wfn.org | Longtime Methodist farm family tries to weather latest crisis

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.UMC.ORG>]

May 21, 1999 News media contact: Linda Bloom*(212)870-3803*New York
10-21-24-71BP{282}

NOTE:  Photographs are available with this story.

By Wayne Falda*

MARCELLUS, Mich. (UMNS) -- With its multitude of lakes and tracts of
unspoiled forests, Cass County, Michigan, has always been the vacation
wonderland for legions of Midwesterners eager to flee hot cities.

But it was also the unquestioned epicenter of Michigan's pork industry.
Millions have been raised here over the years. 

For a long time, nobody raised hogs like the McKenzies of Marcellus.

They were agrarians from the start. John McKenzie, a displaced Orangeman
from Scotland, originally settled the land and later fought in the Civil
War. Edward McKenzie built the Wakelee United Methodist Church on Dutch
Settlement Road, south of town. Generations of McKenzies have worshiped in
the brick and stone church. Headstones bear their names.

The McKenzies clan was there to greet the church's newest pastor,
26-year-old Greg Buchner, when he arrived at Wakelee last July. What Buchner
didn't realize was that he would find himself going through a baptism of
fire with his first true agricultural crisis. "I started seeing the
situation these folks were in and seeing their farms being taken away," he
said.

It wasn't long before Buchner would find himself being asked to play the
role of intermediary between a farmer and God. Interceding on behalf of a
church member with the Almighty has its limits, but Buchner did put out the
word he would help out with more earthly tasks, like getting groceries or
baby-sitting. Anything short of jumping into the driver's seat of a tractor.

"I think that when you accept role as pastor there are going to be times
when you have to get emotionally, physically and spiritually involved with
the problems of your folks," he said.

And many were hurting.

To understand the dynamics of how a farm depression plays out in small town
America, one has to address all key components of the local economy peculiar
to that region.

Marcellus is a tree-lined burg of 1,100, southwest of Kalamazoo, which
enjoyed a boom in the 1880s as a railroad town. The 36 lakes within six
miles of Main Street draw vacationers who find Marcellus to be a nice place
to spend money cultivating excitement. 

For farmers who live here, Marcellus is a nice place to make money
cultivating crops.

But while thrill-seekers always pack up every Labor Day, the farmers remain.
No one doubts that agriculture is the true backbone of the Marcellus
community.

As far back as anyone can remember, pork has been king here. It was that way
when Keith McKenzie came back from the service in 1957 to take up farming.
"Almost every farm had hogs then," he explained.

His family had a lot to do with that.

Back in the 1930s and 40s, when people had a few chickens and a few milk
cows, Keith McKenzie's father, Howard, innovated a method of raising hogs
outdoors on the sloping land. He first fashioned A-frames that offered some
protection from the sun and the elements.

"My dad was real successful at this method of raising a lot of hogs and
doing it with a small amount of equipment," McKenzie said. 

Having 1,000 head of hogs was almost beyond belief. "He had to go to Indiana
to buy corn," he added, as if still wowed at the thought.

"Don McKenzie, my first cousin, was bigger than we were," he said. "He was
raising 50,000 head of hogs outside."

The McKenzies later experimented with curved huts of galvanized metal, or
Quonset structures, to protect their free range animals. The huts were ideal
for mass production. Soon Quonsets dotted the county's landscape for miles
around. 

It was cheap and efficient. If done right, the money rolled in. The odor of
hogs was the sweet aroma of money.

And so from this set of circumstances arose an enduring absolute that
defined life in the second half of the 1950s. Before the lake people
speeding into Cass County in their Chevy Belairs and Studebaker Champions
ever reached their promised land, they had to first encounter the choice
redolence of the McKenzie family legacy.

For atop those rolling, domed hills writhed a living carpet of . . . pigs.

It would be another era and another time before anyone would question the
environmental consequences of these outdoor operations. In time, the
McKenzies adjusted and altered the way they raised hogs like everyone else
in the business.

But by 1999 the outside farrowing and water quality issue in Cass County had
become a moot point anyway. The series of shocks in the pork and grain
industry in the 1980s and especially in the 1990s has unalterably changed
the face of agriculture in Cass County, probably forever.

"I don't think you can find 20 producers any more with any size. And there
are not that many small ones any more," McKenzie said.

Like the McKenzies, the Stamp family has made it big in Cass County. John
Stamp, a third generation farmer and a regular at Wakelee United Methodist
Church, settled on a farm just outside of Marcellus. It was a farm he
purchased in the fall of 1985, ironically from a farm family that lost
nearly everything 15 years ago in what up until then was one of
agriculture's last great farm depression.

"The first year, things were tight. I knew I had to get operating money real
quick," he said. He erected makeshift fencing and water lines to get his hog
operations started. He sold boars to get cash flow going. His sows started
having litters. Fortunately the hog market was rebounding that year. The
money started dribbling in.

"I think God was watching out for me, I'll tell you," he said.

The McKenzies and the Stamps lived through a severe meltdown in 1993 that
forced a lot of their comrades to leave the industry. But rough times in the
hog industry are invariably followed by prosperity. The gung-ho years of
1996 and 1997 brought one such upturn.

