Examples of ‘Hard-Luck’ Stories That Qualified for Drought Payments

Not all who collected aid from the 1988 drought program were Midwestern farmers faced with ruin. Cotton farmers in New Mexico, lettuce growers in New Jersey, a Texas company that raised potatoes, all collected federal dollars--completely legally--even though, by their own admission, they could have weathered last year’s drought.

Here are some stories of aid that spilled beyond the boundaries of the 1988 drought:

Last year wasn’t so bad for Conowingo, Md., dairyman Robert Dempsey. Good rains in July rescued his feed corn from six weeks of no rain, and milk prices were up.

But when he heard about the disaster program, he went over his records with county officials. Two hours of paper work and he was told he qualified for $1,200.

“Six-hundred-dollars an hour,” Dempsey said with a grin as he milked his 140 Guernseys in his long, open barn. “That’s not bad pay. About the same as a lawyer.”

Dempsey makes no apologies about taking the money. “It was there and I took advantage of it,” he said. But he doesn’t favor a repeat of the program.

“It would make people say, I can put crops in the ground and if it doesn’t grow, I’ll collect,” he said.

Chester Lathem and his family are what you might call diversified farmers. They run a real estate company; grow wheat, corn and milo; raise cattle, and own three oil wells that Exxon operates on their Texas Panhandle land.

To participate in federal price-support programs for their main crops of wheat, corn and milo, they have to set aside some acres. In 1988, they planted potatoes on 125 of those acres--and saw hail wipe out the crop. Other crops did well.

But the Lathem family was far from being knocked out of farming by hail on potatoes planted on excess acres.

Their farm, formally named the Lico Partnership, received $134,087 under the drought program, legally exceeding the $100,000 single-farmer aid limit because the partnership is owned by four family members.

The potatoes were insured and were expected to gross $223,600 for Lico, according to Lico’s file at the Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service. Insurance plus the disaster aid brought $214,153--without the expense of harvest, which Lathem said would have been two-thirds the cost of raising the potatoes.

Still, he said he only broke even on the potato acreage.

“You bet it was necessary,” Lathem said. “We wouldn’t have lost the farm over it, but we probably would have had to do some things differently. It would have been much tougher to go back and plant crops for the new year. I think it was a good program.”

The 1987 growing year, plagued by heavy rain and high winds, was horrible for Ted White, a Chaves County, N. M., cotton grower, but no disaster payment program existed to help him then.

White got luckier in 1988, because of the record-setting drought in the Midwest. Although he had a better crop in 1988, he was able to collect disaster aid.

“I had a cold, cold, cold rain and then that wind that comes down like on a runway and just cuts the cotton,” said White. About half his cotton was wiped out last year, although his irrigated fields still yielded a healthy 355 pounds per acre and he made about two-thirds of his normal gross, based on government payment rates.

Insurance paid $8,959, and drought aid approved by the local ASCS office paid $18,285--even though the disaster law included neither cold weather nor high winds.

Last year was not the luckiest for Carl Race Jr., who grows apples and corn in Blairstown, N. J. A well that fed a special trickle-irrigation system for some of his orchards dried up. A pump that watered his corn failed at the height of the dry weather.

But Race weathered the drought well; good production on other acres eased his losses. So he went to the county office with some trepidation to inquire about the 1988 drought-relief program.

He learned he was entitled to a payment, but he felt uncomfortable with government programs.

“It’s kind of a personal pride thing. You think you’re asking for welfare,” he said. “I was thinking some low-interest loans of 4.5%, that would be great.”

Instead, he got cash, nearly $12,000.

“I sat and wondered: ‘What am I going to do with $12,000?’ ” he said. “I decided the best way to spend the money was to buy an irrigation pump.”

He spent $13,000 for a pump. Then came 1989 and its endless rains. “It’s been sitting out there, rusting ever since,” Race, laughing, said of his new pump.

Noel Hicks grows winter wheat in the harsh, arid, wind-swept Oklahoma Panhandle, the heart of what was once the Dust Bowl. In early 1988, the weather was dry in Guymon, Okla., although nothing really out of the ordinary.

Winds he estimated at 80 m.p.h. to 90 m.p.h. damaged 147.5 acres of irrigated wheat in February, 1988. By harvest time, nothing was worth cutting, so he just plowed it up, he said. He didn’t have insurance.

Months later, unexpected help arrived in the form of the drought-relief bill--a program that hadn’t even been considered when the winds took his wheat.

He collected $11,499.

“If the wheat had been good, we would have made twice that much,” Hicks said. “I’d rather have a big wheat crop than take a check from the government any time.”