue to the forefront and brought it to people's attention, we really didn't win anything. It takes a special package to win at the Capitol. At that time they knew we had a lot of support behind us, but that support was not standing with us at the Capitol. Those people were out on their farms and in their towns doing their business. Now a sensible group of people was going to the Capitol with, we hoped, some fairly sensible requests. We didn't demand. We didn't ask for a moratorium against foreclosures. If it's illegal to present a moratorium on farm foreclosures, then why ask for it anymore? We asked for help with interest, we asked for help with the mediation process. By that time we had met with the Attorney General, and his office and the office of Senator [Roger] Moe had come up with a really good plan on mediation. We had a lot of input into that. We met with the farm advocates, and we met with the Department of Agriculture. That's how you win stuff at the Capitol. MR: So was it a lack of political sophistication that hurt you at first, or was it people who were too partisan in the beginning that hurt you? DS: You can't call a press conference by saying, "Delores Swoboda, get on the phone and call the press people and run around down in the Capitol basement and tell everybody we're going to have a press conference at ten o'clock. Tell them we would like to invite them to come." Then when they come, you stand up and run down every Republican who's on every committee and brag up the Democrats. At that time we had Republicans in control of the House, and certainly they were not going to support some group that's going to publicly lambaste them. Of course, most of those comments, thank God, did not appear in the papers, but it certainly put us on the line with the press people. They just didn't respect us at all. We've learned that if you have a gripe with a state or national legislator, or if you have a gripe with your lender, to go to him and call him names or to push him physically or with your words will not win you anything. That's one thing that we've learned and tried to pass on to farmers; that in dealing with a lender, if you can sit down and talk in a decent

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tone of voice, or put your proposal on a piece of paper and present that to him in your best good-faith, peaceful way, you're going to come out of there with more than if you go in and call him a bunch of rotten names. It's the same with the people at the legislature. They're doing a job. If they're doing a rotten job, you've certainly got a right to tell them they're doing a rotten job, but there are ways to tell them that is all mixed with sugar and honey. You can still lambaste them as strongly as you want, but without pulling them down in the gutter and treating them like dirt. That has happened time after time at press conferences, when letters, written by someone on the executive board, were passed out in the Capitol and they totally destroyed not only the legislators' position, but their image as human beings, by insinuating that they were rotten, dishonest persons. You're not going to win any battles that way, even with seventeen thousand people standing out on the steps. It takes a plan. I wasn't very experienced it all this either, and yet I was the only one of the board who had ever been to the Capitol, lobbying, running from door to door. We made a lot of mistakes, and we probably still will, because it's the kind of a ball game that is hard to figure out sometimes. We have admitted to people, "We're not experts; we're grass roots people. We are expert farmers. We're not expert lobbyists. We can't afford to hire anybody, we can't afford to put on a school to train these farmers. Some farmers are going to come in and grab you by the collar and call you a son-of-a-bitch. That doesn't mean that this is the position of Groundswell. This is our position." We put our position down on a piece of paper, and we were always very honest in admitting that we didn't know whether it was legal or illegal, or whether it was possible or impossible. But why couldn't we sit down and discuss it? That's how we won. Maybe if the seventeen thousand people hadn't been there, the concern might not have been there. But a lot of people thought that everything was won and cooked and dried with those seventeen thousand people there. If things have fallen apart since that time, they can't figure out what happened, because the demonstration had everything all straightened out. MR: What were the most helpful things that the state legislature did for you? Was it the interest buy-down, or was it the mediation program? What things really helped in the long run? DS: I think the biggest thing that helped was the fact that they came up with anything at all. I think it was the whole general thing, that the legislature was willing to do something, and they did it in a big way. The interest buy-down program sounded really good, and it did help some people. But we're sorry to say that the lenders picked out--from their creditors--whom they wanted it to help. Part of the reason we don't have an interest buy-down program anymore in Minnesota is because the legislators felt that it only helped a few people. Many times it was a wealthier or better-off farmer who was able to take advantage of the program rather

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than the people for whom the four or five percent interest really would have helped. Now when you look back on that program, it wasn't too hot. But it was number one on the list, so we wrote that down as part of our proposals. Then we had the mediation process. Mediation never really helped anybody win anything. In fact, the majority of people who went through mediation ended up losing everything anyway, or losing a big portion of what they had. As time went on, people learned more about their loan rates. Also, the federal government now has a mediation process and a right of first refusal program, so there's a little bit more teeth in this whole thing. Farmers are beginning to learn that there is a federal program, so they aren't as intimidated when they go to mediation. The lenders are encouraged to at least sit down and do something. Farmers are aware that if their neighbors got a write-off, "Why shouldn't I get a write-off from you, Mr. Farm Credit System Person?" As time goes by, it's more successful. To begin with, it wasn't too hot. Farmers went in there scared to death to meet with their lenders. A lot of farmers didn't know that there was such a thing as a farm advocate in Minnesota who would go along with them, help them with their cash flow calculations. They didn't know that you could go to the extension office and get help with your budget figures. I remember one farmer who called me one night before meeting with his lender and said, "Can you be with me ten miles north of Saint Cloud tomorrow morning at ten minutes after nine o'clock?" He didn't have any paperwork done, he didn't know a thing. We just got hundreds and hundreds of phone calls from people like that. In the beginning, mediation wasn't that big of a thing, either. But it was number two on the list. We also had some things that were done through the omnibus farm bill--like clarification of the input and UCC [Uniform Commercial Code] liens that are put on farmers. Gradually, we got kind of a nice little list of accomplishments. Word got around. Legislators would discuss the changes in the law with their local newspaper, and there would be comments made about this and that. Some things ended up in court, and there would be an article on the front page of a paper about this farmer going to court against the PCA [Production Credit Association] or whatever. Some farmers did the wrong things, and that also ended up in the newspaper. Little by little, just the fact that Minnesota had all these bills--and that Iowa and Wisconsin didn't, or that North Dakota was working to try to get the mediation process that we had already had for a year in Minnesota--made people start to realize that, holy smokes, we were a couple of years ahead of any other state, and that this was pretty darn good. Maybe it wasn't a big solution but it was a start for saving farmers. The right to first refusal, for example, is supposed to be a big important law. The fact of the matter is, I wish somebody could take a survey and find out how many farmers were actually able to buy their land back through their right of first refusal. I think the truth of the matter is

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darn few. Unless you're a big rich farmer and you had lots of additional land to throw into the new mortgage, I'm afraid it really hasn't helped that many people. But it's all part of the learning process. Our Minnesota legislature was willing to give us this and that. We are ahead of other states. We're ahead of what the federal government did, and the federal government used the Minnesota laws as an example. Obviously, some people are beginning to understand what we really have here and our laws. So it's kind of a learning process, and yet it's slow. MR: So all these tools--the right of first refusal, the interest buy-down, the mediation process--have these really helped farmers in any way, or has it mostly been symbolic? DS: It's a little bit symbolic. We may be wrong about this. We've hashed it over a lot at our board of directors meetings. Of all of the issues, I think what it has helped the most is that farmers have gotten mediation notices. Whether they did anything about it or not is another thing. The fact of the matter is they got the mediation notice. Some of them did do something. Some of them went to that extension office, after years of hating everybody in the extension office and saying they couldn't trust them. All of a sudden they found out the extension people did a fantastic job of helping them establish a cash flow and of figuring out where their weakness and strengths were on their farms. Boy, that was something else they learned. By getting those notices and all this stuff going on, I think it's made farmers more aware of the fact that there is a need for them to be involved. Holy cow, if we'd been paying attention ten or twelve years ago, maybe we would have seen that we had some of this help available before we got into trouble. I've had dozens of farmers tell me that if they'd known ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, what they know now, they'd never have been in trouble. They tell me that if they had had the opportunity to go to a Minnesota farm advocate or to that extension office and get the FIN PAK—an extension service program that helps farmers develop a financial statement—work done, they'd never have built that stupid $200,000 hog barn, because they can see now, that it cost them their farm. Something that farmers weren't too good at was their record keeping. All they would do was to go into their bank and make up a quick financial statement. Then the banker would say, "Gee, I see here you've got your land valued at fifteen hundred dollars an acre, Gene. Don't you know that that farm two miles north of you sold for three thousand dollars last month? Now your valuation has doubled. I mean, for God's sakes, if you want to build Delores a new house, go right ahead." So many farmers are saying that if they'd had some of these little things--these basic helps, some of the learning that they've acquired the past few years--this trouble would never have happened to them. So while some of the laws haven't really saved that many farmers, they've made an awareness and made other things happen so that farmers are a little more willing to take a

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stand together. We've had some real good reports. The legislators in Saint Paul tell us that never in all the years they've been at the Capitol have they received the number of letters and phone calls from rural people about issues as they have now. They give us the credit for that. They say, "You people from Groundswell have told those people not what to say, or exactly what words to say. Many times they have no idea what the bill number is." So we're not telling people, "You call up your legislator and tell him to vote yes on number 682," or anything like that. But people are calling up their legislators and saying, "I'm really concerned about..." or, "Do you know what happened to my interest rate at the bank the other day? It went up to thirteen percent again." Or whatever. Legislators say they've never had such an avalanche of letters, and they feel that we're partly responsible for it. We've also had phone calls from legislators in Washington. I had a phone call one day from a very top official there, saying, "What's going on in Minnesota, Delores?" I said, "Why?" He said, "My office has gotten fourteen phone calls in the last hour about an issue that the Senate ag committee is meeting on today." I said, "Oh, gee, that's really good. Our telephone tree is working out here." All we did was call people and say, "Hey, there's a toll-free number to call. Would you please spread the word a little bit?" I heard from one of the people in that senator's office that over the next two days they had well over 200 phone calls from Minnesota, and they thought they'd better back down and look at the issue one more time. So while we're sad that the right of first refusal may not have saved everybody and kept the farmer on the land, it certainly raised awareness. MR: We were talking about the early days of Groundswell and about some of the legislative programs that were passed, and whether they helped or not. Do you think that, all in all, fewer farmers left their farms than if nothing had been done? DS: Oh, absolutely. Oh, absolutely. I guess when you're on a board like I am, your expectations are always in what you demand and what you wish. It's like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Legislators have said to us so many times, "Do you think you can save every single farmer?" We tell them, "Yes." They tell us, "We say you're crazy. That's impossible." But if we give up on one, then it's easy to give up on two, and pretty soon it's four, and pretty soon it's 5,860. So I'm just sad that we couldn't come up with laws and push them through and pass them and get everything approved that would have saved everybody. But we can't expect the laws of the state of Minnesota to do this. That's got to be done through federal legislation. But the programs certainly did save lots of farmers. They probably saved us. We went through mediation. If we hadn't gone through mediation, we

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probably wouldn't have ended up being able to save everything. So yes, it's successful. But I'm just really sad when I know of farmers who did lose. MR: One of the things that Groundswell did, especially in the beginning, was go to a lot of foreclosures. DS: Yes. MR: Do you think that was a helpful or productive tactic? DS: Yes, I feel it was very helpful. On the other hand, it probably did us some harm. It probably made some people think that we're a radical group that liked to raise hell and cause trouble and knock policemen down, which we didn't do. I'm a little sad that the full, true story of what actually happened at each one of those foreclosures didn't really get out. I don't think that the average person knows that before the foreclosures started, we went to the sheriff's office every single time and met with the sheriff. I'm the one who always wrote the speeches for those rallies. I didn't always read them, usually somebody else did. But we always gave a copy of that speech to the sheriff. In those speeches and in all the statements that we ever made, we told people that we were here today to put on a peaceful demonstration. We did not want anyone to cause any trouble, especially for the sheriff. He was an innocent party who was stuck with the job. So I think that if every single person in Minnesota had been able to read those little speeches that we gave, telling the story about the farmer who was having a foreclosure, they'd probably have a different opinion of us. Without those rallies and demonstrations, the average farmer wouldn't have gotten word that there was a problem here. That's why we did it, to get the issue in newspapers and through the media, to let people know, "Here's another farmer who, through no fault of his own, had a problem." Somebody could say, "Well, he probably was a poor operator." People usually thought that was the reason that farmers were losing their land. It was a great thrill for me to write those little speeches about the farmers. I could tell people that this man had won the top dairy awards in his farm--top butterfat tests and all that stuff that goes with the dairy business--that he had won those for the last four years. People thought, "Well, sure, maybe he was a good farmer seven years ago, but the last two years he was too busy going golfing or something." But I could tell people that he had won these awards and that his name had been in the paper. We would bring clippings so that we could hold them up and show them to the newspapers. I'd make copies and hand them out. Then farmers could sit at home and read the article in the paper and say, "Holy cow, you know, this guy was not a flop of an operator. He was not an alcoholic. He didn't beat his wife. They didn't spend the whole winter in Acapulco. And look what happened to him."

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So yes, I feel that the demonstrations were all very necessary. I was very sad sometimes that Bobbi Polzine didn't show up at any of them during that period. They were grass roots things that were done by local people in the community, and the only time she showed up at a demonstration was one down in Austin. That was the day when Paul Sobocinski was in jail in Fergus Falls, and none of the rest of us knew anything about it. Of course, she wouldn't go there and give him any personal support. I was very angry about that. Paul and I always went to those demonstrations, at least the two of us. Gene Irlbeck was at ninety-five percent of them. What we were so pleased about is that local people from the community also went. The farmer's neighbor, and usually his priest or minister, were there, too. Sometimes there were people there from the community, showing that a particular farmer had spent the last fifteen years on the local school board. So I think it helped farmers as individuals. They were able to sit at home and say, "Look at this! Here's this guy who was a good dairy man. He was a good member of the community, and he was on the school board. He sure isn't going to get elected time and time again to be on the school board if he wasn't a good person." I think it helped the guy at home when he got his foreclosure notice. He didn't right away think to himself, "Oh, I'm no good. I made all the mistakes." Or he and his wife didn't sit down and try to figure out who made all the mistakes. Whose fault was it? And always coming up with it was either his fault or his wife's fault or somebody in the family's fault. So I'm convinced. I was at nearly every one of those demonstrations. I wrote every single speech for every one of them. The people were good people. They hadn't done anything wrong. They weren't poor operators, they weren't poor managers. They were good people in the community. I was proud to stand there with them. I think every single person with whom we stood showed everybody else that there were problems here beyond our control. There was a need for us to do something. The few people there who didn't understand what was going on thought that we were just troublemakers. I'm sorry for them, but they just didn't understand. One time I was going to a demonstration after attending a meeting at church. The priest said to me, "Are you going to get arrested again?" And some of the older ladies in our church nearly had a heart attack, because I had been the chairman of I don't know how many big church dinners and festivals and meetings and volunteer groups and everything. And to think that that same Delores Swoboda was going to get arrested again? So I had to take about a half an hour right then to explain why I had been arrested in the past. But at that time, very many people were still unaware that there was a financial problem. They still thought that it was kind of a kooky, rowdy thing to do. There were times when I was scared. I had never been that kind of a person, either. But looking back on it, I'd go again tomorrow. I'd do the very same thing. Only I'd be more hopeful that the sheriff wouldn't blow his cool in five minutes like a couple of them did.

