Survives Crisis : Illinois Man in New Crop of Farmers

The weeds are first, little green tips breaking through the gray and coal-black soil like eyes blinking open.

Trees, leafless skeletons tinted green by tiny buds, are silhouetted against morning skies.

Newborn calves, still wet behind the ears, step tentatively in pastures at first light while insects, newly hatched, race across misty farm ponds weaving trails.

Tractors, damp with morning dew, idle beside barns where sacks of seed corn and seed soybeans are stacked awaiting sowing this week or next.

Perform Rites of Spring

Across the great Midwest Grain Belt, the season is turning. Farmers like Mike Hennenfent are busy at an ancient spring rite--preparing the soil for crops, their annual gamble with wind and weather, insects and weeds.

Hennenfent, 43, has been a farmer for more than a quarter-century. But he begins this season working more land with bigger, more powerful equipment than ever before. He not only survived the great farm crisis that gripped rural America for much of the 1980s, he enlarged his farming enterprise.

He is not alone. Hennenfent is one of thousands of successful farmers whose progress during the farm crisis went largely unnoticed. And he belongs to an evolving class of family farmers upon whom the United States will depend for food well into the 21st Century.

The new American family farmer emerging from the economic turmoil of the 1980s--surviving amid the wreckage of farm foreclosures and bankruptcies--will oversee more land, produce more and spend less time at physical labor than the farmer of the 1960s and 1970s. The signs of that turning are already visible.

Midwestern Mirror

A decade ago, The Times chronicled the annual cycle from planting to harvest with Hennenfent, his wife and business partner, Judy, and their children, Matt, Bill and Julie, as they worked and lived on their fertile farmstead 180 miles southwest of Chicago.

Then, as now, the Hennenfents mirrored the Midwestern farm family. The changes that have rippled across and permanently reshaped agricultural mid-America can be seen on the Hennenfents’ grain and livestock farm and in the way they live. To look at them is to look at the other side of the farm crisis.

The Hennenfents’ success was gradual, imperceptible day-to-day or even month-to-month. It crept up, the way spring creeps up and tints bare trees green. It grew out of conservative spending, diversified farming and keeping debt manageable, which economists cite as perhaps the most important reason some farmers succeeded and others did not.

“I don’t feel any different,” says Hennenfent, a fourth-generation farmer. “I think of myself as average, but when you start analyzing how things have changed it’s almost mind-boggling. I just think of myself as trying to survive.”

Of the years of farm failures, Hennenfent says: “You always wondered if you were going to be the next one. You were always worried that you might be turned down at the bank for a loan or that you might incur a major crop loss. At one time we owed more for our land than it was worth.”

Land is a measure of both success and change.

In 1978, Hennenfent could reach the 682 acres he worked by traveling a mere mile along a two-lane blacktop. Today he farms 1,110 acres along a 6 1/2-mile stretch of the same road. Some of that is the land of those forced out of agriculture by the farm crisis. Hennenfent owns 142 of those acres, 40 more than he owned in 1978. He sharecrops another 660 acres, 80 more than a decade ago, dividing the profits and expenses equally with the landowner while he provides all the labor.

But what is new is the total of 308 acres that Hennenfent has rented in the last few years for a flat annual fee. The practice is a rapidly increasing trend across the Midwest, U.S. Agriculture Department analysts say.

Gives an Advantage

Renting land for cash gives Hennenfent the advantage of farming nearby ground, deciding what he will grow and keeping all of the profits. Some of the land he rents belonged to farmers who did not survive the difficult mid-1980s.

“Large farms are growing larger,” says Leo V. Mayer, a top Agriculture Department economist. “And the demand for land is primarily from other farmers.”

The number of large farms is also growing larger. Between 1978 and 1986, farms like Hennenfent’s with annual gross sales above $250,000 increased by almost 20,000, despite several years of depression in agricultural America. And farms with sales of more than $100,000 grew by 75,000, to 276,000. They are only a fraction of the nation’s roughly 2.2 million farms--about 200,000 fewer farms than in 1978--but they are economically the most significant.

“We have been developing these large, very productive, very efficient farms which produce the vast majority of the nation’s food and fiber supply,” Mayer says.

More land means more and bigger equipment and, conversely, farmers with bigger equipment need more land to farm to be economically sound.

Owns Six Tractors

In the last decade, a time when farm-machinery sales were severely depressed and at least a half-dozen farm-machinery manufacturers either merged or closed, Hennenfent replaced all of his equipment. Today he has six tractors--one more than in 1978. Some were purchased from farmers leaving the business, others from dealers.

“We’ve bought more pieces of used equipment than we ever purchased new,” Hennenfent says.

The horsepower of this equipment is almost double what it was 10 years ago, reflecting another Grain Belt trend that government demographers report. More horsepower allows Hennenfent to travel across fields faster and to cover more ground each trip, pulling new, wider planters, cultivators and plows.

