Retraining Programs : Displaced Farmers Try New Roots

After months of unemployment and three job interviews, Gene Petrich went to work last week repairing plumbing at the local dairy.

About 300 miles to the east, in Cedar Rapids, Scott Holub, who attends community college classes part time, is beginning his third week pouring cold drinks for the midday rush at Burger King.

In Oxford Junction, Mike House is hard at work spray-painting large barns while his wife, Rosemary, who waits tables at a rural cafe Friday nights, spends her days learning to trouble-shoot computer problems.

‘Just Don’t Die’

Once farmers, these four now belong to the growing number who are finding that there is a future after foreclosure and liquidation.

“You just don’t die when you lose the farm,” said Rosemary House, 30, a mother of four as well as a student and part-time waitress.

This year, at least 100,000 farmers will leave the land, forced out of business by the powerful structural changes that are permanently reshaping American agriculture. They join the ranks of unemployed steel and auto workers who also lost their jobs to structural change in the Midwest.

For the first time, the rapidly growing numbers of displaced farmers are forcing heartland states to provide retraining programs for farmers, using federal funds designed for workers who have lost jobs because of economic shifts or changing technology.

‘Declining Occupation’

“The idea of farming as a declining occupation is a new one,” said Gertrude Peerendboom, deputy director of Wisconsin’s Governor’s Employment and Training Office.

In Kansas, a program to provide counseling and training assistance began July 1, the same day that Wisconsin pumped $1 million in state funds into a farmer retraining program. Minnesota, Nebraska and North Dakota have set up farmer retraining programs in recent months.

Iowa, the Midwest’s quintessential farm state, was a pioneer in defining farmers who had lost their farms to liquidation, foreclosure and bankruptcy as displaced workers, launching the region’s first retraining programs almost two years ago.

Iowa’s inclusion of farmers in the displaced workers category is now accepted nationwide. In May, the Labor Department told other Midwestern states that they too could include farmers in the government’s $222.5-million Job Training Partnership Act retraining programs. Those programs, originally designed to help workers plunged into unemployment by the demise of smokestack industries, now are helping retrain those displaced by the demise of haystack enterprises.

“There’s been some real consciousness-raising about the decline of farming as an industry,” Peerendboom said.

“Farming is more than an occupation,” said Larry D. Harmon, director of the regional dislocated workers center at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids. “These people have done what they do since they were children. Changing jobs is more than changing occupations, it is changing a way of life.”

“Most of them think they don’t have any other skills,” said Jane L. M. Warner, who counsels dislocated workers. “They say, ‘I’ve been in farming all my life. I don’t know anything else.’ Actually, they probably have more opportunity skillwise than some other dislocated workers. They have management experience, they have mechanical skills and they have self-discipline.”

Farmers are being offered training in programs that range from building trades to highly sophisticated occupations. In Midwestern agricultural states, there are already a total of several thousand former farmers enrolled.

Sleepless Nights

Among them is Holub, a fifth-generation farmer who decided to liquidate last year. “I had spent too many nights without sleep. We would have needed one or two good years just to get even and I couldn’t see that happening,” said Holub, who, at 27, had never known life off the farm.

Now he is studying electronic engineering at Kirkwood, his tuition and books paid for by federal dislocated worker funds. His wife, an accountant, works for a large company in Cedar Rapids. Her income goes to pay family expenses for the couple and their 7-month-old baby. Holub works at Burger King to earn money to pay remaining farm debts.

“We still owe money. It will take three or four years if we keep eating a lot of cold meat and stay home every night,” Holub said. “But I’ve never burned anybody (on a loan) and I never intend to.”

Going to school, changing careers, accepting the discipline of a time clock and even moving from rural to more urban surroundings are among the adjustments that displaced farmers must contend with after the emotional stress of losing the farm.

‘Everybody Knows’

“You can quit another job and move on without too much hullabaloo,” Holub said. “But you have to advertise a farm sale and then everybody knows. . . . Now I’m at least wanting to try to pull down a set wage every week and work where you don’t have to worry about whether it will rain or not.

“I started school not knowing whether I’d like it or not,” said Holub, who is receiving A’s in all of his classes. “I’ve never lived in a city. We’ll have to move eventually. Maybe when we get our debts cleared up we can find a house on the edge of town, a little more open.”

Living near Cedar Rapids is an advantage Holub has over Gene Petrich, 55, who lives in Sibley, in Iowa’s rural and depressed northwestern corner.

Forced by his bank to liquidate his 178-acre farming operation, Petrich has baled hay, loaded turkeys and worked as a janitor after a lifetime of working the land.

Starting Over

“I know a lot of guys that retire at 55 and I’m just starting over,” he said.

“It’s too bad we can’t get manufacturing in here,” said the former farmer, who added that he is reluctant to move from the rural area where he was raised.

His new job at the dairy is only temporary, and Petrich has no idea what he will do when it ends. There is only one factory in the area, a plant that manufactures paper bags, and it has been laying off workers.

“As the land becomes depopulated, we’re talking about folk finding transitional jobs because there’s little opportunity for anything else,” said Joan Blundall, an education coordinator at the Northwest Iowa Mental Health Center.

“We’re witnessing the dismantling of rural America,” said Blundall, who leads several rural support groups for economically stressed farmers and former farmers.

Computer Training

Moving away from rural Oxford Junction, east of Cedar Rapids, is not an option that Rosemary and Mike House are willing to consider. While Rosemary, 30, learns computer program trouble-shooting in a federally funded job retraining program, her husband is busy expanding his roofing and painting company.

“We’re hustling more now than we did when we were farming. We didn’t cry in our soup,” said Rosemary, who ran the farm with her husband until they were forced to sell because of mounting debts. “We dove right in and said, ‘OK, help us.’ That’s a hard thing for a farmer to do, to say he can’t do it himself.”

The Houses learned about the displaced farmer training from a brochure mailed by Kirkwood Community College. Here and throughout the Midwest, retraining programs are finding it difficult to identify displaced farmers and to get information to them.

“These farmers are second- and third- and fourth-generation farmers. They’re interested in staying on their land, keeping up the tradition, they shy away from job programs,” said Donald M. Buckner, Minnesota’s director of a program to identify and offer retraining services to farmers.

Farm Wives’ Role

Rosemary House qualified for the retraining because she, like many other farm wives, played a major role in running the farm, keeping books, tending to animals and taking part in management decisions.

“I had never driven in the city before going to school,” she said. “Mike always drove when we went to the city.”

But Mike House, 31, does not think he would be able to adjust to the regimentation of a factory job.

“It’s hard to take a farmer out and put him into a factory where he’s doing repetitious things day in and day out,” he said. “He’s going to have a hard time adjusting.”

For former farmer Charlie Behrens, adjusting is particularly difficult. At 64, after a lifetime on the land as a third-generation farmer, he was forced to sell his 160-acre business.

Bad Eyes, Ailing Wife

He has bad eyes, a wife with a serious medical condition and no job.

“They’ll hire young guys before they’ll hire an old guy,” he said. “I don’t blame them. There’s a lot of younger farmers out there looking for a job.”

After a lifetime of producing food, Behrens now buys his own food with food stamps.