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MR: Are there some demonstrations that stand out in your memory? DS: Yes, there was one up at Fergus Falls that I didn't go to. That's when Paul got arrested. Of course, I really think if I had been there I'd have been arrested, too, because they definitely wanted to stop him from what he was doing. MR: Why did Paul get arrested? DS: I think it was a time when the law authorities wanted to put a stop to the demonstrations. They were always very afraid of us. They didn't trust us and thought we were going to raise some hell or cause some trouble or something. I think the sheriff was just the kind who flew over the coop a little bit faster than any of the others did. After he was arrested, Paul wasn't allowed to attend the next couple of demonstrations because of a restraining order issued by the court. The rest of us went without him, and those law officers weren't afraid of us, so I think it was just a case of human frailty or a problem with that sheriff. The sheriff who arrested Paul just thought it was time to stop the group. I've seen all the videotapes that the sheriff's office took that day. They show very clearly that nobody from Groundswell was doing anything to cause any problems. Paul was accused of stealing the sheriff's clipboard and hitting the sheriff with it. But the press has pictures of Paul getting out of the car that morning with some other farmers, and carrying that doggone clipboard. He carried that clipboard to every single demonstration. We had always told him, "You're going to poke somebody's eye out with that or something." In fact, one shot from the videotape made by the sheriff's office shows Paul's name on the clipboard. If we had been allowed to show that to the jury, they would have thrown that case out much sooner than they did. In the end, they found Paul guilty of holding the door shut, and that's all he was found guilty of. In fact, that door has been shut for thirty years. There's a sign on the door that says, "Please use other door." So it was kind of a masquerade. After the jury went out and was deliberating, the judge called the jury back in three times and wouldn't allow Paul's attorney [Kenneth Tilson] in there or anybody else in there while he was talking to them. That is highly irregular. Mr. Tilson is a middle-aged man who has practiced law in the courtroom for years, and he said he just has never encountered anything like it. So that's why Paul was arrested. He certainly didn't hit anybody or knock anybody down. Groundswell members did go and talk to the sheriff that morning before the demonstration, the way we always did. Then when Paul was arrested, he was sent to jail without allowing any bail. That, too, is highly irregular. The whole case went to the Court of Appeals, and they deliberated every single issue. Paul was found innocent on every single count that they discussed. It took about a year, a year and a half, before the final verdict on the final issue came through. The majority of people don't know that he was

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found innocent of all that, either. I don't know, I think the sheriff was just ready to stop us that day. MR: But in the meantime, Paul is still a convicted felon in a lot of people's minds. DS: Right, in their minds. Right. MR: Because he was found guilty of holding a door shut and preventing the sheriff from coming through? DS: Right. But the door that he was accused of holding shut had been locked for years. The videotape shows very clearly that the other door was never shut. It's just two big doors that come together and open in the middle, and the other door was being held open by one of our Groundswell people. He was quite an elderly gentleman from Pipestone, and he held that door open through the whole thing. He was standing there for a long, long time before the sheriff ever came out. And the other door was shut. There's a thing that goes up into the ceiling that you pull down to release into a thing in the bottom, and then you could open the door. Well, the door never was open. It was never meant to be open. So yes, it was quite a thing. It was a sad experience for Paul and his family, and I guess now, as time has elapsed, Paul just feels that this was his part in trying to fight the farm issue. Those things happen. Just thank God that no one got hurt or killed or something over it, you know. MR: Are there other demonstrations that you remember vividly? DS: There are a lot of them. I remember the very first farmer who told one of the farm advocates that he would kill himself if the farm was sold the next day and they had to move off. It was his father's farm. It was a really sad experience being there with him and his family. Yet, it was a very good experience. There was a lot of trouble at that sale, too. Some law officers from the neighboring county suddenly came running around the corner of the building and knocked everybody off the steps of the courthouse. There were some women with children. One child was just knocked flat on his back and barely missed hitting his head on the cement. We've got pictures of that. Then, of course, the demonstrations at Glenwood and with the Reverend Jesse Jackson were memorable. It was a great experience for Groundswell, but it was a very good personal experience for me to be able to prepare lunch for Reverend Jackson. I mean, in those days I didn't do anything really forward, like speaking somewhere, but I was pretty good at making lunch for people. [Laughs] So I was able to help Mrs. [Gloria] Langman take over that project. Reverend Jackson slept at the Langmans, and the next morning I was making scrambled eggs for him. When I see him on TV now, it's a very memorable experience. It was memorable, too, because there were lots of people there from so many different directions and miles away, and yet the very people in that town didn't really care

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to come out. I can remember people looking out of windows and stuff, instead of coming out. When we got home, the local newspaper had a big editorial on the front page about the fact that it was such a small event that the people didn't even bother stepping out of their door to look. However, a few of them took a second to glance out their windows. A year later, we had an altogether different series of statements made by that same editor about the situation in Glenwood--how stores were failing and businesses were folding and banks were having a terrible time, and how many farmers they had lost. It's amazing how things can change in a community, in an editor's opinion, in one year. To me it's sad that when Reverend Jackson was there, with what we were trying to do, that the whole darn town didn't show up for it. Recently, when Reverend Jackson was one of the presidential candidates, the little town next to Glenwood invited him there for the day, and there were thousands of people there. Just for the heck of it, we reminded somebody to ask how many people were there from Glenwood. You would have been amazed at the number of people who were at that little session that day from Glenwood. Yes, when you think back over the years, lots of those demonstrations are very memorable. MR: Some people talk about the "conspiracy of silence," that farmers didn't want to admit that they were in trouble to their neighbors, to their friends, to their pastor. Do you think that those kind of demonstrations, when people were fighting the foreclosures, helped people be more open about their situation? DS: Yes, it helped a lot of them. But there are a lot of them out there yet who will not talk about it. I have people come here to my house, crying. I have people still calling here, who would like to kill themselves, who have no food in the house, who don't understand what this notice is all about. What does this letter mean? I talk to them about needing some help, about getting a farm advocate. But they are still very insistent that we don't tell anybody that they've been here, or that they've called me. There is still a great deal of--I don't know--maybe pride; that word has been used so much over the years--pride. I don't know if it's pride nearly as much as it is embarrassment. They're embarrassed because they look at their neighbors and it looks as if everybody else is going just wonderful. So part of this quietness and part of this keeping everything inside has made the story not get around. I talked many times to a farmer who said he was going to throw in the towel, to kill himself, to drive off a cliff. Then another time he told me he was going to load up the family and go to Arizona, or that he was going to load up the family and go to California.

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The next night he called and said he was going to kill himself. This went on for about a year and a half. I tried to tell him a half a dozen times, at least, "Are you sure the neighbors are all in good shape?" He would say, "Well, gee, they're all farming with the same machinery. They've got the same number of livestock. Everything's just wonderful." Then I would say, "But you don't know. Maybe they ended up deeding everything back to Farm Credit System, and they're going to rent and run the farm for two years. Then they will have to get off the farm. Are you sure that isn't what is happening?" And do you know--and it's a sad thing--his very best friend lived kitty-corner across the section from him--they were like a mile and a half apart by the road. One day he called about two in the morning, which wasn't unusual, and he could barely talk. I said, "Well, what happened now?" He said, "You know my best friend Jimmy? I introduced him to you." I said, "Yes, I remember him." "Well," he said, "Delores, I just came home from wiping him off the basement walls." I said, "You have got to be kidding. I didn't think Jimmy was having a problem. What happened?" "He got his foreclosure notice about a week or ten days ago. I always told him what was happening to me, but he never said a word about any of his troubles. I guess I really didn't honestly explain everything to him that was happening to me, either. But he must not have known who to talk to or what to do. He didn't have Delores Swoboda to call up. So he shot himself down in the basement. They came and picked up what was left of his body--the coroner's office or ambulance or whomever. But there was still such a mess in the basement. Who would go down there and clean it up? So I did." And I'll tell you, that man could barely go to the funeral or go back over there to the house. These were best friends. The women worked together in town. In fact, Jimmy's wife had helped his wife find a job. Jimmy's wife had been working periodically over the years, but this other guy's wife had never had a job. So she helped her find a job. They even drove to work together. But Jimmy's wife never said a word to her. I don't know if Jimmy himself even told his wife. I mean, we're not exactly sure right now what all happened.

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Another farmer called and said, "Geez, I just can't tell you what's happened here in our neighborhood." I said, "What's that?" He said, "You know that guy across the road that I've always been saying that he and I farm very similarly? We live very much alike. And here I'm in this terrible financial trouble, and that guy hasn't got any trouble. I just couldn't figure it out. Neither one of us ever inherited anything from anybody, and we're about the same age. You know what? You were telling me about those deals where they deed everything back to the Farm Credit System? Today was their last day. They had to move out of there." And he said, "We would not have even known they were packing if the kids hadn't gone over there on the three-wheeler and seen them loading up their personal possessions. They have to leave everything except the car and the pick-up on that farm, and take their personal stuff and their furniture out of the house." So the silence is still there. A lot of us go around and talk at church groups, and when we talk with priests and ministers, they say that very, very few people come to them with their farm problems. Our priest said that one lady came--she was just in tears--and told him that her husband was drinking and chasing women, and that it had never happened before. Do you know that she went through that whole counseling process, and she never told that priest, ever, that the trouble started when the foreclosure notice came? I mean, the priest had no idea they were in a financial pickle. So I called her up one day and said, "Gosh, how are things going? I heard through the grapevine you're having a little trouble." She said she figured I knew that her husband had run off. I said, "Yeah. Is that your major problem?" She said, "I don't know what to do. I don't know if I can hang onto this farm, or if he'll come back, or what to do." That's all I needed to hear to say, "Can I come over and we'll talk about it?" And that's how the trouble began. He got the notice in the mail, sat down and read it at the kitchen table, and never said a word about anything. He just said, "Here, read this." And he left, went to the bar, and the drinking started. Pretty soon, he just ran off with some other woman. His wife never told the priest about the foreclosure. I don't know why. We've talked to ministerial associations. Linda Ahrens and I talked to the whole southwest regional meeting of the Church of Christ ministers. And that group,

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too, said it's highly unusual for someone to come in. Even business people from town in trouble, or people who lose their jobs--it doesn't make any difference--nobody comes in and tells the minister that they are in financial trouble. MR: Why do you think people are more willing to admit they're having personal problems than financial problems? DS: I don't know. We've tried to figure it out. We've hashed it over and over. This might sound crazy, but I'm going to tell you anyway. Nowadays, how do people judge other people? They judge them by how nice a car they've got, how nice their house is. If your kid graduates from high school and is going to go to some big school in New York that costs three times as much as your local University of Minnesota school, or whatever, that gives you prestige. Is that how we should judge people? Is that how we should determine how good a person is in this world? Well, that seems to be the case. We're very understanding if a marriage breaks down. We don't stay away from divorced people the way we used to. I can remember a lady friend of mine telling me, "For God's sakes, this divorced woman moved into the house next door, and I told my kids not to talk to those kids or that woman. We're not having anything to do with her." Well, needless to say, that was twenty or twenty-five years ago. Nowadays, divorce isn't the same kind of a problem. And if you have an alcohol problem, that's an illness. People have learned to have sympathy and patience and to give that person support. But if you're living in a shack, if your house is run down, if it needs paint, if your farm buildings need paint, if you're driving a car that's full of rust, you are considered a failure. Nobody knows if you've got five million dollars in the bank or if you don't. It appears that you're kind of a flop. If you're a farmer and your buildings have tumbled down and your machinery is kind of rickety, it doesn't make any difference if you get the job done perfectly with that old crummy machinery; you're considered not too hot. I think that's where the problem is. I might be wrong about it. The days of judging people by what they are as human beings--are they good, friendly people?--are long gone. Success and a big new house now puts you on the map. Suppose you want to run for mayor of the town. If you live in a poor part of town, in a poor house--even if that house is totally paid for, and you have five zillion dollars in the bank--you're never going to be able to win as mayor. I think that's where the trouble is. People feel that being poor is the only sign of human frailty in this world right now. You can have a divorce, you can become an alcoholic, you can have a drug problem, you can steal something from somebody. If you're sorry afterwards, well, that's all right. But if you're poor--if that's the way it appears and that's the way people feel--that's a sign of you being a flop, and you better hang your head in shame. That's how I think people see it.

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The more I talk to people, I discover people with incredible backgrounds--the things they've done in their community, the things they've been involved with, the fact that all the children went to college. I mean, what a tremendously successful thing it is for a mother of seven children to send all of those seven children to college. Three of them came back, and they're all farming. But now dear old Dad is losing the farm, and they feel like a total flop. With all those wonderful successes, how in God's name could they feel like a flop? I think of one lady who has called many times threatening to take a bottle of pills. At one time she had a very good job--a job that took a lot of brains. She also raised seven children, one of whom is an alcoholic. About the same time, their financial problems started. With the combination of the financial problems and the alcoholic son, she now feels that she is completely a flop. Some days she doesn't even have enough self-confidence to write a letter to anybody, because she thinks, "Who would want to get a letter from a person who is such a flop?" I'm happy to say that she went over to Marshall, to one of the support groups for women there, and she has learned that she is not a flop. Her husband can't understand it--he still thinks she's a flop. "She's either a flop or she's losing her mind," he says, "One or the other is wrong with her." So I'm convinced that that's why people, when they go to the priest, will tell him about all their troubles except the fact that the whole problem started when they began losing the farm. Most of my contact with people is on the phone. I'll talk to them on the phone one to three times a week, over several years. Some of them I never meet; I never see them. Some of them go through all their financial trouble and manage to save only eighty acres of land. Yet if the foreclosures were in the paper, they are not happy until they get a brand-new car. They have to have a brand-new car, and they feel that that's part of their survival. They seem to think it's the means of regaining their way back into the community. Otherwise, people in their church wouldn't talk to them, people would think they'd been trying to beat the bank out of something and they'd be considered dishonest, rotten people. They are so terribly ashamed about the foreclosure notice that they're trying to rebuild their footing in the community. And the way to start is to buy a new car and go to our clothing center at Wanda and dress better and try to rebuild that way. Weird, isn't it? MR: What is the best way to help these people? Is it through one-on-one counseling, or can you hold a meeting and have people come? DS: Well, it's different with everybody. I would say that better than ninety-nine percent of the people who have come to us need a certain amount of that one-on-one first. Basically, they trust us because they know we're all farmers. Then there's that newsletter that I put out. People read it and know that I'm not some big hot shot, educated professor type. I'm just an old farmer out here!

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The first time they call, they just visit about God knows what--something in the newsletter or whatever. I've learned, as you do learn slowly, to say to them, "While we're talking, before we hang up, how's everything going with you personally?" And sometimes--most of the time--they'll say, "Oh, pretty good." And I'll say, "Boy, shoot, you're one of the lucky ones. Cripes, the last 582 people who called up are having a heck of a time. And you know, if you ever have any problem, just feel free to call me right away. I mean, you know from reading the newsletter, we've been through lots of hell. We've learned a few things. I mean, if you ever have problems, don't just sit and let it go 'til it's too far gone. Don't hesitate to call." Sometimes that will break them down and they'll say, "Yeah, you know what? Our mediation starts next week." Or, "Yeah, one of these days I'm going to get one of those mediation notices." Sometimes that'll break them down. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they'll call back in an hour and say, "You know, you were pretty good to talk to. Ma and I, we been thinking about it here." I will say that over fifty percent of our calls are from women calling when their husbands don't know about it. They'll say, "That helped for him to talk to you. I think I'm going to get him to call you again." Then I will ask for a little background. They'll tell me, "We got big trouble. I don't have any food in this house. We can't pay the light bill. I don't know how we're going to milk those seventy head of milk cows." So we are making a little progress. I talked to one guy once a week for two years--I never did know much of anything about him. I never could figure out why he was really calling me. One day he called me, and he was mad because he couldn't find Lou Ann Kling, a family farmer from Granite Falls, Minnesota, and a co-founder of the farm advocate system in Minnesota. I said, "Well, by golly, she's right here at my house." "Oh, God! Can I talk to her?" She was sitting over there, busy with something, so I laid the phone down and I said, "Lou Ann, can I butt in here a little bit? So and so is on the phone." "Oh, God, yes," she said. "His foreclosure is tomorrow." Well, I had talked to him maybe three times in the last week. He never once told me that he was in for foreclosure or anything! So you see how different people are.

