Bill Doskoch is The Western Producer’s website editor.
It’s not often that I write a story (Towns not feeling farm crisis, Dec. 23) that hurts businesses and brings much general wrath on my head.
“You hurt us,” farmer Larry Harpauer told me after a Sask Rally Group meeting of about 55 disgruntled farmers in Humboldt on Jan. 6. “I know now you didn’t mean to, but you did.”
I know I hurt one person.
A very contrite Bernie Malinoski, general manager of KMK Sales, had received many, many angry phone calls after the story came out.
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His business was likely damaged because he said although some people took big hits on their income, others saw it as part of the cycle of agriculture rather than an all-out disaster.
He didn’t disavow what he was quoted as saying, and added this: “I did say one thing to Mr. Doskoch, which didn’t get into the article, that I felt there was always a gestation period between the time when your commodity prices disintegrated and when we as dealers feel that.”
Fair enough. Consider it said now.
Malinoski was concerned about his picture appearing directly below the headline (which, based on calls, got peoples’ goat more than the story) because it looked like he said those words. He didn’t.
What impression was I left with at the end of the meeting?
That people in the audience are angry and scared. One fellow talked of carrying a pitchfork in future farm protest rallies, and another raised the western separatism card. That’s probably because people are uncertain about their futures, that they see a lifetime of work, their communities, and a way of life in jeopardy.
If you’ve spent a lifetime building a
$2 million operation, you can’t just walk away, Harpauer said. Others mentioned neighbors who had quit farming.
Some raised the spectre of farmers simply becoming employees for companies like Cargill in the future, of going the way of corporate farms in the United States.
Mainly, I think they see government aid as the only lifeboat in this stormy economic sea, and they felt the story might keep them from getting a seat in it.
To illustrate the need for cash, Ray Bashutsky, one of the meeting’s organizers, said up to one-third of all farmers won’t be able to plant a crop this spring without immediate financial aid.
People grilled me on the story, and then asked for some answers on the farm crisis itself. Unfortunately, journalists are the wrong people to ask for answers or solutions. They ask questions, gather information and report stories.
To do that, they need to hear people’s stories, and at the meeting’s end, I offered an invitation to anyone who was under financial stress, or whose community was being badly damaged by the farm crisis, to come and talk to me (and I include anyone reading this.)
No one did.
I buttonholed a few people in the crowd. One fellow, Kurt Michel, 35, of St. Gregor said he did OK because he had a really good crop, but if prices stay low for a year and he gets an average crop, “I can’t sustain it. I don’t know what to say.”
Another fellow, who asked that his name not be used, said, “another year of this and we’re done.”
While I might tinker with a few things, I believe the story was fundamentally sound. For context purposes, it might have been useful to highlight some information about the crisis that we’ve previously canvassed in hundreds of stories and a special web report: The Farm Crisis for Non-Farmers (available at www.producer.com).
Finally, farmers asked me what they should tell reporters. My answer was this: The truth. On the record.