His pride and joy is a giant 2-year-old combine that is too big to keep in the equipment building where he stored his harvesting machine a decade ago. Farmers who are the first to embrace new technology are likely to be among the nation’s most successful, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment says. Hennenfent qualifies. His combine is equipped with a state-of-the-art threshing mechanism that is ranked as one of farming’s most important mechanical advances in the last decade.

The combine--a demonstrator that Hennenfent bought from a dealer after it had been used for one year--allows him to harvest more acres more quickly with less damage to the crop than older combines.

Machinery Firms Merge

Today Hennenfent works his land with Case International farm machinery, a brand that did not exist in 1978, when J. I. Case and International Harvester were competitors and Hennenfent favored International Harvester equipment.

Twice as much land to work and machinery with twice as much power has also resulted in twice as much debt. Hennenfent now owes about $338,000, double his 1978 debt for land and equipment.

A decade ago Hennenfent sold 1,400 hogs for slaughter. This year he will market about 3,000, raised in two modern confinement barns, one completed this spring, an $80,000 investment by the landlord with whom he sharecrops.

Hogs helped Hennenfent survive the farm crisis. After economic hard times forced farmers to liquidate breeding herds, the price of hogs taken to slaughter reached record highs. For example, last year Hennenfent sold some hogs for as much as 65 cents a pound compared to 49 cents a pound a decade ago. When grain prices fell, instead of marketing his corn he fed it to his hogs, thereby increasing his profit.

Last year, largely because livestock prices were so high, the Hennenfents had a net income of about $40,000. However, there were some years in the last decade when the family had to borrow money to meet financial obligations.

New Breeding Stock

Just last month he purchased seven new “hybrid” breeding sows at $450 each. “We’re hoping for faster growth and higher quality of meat and stronger pigs at birth. We think we might see an increase of one pig per litter and reduce the time it takes them to reach market size,” says Hennenfent. Even without this new breeding stock, Hennenfent has seen his average pig production increase by about one pig per litter during the last decade.

His beef cattle breeding herd has increased 20% in 10 years. This spring there are about 60 calves taking tentative steps in the morning light.

“I don’t think I’ve done all that well or got all that much,” says Hennenfent, taking inventory. “I’ve had some opportunities that I’ve taken advantage of that have worked quite well for us. You can make good things happen or you can make bad things happen. Judy and I have a positive frame of mind in making decisions . . . we’re going to do something and make it turn out.”

In 1978, when The Times began the chronicle of his growing season, Mike Hennenfent spent spring days from sunrise till sundown piloting a tractor across bumpy gray and coal-black fields, working 12- to 18-hour days tending his land and animals with the help of one hired worker. Today he spends part of his time studying grain and livestock markets on a computer screen in his office. Two hired workers pilot tractors that run from sunup till sundown.

Although hired workers are common on Western fruit and vegetable farms, the dependence on them on mid-America grain farms is relatively new. In 1970, according to Agriculture Department demographer Calvin L. Beale, there were two or more farm operators for every hired worker in the Corn Belt. “Now farmers are gradually depending more on hired farm workers,” he says, a change suggesting that an emerging class of large rural landowners-employers is replacing a rural population of small farmers who performed chores for themselves.

Beale sees this trend as an acceleration of the changes triggered by widespread farm mechanization after World War II. “A lot of the change in farm population since 1980 would have happened over a longer period of time but (sped up) because of the farm crisis.”

Some Midwestern farm workers are former farm owners. Others are professional farmhands who generally work year round for the same employer.

“As you look at the successful farmers in our community . . . those of us who are surviving have more employees and manage additional numbers of livestock and acres,” Hennenfent says. “We’ve become, in the last decade, an owner-manager-operator, more so than an owner-operator. We do less of the physical work and more of the management. . . . In 10 more years I’ll probably have three or four employees.”

Doing less of the physical work has produced other changes.

A decade ago, during the busy spring planting season, Hennenfent saw his family mainly at mealtime. Today, Hennenfent and his wife are comfortable leaving much of the farm labor to the hired help while they go off to watch Julie, 17, pitch for her high school softball team or Bill, 16, pitch for his high school varsity baseball team.

Take First Vacation

In 1978 Hennenfent saw farming as something he did 365 days a year. In 1986, for the first time ever, the family took a three-week vacation, driving across the country, visiting Yellowstone and Disneyland. They traveled in the family van--bought used to replace the family car, which daughter Julie now drives.

This year Judy accompanied Mike to a business meeting in Florida.

“Ten years ago we wouldn’t have gone to Florida,” Hennenfent says. “But things that 10 years ago were dreams and goals are accomplishments today.”

The family still gathers at mealtime, seated around a wooden table in the remodeled dining room next to the new kitchen. Meals still begin as they always have in the Hennenfent household:

“Bless us, oh Lord, in these thy gifts which we are about to receive from thy bounty, through Christ our Lord,” says Hennenfent.

Seated at the table are Judy, Julie, Bill and Matthew.

Judy, who a decade ago believed her place was in the home tending the family, returned to junior college last August. There she is taking accounting courses in preparation for taking a job in town someday to help put the children through college.