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I picked up that phone--by this time I knew him just as well as I know my own cousin--and I said to him, "She just told me your foreclosure is tomorrow. How come you didn't tell me about that? I mean, maybe I could have helped you." He said, "You did. You helped me every step of the way just by giving me support. When I'm down, I call you, you know. What else could you do for me? I'm at the end of my rope. I'm going to lose everything. What the hell should I tell you about it for?" That was his opinion. That was his way of handling it. He would call up Lou Ann, too, and half the time she couldn't figure out what he was doing. Since then, his foreclosure did go through. Of course, he had a year's redemption time. With our right of first refusal law, he finally went to Lou Ann and had her do some things for him. So what's going on? I don't know. She's not free to tell me. That's his personal business. But I don't know what's going on with the guy. He doesn't tell me. But he calls me all the time! At least he now goes to Lou Ann, and she has some idea of the things that she has to do for him. Isn't that crazy, how different people are? MR: There have been some reports in the media that the rural suicide rate hasn't gone up, that the hunger problem in rural America is overstated. What has been your experience? DS: The foreclosure notices came out for the FmHA borrowers, and we got a map that shows how many notices are going out in each county. So we had an informational meeting in this one county. The turnout was terrible. We were very disappointed. Of course, we had not known that there was a couple of other events going on in town that night that were probably more important than ours--at least to most people's way of thinking. So that made us feel a little better. But we were convinced that because there was a lot of FmHA foreclosures in that county, there were a lot of other problems as well. Two days later, the "Toys for Tots" program on TV quit asking for toys and began to ask for food for the food bank. And wouldn't you know, that county had their food shelf on TV all day that Saturday. They were saying, "We're not asking for toys anymore. That program is over with. We're now asking for food for the food shelves. Look at this rural food shelf--there isn't any food left." While the cameras were running, somebody brought in a box of food. The nice lady there who runs the place quickly started putting that box of food on the shelves, and just as quickly people were there taking the food off. They talked to all kinds of farmers who were standing right there, who said that if it wasn't for the food shelf, they didn't know how they could survive at times. Isn't that strange? Nobody showed up at the meeting to get information to try to help themselves, and yet the food shelf was empty there. It's strange how things go. I know that the media says all this stuff, but I wonder where they get their information and their numbers? All we know is that it appears to us, as time goes on, that some people who already were in trouble three or four years ago are still having trouble. Now the drought in

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Minnesota caused everybody to end up with sixty-five percent of what their farm normally would produce in an average year. God, farmers can't make a living when you get 100% of a crop! How in the world are you supposed to survive when you only get sixty-five percent? I see the trouble just continuing, getting worse in some areas. Some areas that were declared hunger counties three or four years ago are getting used to having troubles, and some people have learned to adjust. I know gals who had never planted a garden five years ago, and now produce every one of the vegetables their family eats. One lady said she gets a bang out of me talking about the ducks I never get cleaned. They did that, too, this spring. They bought ten or twelve older ducks from somebody someplace. The ducks were ready to lay eggs this summer and hatched out some ducklings. Now they also have some chickens, and they are learning to raise a couple of hogs. So they've got meat. One guy called up and he said, "Well, we're not going to starve to death this winter. I'm not going to have to call up Delores Swoboda and ask her to get somebody to go along with me to any food shelf." I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Well, we got a pig in the freezer, and we got a couple of calves that we're raising. I tell you, we're making some adjustments around here. I don't know how in the hell we're going to pay the light bill, but I'll tell you, we're not going to starve to death this winter!" When we had people passing out toys for kids this Christmas, one lady who is fairly new to Groundswell called me up, almost having a heart attack. She said, "You just won't imagine what I ran into today. This man--all he had to eat was hot water." He was drinking hot water, trying to survive! So she went over to his house and said, "I think we've got to go to the food shelf." And he said, "There's no way. I just can't walk in that door." So she went to the food shelf and got him whatever they would have given if he'd gone there himself. He was so pleased and excited that he has now told a couple of people, "I will never sit there starving again." I mean, he just didn't know which way to turn. Now, is that only representative of a few scattered incidents? Or isn't it funny that when you run around from neighborhood to neighborhood, how all of a sudden you'll run into five or six families who don't have a thing to eat? MR: Tell me about how the women's group was started.

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DS: Over the years--especially since we started keeping better records of all our incoming phone calls--it seems that more than half of the calls we receive are from women. Many times the husband doesn't want his wife to call, or she is calling when he's outside. The women ask for help for the farm. Naturally, that's where they start. Then, later in the conversation, we'll find out that they only have two crackers in the house, or their kids are going through a tough time at school because they don't have the right kind of clothes or those fancy tennis shoes. Many of us have talked about this a lot, over the years. We thought maybe what we need is a chance for women to get together, not just farm women, but all rural women. We are certainly brought together by financial problems, but there are other kinds of issues too. A couple of years ago, we put together a project. We wrote a grant application to the Minnesota Women's Fund for money to form a women's support group, but we were denied. They had a great number of requests and not much money. Six months later, we decided to write another grant application. That application seemed to be better, but it still wasn't approved. Throughout this process, we were talking to more women about whether we should go ahead with this kind of an organization or not. There seemed to be a real need for more of this kind of mutual support. In the last couple of years, other organizations have formed women's groups. For example, Lou Ann Kling at her office received a grant from the Minnesota Women's Fund. Her project gets farm women together--and hers is just for farm women--and teaches them about the financial process. Because suddenly, in the last three or four years, women are forced to sign everything at the bank window. Many of the women have no idea what's going on or what the interest rates are. So there's a need for that project. It's teaching those women to better understand farm finances. Another point is that most farm women do the book work. All of a sudden, when trouble hit and everybody was in financial trouble, many women felt it was their fault. If they had been doing a good job of the book work, how come they didn't figure this and that out? How in the world are they supposed to figure this and that out when they don't even understand what's going on? So that's a really good project for women. They've had, I suppose, six or seven meetings since they got their first grant funding. We felt that since women were calling and contacting us, they must trust us, or they wouldn't call. And through those phone calls and our newsletter, if we could urge those women to go to Lou Ann's meeting or to one of our meetings, then at that time we could tell them about other help that was available. For example, we finally did schedule just an organizational-type meeting. We sent out some letters and called up some gals whom we knew very well. We asked them to get together and talk about what was going on and what their problems were. They did come to the meeting. We had a big crowd of people. You always invite twice or three times as many as you think will come. Well, everybody

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came. Then we sat and talked about what their problems were and what they'd like to have in such a group. Finally, the Minnesota Women's Fund did give us $1,000 to hold some of those kinds of meetings, so we could make lists and write down what the concerns were. We had blackboards full of concerns. One of the things that Lou Ann's group was addressing, for example, is that a farm wife has to sign the IRS [Internal Revenue Service] papers. If she just works on the farm, she's worth at least fifty percent of whatever income was produced on that farm. But when it comes to getting Social Security, she gets a small portion of what her husband gets. Now that's not fair. If the husband is younger than the wife, she has to wait until he reaches Social Security age before she gets anything at all. It just is not fair. There are also gals who are divorced, gals who are single and with a family. What happens when the husband dies and she goes to the bank? Maybe she has two sons at home who were farming with dad and who are nineteen and twenty-one years old. Now the mother and the boys have decided they are going to go ahead with the farm. They go to the bank window, and she can't get any money. She has no credit. There are many more issues, and I could sit for an hour and talk about them. But in a nutshell, I guess, when we added everything up, one other big issue emerged. A lot of the gals can't afford to have any fun. They are either working all day at a job away from the farm, or they are working on the farm trying to take the place of a hired man. So when evening comes, they are tired. But they would like to go to some fun events, too. Out here in rural Minnesota, sometimes you have to drive fifty or 100 miles to go to a fun event, and there are no funds for it. There are also no funds for a babysitter. So we decided to have some meetings that were informative and that would include women speakers. For example, there is a lady highway patrol officer who is also a mother. She has four tiny children, and her husband is a deputy for Brown County. She offered to come and talk about her job--that of working in a man's job with a family and a husband. If we had some speakers like that so gals could see what other people are going through, if they could learn from each other, then we could have some fun events, too. For instance, if something was happening at the legislature that the women could take part in, we might go to the Capitol and blitz that place for several hours. Then we could all go out and have dinner. Well, we need funds to do that kind of thing. So that's what our women's project is going to be about. MR: There was a survey put out by the University of Minnesota about some of the pressures that are on rural women. Are you finding similar concerns, such as the problem of the many roles that they have to juggle? DS: We have just attended some meetings by the Minnesota Rural Futures. Yes, I thought that survey was really good. Several states have done that. Iowa had a really good survey,

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too, with a lot of similar questions. It really shows the problems of the rural women, not just farm women. We thought our project would involve all rural women. You don't have to be a farmer. In the last couple of years, Groundswell has begun to address the problems of the small town communities. We've got gals who live in town who are very, very closely connected with the agricultural problems. They are affected by what is happening in agriculture. So we're going to include all rural women. For example, Rural Futures put out press releases and did a good job of inviting people to that meeting. But I was disappointed at the meeting. I was disappointed that your average "run-of-the-mill" gals weren't there. That's one thing that we would like to see. Like I said, there are lots of organizations that are trying to form women's groups, but the women don't go. We are hopeful that through our project, perhaps we can steer women to some of these other meetings. We can't provide everything. We're not trying to replace other groups, or put on the same kind of meetings that Lou Ann or any other group is doing. There's no sense in duplicating things. But we feel that the rural women do contact us, and maybe if they come to one of our meetings, we could tell them, "You know what's going to happen over here at this meeting?" And maybe we can convince some of those people to attend a meeting put on by a different group. I was disappointed by Minnesota Rural Futures. They had a meeting at Windom, too. A couple of gals on our Groundswell board went, and they were disappointed also. It seemed like everybody who was there worked for an office or something. Sure, we need those people involved. But we should also include the common, everyday, run-of-the-mill gals who need some help, who have names on their labels that say "farmer" or "housewife" or "mother." MR: A lot of the women in this area use social service agencies like food shelves and battered women shelters. Has there been a growth of services in the rural community because of the rural crisis? DS: Yes. About a year ago, we compared the number of food shelves available in 1980, then 1984, and now in the present. And, yes, the services have grown tremendously. A new kind of a community awareness has helped. We did a lot of work on this back about three, four years ago. Anne Kanten, the deputy commissioner of agriculture, did a lot, too. We would go to agencies in the Cities and to the Department of Health and Human Services and tell them that more help was needed. For example, many of the food shelves were only open one morning or one afternoon a week. If people were working a little part-time job, or if they just couldn't get there that

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particular day, they couldn't get any food. We promoted the idea that the food shelves should also be open one evening a week, to give everybody a better chance to get there. Another problem was that the policy was to give people a three-day food supply. That just wasn't enough. In that three-day period, you were supposed to be able to go to the welfare office and get better help--food stamps or whatever. Some food shelves did change that policy. They will give people more food, but other shelves just stick to the letter of the law. It's a little bureaucracy there. If we can't get to the head person who's running that food shelf and explain to him or her why they should give a little longer food supply, those food shelves still give out only the basics. We have met with the people from Countryside Council who work with the food shelves in southwestern Minnesota. They've done a really good job of passing on the need for more food. Yet, with some food shelves, you just can't make any progress at all. Then, too, some food shelves are so in need of items that there is just no way they can give any more than a three-day food supply. They have also started a whole new program called "Waking Up the Down and Out." When the records show that a person has come to that food shelf several months in a row, it's obvious that his or her problems are not being solved. So as not to make the person feel like they are being jumped on or being backed into a corner, they try to help these people figure out what their problems are. For example, "Do you need a little more training here so that you can get a better job?" Some of the women directing this program in Marshall are hooked up with agencies all over the state. They help you get some additional training or take an aptitude test. Maybe you are qualified for something that you are not even aware of. They try to help you get into a better job so that you don't have to go to a food shelf for the rest of your life. So, yes, there are more services available. Our biggest problem is that people don't know about them or they are too embarrassed to use them. They all know about the food shelves, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they will go to them. We still have Groundswell people who have to take people to the food shelves or who take the bags of groceries to that family. When the family sees what's in those bags, when they understand how much this will help them, maybe the next time they will go into the food shelf with us, and then finally, maybe they will go by themselves. But so many people just feel degraded and embarrassed. Years ago, they used to talk about pride--that farmers had so much pride. Shoot, I don't know if it's pride or if it's just down right humiliation and embarrassment. They are embarrassed because they've been good citizens in the community, and now all of a sudden they've got to go in and ask for food. It's the same way at the welfare offices. Things have slackened up a little, but, in fact, we're doing some work at the legislature this year trying to explain what happens when a farmer goes to the welfare office and asks for some help. The welfare officials will use his depreciation schedule and decide that he doesn't qualify. If over the years you hear that six people you know went to the welfare

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office and couldn't get any help, you think to yourself, "Why should I go there and ask for help? They'll just say, `No.'" So we're trying to do some work on changing that. For example, we want the welfare office to use a different method of determining whether you qualify or don't qualify for welfare. A farmer can have $100,000 worth of machinery, and that's what it shows on his depreciation schedule. But maybe he owes $200,000 on it. What are you going to do? Sell the machinery? You can't sell it, because it's mortgaged. MR: And you can't eat the tractor. DS: That's exactly right. There was a joke going around that if you had a cow or a sow or a plow, you were done for. You didn't qualify for any kind of help anywhere. But I think times are changing a little. At the welfare office and the food shelves, people are beginning to realize that there is a growing number of working poor in the cities and in rural areas. Even if you have a job, or a line of machinery, you can still be in a pickle and need some help from time to time. So it's getting better, but there are still people falling through the cracks. MR: Groundswell has grown quite a bit since the early days. One of the growing pains occurred when Bobbi Polzine left. Can you talk a little bit about that? There is some confusion over how that happened. DS: Well, I'm a little confused, too. When you work with people whom you didn't know before, sometimes it's hard to judge what happens to them. I think all of us are in complete agreement that when we started, Bobbi was very concerned about the farm crisis. She's a very intelligent woman. She has a way of stimulating a crowd to become involved. She did the best she could and did a lot of good things to get this whole project moving and to help make people aware of what was happening out here. As time went by, it seemed that something happened. There's no way to judge what happened. We all have our personal opinions, and on the other hand, there are other opinions. I guess what really happened is that suddenly Bobbi seemed to have her own agenda. I'm not saying that there was anything wrong with her agenda. It's just that when Groundswell was formed, we were formed with the cooperation and involvement of all kinds of people from all kinds of farm organizations and other organizations. We had Democrats and Republicans. There were even some people who didn't belong to any organizations. Through the process of organizing Groundswell and getting the ball rolling, we had set up some goals. We set up some bylaws. When we reached the point where people couldn't afford to spend their own money anymore, we had to get some grant applications. When you request funding, you have to have a program or a project profile of what you are going to spend the money on. Through this whole process, again and again, the board of

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directors and the executive board would sit down and discuss what we were doing and why. We would discuss what the board wanted to do and our reason for being. All of sudden, it seemed as if Bobbi's agenda was going in a different direction. Finally, none of the board members approved of her actions. Some of us on the executive board tried to figure out what to do. It's very difficult when you work together a lot and it's a seven-day-a-week involvement. Pretty soon, you're personally involved with that person. Who am I, Delores Swoboda, to jump all over any other member of that committee and say, "Hey, this is enough of what you're doing. I don't like it."? In talking to the big board of directors, some of us realized that people were becoming concerned there, too. So we thought that maybe the thing to do was to just silently quit and go and do something else. All of us have been involved in many other issues. There's always public service to be done, or you can stay home and do your own work. When we told some of the board members this, they didn't like it. They said that each one of us had certain capabilities or some special expertise here and there. They just felt that there was still a need for Groundswell to continue and that we should approach the issue with Bobbi. So we did that. We tried to say, "Hey, we've got to pull this together. Let's get out a clean sheet of paper here, and let's one more time define our goals." She was willing to do that, but then suddenly we'd hear that she had been somewhere and said things that our board had not approved. We are a nonpartisan group, and she would go down to the Capitol and just lash into the Republicans very strongly. That is one position that Groundswell took about the second or third week we were organized--that we were going to be a nonpartisan organization. We have Democrats and Republicans in the group, as well as people who have other political affiliations. So, good Lord, you can't go down to the Capitol and lambaste the Republicans. People on the board said, "Wait a minute. This is destroying our position down there." It wasn't that she was offending anybody personally. But our board felt that she was not following the agenda, and that in the end, this could spoil, stop, or destroy what we were trying to accomplish. Then she made a couple of trips to other countries. I don't know if it had anything to do with Groundswell or not. I guess none of us will ever know. But when she came back from Nicaragua the first time, our board members--not the executive board, but the board members at a board of director's meeting--asked about that immediately. It was the first thing that came up. We had just gone through the minutes and the treasurer's report when somebody said, "Before we go on here, we'd like to know why you went, Bobbi, and who paid for it. Who supported you? Why did you feel that you had to go there? Isn't this a Minnesota organization? Why are we involved with other things?"

