The Farm Crisis

The Farm Aid concert was organized by Willie Nelson, John Cougar Mellencamp, and Neil Young to raise awareness for the hardships that the Farm Crisis caused to family farmers. Willie Nelson said that Farm Aid was designed to “buy the farmers a little time until long-term answers to their problems can be found.”(1) These problems began in the late 1970s, but every farming community was impacted in very different ways. 

In the early 1970s, the USDA and other federal agencies encouraged farmers to increase production and farm “fencerow to fencerow,” in the words of Earl Butz, the secretary of agriculture. Advancements in farming technology and the opening of new export markets in the USSR enabled this expansionist mentality.(2) However, it also planted the seeds of the Farm Crisis. Farmers took out more loans and leveraged greater debt on the price of their land in order to meet the global demands and profit from the new markets.(3) As farmers produced more efficiently, the prices for their crops consistently decreased, and in 1979, the Federal Reserve began to raise interest rates to control inflation. This began a significant decrease in the value of land and made debt repayments much harder for farmers.(4) Things got worse in 1979, as President Carter enacted a grain embargo on the USSR after it invaded Afghanistan, closing off this large market to farmers.(5) These problems created an economic disaster that would only worsen, and farmers, banks, and even manufacturers like John Deere would all feel the negative effects.(6) The Farm Crisis produced tragic results for farming communities. Debra Walker, who grew up on a farm in Carthage, IL, said that in one year of the Farm Crisis, four farmers who lived within one square mile of her family farm, including her own father, died of heart attacks due to extreme stress.(7)

Illinois felt the effects of the Farm Crisis just like any other state, but every community in Illinois had its own experience. In 1983, total farm expenses and debt for Illinois farmers was estimated to be 6.9 billion dollars.(8) John R. Campbell, the dean of the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, wrote that the value of farmland in Illinois had dropped about 65 percent when adjusted for inflation between 1981 and 1985, and predicted that more than half of Illinois farmers would end 1985 with more debt or be forced to leave farming altogether.(9) The University of Illinois attempted to alleviate the problems that farmers were facing with agricultural research and programs like Rural Route.(10) Rural Route was a telephone counseling service for farmers in need of financial and emotional support.

Within its first few months, 812 local farming families contacted Rural Route. Farmers in central Illinois, and Champaign County in particular, were more likely to avoid the worst effects of the Farm Crisis. Dennis Riggs, who worked at the Champaign County Farm Bureau, said that the soil and weather in central Illinois, which ranks among the best in the world for farming, saved many farmers from complete disaster.(11) However, farmers in southern Illinois were not as lucky. An article from the Los Angeles Times documented the disparity between Hamilton County in southern Illinois and Champaign County. In 1985, as the Farm Crisis ripped through the small town of Broughton in Hamilton County, every business except the U.S. post office shut down. The postmistress credited Champaign’s soil, local businesses, industrial plants, and the university for helping it through the Farm Crisis.(12) These features made the difference between a community that would survive the Farm Crisis and one that would fall victim to it. The Farm Crisis had disastrous effects in Illinois, but even this narrative cannot summarize the experience of the Farm Crisis because each community and each farming family faced their own set of challenges.