Dr. Tom Fricke, Ann Arbor, MI

[Note: This text for the proceedings is a much shortened version of the longer talk that will include slides from a study of farm life in the Richardton, North Dakota area.]

Iris Murdoch

Callen Hoff, Richardton Farmer

Rule of Benedict

One Monday night in August, under the pan-sized harvest moon over Cal Hoff’s Dunn County wheat fields, two tired men eased their huge red machines into the shadows of an abandoned farmstead marked by a shelterbelt and a single weather-beaten shed. Cal and Julie had hauled their last load of the day. Casey had just taken his full load of grain back to the yard after working his magic under the old Ford’s hood. I’d hung back with the service van and the gas tank trailer to feel the cooling air and watch the play of combine lights against the sharp edge where stubble meets standing grain. Mark and Neil gentled their combines into position, swung their augers out, and pumped the sweet fullness of new wheat into the last truck’s groaning box. They’d been out here all day running those three trucks through their paces. Two combines bring surrender to a field more quickly than seems reasonable. Nobody gets much chance to rest.

If there is any meaning to this for these farmers, it resides in the unsubtle union of flesh and spirit that they live every day and that one way or another gets proclaimed from their altars every week. Something like this lived in Cal’s comment to me during a break from seeding back in April , "I know what we’re doing is right. And I know the Lord made me for this. I just want to do it right is all." This idea of the good resides in the body’s actions, in habits built up over a lifetime. There is no other way to be good than to do good. There is no other way to be a farmer than to farm. There is no other way to be than to do.

Although fewer than two percent of the people in the United States and maybe just a hair higher percent in Canada are engaged in farming these days, most people feel a connection beyond experience to these scenes. The family farm signifies a core element of our national self-understanding. From the Jeffersonian image of a democratic republic resting on its landed and independent citizenry to more current images linking the good life, a living work ethic, and strong family values to the countryside, farming has long held an especially virtuous place in the Canadian and American imagination.

Much of what these images have in common has to do with the connections among work, character, and family. Couched in a language that emphasizes farming as a way of life, our understanding of farm life treats it as the last redoubt of integrated family and work life before our nations took on a more urban and harried feel. Even when the story is less than idyllic, we nevertheless hold farmers up as a kind of idealized contrast to the sense that something is missing in today’s urban temperament.

As an anthropologist, I’m less an expert in statistics and big national trends than in the concrete lives of people I live with when I do my research. I use the statistics to tell me if those local lives are a part of a bigger trend. And I use the local stories to tell me something that gets lost in the numbers. The statistics by themselves can be depressing. In North Dakota, today’s number of independent working farms come to about half the number you’d find in 1960. In Manitoba, the number of people living on farms is about half of what it was in 1961. For both places, in spite of political and policy differences, the unmistakable sense from the numbers is one of worry, uncertainty, and decline.

In this presentation (this proceedings text is a much shortened version of what I’ll say at the conference), I want to go behind those numbers to talk about the more complicated story that comes from real people’s lives. I’ll focus on one place, as anthropologists do, but just as the general numbers are similar for the larger Canadian and American regions, the picture that comes from a single place casts its light on a wider population.

All stories are moral stories. All symbols, to the extent they engage the emotions at all, are moral. The uses to which they are put allows for an imaginative grappling with experience that is both motivating and evaluative. The uses of rural and farm life turn on an idea we call character, a notion which has fascinated Canadians and Americans throughout their two histories. Most recently, Richard Sennett has done so in a book with the dramatic title The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism. In that book, he suggests that the content and meaning of character, along with its role in creating moral relationships, can change with material circumstances.

Here’s where I think the kind of character that comes out of the common experience of the family farms in Manitoba and the Dakotas (and elsewhere) has something to offer to the world today. There’s no doubt that the good things about farm life are threatened in today’s world. But laying them out is important, both so we can evaluate what we stand to lose and what might allow us to keep it going strong. Let me sketch out some of what I’ll present in the words and experiences of farmers in Stark County, North Dakota.

Richardton is one of the towns on the Northern Pacific settled by people who came to the area between 1890 and 1910. As in Canada and the rest of the northern plains, the surrounding country was promoted by active boosters as the land of infinite possibility, the weather "healthy and bracing" rather than extreme, and the future bright for anybody with the strong character. In 1908, the Dickinson Commercial Club published a typical claim intended to bring more people west:

In all this booster literature, the main point is clear: if you were good enough, if you had the right character, you would thrive.