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Well, right before that it came out that Bobbi had been to California a couple of times. She had been to New York. None of us on the executive board knew anything about that. We thought we should have the kind of a relationship with each other that we should report these things. So she kind of told the board that it really was none of their business why she went to Nicaragua. Maybe it wasn't. We are not exactly sure. That's not to say that other people from our organization have gone to Nicaragua or other foreign countries. But I think that when you get into a leadership position with an organization, as with the leaders of the Farmers Union or the Farm Bureau, you have to be very careful about what you do in a public way. That's what we were trying to impress on Bobbi. It wasn't too long after that, that she went again. Some of us on the executive board were becoming more and more concerned about what was happening to her personally. If she had a good reason for going and it was something that was going to help Groundswell, then she should tell us about it. Maybe that was the direction we should all go. We thought it should be discussed with our board of directors to see if it was something we should address. About that time, the executive board received an invitation from a representative of the board of directors. They told us they were calling a special meeting--that this problem had to be straightened out. They had put up with enough of it. The board had heard all kinds of rumors about where Bobbi was getting funds to travel, and nobody had any idea whether any of this was true or not. So they thought it was time for Bobbi to step down as the co-chair of Groundswell. They were going to let her off lightly. But she didn't agree to do that. So finally they had another board meeting and voted to dismiss her. It was a nervous, sad time for all of us. I was afraid that without her presence--the media was always so anxious to talk to her--that maybe it would take Groundswell several years to regain its credibility. We tried to meet with Bobbi and discuss this sensibly. We wanted to say to her, "Hey, step down as the co-chair. Maybe you should continue as a member of the board of directors or as a member of the executive board." But she wouldn't have any of that. So it was kind of a trying time for all of us. MR: So it was the board of directors, and not the executive board, that asked her to step down? DS: Right, it all got started from this board of directors meeting. Of course, as with any statewide meeting, there were people from some areas who didn't come to that meeting. But they had been contacted by phone, and there had been a lot of discussion back and forth among board members. Some board members were very much against removing Bobbi. They felt that she was the whole backbone of Groundswell. Those people were not really aware of what was going on sometimes within the executive board. For example, they thought that Bobbi did all

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the contacting of the press, and that's why we were doing so well. They didn't realize that that was why I went on the board. That was my job. I'm the one with the telephone numbers to contact people in the press and news media. It wasn't that I was so hot, it was just that I had called them before on other issues. So through all this process, there were things that some members of the board of directors had to find out. It was too bad, because for some of them, it sort of knocked the wind out of their sails. They were depressed, and they felt like maybe they had been deceived. That wasn't it at all. I didn't need to have a big pat on the back for all this work. Nobody had to know. When you're working together as a group, each person does his own little part. We all tried hard to work together so that none of us needed a big pat on the back for anything. It just happened that as co-chair, the local and national press would come to talk to Bobbi, so it seemed as if she was more important than anybody else on the executive board or on the board of directors. But the rest of us never really felt that way. If somebody does something, fine, we all pat him on the back and hug him. We're proud that this person did a good job at whatever he or she did. But we were always convinced that every single one of these farmers out here has something to contribute. Delores Swoboda is no better at this whole thing than any other person out there. I always tried to tell Bobbi that we had to work together more. But finally, it seemed that if it didn't involve the press and if it wasn't a big public issue, she didn't want to waste her time with the daily drudgery of doing what has to be done to keep an organization going--of keeping people informed and of standing with a farmer who's being foreclosed. So it was a devastating time for a lot of people. People who had put her on a pedestal suddenly found out that there were other people out here--not just the executive board but lots of other people--who did a whole lot of important things that made it possible for Bobbi to show up on national TV. So it was a sad time for all of us. MR: But maybe it was also a positive growing pain in the sense that you realized that the organization was stronger than just one person. DS: Yes. Of course, you don't see that when you're going through it. It's like before you go to surgery, you think, "Well, shoot, this is never going to work out." It's not until you are recovered that you can look back and see that everything would be all right. Of course, we can look back now and say that it definitely was a good thing. Maybe it should have been done sooner. Maybe it wouldn't have been so devastating and such a sad thing if we had done something sooner. I don't know. But I'll tell you, at the time, I was just thoroughly convinced that it was the end of Groundswell. There were people on both sides who were upset, and the press was involved. Then, of course, Bobbi's feelings were hurt, and she made some statements to

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the press that very nearly destroyed what was left of Groundswell. It was a really depressing time. I was thoroughly convinced it was going to destroy us. I was thinking, "What are we going to do to bring this group back? What are we going to do to regain trust and confidence?" We still have areas of the state where it's tough. We do have some meetings scheduled in the next couple of weeks in the southwestern part of the state. It's tough. People who didn't like Bobbi think that Groundswell is no good, that we are nothing but a bunch of fools. People who liked her very much are still angry with us that we removed her or that she was removed. So it's tough when you get people choosing sides and working against each other. From the start, we were trying to convince people to work together. It's difficult when you are working on a statewide basis and everything is so much in the public eye. For some people, this was the first time they'd had their pictures plastered on the front page of a newspaper, or the first time they attended a press conference with all the big newspapers from the Cities there, plus the Associated Press. Sometimes I hate to think about what we all went through. Now when I look back, I think it was a learning process for us. It taught us to go back to the people and to pull the board back together. We are pleased to say that in the end, we only lost about three directors from our board. At the time, we had a sixty-member board of directors. We have three who have never come back. I understand one gentleman has some health problems, so he is not able to be involved in anything since that time. But we hate to lose anybody. It's just like keeping farmers on their land. We don't want to lose one. It's the same way with this. When you do lose someone on the board, then there is the problem of that area of the state having to be reorganized. We've had to spend the last couple of years doing that. MR: Another growing pain of an organization is setting up its structure. Can you discuss the structure of Groundswell today? DS: We started out as a movement. I don't exactly understand what that means. I guess a movement is when a bunch of people get together and grab an issue by the horns and run with it. It was very successful. The timing was right. As time went by, and we ran into financial problems, we had to ask for some funding. Since there is nobody who will fund a movement, you have to have some kind of a stronger, better-based structure. To begin with, we had an executive board--which for a long time we called our steering committee. There are still some people who can't figure out the difference between the steering committee and the executive board. We always had that, and we also we had a board of directors. Originally, the board of directors was made up of representatives from the sixty counties. As time went on, we began to learn that sixty is a very large number. In fact, we have forty-five board members right now, which is still too big a number. It's

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very difficult to get everybody together. What we have done, over the years, is to hold meetings in those fifteen remaining counties to re-elect that director and to set up a little stronger organization so that we have a better base in those counties. Through that process, our board of directors had to sit down and prepare a set of bylaws. The first set wasn't very elaborate. The second set of bylaws was submitted to a lawyer. We got some help and went back and worked on it again. Then we took it back to the lawyer. We've worked on it so much that this year, at our annual meeting, the board felt that only one change was necessary, and that was clarifying the fact that our steering committee is the same thing as our executive board. Along with the bylaws, we set up a better structure and a better working relationship between the executive board and the board of directors. Each has a responsibility to the other, so that one bunch can't just up and decide they are going to do something without some clarification or approval by the other board members. Along with that we set up some committees which cut down on the responsibilities of the board of directors. We have legislative, organizational, and fund-raising committees. We still need to set up other committees. We are in the process now of trying to get somebody whose sole responsibility is the clothing center. We have a toy project that is going like crazy. We are trying to get some additional funding for that. We also need somebody in charge of that. We have a finance committee, but Sue [Beranek] is still doing all the book work. It gets to be quite burdensome, especially since she just had a baby girl the other day. The finance committee meets with Sue to determine in advance if we are running into financial problems, or so we can see ahead if a line item is costing us twice as much as we had projected, or if we had projected five times too much in another account. It's up to the finance committee, along with Sue, to go back to the executive board and say, "We have trouble here." Or, "Could we ask approval from this funder to take $2,000 out of this amount and put it over here? There's no sense of having three times as much money in an account as we need." We try to run everything like a business. We are incorporated. We are tax-exempt. We are nonprofit. We have an accountability. We have to answer to the IRS and to the Charities Division of the Attorney General's office and to our boards and to the people we represent and to the people who donate money to us--not just the big funders, but the people who give us a fifty-cent piece in a hat at a meeting. There are always things that need fixing, but we are learning. One thing that has helped us in the last couple of years is that we have been able to get some technical assistance from people who have helped us pull this organizational stuff together.

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I think of how we started--with meetings that had no agenda, just three things someone had written down on a piece of paper. It's no longer like that. We have people who take care of setting up agendas for meetings. I'm still the press person and the media person. When it's time to call up Channel 5, Delores Swoboda still does that. But we are learning. Somebody else needs to be involved, because I could drop dead tomorrow. When I go to the Capitol press room, I need to take another person along and introduce him or her. We are kind of in that process right now, of trying to get somebody else involved. Then that person could also write a press release. We have a new secretary. Jan Bossuyt had been the secretary of the executive board for a long time, but she now has to work a full-time job--they have gotten into their own financial problems--and it's just too much for her. She has agreed to stay on the executive board, and now Chloe Klinkler is our secretary. At our annual meeting, we added another person, Gloria Tepfer, to our executive board. She has agreed to take on the membership committee. We need to come up with ways of increasing our membership. We don't demand that you send twenty-two dollars a year to be a member of Groundswell, but we need ways of getting it across to people that while you can't send a lot, to please send something, please send what you can. Some people just don't have very much to send when they don't have food on the table. But maybe if that word could get out, more people would be willing to send us a dollar or something. So Gloria has agreed to take that on. We also have a Farm Credit System committee that has been going for about four years. We are now in the process of re-doing that. If we can get funding, we are going to try to hire people to work on that committee on a half-time basis. They could set up meetings for those issues and take a little pressure off Gene Irlbeck. He's had the organizational committee chairman job ever since it started, and now that we've got more groups and more committees putting on meetings, it has become just too much for him. So we are changing, hopefully for the better. When you look at it on a piece of paper--where we are today, and where we were a year ago, and where we were four or five years ago--we are better organized. We've just about got both feet on the ground. MR: The one area of growth has been the grants process. Can you talk about the first grant and how that has grown from there? DS: Yes, I will talk about the first grant. Well, somebody told me that there are places where you could get money. Of course, we weren't nonprofit. So Bobbi and Norm [Larson] did a lot of work trying to get this nonprofit status in place. I didn't asked any questions--just sat there and kept my mouth shut and didn't pay any attention, always thinking that I had enough of my own things to do. I just didn't pay any attention. Well, when it came time to try to get some funds, the first thing I learned is that you need to

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have tax-exempt and nonprofit status, or you have to find a group or organization to funnel your money through. So then I said, "How come Groundswell doesn't have one of those? What's the problem here?" Well, I looked at all these letters from the Internal Revenue Service, and I could see what the problem was. So I said, "How about if I go to a lawyer who helped MINNFAIR with this same very issue and see if he could help us?" It took, I suppose, about six or eight months of constant letters and phone calls from all of us. Sue sent in financial reports, and our accountant had to send in all kinds of stuff. I've got a file about two or three inches thick on this whole thing. We finally got nonprofit status. Because of my lack of knowledge, I put off writing grants until I had a feeling that we were going to get this status through. What I should have done was go to some other group to see if we could funnel our funds through them. But I didn't understand how it all worked, and neither did anybody else in Groundswell. They hadn't gone through this. Finally, I got an address of a grants funder. I wrote them a letter and asked if I could send in a grant application, and they said, "Sure. There's a process that you go through and you should have a preapplication form. Fill that out." Well, I don't know if we ever got it, but I never did see what that thing was. I did get a letter from them saying that they would be sending materials to us. Time went by and the deadline was coming, and I never did get the proper form. So I sat down and wrote on plain paper what was going on in Groundswell. I had never seen a grant before in my life. Well, I sent it to the national Campaign for Human Development [CHD] in Washington, D.C., and we were approved for $35,000. It's a miracle, because I had never seen a grant before. They said it was the most unusual grant they had ever seen, and they probably are still talking about it today. But they said that I wrote from my heart, and that sometimes the professional grants writer is just putting down a whole bunch of statistics to come up with all kinds of really wonderful things. So my grant application was really something. Since Groundswell's application, other farm organizations across the United States also have received funding from the CHD. So I'm kind of tickled about that whole thing. Since then, we have been approved two more times. Needless to say, one of the first recommendations was that we get somebody to teach Delores what this grants thing was all about. So Tom Quinn from Wisconsin Farm Unity met with me several times. He came over to my house, and I went to his house. Finally, through the process, I got to see what a grant looks like. I'm still not very good. I'm the first to tell that to the funder--that I'm not a professional grants writer. I've learned to ask them for help, "Is there anything that your staff people could do to help me prepare a presentable and an adequate application so that maybe we can get funded?" That $35,000 was like a miracle, because we were at the point in time where all of us were ending up in such financial trouble ourselves. We just couldn't afford to fill up the

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car with gas and drive 200 miles to go to some farmer and stay there for a day or two to help solve his problems. We couldn't afford to go to the Capitol or to hold meetings, or anything. We just couldn't afford it anymore. I wrote another grant application before I got any help on grants writing. I wrote to the Headwaters Fund in the Cities. We got a grant that helped us pay for gas for our board of directors and to provide a sandwich and a bowl of soup at meetings. Let me tell you, that really, really turned everything around as far as our board of directors is concerned. That money enabled those people--who are all farmers, who are all living through this crisis--to afford the costs of jumping in their cars and helping someone or to attend a meeting. From that point, we've gotten funding--small amounts that didn't really need formal grant applications. The Lutherans gave us some money. A Jewish group in the Cities gave us $500 one time to cover the costs of holding a meeting. Little bits and pieces like that have come along. Tribe 1, a foundation in the Cities, gave us $10,000. The Minneapolis-Saint Paul Archdiocese awarded us $15,000, and we have just been approved for the second time for that amount to hold meetings in the Archdiocese's rural counties around the Twin Cities. We have a meeting scheduled there next week in one of their counties. There are places where Groundswell hasn't been really active in the past. Maybe the director there fell by the wayside--he lost his farm and had to get a job driving a truck in town or something--so that county all of a sudden became very silent. These grants give us a chance to have meetings in those areas, and they have increased our support and membership tremendously. Right now as we grow, the more people on our boards, the more people who attend, the more meetings we have, the more it costs us. We are in a position now where we could run for awhile and cover a lot of bases, but if we want to continue to grow, to do new projects, and to involve more people, we need additional funding. So that's where we're at right now. I think I've sent in eight grant applications in the last sixteen days. I don't know if any of them will be approved, but you've got to start somewhere. Usually they write back and say if you were approved or not approved. Then I have the right to call them and ask them why. Maybe it's for the simple reason that their organization just doesn't believe in what we are doing, or they don't fund anybody outside of the Twin Cities, which is a major problem. I've been looking at the funders in the state of Minnesota. Some of them have many millions of dollars but only two percent of their funds goes outside of the Twin Cities. So maybe some of this will be a learning process for the funders, too. We need to wake them up to the fact that there is a need out here in rural Minnesota. Maybe rural people aren't sending in grant applications to them. We will work on both ends of this. I know other people, like Lou Ann, has had trouble funding her office. The resource centers are having trouble. The farm advocate program is very concerned whether the Minnesota