Good years help to re-build financial assets. Good thing too, for the
disaster of this past winter was unparalleled. Downtown Marcellus was
deathly quiet while hog farmers endured the worse depression in their
history.  

"You could look out on the streets and not see near as many people as we
used to," said Fred Learman, owner of the Napa Auto Parts store.

Farmers stopped spending money. With no business coming in, Learman would
sit alone in his shop. "There were a lot of times when it was quiet here,"
he said.

Across the street, the 80-year-old proprietor of the Cozy Cupboard diner,
Clara Clark, shook her head. "The farmers have always been good to us. They
just didn't have the money to come in to eat any more," the thinly-built
woman said in her eatery.

A McKenzie very rarely loses money in the swine business, but this was
different. "I never got skinned like I did this year," Keith said.

To understand what has transpired in Cass County and every agricultural
county in the United States would require volumes. The era of a changing
agriculture in America - the bankruptcies, the wholesale consolidations, the
emergence of agri-giants every bit as monopolistic as the Vanderbilts and
Rockefellers in the history books - has suddenly dawned.

Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman worries that the sweeping
consolidation in the farm industry is fast destroying farmer's role both as
an independent entrepreneur and as the linchpins of the little town.

"I don't think we want to live under a system of agricultural Darwinism with
survival of the fittest becoming the survival of the biggest," he said
recently. "We don't want to get to the point where farms are reduced to
being serfs in a kind of feudal agricultural system."

Glickman is concerned that the giant packing and processing plants are
exerting such control up and down the food chain that farmers now under
contract to produce animals for them "are in some ways employees of those
firms."

What Glickman called "a profound restructuring in the hog industry" has
forced small and mid-sized farmers to accept lopsided contractual terms that
are written by those giants and offered to farmers on a take-it-or-leave-it
basis. 

One of the giants, IBP reported it quadrupled its first-quarter earnings for
1999 to $57 million. Those exceptional profits coincided with the period
that they paid farmers next to nothing for their animals.

"Since 1967, the number of hog operations in the United States has fallen by
90 percent," Glickman said.

Everyone in agriculture, from Glickman on down, fear that among the
remaining farmers only those who are beholden to the giant processors will
do well no matter how much they expand and streamline their farming
operations.

For years, farmers have seen this disturbing revolution coming on - and
coming on fast. But nobody - even Glickman - foresaw the disaster that was
to come last fall and winter.

"We didn't have any problem marketing our hogs this last winter, we just
didn't get any money from them." McKenzie said.

With the price of hogs slumping to 10 cents or 8 cents a pound, a 250-pound
animal wouldn't bring more than a twenty dollar bill and a few singles.
Subtract a few dollars for the cost of shipping, "and you would end up with
a mighty small amount of money," McKenzie said.

It was as if General Motors gave its cars away this past January.

On the surface, the story is straightforward. Prosperity led to
overproduction on a scale nobody had anticipated. But the consolidation and
the cutthroat economic warfare among the giants themselves caused vulnerable
packing plants to close, thus setting the stage for catastrophe.

While the crisis for hog farmers has abated, it's worsening for grain
farmers. Many will go through the throes of a severe price drop. Once again
the heart of the issue is mounting surpluses. 

The McKenzies pull together as a family to get through the low times.

McKenzie farms with his son Brian, 31, who became a new father again this
May. They have a partnership whereby they raise their own grain to feed the
hogs in their operations. Keith's son-in-law, Ed Reed, operates a modern
confinement operation nearby but buys all of his feed from the local grain
mill. 

Reed, an electrical engineer by training, is typical of the new breed of
farmer: young, smart, and savvy enough to take advantage of contractual
pricing opportunities on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But not all of his
worries this winter were economic.

Last year, an especially devastating respiratory disease swept through his
herd. The virulent disease, called Acute Porcine Reproductive and
Respiratory Syndrome, or PRRS, is an epidemic not unlike a swine flu.  The
disease causes abortions in stages of gestation and can even cause mortality
rates among sows and boars.

To rid his herd of the disease, Reed launched a vaccination program and made
his facilities as antiseptic as any hospital. "It took us 20 weeks - one
full breeding cycle - to get out of that mess," Reed recalled. 

"We got things turn around in January of this year. But no sooner than we
licked that problem the blizzard hit," he said.

Temperatures dove to minus 18 degrees just as the liquid propane heaters
inside the hog buildings began to fail. With the emergency becoming
critical, it was all he could do to keep his herd warm and dry with portable
fuel oil heaters called salamanders that he purchased in Kalamazoo. 

At times this past winter, Reed worked into the night shipping pigs out in
semi-loads. "There was a period of four weeks that I wasn't home," he
recalled after a Sunday service at Wakelee.

Reed saw many of his pigs die from PRRS and wasn't about to lose any more
while winter storm raged at the same time as the industry's price storm.

 "Maybe that was a blessing we didn't have that many hogs to sell," he
laughed while his 18-month-old son Adam squirmed in his arms.

For Stamp, it was luck, hard work and maybe a touch of divine intervention
that kick-started his operation. "God had a plan for me," he said. But he
doubts that anybody today would take the risk he did 15 years ago.

"Its almost impossible for a young man to come out of high school to begin
farming. It's not happening," he said.

# # #

*Falda is a writer for the South Bend (Ind.) Tribune. 

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