Richardton’s growth was slow until the turn of the century. Nearly all the communities in Stark County reached their peak populations twenty years and more ago and have been in steady decline since. Table 1 shows that, after that first spout of growth, the history of these towns looks a lot like a history of leaving. By 1970, Richardton began its steady loss of young people and population decline after edging up to its census peak of 799. Its 1990 population was 625.

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Miles to

Town Bismarck 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990

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New Salem 32 621 711 804 875 942 986 943 1081 909

Glen Ullin 54 921 875 950 976 1324 1210 1070 1125 1118

Hebron 62 597 1374 1348 1267 1412 1340 1103 1078 888

Richardton 75 647 626 710 682 721 792 799 699 625

Taylor 81 ---- 285 263 251 258 215 162 239 163

Gladstone 87 ---- ---- ---- 278 224 185 222 317 224

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Table 2 shows something else that is also a feature of the whole northern plains region: along with changing population figures, the urban and rural character of the area in 1990 is almost a reversal of what it was in 1910. In that first census 65% of the population lived on farms and 30% in the city of Dickinson. By 1990, it was 70% in Dickinson and 20% on the farm with the percentage in small towns staying roughly the same.

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Year 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 1980 1990

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Population 12,504 13,542 15,340 15,414 16,137 18,451 19,613 23,697 22,832

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While decline is partly a material event linked to the thinning population and poor farm economy, the way people talk about it goes beyond a simple recounting of the inevitable. Decline has a moral component, too. Just as the early booster literature emphasized that anybody of a certain character could make it in this country, Richardton people also link economic circumstances to character. The shrinking population base and the hollowed out main streets can be taken, when that nervous feeling comes over a person living in the area, to be indicators of moral failure.

But, the occasional discouragement aside, I want to argue that there are signs of real strength in the culture of the region, too. To find those threads means looking and listening to the enduring culture of northern plains farming.

[In this section of the talk, I will go over the key parts of what we might call northern plains farming culture using quotes from the people I interviewed in the Richardton area. For this proceedings text, I include a sample from the themes of work and family.]

Robert Bellah, in a book called Habits of the Heart, distinguishes between work as a job, as a career, and as a calling. "In the strongest sense of a ‘calling,’" he writes, "work constitutes a practical ideal of activity and character that makes a person’s work morally inseparable from his or her life." The pieces that go into constructing a way of life include a set of ideas that link behavior, relationships, and internal virtues. In Richardton, people speak of these in terms of work, family, and the character defined by having a work ethic. These ingredients exist within a shared context that we can think of as a family farm culture. They depict internally necessary orientations within Richardton.

Work. Regardless of age or gender, the people I talked with rooted things in work. Not only is life unimaginable without working at something, but "work--for me, for anybody--work is life," as one man put it. Another man told me, "There’s a time for work and a time for play. When it’s time to work, you work, and when it’s time to play, you play. I believe, dinking around, I can’t handle that." And a woman put it similarly, "I think, you know, your life is your work."

There’s no need to look far for the origins of this strong feeling about work. Every person I spoke with talked about its importance in setting the character of their lives. Whether they grew up in town or on the farm, nearly every person had the experience of farm work because of the overlapping kin and labor-sharing networks that tied townspeople to farm relatives. It’s easy to see that most people grew up in a world that lacked room for idleness and the comments of older people are hard to distinguish from those in Cal’s generation. For some, the sheer amount of activity was a source of humor, as with a retired 72 year old carpenter:

Craig’s wife Renae, a notably independent and competent member of the community, wakes up every day at 4:30 to have quiet time to get work done and think by herself. I remember sitting down to a late dinner at Cal and Julie’s only to be interrupted by a phone call from Renae. One of her cows was having trouble calving and she needed help. Cal set down his fork before taking a bite and we rushed over together to give her a hand. "Renae never calls for help unless she means it," was Cal’s explanation, "She hates taking help on little things."

Renae’s comment begins to supply a reason for the emphasis on hard work beyond its self-evident value: work was a part of an economy of relations.