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legislature will give them enough funding. All of us have to work together and hope that we can survive somehow. MR: Why do you think that they don't fund rural groups? Is it just that they've had a tradition of funding in the Twin Cities and they don't see the need? DS: I don't know. Funders are listed in a book, and some say that they only fund organizations in West Saint Paul, or the Metro-area only, or in New York City where they have an additional office, or in Houston, Texas, where their other plant is located. And I guess they certainly have a right to do that, except it's up to us to point out to them that what happens to us out here in rural Minnesota is going to affect them. It is affecting them, and it will continue to affect them and the employees in their plant. The other day I wrote to an insurance company asking for funds for our clothing center. Only two percent of the tremendous amount of their funds goes outside the Twin Cities area. Two percent is just a drop in the bucket. In my application, I was trying to point out that I have had a life insurance policy with that company since I was about four months old. I suggested that part of their clientele is out here in rural Minnesota, and if there are financial problems out here, eventually that is definitely going to affect their business. They can't just depend on selling their insurance to everybody in the Twin Cities area. I know that there are insurance people who have their offices out here in rural Minnesota. Part of it is a learning process for them, too. When you think back to the past, there weren't very many organizations out here in rural Minnesota. It's just in the last few years that the problems have cropped up and that these organizations have formed. Even local groups like the Jaycees are having problems gathering enough funds from their local communities to keep their programs going. The Girl Scout office in Redwood Falls represents a big area here--I suppose it's the southwest quarter of Minnesota. I talked to the gal who works there, and she is trying to learn this grant-writing process, too. In the past, they didn't have such a big problem raising funds out here. They'd put on fundraisers, and they'd sell something, and they would bring in a lot of funds. But now, with the size of their office and the people involved, they just can't get the funds anymore. So they are forced to write for grants, too. She also said she's having a lot of problem with companies that say, "No, we don't fund in your part of the state." She told me about one organization that only funds in the Twin Cities and in Duluth and nowhere else. Maybe with more requests coming from out here in rural Minnesota, they will eventually learn. Of course, there is funding available through the Southwest Minnesota Initiative Fund and that's helping a lot of groups out here. But that makes it unnecessary for those organizations to contact Twin City funders. They just contact the Southwest Initiative

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Fund. If they can't get approved by the Southwest Initiative Fund, then they have to go to other funders. MR: I heard at one point that Groundswell was targeted by the LaRouche organization. How did that happen? DS: I don't know. I do know that in several of their publications, they really blasted us. They went through one period where they were blasting people who were on--not our executive board--but our board of directors. They were accusing us of all being lesbians and gays, of not understanding the farm issue, different things like that. It's interesting that you mentioned that because yesterday someone from the Land Stewardship Project called, and they are going through the same process. There's going to be an article in the Montevideo newspaper about the LaRouche people trying to destroy Land Stewardship. The lady I spoke to was all upset, wanting to know if we had ever had this problem. Well, we just kind of ignored it at the time. I did put a blast about it in one of my newsletters not too long ago because the evidence I had of what they said about Groundswell stuck under my collar a little bit. So I wrote that, "I wish they'd quit blasting us all the time and trying to destroy us." I didn't repeat what they had said or anything. MR: Is it just a phase they go through with different organizations? DS: I don't know. We know people personally who are somewhat, not actively, supportive of them. They come to Groundswell meetings, and they are very concerned about what's happening in the community. I'm sure these attacks aren't coming from those people. In fact, one person I know, who is very, very strongly in agreement with all of their policies, has just donated a tremendous amount of personal volunteer services. We were looking for furniture to help a family, and he brought beds over to the Wanda office. He's just a tremendous human being. And I know darn well none of this comes from him. So I don't know what their problem is with Groundswell. Every once in a while we get blasted really good. MR: You mentioned the clothing project a number of times. What is that all about? DS: In 1987, we had a fundraiser, a consignment and donated goods auction, as another means of raising funds. I had said, "Why don't we have a garage sale too? If we could make fifty or sixty dollars from that, it would be tremendous." All kinds of Groundswell supporters from all over brought items for the garage sale. We made $300 to $400 just from that garage sale. Then we had lots of items left over. Of course, people didn't want to take them back home again. I said, "Well, why not leave them right there where they are, put a few signs up, and say it's free?" Farmers come here to the Groundswell office, and Harold Hutchinson also has his office in ours.

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MR: Harold Hutchinson is an advocate? DS: Yes. He's a Minnesota farm advocate. We provide free office space for him there. So farmers not only come to see Harold, but we have other farmers who come in for help and for meetings. We told them, "If there's anything in there that you can use, that would surely be nice." As time went by, let me tell you, people were just picking those items up until there wasn't anything left. About that time, a Catholic church in Redwood Falls had a big clothing drive, and they didn't quite know what to do with that stuff. They were going to send it to the bishop's clothing drive and it would be taken to some storehouse. Well, there are warehouses in New York City that are packed full with clothes just rotting there. They didn't know what to do with the clothes, and it costs a lot of money for the churches to send to the clothes to New York or wherever. So I called the lady in Redwood Falls who organized it and asked her if there would be any way that Groundswell could get a couple of bags of kids' clothes. I said, "We don't have anything left from our garage sale. The kids' clothes disappeared in a week or so." "Oh," she said. "I'll take it to my committee. I'm certain if somebody can use the clothes here, why pay to send them to New York and put it in that warehouse there?" Later, she called up and wanted to know if they could bring the whole works over to us. Some people from the Firestone store have a U-Haul business, and they donated the use of a big U-Haul truck. They hauled over 3,000 pounds of clothes to our clothing center. Let me tell you, we've got this big, big hallway in the school, and it was piled to the ceiling and beyond. They brought pickup loads of stuff. There were brand new items that still had the price tags on them. So we quickly made up signs and sent them to every church in the country, and to our directors to hang up in stores in town. We put it in the newsletter and just did everything to inform people. As a result, all of a sudden, we now have 150 families a month coming to the office. It's just fantastic that people who don't need those items anymore will donate them, and people can come here who do need them. Mothers have called and said that they are having such a time with their kids because they don't have those fancy tennis shoes. We have ten boxes of practically new tennis shoes that came in--just the kind kids like. Mothers come to the center, and they are just speechless with tears. Little kids come over and grab Diane [Irlbeck] by the leg and say, "Thank you, thank you, lady. Now I've got boots and I can play outside, too."

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We've learned a lot from this. It gives people a good feeling to bring material to the center. Anybody is free to bring their things there. In the summertime when garage sales are going on, some people clean out their stuff, and they wish they could sell all of it. But that's never going to happen. For example, Lamberton had thirty or forty garage sales on one day. Half of those people brought what was left to our office. Some days when you walk in, there are 800 pairs of women's slacks in the office and you think, "My God!" But it comes in, and it goes out. It's tremendous the number of people that the clothing center has helped. Then for people who bring stuff, we will give them a little credit slip that they can use for the Internal Revenue Service, if they wish. If they bring in six garbage bags full of used clothing and they feel it's worth five dollars, Diane will give them a thank-you for their contribution and a receipt so that they can deduct five dollars from their income tax. It makes those people feel good that they can help somebody else. In the meantime, there are several churches whose women come over and pick out real gaudy or bright materials--the kind that people don't wear anymore, like the polyesters. They take those items home and they make quilts with them, and then they bring the quilts back. This winter, we have helped four families who lost everything in fires. I think two of them were farmers and two of them lived in town. They just lost everything. Well, they all had insurance, but you know how it is. Immediately after that fire, where are you going to go quickly to buy stuff? So people come to the center immediately after a fire and get clothing. Then it would be nice if they had a little bedding, so somebody gives them a bed. We even have had people bring in furniture, dishes, cookware, and small appliances. One lady moved to an apartment from her house. She was going to keep a majority of her items, but she had quite a few things that weren't going to fit into the apartment, so she donated it to the center. There were people who moved into a complex in Redwood Falls, and they came with nothing--very, very little clothes, no furniture, no dishes, nothing. In the first place, they couldn't have afforded to move their things out here even if they had any. So they just packed what they could into their cars. The chief of police in Redwood Falls took this on as his own little project. He got these people over to the clothing center to get clothes. We have helped them get beds and some of the quilts. People bring bedding to the center. The last shipment we got, I bet there were ten or fifteen brand-new sheets that were in the original package. Somebody must have had them in a drawer and bought a different size bed or something and didn't need them. So it has just helped a tremendous amount of people. We are all excited about it. Diane is really good at welcoming people there. We have volunteers. We have one special volunteer who comes several days a week. She lives eight or ten miles from Wanda. If

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nobody else comes, that doesn't bother her a bit; she just works by herself. This is her little project that she has taken on to try to keep the center going there. She is just a sweetheart. We have also approached women's groups in churches and senior citizens groups to send some people over to help sort these clothes and get them out of the bags. One lady took home a great big box of baby clothes that were stained. She washed that stuff and then brought it back, and it's just like new. Many items are like new, except they all have a little spot somewhere. More and more people are involved. Last Saturday, we met with the Redwood County DAC [Day Activities Center]. They work at the clothing center at Redwood Falls for the handicapped and mentally retarded. We're going to get some people to work here, too. We will have to hire them, but they have someone who brings them over and trains them. This is a way of providing some employment for those people as well. So, while it's good to have volunteers, this could give the handicapped a chance to earn some dollars. I don't have any real concrete information on it yet, but they have people for whom this would be a great experience. If they could come over just two days a week and help Estrid Eichstadt, the gal who works there all the time, we could probably do more work. It would free up Estrid to send out additional notices to churches and to our directors to hang up in their towns so that people hear about it. It's a fun project. In a way, it's sad that people have to resort to clothing centers in this day and age and in these United States of America. But the fact that we could make that little boy so excited--they have several children in the family. He wasn't in school yet, so when the other kids would go to school, they would wear the only pairs of boots they had in the house. So he didn't have any boots to play outside with. So he just grabbed Diane and hugged her leg up and said, "Thank you, lady. Now I can play outside, too." We've had some good things happen. It brings more people into our office, it makes more people aware that we are there. As time goes by, it involves more and more people. That's what we are all about. MR: Another major effort is the toy project. How did that get started? DS: In 1986, Lois Schmidt from the Marshall Countryside Council office called up and said, "Have you got any farm kids whose parents can't afford toys for the kids?" I said, "Oh gosh, I wouldn't know where to begin telling you about it." She said, "I'm going to give you a lady's name down at the Saint Paul Food Bank. Call her up and see what's going on."

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So I called her up. I had met her before at Food Bank, Food Shelf, Fair Share, and Food Share meetings. I had been working on those kinds of project for a couple of years. Back in early 1986, Groundswell had received $20,000 from Willie Nelson's Farm Aid project. We were supposed to give that $20,000 to farmers for emergency food. We debated, for I don't know how long, how to go about this process. How would we use that money to get food to farmers? Finally, we went to the Cities and gave it to the Saint Paul Food Bank. They, in turn, allotted it to rural county food shelves. So that is how I had met this lady. I called her up and said, "I just got a call from Lois Schmidt and I understand that there might be some toys available." She said, "All there really is is Santabears." They were those great big Santabears. We got 500 of them. We called our directors and let them know that the toys were available. We got those Santabears here, to my house, on December 24th at about three in the afternoon. We didn't know for sure exactly when we were going to get them, so the guys called from the Cities when they got them loaded on the truck. Then we knew how many they had. I had fifty to seventy people come to my house on December 24th to pick up the Santabears. On top of that, I was having Christmas at my house that year. The letters we got from people from all over who got these Santabears--it was incredible. It was so sad that I just don't think I will ever forget it. The next year the toys were going to be distributed out of the Saint Paul Food Bank. So we had kind of an "in." Most people knew us. A couple of times, I'd been to some meetings down there. Sue and I went to a meeting with the Food Bank and Food Shelf people one time over at Health and Human Services, trying to promote giving out more food at the food shelves. So I called those people and said that we were hopeful that we could be included in the toy drive that year. Well, they never know how much they are going to get. This is all done through the Toys for Tots and the Marines. There are two different Marine groups down in Cities. They take turns. Every other year a different group does it. That year, the Marine group was working very closely with the Saint Paul Food Bank, and they have a great deal of expertise in handing out toys. They have a process. They've been in the business of dividing things up for a long time, so it is all run very smoothly. But the Toys for Tots program is done for the Twin Cities area, not for rural Minnesota. So they had to see to it that the needs in the Cities were covered first. They never know how much people are going to give until the last minute.

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In 1987, we got a call from the Saint Paul Food Bank at eleven o'clock on the 23rd of December. The local furniture store owner would let Gene Irlbeck drive his truck, and he donated the use of the truck and the gas. The guy down at the Saint Paul Food Bank said, "I don't know what size truck you're talking about, but maybe you should have something else." So my son quickly went and borrowed a topper for his pickup, and he drove that down there. There was a family from northern Minnesota with a son in the Cities. He also brought his pickup with a topper, and then two other people from southeastern Minnesota drove up there. We were hoping we would get 500 Santabears or something. Well, when we got it all loaded up, that furniture van was full of toys. The pickup had no boxes or anything--it was solid stuffed animals. I don't know how many watches were in there, but they were really nice--anybody could wear them. The other pickups were all full, also. The trucks got back to Wanda at 10:30 at night on the 23rd. Diane had help at the office to unload them. The next morning, when we woke up, the roads were all iced over. You couldn't even stand up on them. So my neighbor went down--she has been really active in Groundswell and she's the Renville County director--and took her pickup to Wanda. I brought mine, too. We loaded up everything that we possibly could into those pickups and brought it over here to my house. Martin Berends from Montevideo and Wayne Kling from Granite Falls went to Wanda. They loaded up their van and pickup with as much as they could take, and they distributed the toys in their area. And, by golly, on December 24th, we had distributed well over 5,000 toys from the Saint Paul Food Bank. MR: In a single day? DS: Yes. On the ice. And nobody had an accident or anything. I suppose that day I probably had sixty or seventy people come to my house. We had food shelves and welfare office representatives come to my house or to Wanda. By that time, a lot of counties had tried some little project to raise toys. In Redwood Falls they have a project they call "Share the Spirit." Lots of people do a lot of hard work to raise not only toys, but gifts for people in nursing homes, retarded folks, and people in mental hospitals. It's a pretty good project, but there is always a shortage. So our toys helped them. Once again, I had all these people tracking through my house on the 24th. But I was happy to have them there. At first we thought, "Well, we must have 2,000 toys here." But after we added up who got what and with all those pickups that went to other places, we had well over 5,000 good-quality, beautiful, nice toys and probably another 1,000 or so coloring books and small items. So this year we made contact with the Saint Paul Food Bank and the Marines early on. The only trouble was, this year it was a different Marine group. They didn't want to do

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anything with the Saint Paul Food Bank. They wanted to distribute the toys themselves. So they rented a warehouse where Northwestern Bell used to be, and they collected all the toys, and they did their own thing. I got phone calls about toys from the first and second weeks of December. This year, they called us down to Saint Paul on the 20th. We thought, "Boy, aren't we doing well! We're way ahead of schedule. This year we're going to be able to spread the project to forty counties, instead of thirty." But when we went down there, they were very mixed-up and unorganized. It was not any one person's fault. It was just that it's such a big project, and every year those Marines have different people as the chairman. It doesn't seem like there's any follow-up. Now the Saint Paul Food Bank has a new director, and he tried to get together with them during the summer and explain the process to them. But it just didn't work for a whole bunch of reasons. Many people were at fault, not just one person. When we got down there, I immediately introduced myself. The gentleman who was organizing this had a piece of paper there with Groundswell's name on it. It said right on there that Groundswell was to receive 7,000 toys this year, and we did. The only trouble was, the whole 7,000 could be loaded in the back of one pickup. They were all little-bitty, very cheap plastic watches that a little kid could pin on his pocket. It had a little clipper thing like this that he could pin on his shirt collar. We also got little trucks that were three inches long. That's what the 7,000 toys were. So this year we had a problem. We had made contact with welfare offices and food shelves and everybody from last year, and it was really a sad situation. At the last minute, they had a whole pile of used toys down there. They did give us that. I think they gave them to us so they wouldn't have to put them in the dump. Some things were salvageable out of that for kids whose families weren't going to have anything this year--it was better than nothing. We also had some toys left from last year. The weather was so poor that I had some items left at my house when it was all over. In '87 there was one Indian reservation that we were unable to contact on the 24th. We didn't know anybody there. We just called everybody we could think of in the area, and we still couldn't get a hold of anybody. We even called the local sheriff. Finally, those people came on Christmas Day and the day after Christmas and got some toys. But after that, we had a little box of this and a little box of that left over. So for Christmas of 1988, we put that all together, and that did help some. One lady had done a lot of work down in southwestern Minnesota, contacting people. She had drop-off places where the toys could be picked up. Other directors had done the same thing. It was just embarrassing and sad that we had so little to give people.

