“The meetings jumped from town to county to state to across the country. “It was the spark we’d all been waiting for and it set off an explosion,” describes Senter. I’m sick of hearing it and bellyaching is all I ever hear from farmers.’ Whoever the trucker was, he was exactly right.”Ĭhallenged to action in a genesis moment, the five Baca County growers called a local meeting to address the plight of family farms. He said, ‘I wish you farmers would stop bellyaching and do something. The trucker looked them in the eye and set them straight. “But all of a sudden,” continues Senter, “a truck driver finished his food and walked over. “They were letting out a never-ending chain of, ‘How are we gonna pay our bills? How are we gonna see tomorrow?’” “They were bellyaching,” says Senter, a seminal figure in the founding of AAM. At a gas station-diner in Campo, Colo., a quintet of growers commiserated on their economic troubles, chasing their sorrow with multiple pots of coffee. September of 1977 marked the end of “talk,” when five farmers changed the trajectory of U.S. (Photo courtesy of Oklahoma Historical Society) “AAM gave farmers an outlet and they knew they weren’t alone-otherwise American agriculture was going to see bloodshed,” says David Senter. Misery loves company, and we’d all talk and talk.” “You focused on survival, and you couldn’t think about buying land, but most of us just stood around complaining. “By the late 1970s, all you could do was cover expenses,” recalls Senter. They were fixing to start the American Agriculture Movement (AAM) and set farming on fire.”Ī stone’s throw south of Fort Worth’s 1970s urban sprawl, David Senter farmed in Johnson County, growing 2,000 acres of blackland row crops, 1,000 acres of pasture/hay, along with 100 head of beef cattle and a 100-head dairy operation.Īmerican farmers watched $13 billion of ag income disappear in 1977, according to USDA. Thank the Lord for the boys in Campo, Colorado, who had enough of things even before I did. “I couldn’t predict I was about to get teargassed by the government or drive a tractor all the way to the National Mall in Washington, D.C., but that was about to happen. “Desperation started to take hold of my life,” he says. Kimbrell stood at a cruel impasse: immovable, anemic crop prices to the left, and foreclosure to the right. Every commodity was affected to some degree everywhere in the country, and that meant every family farm was starting to see the writing on the wall.” “When you can only get $1.25 for a bushel of wheat, try outyielding that price. “I had some really great wheat yields that made almost no difference in trying to cover the cost of production,” he says. Year over year, like many agriculture producers, Kimbrell was financially flailing, and big yields provided no salvation. producers began feeling the sting of subsiding crop prices and rising production costs-a chronic pain that outlasted the typical vagaries of commodities and moved the market from the doldrums to a genuine rut. Teargassed on the Mexican border, imprisoned in Texas, hammered by biblical hailstorms and crop failures, worn to the bone by a buck-wild tractor trip, devastated by the heartrending death of his teenaged firstborn, and yet grateful from his core for the opportunities afforded by American agriculture, Kimbrell is a character seemingly pulled from the muscled lines of a Hemingway novel or the colorful script of a McMurtry saga.īy mid-decade, U.S. I was only 36 when I started that cross-country trip, but when I finished, I was an older man than I am right now.” “It ground me down every day to a kind of tired that is hard to describe. “I’d drive it all again right now, but my body wouldn’t stand the wear,” says Kimbrell, 78, speaking through the molasses of a sweet Texas drawl. in 1979, and occupied the National Mall, demanding political attention to address the realities of an agriculture industry in collapse. Launching from the hard-scratch plains of the Texas Panhandle, Kimbrell rode in Tractorcade-an epic 5,000-tractor farmer army that rumbled into Washington, D.C. Eating wind and snow in dead winter for 1,800 miles, Don Kimbrell barehanded the wheel of an open-cab tractor and crossed a continent in 21 days, driving a John Deere G into history.
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