Hunger Grows Among Farmers in America’s Heartland, Land of Plenty : Midwest: Many find it difficult to make a living, pay utilities and put meals on their own table, forcing them to depend on food banks.

Seven days a week, Al Reger tends to his land, growing the corn and raising the cattle that feed other Americans. Once a month, he stops to seek help--to feed his own family.

The fourth-generation farmer knows that sweat and sacrifice alone won’t guarantee his family three meals a day. So he and his wife, Carolyn, devised a swallow-your-pride solution: They help run--and rely on--a food bank.

“It’s a lifesaver for us,” said the 42-year-old father of two. “The grocery bills are the highest bills any of us have, except heat in the wintertime. Without this to stretch our food budgets, there would be hunger, true hunger.”

Here in the heart of America’s heartland, the farm crisis is a memory for some, but an aching reality for others who are finding it harder to eke out a living, pay the utilities and meet one of life’s most basic responsibilities--putting food on the table.

Hunger in the heartland is, by some accounts, a growing problem. Last fall, Tufts University experts analyzed one report that estimated up to 30 million Americans don’t get enough to eat. It concluded that the biggest increase in recent years appeared to be in the Midwest, including rural areas.

“In the breadbasket of America . . . growing numbers of people from farms and cities, perhaps for the first time in their lives, are bringing their children into emergency feeding facilities,” said Larry Brown, director of Tufts’ Center on Hunger, Poverty and Nutrition Policy.

The irony isn’t lost on Dave Ostendorf of Prairiefire, an Iowa-based rural activist group.

“It’s a tragic commentary that many of those who produce the food are themselves not really well fed,” he said, noting that unlike the South, “hunger and poverty in the rural Midwest are out of sight and out of mind.”

Not everyone agrees with these dire assessments.

Some experts say the 30 million estimate is far too high. Others say the problem is malnutrition--not hunger--because no one is starving. There are no babies here with bloated bellies, no skeletal-like adults staggering in the streets as in Third World nations.

“The picture of hunger in the U.S. is more subtle,” Brown said. “A child may be five, six pounds underweight. . . . Most people would not even notice it. . . . From a health perspective, it’s a very serious problem.”

Some statistics support his claims about food shortages.

The Missouri Rural Crisis Center, which operates 10 food pantries including the one run by the Regers, served more than 25,000 people in 1992--almost twice as many as two years earlier.

Food stamp numbers are up, too, in several largely rural Midwestern states. Indiana posted a 59% increase in recipients from 1988 to 1992; Missouri, a 44% jump in the same period.

Experts attribute the increases to the economic turmoil of the ‘80s and the aftermath of farm troubles and factory closings in the Midwest.

Some activists also contend that these numbers reflect just part of the problem because many folks are intimidated by red tape or too proud to seek help.

“Having a farm, you’re supposed to be a rugged individual, a self-starter,” said Roger Allison, director of the Missouri crisis center. “Here you are, coming to us for a handout. There’s a whole mental stigma associated with that.”

Reger confronts that, especially among farmers using the food pantry, which serves about 30 families in this desolate hamlet in north-central Missouri, 20 miles south of the Iowa border.

“They feel it’s a failure of themselves to do well,” he said. “We try to tell people, ‘It’s not your fault.’ It’s bigger than that.”

Reger knows from experience. The money he saves from using the food bank helps pay $240 a month in health insurance premiums, but he still needs a second job--he runs an agricultural repair shop in town--to make ends meet.

But having filed for bankruptcy in 1986, Reger said it wasn’t difficult to seek assistance. “The shame factor,” he said, “had already worn off for us.”

Compounding these psychological barriers are some practical obstacles.

A 1990 report by Public Voice for Food and Health Policy, a research and advocacy group, found nearly eight times as many supermarkets per county in urban areas than in rural ones.

Free services, too, aren’t as abundant as in cities. “You may have a town of only 500 people and have 10 people in need. You’re not going to organize a soup kitchen or a food pantry,” said Patty Morris, the group’s research director.

Government commodity programs that provide staples serve many, but others need more than that, even as they tend crops or raise animals that feed others.

“Everybody has this common concept that if you live on the land, you’ve got to be self-sufficient,” said Ostendorf, the Iowa activist. “A lot of folks . . . just can’t do that.”

A farmer raising corn and soybeans doesn’t have the makings of a balanced diet. A livestock herd may be mortgaged to a bank.

“The way it is on this farm is the cows and hogs eat first and me and Jim get what’s left over,” said Elizabeth Compton, who lives with her husband and four children in Buffalo, Mo. “They’re the ones producing our income.”

“City people don’t understand,” she added. “It’s irritating to explain that most everything the farm makes goes back to the farm. If I sell a cow every time I have a bill, what am I going to have left?”

After 13 years of farming together, the Comptons say hard times are forcing them to call it quits this year.

Elizabeth Compton hopes to set up a local food pantry--and will use it herself.

Farmers and activists already have taken similar steps.

Most food and household goods supplied to pantries come from private company donations. Patrons usually are asked to make monthly contributions.

In central Nebraska, a farm couple has operated a twice-a-month food pantry since the mid-1980s, serving about 60 families.

In Sedalia, Mo., both the young who work low-paying jobs and the elderly on fixed incomes use a pantry run by the Missouri Rural Crisis Center.

One woman had subsisted on a single meal of cereal a day before she came to the pantry. Others had faced a brutal choice: Pay costly medical bills or buy food.

Pantry manager Gwen Grapes knows all too well. Her husband, Ron, a former farmer and welder, was injured in a work-related accident. His medicine bills: $200 a month.

“Without this, we wouldn’t be able to eat,” she said, waving a flannel-shirted arm toward boxes of cereal, cheese and canned goods lining the storefront wall. “By the time you pay your bills, his medicine, there’s nothing left.”

Eva Mae McClure, who worked for years as a waitress, cashier and cook until health problems sidelined her, is in similar straits. Her husband is disabled and they rent out their farm in Hughesville, Mo.

She started using the pantry last year after discovering government restrictions limited their food stamp allotment to $10 a month.

“We have no shame about it,” said McClure, a folksy, bespectacled woman. “There was a time when my husband would have died rather than do this.”

“He came around to seeing this is not a disgraceful thing,” she said. “It’s not because we’re lazy, not because we’re not making an effort. We’ve paid taxes for years and we have a right to use the programs that are out there.”

McClure said the money she saves allows her to have a phone. For a $17 monthly contribution, she receives up to $70 a month in groceries--including cereal, soup, boxed potatoes, frozen beef dinners and yogurt.

She supplements that by raising rabbits, then eating them.

McClure tries to persuade others in need to be realistic--and to acknowledge their troubles.

“Farmers have to stop being ashamed of being poor,” she said. “Pride is great and it motivates you to do the best you can. But when you do, you have to start looking for other doors God has opened.”