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The first Groundswell meeting of 1989 was on January 3rd, and toys were number one on Dorothy Riddell's agenda. She said, "I needed over three hundred toys for Christmas. This year, I'm starting to ask for repairable used toys right away." She has approached senior citizens groups to ask if they will take on a toy repainting project. She has received donations of new materials to make new toys. Something is certainly better than nothing. I guess it's time for us to gear up anyway. If we have another drought in '89 like we did in '88, I tell you the need and the problems out here are going to be tremendous. Then what happened in '88 was that the people whom we had worked with on food shelves and other programs in 1987 needed additional help in '88. And if we should happen to have another drought here in '89, something will have to be done. One project is beginning in the Eagle Bend area. We are trying to get one going over here. The southeastern region has already met with Dorothy, and they are gathering up toys, too. So this is a whole new project. I don't know exactly how it's all going to work, but I have written a grant proposal for funds to cover the cost of those new materials and electricity. We think we have a place where materials could be collected in the Eagle Bend area. People could come there to work. In the last two months, my husband has been involved in collecting wood from plants in Redwood County, rather than the wood being hauled to the dump. MR: For scrap. DS: Yes, the dump won't accept scrap wood anymore. So Groundswell has a project here in the wood chipping business. The lumber is brand new. There are people who could make rocking horses or all kinds of things for kids, or little rabbits or dog figures for people in nursing homes. We are also working with day activities centers where the mentally retarded and handicapped people can do work like that, too. So, maybe, when Christmas 1989 comes along, we won't be in a terrible position like last year. Of course, a different Marine group will be doing it in '89, so that might make a difference, too. I have written letters now to everybody in the Cities who was in charge of Toys for Tots, trying to explain to them that Groundswell also receives toys from that program. I don't think that they are aware that we were getting any of these toys. So I really did some pushing right away in the month of January, asking people, "Were you aware that we were getting some of those toys, and what the need is out here?" Maybe this will be addressed differently or a little better next year. I don't know. But we can't always count on the Twin Cities. If the economic problems hit there and affect those people, then they collect less toys.

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I still have one major concern. I wonder what happened to all the toys that were left down there in '88. The director at the food bank told us that after the '87 Christmas season was over, they had 10,000 toys left over. I bet you they had 30,000 toys left over this year because the program was just such a mixed-up mess. I wonder what happened to them. I just wonder. MR: At a meeting I attended, you talked about what you perceived as the dangers of vertical integration. Could you discuss that a bit further? DS: We just went to a meeting in Des Moines where there were probably ten or fifteen states represented. The subject was vertical integration. We in Minnesota were very concerned. We wanted to attend the meeting and see what is happening in other states because we feel that vertical integration is rapidly moving into Minnesota, especially in this area. One of the local elevators in the area started making deals to have farmers build turkey barns. The turkey industry left Minnesota for a long time. Now it's all coming back again. We have also heard that corporations are going to have farmers build hog barns, with 1,100 sows in one building. We're very concerned about this. We don't like it. MR: What is the problem with that sort of situation? DS: Well, if you get a contract, like raising turkeys for Swift, the contract tells you everything you have to do. It tells you very little about what the company has to do. And the company can terminate the contract anytime they want. We already see that some of these farmers who built the turkey barns haven't made a cent, and they're on their fourth batch of turkeys. For example, one of the turkey growers had a sickness problem. The company notified the farmer that he had thirty days to correct this problem or it will drop his contract. Well, now if the contract is dropped, the farmer will sit there with $1.2 million in debt and no place to sell his turkeys. I suppose that what the farmer could do is to go to another turkey outfit that will buy the turkeys from him. The only problem is that when you have to sneak someplace else and try to dump your product when it's practically ready to be sold, then you're just going to get rooked on the price. And if you don't have a contract for the next batch, what are you going to do? How are you ever going to pay that debt back? You will have this great, big, humongous building sitting there that really isn't good for anything. You could park machinery in it--in fact, the machinery of several farmers could fit in there. So for the big corporations, everything is to their advantage. The farmer provides the building and all the equipment. The corporation tells the farmer that this is an opportunity, for example, to clear $80,000 a year on a turkey barn. And the corporation tells the farmer that two people can do the work. Well, I'm sorry, but that's an out and out lie. These farmers who have those turkey barns know pretty shortly after starting the

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project that it takes four, or five, or six people to run the barn. And there are periods of time when you're moving turkeys in from one building to another where it would be very nice to have fifteen or twenty people working with you. I talked to one gentleman who had become involved in corporate turkey production. He was very proud of the fact that he was paying a fantastically wonderful wage to these young men who were working for them. He told me that he was paying them a wage that would average out to six dollars an hour--or $240 for a forty hour week. He said, "That's pretty darn good for out here in this rural area where a lot of the jobs are all minimum wage." So he was quite proud of himself. A half an hour later in the conversation, I found out that his workers averaged from sixty to eighty hours a week. So if you divide sixty hours into $240--they like to pay by the week, not by the hour--those young men were now getting four dollars an hour. And if they have to work eighty hours a week, those young men were getting three dollars an hour. Then later in the conversation, the farmer said, "Golly, I'll tell you it's really tough for these young people nowadays to make ends meet. None of the young people who work for me have insurance. I guess I'm going to have to take some steps and see if I can't get some kind of a group insurance policy because they don't have any." And I said, "Well, gee, with the tremendous wages you're paying them, they should be able to afford insurance." But the wages are nothing. It's slave labor. That very same farmer is the one whose turkeys have health problems, so we're wondering if he's going to survive. He has a couple more days yet before his month is up. The rumors around the community are not good--I hear that the turkeys are still dying quite rapidly. Once turkeys get sick, they do have a habit of dying very rapidly. So I don't know what's going to become of him. During that same conversation, he told me that he's also interested in setting up one of these big hog barns. Well, we know for a fact that he owes $1.2 million on that turkey barn. The sad part of it is that the corporation claims that he can pay for that building in seven years. Well, you see, in the contract it says that the money for the building and equipment will be taken out of his turkey check. So if anything happens to the price so that it goes down a little bit, yes, his building payment will be made. But I have lots of personal friends, classmates who have been in the turkey business up in northern Minnesota for years, and certainly your building payment is always made. But your feed payment isn't always made or your employees' paychecks. One of my classmates ended up with a great big light bill and the power company shut the electricity off because he was not able to pay the bill. Well, he had nothing left from the check. They just sent him a bunch of pieces of paper with numbers on it. And we just feel that these turkey barns are just the start of what's really a bad situation for everybody.

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In the hog business, the problem is that hogs are very hard on equipment and buildings. So even if you've got everything paid for at the end of seven years, it wouldn't be worth forty-five cents. It would be worthless stuff that would have to be replaced. So if you don't end up with a considerable amount of money in your pocket by making some kind of profit, at the end of seven years you're back where you were to start with. We are just very concerned about vertical integration. We don't like it. MR: There is a law in Minnesota against corporate farming. Does that offer enough protection? DS: Not really, no. We have attended some hearings down at the Capitol where the legislature has discussed this issue. The attitude is that if the legislature gets any stricter with these laws, the legislature will scare corporations out of Minnesota. If that happens, we will end up not having all these hog farrowing, turkey, and cattle feeding setups. Even our commissioner of agriculture made some comments that he doesn't want Minnesota to lose its livestock industry. Well, wait a minute. We're certainly don't want Minnesota to lose its livestock industry either, but there are certainly other things that can be done. The problem is, number one, that a lot of farmers can't even get the money. They can't borrow money to buy livestock and put it in their buildings and feed them. And then the next sad part is that if you do raise the animals, the price is so low that you aren't making any money. So why do it in the first place? I've had calls from farmers now in the last three or four weeks who had hauled their hogs to Sioux Falls and who were waiting in line to sell them. These were hogs that these farmers had raised themselves. One man called and said that this had never happened to him before. He went to Sioux Falls and was told that he couldn't sell his hogs that day. The operators of the hog lot said that they had had too many hogs. This farmer couldn't understand how the hell that could have happened, because it had never happened before. So he got out of his truck and talked to the man ahead of him. That man said he was told that he couldn't sell his hogs, either. So these farmers started walking up the line of trucks hauling hogs. They didn't have to go very far to discover that all the farmers who were ahead of them in line were from Canada. So the lot had an overabundance of hogs that day and they just wouldn't take any more. Whether this is true or not, I don't know--I can't hardly believe it. But these farmers were told that these Canadians were getting twenty cents a pound for their hogs that day. Well, you almost have to get forty-two or forty-four cents a pound in order to break even--to get your investment back. The Canadian farmers didn't care because they're subsidized. So why should the lot pay Delores Swoboda forty or fifty cents for her hogs when they can buy all they want from the Canadians for twenty cents? I understand that the pork producers now are starting to get concerned and that they're contacting their legislators. But you see, that subsidized Canadian hogs will push out the private farmer, the family farmer, from raising his own hogs. Why should he stick his neck out?

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MR: Some farmers I talked with said that raising livestock is almost impossible on a family farm just because you have to have such a large operation. Are there ways to keep livestock on a family farm or is it all going to be large operations in the future? DS: It doesn't have to be a large operation. That attitude gets back to the "bigger is better" philosophy that farmers were all told about so long ago. The sad part of it is that everything is so costly nowadays. The cost is so high for fertilizer, feed, electricity, and repairs. Say a family farmer had five sows, with an eight pig average, so that he produced forty feeder pigs. He fed them until they were ready to sell. If you were to make $10.00 a piece profit--which you can't at any of these prices nowadays--multiplied by forty hogs that is $400. That isn't enough money to buy a tank full of diesel fuel. So that market pushes farmers into raising more and more hogs. If he is trying to make a $2,000 profit, he has to own five times as many sows as he had before. MR: So the problem really is price more than the operation of the farm? DS: Exactly. Exactly. We have neighbors who are raising cattle for everybody but themselves. They've got many thousands of head--these neighbors are one of the biggest cattle raisers in Minnesota. But they are having a problem now. They have so much manure and bedding to haul out to their fields that they are asking people six or eight miles away if they could give people this stuff. These neighbors' fields are so covered with manure that they can't haul it out anymore. So being bigger has lots of problems, too. You also have problems with livestock sickness when your operation gets bigger. MR: There has been a lot of talk about the use of growth hormone for livestock, particularly bovine somatotropin [BST]. What is the Groundswell on that issue? DS: Well, I tell you, our board has never really taken a formal position on it. We're just burying our heads in the sand, trying to stay in the middle of the road on this. Part of the reason for that is if you read the reports from the medical people, they swear up and down that it doesn't cause any health problems. Then we read reports from Europe which say that there are health problems. So who in the world is supposed to make this decision? Most of us who have been involved in farming for a long, long time are convinced that it's not necessary for the family farmer to use growth hormones. If you're just an average size operator doing your own thing on the farm, then you don't have any need to use them. The big operators, of course, can't get around using hormones. They have to do that now. The Minneapolis Star Tribune did a big article about two or three months ago on the Revier Farms here at Olivia. The operator said that giving that hormone shot helps them clear another thirty dollars a head. Well, an additional thirty dollars is a tremendous amount of money. I don't know what the shot costs--I think that cost was mentioned in the

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article, but I just don't remember what is was. But to get another thirty dollars nowadays is a great, big amount of money. That doggone price for livestock and the problems of making a penny here and a penny there are sometimes forcing people to do things that they wouldn't do otherwise Those people who have the big feed lots--I wonder if they're happy about eating hormone-treated beef themselves. But if they believe what they read in the paper--that these hormones won't bother anybody--why worry about it? I don't know. Groundswell has discussed this issue a couple of times at meetings, but we just never came out with a position one way or the other. If you were to take a vote today, we would definitely be against hormone use in livestock. But we have not come out and made a statement on this issue at this point in time. MR: [Minnesota Commissioner of Agriculture] Jim Nichols has said that if other states use BST, then Minnesota will have to use it. And if the big operations use it, then the family farmer--just to compete--will have to use BST. What do you think? DS: Well, I know that Jim Nichols has said that if Minnesota doesn't allow BST, we will be an island out here. Legislators are also saying that we don't want to be the odd duck bunch. But wait a minute. We often wish that the consumer would have a chance to make a statement on this issue, too. I'll bet you ten bucks that if you went around and knocked on every door in the state of Minnesota, better than nine out of ten people would say, "No, I don't want to eat hormone-treated beef." And if this is what you're going to do, then put a sign out that says what is in that piece of meat. Then let's find out which meat consumers prefer to buy. I don't know. I don't know what's really going to happen. We also talked about this issue at that meeting in Des Moines the other day. We think that when one state takes a step, a second state will take a step, and that eventually use of hormones will mushroom and everybody will probably go along with it. But we feel, too, that it's just the big chemical companies that are pushing this whole issue. These companies want to convince farmers that there's nothing wrong, that hormones would be good for their operations, that farmers would make more money with them. Eventually, as farmers are pushed against the wall trying to make an extra quarter or fifty cents, and hormones might add an extra thirty dollars a head, more and more people are going to do it, I suppose. MR: Do you think that the consumer backlash against pesticides might stop the use of hormones in livestock? For example, the public is very concerned about Alar on apples. Will people start demanding things that are pesticide-free? DS: I think consumers are doing so already. We go around to a lot of different events and meetings. We discuss how little a farmer gets for the oats in a box of Cheerios and how

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much the public is paying for that hog--a farmer will get eighty or ninety dollars for it, and the consumer is paying $400 for it in the store. I don't use any medicine or hormones on our hogs. The hogs don't have that kind of stuff injected in them. After the meeting is over, we are shocked by the number of people who say, "Can we come out and buy a hog from you?" So I think it is a matter of people from all walks of life coming together and saying, "Stop." When we go to an urban meeting, we're really hit with those questions all the time. "Why do you farmers have to do that to us? Why do you have to spray our food with all those pesticides? Why are pesticides in your corn bins and your wheat granaries? Why do you have to be in the fields spraying, spraying, spraying? Does that stuff wash off?" Those are the kind of questions that we're getting. When the apple scare came up, it just alerted more and more people that there is a problem. More and more people are getting concerned. I just love it. I think it's great. I'm personally against all that stuff. We grow peas for Green Giant. They're a good company, and they sell a quality product. But they spray and spray the crop. The helicopter is out here day in and day out spraying. They post signs that say, "Don't walk in this field for twenty-four hours." Well, if must be bad for you if you can't even walk into the field. My son used to do measuring, testing, and sampling out in the fields. The first thing Green Giant taught him was to be darn sure that he looked at those signs because they didn't want him in that sprayed field. Well, that pesticide is going into that pea. Even if it's a minute amount, eventually, this will catch up with everybody. We're going to have sick people. People are probably already sick from it, but nobody can figure out what caused their disease. MR: Do you think the concern over pesticides helps the family farmer in that the larger operations and corporate farms tend to use more pesticides? DS: Definitely. Absolutely. That's the big secret and the big difference between the family farm and farming on a big scale for somebody else. You just can't keep hogs in a building continually day after day after day after day, year in and year out, without having trouble. The only way you're going to survive is to start shooting them with whatever it takes to keep them alive and healthy so they don't die. A small size family farmer farrows his sows and then moves the pigs into a different building or lot to fatten them up. All of a sudden your building is sitting empty for a period of time. That gives the building a chance for the disease cycle to be stopped. And yes, the family farmer can do that and has done that for hundreds of years with no problem. Where the problem started is when people started pushing. The big operators are trying to run too many animals through a particular building in a short period of time. They never let up. There's never a break in between there. And they're going to have trouble.

