Montanan Pioneers Effort to Save Farms for Progeny

Like her Scandinavian forebears who led the way across a trackless prairie to a new life, Helen Quick Waller is breaking a trail for those who will come after her.

Waller has lived in Circle, Mont., for most of her life. But these days you will hardly ever find her at the ranch. More likely she is in Washington, D.C., or Switzerland, or at somebody’s farm in Kentucky or Iowa.

Waller, 59, is a founder of the National Save the Family Farm Coalition. It is a grass-roots rural network in 35 states that aims to tilt government agriculture policy away from corporate farming and make it more favorable to the small producer.

Married Sweetheart

Waller was raised on a farm outside Circle “and grew up poor, except I didn’t know it, because everybody else was like us.” Both she and her husband, Gordon, who was her teen-age sweetheart, attended one-room schools, and they married after he came home from military service.

She became a farm wife who raised five children, an active civic leader, and a hands-on ranching partner. Then, in the late 1970s, multinational energy companies targeted eastern Montana for giant coal mines and power plants.

“Who were they to come into our communities and tell us 15,000 construction workers were about to descend on us?” Waller said.

Lessons learned in that fight paid off in the family farm crisis. Waller recalled thinking: “What good will it do us to save our farms from draglines (mining apparatus), only to lose them to the bankers?”

Much of the 1984-85 family farm bill was written at Helen Waller’s kitchen table by dedicated coalition members who then passed it on to Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa).

“When the Family Farm Act was being written, Helen was right there,” said Harkin, who called her an “ally in the fight to ensure that our farmers receive a fair profit for their products.”

The Harkin bill failed in Congress, but some of its provisions made their way into law, and each year the coalition tries to get more of its goals passed.

Waller was an unsuccessful Democratic primary candidate for lieutenant governor last year. She is keeping mum on any future political plans.

“I put in a lot of 15-hour days, and when I get home I go immediately to the field. When I’m on the tractor I never run the radio because that’s when I do my best thinking. That’s where I construct my congressional testimony.”

Waller said women have become active in revising agriculture policy because “we see the agony our husbands are in because they are made to feel that what they do has no value anymore.”

The Waller ranch is an endless horizon of rolling prairie dotted with sleek cattle and enriched by well-tended crops.

“The only reason I put myself through what I do,” Waller said, “is because I have kids and grandkids, and I want to be able to turn this farm over to them and know that it will go on.

“The stakes are too high in this one to see myself wearing out before we win.”