Bookkeeping Complicated

“I probably do less physical work on the farm than I did 10 years ago because we have two full-time men and two boys who help. But the bookkeeping has become more complicated and is more time-consuming,” she says, even with the IBM computer they bought a few years back.

Julie, 17, will graduate in June and join her mother in junior college in the fall to prepare for a career in child care or nursing. Although she dreams of “raising animals,” Julie is not certain she will live on a farm.

Bill, 16, in kindergarten a decade ago, is now a high school sophomore, both an honor roll student and an athlete. He expects to major in agriculture at the University of Illinois. “Maybe ag business, maybe farming,” he says. “It will depend. . . . If things look better and Dad’s had a lot of success, maybe I’d have something to fall back on, something to start out with.”

Matt, now 12 years old, has spent the decade being his father’s shadow. He greets visitors to the farm by telling them proudly about the crops or the livestock or the new equipment. His collection of scale-model farm machinery contains more than 100 pieces.

“I’ll probably start out on my own,” says Matt, who has the future all figured out. “Dad run his first farm when he was in high school; I’ll probably do the same thing. Maybe later I can take over here. When you’re a farmer you’re more your own boss, you know. I like to work more outside than in buildings. When you’re farming you’re always doing something.”

The Hennenfents, who have now spent half their lives building a family farm enterprise, are lucky to have both Bill and Matt interested in agricultural careers. Rural demographer Beale predicts that in coming years more and more farms will be sold rather than inherited because there is a nearly 50% decline in the ratio of farm children to farm adults.

“We have depended, in agriculture, on drawing in the sons of farmers,” Beale says. “If you are going to keep inter-generational succession, then you have to draw a higher percentage of kids into the business. If kids don’t take over, either they become absentee owners or more farmers have to sell (making land available for the enlargement of other farms.)”

“The boys feel like they’ve got a place in the future . . . they have the opportunity if they want it,” Hennenfent says. “We talk about it, about whether they want to be farmers, what they want to do when they get older, do they want to be involved in agriculture or be away from it. I tell them, ‘I can’t wait until you’re old enough to run this place so I can be doing something else.’ I remember my dad telling me the same thing.”

Although Hennenfent’s farm is larger today, the nearby town, Knoxville, where the children attend school and the family shops, is smaller.

The lumberyard, a grocery store, two gas stations and a small appliance store are all closed--victims of the farm crisis. Demographer Beale reports that Knox County, where the Hennenfents farm, suffered one of the highest population losses in Illinois in the last decade.

Good Friends Move

“We have some good friends . . . who went through a couple of reorganizations and finally bankruptcy and they moved their family out of the state,” says Judy Hennenfent. “Now they run a restaurant. And this fellow was once winner of the state’s outstanding young farmer award.

“Another fellow who used to farm down the road went to sell farm equipment and now he sells seed,” she adds. “And we’ve had two different farmers across the road. One went to work for the government and the other is a mechanic with a trucking company and is much happier and better off now.”

The Hennenfents say they survived by being conservative, even in good years.

“Some people thought there wasn’t going to be any more land and the only way to farm was to own it. They just went out and bought land and found themselves with a debt that was not manageable,” Hennenfent says. “We bought small parcels. We bought 40 acres instead of 80 or 160. Instead of buying big four-wheel-drive tractors we bought smaller two-wheel-drive tractors. In place of doubling our acres in two years--which was the goal of many operators--we chose a slower route . . . pay as you go. . . . We grew at a steady pace instead of doing it all at once.”

Although Hennenfent first enrolled in federal farm subsidy programs during the mid-1980s, he believes he could have survived the turbulent decade without federal assistance.

“I feel that we’d have figured out something. Probably our standard of living wouldn’t have been as high, we probably wouldn’t have expanded,” says Hennenfent, who received $40,000 in government subsidy payments last year, compared to none in 1978.

Looks to Future

Looking 10 years into the future, Hennenfent sees himself even more involved in management and less involved in day-to-day labor.

“In 10 years I might think things are comfortable enough that I won’t be wearing blue jeans and work shoes,” he says. “Matt and Bill will probably have some involvement in agriculture. . . . I’d like to see them start out and build empires of their own.

“We may be producing crops other than corn or beans, maybe some specialized plants . . . maybe a new plant developed with biotechnology that will have a whole new purpose that we don’t know about now. I can remember when my dad didn’t plant soybeans, and now they are the major cash crop around here. I think in the next 10 to 20 years we’ll be producing crops that we don’t even dream about now.

“And we may not be in the livestock business by then. The livestock industry is becoming less of a small family operation and more of a large-scale enterprise. Our 3,000 head (of hogs annually) is not one of the larger operations any more,” says Hennenfent, who sees agriculture, like the seasons on which it depends, turning.

“I wouldn’t discount the possibility that we would have doubled our operation again by that time and that I’ll have more gray hair. I’m glad I’m getting gray hair, because when you have gray hair they know you’re not wet behind the ears anymore.”

Times researcher Rhonda Bergman in Chicago also contributed to this story.