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MR: You talked at one meeting about the effect of the rising interest rates. For example, Federal Land Bank has gone from 9-3/4 to 12-1/2%. What does that do to the family farmer? DS: Gee, it must have been awhile since we talked about that because the (check if this is the first reference, if so, it should read Production Credit Association) [PCA] is at 14% right now. I just had a farmer's wife call me this morning. They are trying to borrow some money to feed their hogs. The bank note read that the interest rate would be a variable one of no less than 15% and no higher than either 21-3/4 or 22-3/4%--I can't remember yes. So yes, the interest rates are climbing and that causes a problem for everybody. Add that to the drought last year, where people have fewer bushels of corn stored with fewer dollars--with the interest rates now, these people are not able to cash flow. I don't know where it's going to end. We still had a government program this year where people got an advance deficiency check when they signed up, so that did prevent some problems. We hear a lot of scuttlebutt now in the coffee shops. If you're not allowed to charge your fuel or your fertilizer and you have to borrow that money, it's going to cost many more dollars this year than last. In addition, fuel and fertilizer and everything else have just gone up tremendously in price in the last year. I just can't believe how much the price of fertilizer has gone up. So if you add the rise in prices, plus a tremendous jump in the interest rate, people just can't cash flow. It seems like it's the last hit for a big round of trouble again. MR: It's almost going back to the conditions that started the rural crisis in the beginning. DS: Exactly. Except the prices for your input material keeps going up. They never went down. Those prices just keep going up and up and up. Sure, the interest rates went down for awhile, and so with the lowered interest rates you could afford--you couldn't afford, but you could manage to keep alive if the prices went up a little bit the next year. Now we're getting hit with both high prices and a high interest rate again. I just don't know what's going to happen. I don't want to have a negative attitude all the time and say, "Oh, God, this is terrible." Somebody told me one day that you're supposed to give people some hope. Well, I'm trying to figure out what to say. It's very hard to sit with a big smile on your face and tell the farmer, "Oh, come on now. This is going to be all right. Let's buck up. I mean, the Lord is going to take care of us." I don't know what to say. It's all hogwash because I don't know how things can get better when everything is costing more. MR: Some people blame the farm crisis on farmers who expanded irresponsibly. But you're suggesting that they don't have any choice, because prices keep going up and up--that they're not behaving irresponsibly, but the prices are.

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DS: Yes. Exactly. You know, we all made mistakes. You thought that by building that new hog barn to three times the size of the original--not that you would make three times as much money, but that maybe you'd make one and a half times as much money. Then interest rates jumped sky high and commodity prices went down. Instead of making one and a half times more money, you had an additional debt, another great big interest bill to pay. So it turned out to be nothing but a mistake. I don't know. It's been a learning experience. When we went to that meeting in Des Moines, they had a little practice session. We divided up into four groups, and we were supposed to pretend that we had announced a meeting for which twenty farmers had shown up. The reason for the meeting was to talk about vertical integration and explain to farmers how it works and why this is not necessarily a good thing for you or the community. So our group did that. We're all farmers, and they're all good people who are very caring. You have to a farmer to understand this issue. When all the discussion was over with, everybody thought that we had done a really good job. I said to them, "Okay. We've got the information here in our hands that we're going to present to that farmer. We'll give him a handout he can take home and look over again. We've put numbers on the board. We have thoroughly convinced that farmer that vertical integration is really bad for him." Today, vertical integration might look all right because you can put those hogs in. The company will furnish the feed and the hog. They will pay you X number of dollars for each live hog that comes out of your building. It looks to you, the farmer, that this will be clear profit and that you're going to be in really good shape. But down the road many things can happen. Your equipment will be worthless because hogs are hard on that. In western Minnesota, companies started having people raise hogs for them four or five years ago. I've had calls from farmers who started getting eight dollars a head, and now they are getting four dollars. But as I said to my group in Des Moines, "We can explain all these facts to farmers. It's all there. It's very clear. The farmer understand exactly what we're saying. But what the heck is the alternative?" If that farmer could put 100 hogs in his building right now with no expense to himself because he already has the equipment, he could make $800 at eight dollars a hog. That's $800 that the farmer wouldn't have any other way. So he is backed to the corner. He has no choice. That farmer is trying to save his land, and every penny is important. "So what," he thinks, "I have no alternative." I said, "The reason we came to this meeting today is that we want to find out what the alternative is." And nobody had an answer to that.

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The basic problem is that that farmer cannot borrow money to turn anything around. And if he still owes money on that building with interest rates going up--all the rates are variable nowadays--how in the world is he going to survive? He can't let that building sit there empty while he's paying interest on it. There's no place to rob that money from, so the farmer has no choice but to raise hogs for somebody else. MR: So these corporate arrangements are very tempting in this environment? DS: Absolutely. The farmers who have been on our board for a long time tell the story really well. For example, Gene Irlbeck said that he is very, very concerned about what's happening in Redwood and Brown counties with these corporate contracts. But when he got a brochure on corporate farming in the mail, he said that his wife nearly had to take the sparkplugs out of the car. It sounded so good that he wanted to drive over there and sign up right now to build a turkey or a hog barn or something. These companies pick influential, sensible, good operating people in a community to put up the first building. Then those people brag it up. I had a farmer call me last week. He had seen a gentleman who has had a turkey barn for two years who was telling him how wonderful corporate farming is--that they're just making money hand over fist. But my relatives who live next door to this man say that he can't get anybody in his family to work on this turkey barn anymore. They've had it. This man has not made all kinds of money. But here he is telling other farmers how wonderful corporate farming is. Now is he getting paid to be a good speaker? This man's picture and story were in this brochure. It all seemed so wonderful that Gene said that Diane nearly had to nail him to the wall because he just wanted to go over and sign up right now. MR: One of Groundswell's goals has always been to keep farmers on the land. But you also know farmers who have lost their farms. Of that group, what are they doing now? DS: Oh, it's a mixture. I suppose if we made a list, some of them have left the state. I don't know whether it was just embarrassment or whether they were just frantic to find someplace to go and something to do. We also know that if we made that list, better than three-fourths of the people who left the state have already come back. I think of one farmer who had to move off the land when his farmer lost the farmer. Somebody else lives on that farm now, while this man works for a fertilizer company. He does a very good job. He is a very intelligent young man who is well thought of in the community. But if you talk to him today he would say, "I would prefer to be out there milking those cows. I don't want this kind of work, but I guess I'm going to have to do that for the rest of my life." I also could give you the names of people, if I were free to do that, who have gotten jobs in town, starting at minimum wage. I can think of a couple of farmers who did really

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well--they moved up, they were advanced and promoted. They are receiving very good wages so that their financial situation is wonderful. But their happiness is not there at all. I have talked to their wives during a couple of our women-only meetings. These gals have told me that their husbands are getting $11.25 an hour. One had to move off the farm and is living in the community, the other bought the building site. The kids are still in school. Everything is going really well. They don't owe much to anybody, unlike they did before. It's just unbelievable. With those really good wages for a rural area, the picture should be beautiful. But one woman said that it was like a veil or a piece of a cheesecloth over a picture--that the sun wasn't really coming through. Her husband would prefer to be on the farm. He is forty-eight years old and born and raised on a farm. There is a whole big, long story of what happened to that man and his family. And yet he is doing really well at his job. I think of another guy who is working in Hutchinson. He has to drive a ways to the job, working at 3M. He has received some really good promotions. His wife works, too, at a another place, so their financial situation is completely straightened out. If they continue the way they are going, chances are that they will have a very bright, happy future. But he doesn't like it. Every single night, when he goes to work, he doesn't really want to be there. He would just prefer to be back on the farm. This same story can be told with an urban person who had his mind made up that he wanted to do electrical work, for example. But he never seemed to be able to get his foot in the door, so he ended up having to go somewhere else, to get a completely different kind of a job. Everything looks really rosy, but in the back of his mind, he always wishes he could have done electrical work. I think that is probably the way it is with farmers. Some of those who lost their land are still living on the building site. They have tried to rent the land back, tried to get the farm started again, but it just never happened. Now somebody else is farming the land. A lady called me this morning. They had lost their land, and now her husband is working for a neighboring farmer who is getting bigger and bigger all the time. But her husband has only worked four days so far this spring. This neighbor will hire him anytime he needs additional help. He has two sons who farm with him. This neighbor is a good man, a good operator, and he and her husband get along really well. The only trouble is that so far this spring, this neighbor has needed that farmer for just four days. Now four days will not keep this family alive financially. This woman who called does have a very good job in town. They're going to have food on the table, they think. But she doesn't know what on earth her husband will do with himself if he's only going to work four days. Now maybe this week he'll get to work four or five days. But once the beans are planted, there will be a lull again until cultivating starts. So those are some of the stories of what has been happening.

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MR: Someone told me that the problem is that the farm crisis hit just when the emphasis was on people getting satisfaction from their work--that people shouldn't work for a paycheck alone, but to get a sense of identity. This made it particularly hard for farmers who were thrown off the land when farming was what they really wanted to do. DS: Of course, I don't know if it made any difference that people were discussing that at this point in time. I think of farmers as people who have been born and raised on the land. They get a great deal of joy and satisfaction out of their job. It's a big hullabaloo when they end up with six sets of twin lambs in three days or when the sow farrowed and had seventeen baby pigs. That's where they get their enjoyment. They like the smell of the ground turning over behind the plow. Maybe talking about being satisfied with your job is just an explanation, really, of what farmers and farming has been all about all these years. My son was out here last night with his little boy. My grandson looks at those baby pigs, and it's just something that some kids will never experience in their entire lives. They will grow up, and they will never have the opportunity, unless they go to the zoo, to be around something like that. That kind of appreciation is why a farmer is a farmer. They get an awful bang out of looking out in the morning and seeing the sun shining on that alfalfa field all blossomed out, or the corn setting ears and the silks coming out. That's the satisfaction they got from the job. For many farmers, all they really would like is to have enough money to pay their bills. They get a great deal of satisfaction out of just plain doing that work. And you're right--a lot of people in this world make very good money at their jobs and hate every minute of it. Very, very few farmers hate anything that they're doing. They might hate one segment of it, like pitching manure or baling hay when it's 104 degrees in the shade. But, basically, farmers are very satisfied with their jobs. MR: The former head of the extension service said that what they would really need to do is sit down individually with each farmer to look at his books and counsel him as to the best way to manage that particular farm. The extension service cannot afford to do that. Barring that kind of individual counseling, how can you teach farmers to manage their cash flow and keep proper records? DS: Oh, it's a tough process. I guess that's one reason why I think there's a need for an organization like Groundswell. We have farmers talking to each other. During one of our meetings, a farmer will say that it costs him 1.3 cents to do something. Or that it costs him $42.16 a hundred to raise his hogs to slaughter weight. He will be sitting next to another farmer who doesn't do this kind of bookkeeping. What we always hope is that we will learn from each other. If one farmer is saying that it costs him $42.16 a hundred to raise his hogs and the next guy has no idea whether it cost him fifty cents or $112, maybe the second guy will go home and get out the pencil. Maybe he'll start thinking, "I'd better

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begin keeping track here." That's the only method we can figure out. There is no way to just sit down with each farmer. MR: I've talked to some farmers who have been suspicious of the extension service and who have been unwilling to work with the agents. Has that been a problem out here? DS: Absolutely. Oh, gosh. I can't remember when it was--I suppose it was about two years ago--a couple of us were invited to the statewide meeting of the Minnesota extension agents. We didn't know what they wanted, but we thought, "Well, sure, we'll go there." We know many of the agents personally. The reason we were invited there was to explain to them how Groundswell could hold a meeting and have 200 or 500 people in attendance. One agent told me that he had sent a letter about a meeting he was holding to every farmer in his county. He ran a great big article in the newspaper for two or three weeks about what was going to happen at this meeting and why it is important for farmers to be there. He also publicized it on a radio station that is heard all over the county. After all that, he had four farmers show up. We tried to be really nice. We don't want to offend anyone. After a couple of hours of going over this stuff and asking us a million questions, I finally told them that the problem is that farmers don't trust them. I mean, they won't even go there and get their cash flow run through their computers and stuff and it's all free. Now doesn't that tell you something--you're providing free services that are respected by FmHA and bankers and everybody else and yet no farmer will go there? I think that attitude is beginning to turn around slowly, just because of the mediation process. Farmers were forced to go into the county extension offices to sign papers and reply to the mediation notices. In that way, farmers found out that the agents are human and probably the first to admit that they have made some errors in the past. So I think that attitude is turning around a little bit. But I still feel that if you were to ask farmers, probably three-fourths of them would say, "Well, I go there to the extension service and listen to their advice, but I take it with a grain of salt." Or, "I heard the Redwood County agent speak over the radio or I read something he wrote, and you know, that guy is pretty sharp. But the guy in my county doesn't know nothing." So farmers are beginning to listen to the extension service. Last year, for example, the Redwood County extension office had some meetings on the drought. There were all kinds of disease and bug problems in the grain that came up because of the drought. The extension service had very, very good turnouts at those meetings. And after meetings were over, you could hear people as they stood and talked or as they walked to theirs. One farmer would say, "You know that Hanson, he's pretty sharp. I think he gives a damn about us guys. But that other guy, I didn't think he knew what he was talking about." So farmers are starting to attend the extension service meetings, but they're still hesitant about whether they should accept their advice.

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MR: What do you think that mistrust originally came from? DS: Well, the extension service told farmers to farm fence row to fence row, that bigger is better, to put lots of fertilizer on the land. Farmers listened to that, and now they felt that that was not good advice. By farming fence row to fence row and putting on lots of fertilizer, it helped us produce a surplus that supposedly knocked the heck out of our prices. So the distrust just moved right in. I think part of that problem came was that the petroleum industry had a lot of influence on the extension people in pushing fertilizer use. Now farmers wondered why they listened to those people because those practices actually turned around and slapped them in the face. MR: What will be the impact of the 1990 reapportionment on rural areas? DS: It isn't going to be a great big, total disaster. I talked with my local representative here and tried to understand how much more area he will represent after reapportionment. It was like two townships over on that side of the county and three on the other side. So it isn't going to be a big disaster--we're not going to lose fifty or sixty representatives out here. It's just another hit. I suppose--what the heck did he tell me?--out of four or five or six reps, we'll lose one. Of course, we don't need to lose anybody out here, and we don't like it. This pattern will continue--that's the bad part of it. As the population drops, it's just inevitable that that will happen. We're also worried about the effect of property taxes in the rural areas. I read a report yesterday that the bill currently in the legislature will help urban people. But this article was saying that in the town of Redwood Falls, if your business was valued at so much, your taxes could be expected to go up by so much next year. Farmers already took a big rise in property taxes this year. One elderly lady in Redwood Falls said her taxes went up $200 and some dollars and all she gets is that little bit of a Social Security check. She's concerned, because with $200 more here and twenty dollars more there, pretty soon the dollars just don't stretch. MR: Will a bill for interest buy-down pass the '88 legislature? DS: No. They're just not interested in it. In the Senate, they have the link deposit bill which seemed to be accepted favorably. The trouble is the House has a different bill, and these bills will never come together and amount to anything. So we don't expect any interest relief at all. Part of our request was for interest relief for rural businesses. The legislature did discuss that for one day, but I don't think that will amount to anything, either. So we're really sad about that. MR: Do you expect any kind of legislation that will help farmers out of this session?