The Working Family. Richardton farmers are quick to point to the collective nature of the enterprise. Craig is especially aware of the impossibility of relying on one person:

Julie follows up by emphasizing the inseparability of family and work and the complementary roles they fill in the farm economy: "When you’re living this life it’s a family thing." She went on to say:

Julie and Cal’s comments point to the heavy reliance of the family farm way of life on teamwork within the family. As adept at the work of driving trucks and tractors, feeding cattle, and handling the calving as Julie is, she takes these tasks on as additions to other responsibilities within the household – work like baking bread and handling the book work, but also the important work that doesn’t get counted directly but that is essential to keeping the bonds of community alive. These things get called by anthropologists a part of the emotional economy of the family enterprise, the attention to the glue that keeps one family bound to another. During my time there, it was Julie who made regular visits to Cal’s grandmother at the hospital or who alert to the needs of smoothing tensions when they’d come up in the grueling schedule running from calving to harvest seasons.

[After talking about what makes northern plains farming culture distinct in the national context, I’ll return to the issue of how things are changing with the expectation of people moving on from the local area. Just looking at the figures in Table 3 gives a hint of the percentages of people leaving. Even for those people who graduated from the local high school from 1973-1975, people in their late forties to fifty years old today, we can see that although most of these graduates (77%) live in North Dakota, just 37% still live in the Richardton area . If you look at more recent graduating classes, you see that the rate of leaving is growing. Just 3 out of 20 of the graduating seniors I spoke to in 2001 expected to be living in the area after 5 years. This means that parents think of themselves as preparing their kids for a new kind of world from the one they grew up in.]

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Men Women Total

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When Cal and Craig were growing up, it was more or less assumed that some of the kids would stay to take over the farm. Working in the family economy was an unstated apprenticeship for a way of life. Contemporary life makes that a far less certain prospect. It isn’t just Richardton that’s losing people. The entire county loses population with every census. Farms grow bigger as the population thins. School districts consolidate. Businesses close. Cal watches quietly as yet another farmer shuts down and leaves the land and wonders, "Will I be next?"

Today, parents are compelled toward a more consciously planned upbringing for their children. Where Cal and Julie never went to college, they make a point of encouraging their own son and daughter to attend. Casey, one of the three people in his high school graduating class who intends to be in Richardton and can’t imagine anything else but farming.

In the changing world of Richardton, farming gets viewed as an advantaged preparation for a probable life away. Renae speaks for a widely shared view:

Growing up on a farm becomes valuable for the virtues of realism, practicality, and internal character that it instills. Renae continues:

This new world of preparation has its continuities with the way of life in Richardton, but the focus is on internal qualities that are not necessarily shared by others. Nor will character be so easily reflected in the concrete ways that Richardton fields can reveal to the attuned eye. Where all farmers share the same modes of work and are better or worse at it, those who leave Richardton will pursue different careers and will live in a more varied context.

This brief tour of the presentation presents a more complicated picture than the statistics by themselves. Depending on how you look at things, you’ll see a story of decline or a story that’s more hopeful. The stock in trade of anthropologists is to make them reluctant retailers of solutions. We have the responsibility of observing change and avoiding judgement. But, it can’t be left unsaid that any discussion of people’s lives in the depopulating northern plains is a discussion with a history going back to the original soul of the two countries, Canada and the United States. Thomas Jefferson, expressing it for America, had an idea that he was sure would give solidity to American democracy. Part of his idea of what made democracy work involves the very sentiments expressed by the people of these farms near Richardton. To talk of farming families is to talk of a cultural tradition that feeds how those of us in cities thinks about our national character. This is much more than a simple question of economics.

One of the other names people use for this part of the Great Plains is "next year country." The Euro-American history of the place begins with dream. And reality has been a hard bed to dream in. But next year country is a place where people always hang onto the possibility of it getting better. When I first met Cal, he was already talking about next year as we scuffed through the present desolation of a field destroyed by hail.

I’ll close here with a word from Ken Kreitinger, former president of the Richardton Manufacturing Company:

Ken put it about as well as any anthropologist could. The cultural factors, the things you find expressed in the comments and everyday lives of farmers is the source of strength that feeds the possibility for hope. At the very least, it shows that farming life contributes something more than food for the nation and the world , as important as these are. It contributes a people with a character essential to the health of the nation. There’s more, too. These same elements of character, the sense of "next year country" and the willingness to keep going by making adjustments, are the kinds of cultural attitudes that lead to promising new attempts to make a way of life work in a tough environment. I think the spread of the zero till idea grows out of those cultural underpinnings and this conference is itself a sign of the vigor of a culture and a way of life that may be changing, but nevertheless carries a core of value through those changes. I’m honored to have a chance to speak to you and to elaborate on some of what I mean in the actual presentation.