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DS: Well, I made a statement the issue the other day, and I have to be careful how I say this, because I was told I was wrong. In the House, they have a $14 million ag bill. Part of that bill would cover the drought--the haylift, some financial support if you had to dig a new well, reseeding your pasture if it all dried out. They'd give you some help for those sorts of things. Then we were asking for some help for federal crop insurance. At first, the legislature said they would try to give twenty percent support of the cost of the insurance. Then that figure went down to ten percent support. In this $14 million budget package, I think it includes ten percent support. Well, federal crop insurance will cost Gene and me somewhere between $2,000 and $2,500. Ten percent, man, that isn't going to be a big help to us. The only trouble is that we're also being told of the $14 million ag package, it will be a miracle if it passes with $7 million. Then the other day, there was another hearing, and a whole bunch of other bills were put into this same package. For example, the package includes $250,000 for the resource centers. There was quite a list of all those bills. If you add that all up, I'm wondering if we're going to get ten dollars or $4.80. So in my way of talking, which isn't always correct, I said, "Well, even if the bill passes, it isn't going to help anybody." I guess that isn't really a correct statement because if you get $10, I suppose that's helping you. But that sure isn't much. So I'm still saying, in my less saner moments, that the bill isn't going to help anybody. MR: I know that Groundswell has spent quite a bit of time trying to improve understanding between rural and urban areas. Has that been effective? DS: It's really funny, but some days, depending on who you're talking to, I think we've made more progress with the urban people than we have with the farmers. Yes, anything that anybody does to help someone else learn, is an accomplishment and is certainly for the betterment of everybody. We've done lots of work with churches, so we get invited to lots of their meetings. We’ve also been to the Minnesota Food Association meetings where they've had urban people come to the country and rural people come to the Cities. We've always been really pleased with any kind of meeting like that, because it just seems that it creates more understanding. And like I say, sometimes we begin to wonder if we aren't having better luck with the urban people. It's the same way with the legislators. We're just really unhappy right now that some of the rural legislators are just not pushing anything down there for agriculture at all. Yet we can walk down the hall and run into an urban legislator who's very, very concerned. "How are things out there? Is it really getting better like they all say?"

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And when we say, "No, it's not," and just explain the situation a little bit, these urban legislators are all concerned. It's funny. Well, we just keep on doing what we can and hope, eventually, that enough people will learn. For example, in talking about the effects of the drought last year, we were very disappointed that the governor had appointed this drought task force and that nothing ever came of it. Its report has never been presented to anybody. The task force was just a big waste of time, because if the report would have been presented in the way it was supposed to be, certainly there would have been some results. MR: You even told the story that on a national level, Lou Ann Kling and Merle Hanson went to Washington and were received only by the Black Congressional Caucus. DS: Yes. Yes. Isn't that funny? Since the last time we talked, people from the National Save the Family Farm Coalition and the North American Farm Alliance have had meetings with legislators. The National Save the Farm Coalition has tried again to address some of their concerns about FmHa and the farm credit system. The coalition says that there is still a great need for debt restructuring and for people to pay attention to what's happening. They feel that FmHA needs to try to restructure these loans because of the rural crisis and the drought. There have been all kinds of meetings with legislators. There are hearings taking place right now in the Senate and House ag committees trying to get these very things accomplished. But sometimes we're just shocked at how little push we're getting and how little support we're getting from some of the rural legislators. If we call their office and ask what the big issue is today, they'll say it's trying to decide who should get kicked out of their job in Washington for being a scoundrel. Now we resent that. We think that a rural legislator should really be concerned about, number one, what's happening out here. So that's disappointing to us. MR: So even on a national level there's not been a lot of success for rural legislation? DS: Exactly. It's really funny. It seems as if you can sit back and watch how the whole entire country will get hung up on one issue until it's everybody's concern. Then three weeks later, they don't want to hear about that anymore. The issue is all over with, whether or not it's settled or no matter what really happened to that deal. No one questions it, and if you do, nobody knows anything about it. It just seems as if that's the way the American people are. MR: So the farm crisis had its few moments in the sun? DS: And that was it. That's the way it seems, doesn't it? It was a big deal--the media was out on the farms, and television stations from all over the United States were calling up

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wanting to know what was going on in Minnesota. Then all of a sudden, it's over with. It's old news. They don't want to hear about it anymore. MR: What will be the effect of the FmHa notices that went out in January? DS: Oh, gosh, I don't know. Gene [Swoboda] is on the Renville County committee. When we heard that 4,000 notices were going out in Minnesota, I thought, jimminy, that's a lot of notices. It was the end of January or February when Gene found out that Renville County had sent out an additional forty notices. So we finally have awakened to the fact that this will be an ongoing issue. Nobody has ever come out with what that final number of notices will be. Eventually, of course, we will get some numbers down the road through the mediation process. I know from talking to Kathy Mangum at the extension service that ninety mediation notices a month were being sent out. Then all of a sudden, bingo, they had 250 notices in one week. So we will get some numbers, eventually. We're just wondering how many people today are moving into that financial position and whether they're going to get a packet. I know that in our neighborhood, somebody just got his packet last week. Well, I have no idea how many other ones were sent out that particular day, too. MR: The impression the media gave was that FmHA was sending out all these notices at one time so they could get these loans restructured once and for all. But that's not what happened? DS: No. No, that's not it at all. Certainly, FmHA sent out a whole bunch of packets at one time because those farmers had been in limbo for the last three or four years. FmHA was not allowed to foreclose on anybody because of that court action. But FmHA couldn't send out a notice to someone whose 180 days aren't up yet. That's against the law. So if a farmer moves into that position two days later, then FmHA has to send him a notice. And it's the same if it happens two months later--it's just going to be an ongoing process. MR: Do you think that ultimately a lot of foreclosures will result from this FmHA action? DS: Well, I think that will depend a lot on the county that farmer is in and on his county supervisor. We're really proud to say that the supervisor in our county is willing to work with us. He is telling people when they come into his office that he'll help him, and that they can figure out this problem together. Now Gene's not supposed to tell me all this information--but he'll come home and say that our supervisor made some really startling comments.

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In fact, the FmHA committee even had a situation here two or three weeks ago at the meeting where a farmer didn't cash flow. When the supervisor presented the case, Gene looked at Gloria [Tepfer] and she looked at him, and Gloria said, "Well, he doesn't cash flow." The supervisor said, "Oh, but wait a minute. I think we can work this out and extend his term. I certainly think that he can be made to cash flow." Now we never have heard those kind of comments made by FmHa before. We had eight meetings in four days all over the state last month. In one particular county, that county supervisor tells every single farmer who walks in the door to the FmHA office that this farmer should file bankruptcy. Now this supervisor doesn't want to do the paperwork. He doesn't want to fiddle around with these people and spend his time with them. Now in that area, there's going to be trouble, isn't there? MR: Maybe what people don't understand is that the county supervisor has a lot of discretion about handling the situation. DS: I'm sorry to say, that's the truth. And, of course, part of the problem is that your county committee has got to be informed and aware of what's going on. If your county committee understands that and works with that supervisor and pushes and prods, then the committee will be successful. It's the same issue of local control and local representation. If the committee just sits there and says yes to whatever the supervisor does, then nothing will be accomplished that he doesn't want it to be accomplished. It's just that same old situation again. There should be people on those county committees who understand what's going on and have a willingness to push and prod to move that supervisor along. MR: Minnesota is a role model for other states in its farm advocate system. What was the eventual success of that program? Were there some advocates that were especially effective and those who were not? DS: Well, I think it's the same as any other program. For example, if you start a volunteer group in your community of people to visit shut-ins--one person will do a really, really superb job of everything. Gosh, you just wish you had 500 of those people. And some others do really well in this position, but not so hot in another position. And while we think it's a good program, it still depends on that individual advocate. Everybody is so busy trying to cover the bases--for example, Lou Ann is not only a good leader of that group, it was her idea. She was the one who started the whole program. She's a very knowledgeable lady. The sad part of it is, she's also a darned good farm advocate, so she's got people running for miles to come and see her. She just cannot handle fifty or sixty jobs all in the same day.

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We have often wished that the program could be improved a little bit--to take somebody like Lou Ann and pay her a decent full-time wage to work with those people on a day-by-day basis. If I were doing the job, I might be really good at doing one part of it and not so hot at another. With Lou Ann working full-time, she could pick on that up if she were spending time with me while I was dealing with a farmer. Then she could see to it that I get some assistance. There's not much of a system to check up on those advocates and see where they're falling down. You could have the very, very best advocate in the world, who is 110% perfect on everything, but who doesn't win one single battle in mediation. That doesn't mean he's a bad advocate. There isn't a good way of gauging which advocate needs help out there and which advocate is off on the wrong track and unaware of some of the laws. I've heard that one of the advocates was giving advice to people on bankruptcy and was unaware of the amount of exemption one could claim. Then one farmer talked to somebody else and said, "How much exemption do I get now on this bankruptcy? Is it $10,000 a person?" That advocate wasn't exactly sure, so others looked into it and found out that this person didn't really have his feet on the ground. Now that person is a very good advocate, but just in this one little thing, he didn't have the proper knowledge. Well, it was discovered that some of the advice this advocate had given other people was lacking in this respect. That's why I wish there would be some money guaranteed. When we were down at the Capitol on Monday, it sounded to us as though the legislature is trying to take some money away from the advocate program this year. And God knows what the legislature plans to do with it. We didn't get told that part. Here we've got all these foreclosures going out, and that's when they want to take money away from the advocate program. That's stupid. This is when they should make darn sure that there is money so that these advocates can go out and do their jobs. It just doesn't get put together without money, you know. MR: You'd mentioned earlier that you felt that the right of first refusal, the interest buy-down, and similar programs didn't really work to help farmers. What would help farmers? DS: A fair price. And how in the world is that ever going to happen? When the farmers get a penny more, the consumers have to pay five cents extra. In order for the farmer to get a fair price and not cause the consumer to be unable to make a living, to be unable to afford to buy meat, and food, and the other products we produce--I don't know. I mean, it's so out of whack, this whole system. I sometimes wonder if it will ever get straightened out.

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MR: I know that in writing grants, you have to set long range goals. What do you think the long range goals of Groundswell should be? DS: We've got a whole mess of goals. Some of them are like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. When Groundswell began, our main reason for being was to save the family farm. You can put that down goal on a piece of paper and end up with a whole list of goals and objectives you'd like to accomplish in saving the family farm. What will be the result of saving that family farm? All of a sudden, you're talking about your rural communities, your small towns, your churches, and your schools. It's just an ongoing list. Sometimes when I write these grant proposals, some of the funders will say that there aren't enough people in this world who can solve all those problems. So sometimes we write down our mission, and we list our goals and objectives. We then make up a sensible list of what we actually think we can accomplish here. Parts of that list include very small issues, like if we could, in six months, make ten people feel better about themselves, or know that somebody cares about them. Maybe that's a darn big accomplishment. And maybe that's all we're going to be able to do in this world. But then we're all farmers, and we just don't give up. And we're just bound and determined that we're going to solve some of these issues one way or another. I guess that's what keeps us going. MR: We're asking everybody in this project how they define what a family farm is. What is a family farm to you? DS: Oh, we've got a good explanation for that. We've talked about that issue for many years. We feel that a family farm is an average sized farm for the county you live in. Now in Renville County, the average sized farm is about 420 acres, or something like that. So that's what we consider a family size farm. Now, if you get into some areas--let's use North Dakota as an example. They only farm half of their land each year. So if they owned 400 acres up there, that would mean they were only farming 200 acres in a year. With light soil and very little rain there at times, there's no way that they could survive. So in that area, maybe the average sized farm is 800 acres of land. That's what we feel is a family farm. It's the average sized farm in a county that can be run by a family. Now that doesn't mean that if you have three married boys with families farming with you, that all these people would have to survive on o survive on 400 acres of land. You could multiply that acreage by three, in this example. So if you have a family group farming 1,200 acres of land and you divide that by three people, you're each farming what is still the average sized farm in a county.

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MR: So the operation of the farm is the important issue--that the family itself runs the farm? DS: Exactly. MR: What about ownership of the farm? If you rented your land out, rather than owned the farm site, are you still a family farmer? DS: You mean if you're renting the land and farming? And you don't own it? Well, I don't know. You know, years ago it wasn't such a big thing to own all this land. That wasn't the necessary thing. A lot of farmers were very pleased and proud if they could own eighty acres with their building site on it and rent another eighty acres of land. Well, pretty soon we had to own 160 acres of land and rent another 160. And now it's 1,000 acres. So sure, as you get more and more machinery and it's easier to farm more and more land, you've got fewer and fewer units that are needed. We feel that you should be able to make a living off the land. A family should be able to make a living off whatever the average sized farm is in your community. If you're living in southeastern Minnesota, the average sized farm is much smaller there because there is a great deal of dairying. They've got a lot of pasture land. I don't know what the figures are right off the top of my head--to make a living there by milking cows and owning some pasture might require 300 acres of land. You should then be able to make a living off that. But there's where the problem comes in. You can't make a living from an average sized farm. So old dad says, "Well, I'll tell you--this machinery, I think, could handle another eighty acres. So let's rent that over there." Little by little, everybody just keeps pushing it right to the limit, trying to make that dollar so that they can survive. Some people say that if you raise commodity prices for farmers, you'd end up with these great big farms just gobbling up everything and making a killing. I don't know. I don't personally believe that would happen. None of us want to work twenty hours a day, seven days a week. I really think we'd all start backing down. Why raise 5,000 hogs if you can make a living with around 1,000? Why milk 100 head of milk cows if you can get by milking fifty--making a living and paying for your land and your groceries? MR: One last question. Your son Don is already a farmer. Would you encourage your grandson to be a farmer? Is that still a good way of life? DS: Well, Don's shaking his head over there. Did you see him? I still feel that this farm life is a good life. You talk to the farm wives, the gals, and the thing we always liked is that the family is doing everything together. You can look out the door, and there's your

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husband out there in the field. He can look up to the house, and there you are out working in the garden. The only trouble is that in the last twenty years, everything got all screwed up. It isn't the old farm life like you used to know. Now everybody has jobs off the farm. The wife is working full-time, and maybe the husband has a part-time job selling seed corn. When I think about my grandson being on the farm, the ways things are today, God, I hope not. But then again, gee, it would be nice if he could live the farm life that we all used to know. I mean, Don lived in that kind of a situation on our family farm. But now, when everybody has to work on the farm and then have an outside job and do sixteen other things in order to make a living, then he might just as well go somewhere and get a job. But then he isn't going to have this farm life. We feel the same way about Don. You know, maybe he should have gone somewhere else and gotten a different job, without having to live through this agony of wondering whether he was going to survive another year. He's young enough that he still could go out and come up with an entirely different career. The only trouble is that he loves to farm. And he loves this family farm life. I'm sure glad that I don't have to decide for my grandson. MR: Thank you, Mrs. Swoboda.

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