Near Bankruptcy, Farmer Gives Up
Lowell Nelson knew something was terribly wrong last year when he was planting thousands of bright orange seeds for his sugar beet crop. The skies were clear, the breeze soft--but he could not stop crying.
It was spring, the season of new beginnings, when optimism is not just talk but gospel throughout farm country. But Nelson already felt doomed.
He knew he needed a good crop. He knew he needed good prices. And he knew too, all that was beyond his control.
Nelson had always been a stoic, the one who would make the family funeral arrangements when others could not, the one who would be ready with the soothing word in times of crisis. Now he was having a crisis of his own.
“I just wasn’t able to cope anymore,” he says in his soft, lilting voice. “To have something like this happening to me scared the hell out of me.”
This spring, Nelson’s health problems and money troubles--he is broke and more than $1 million in debt--forced him to stop farming after 33 years.
This fall, Nelson stood on his land with his wife and three sons on a chilly, windy Friday afternoon just before Thanksgiving, listening to the rat-a-tat-tat patter of an auctioneer selling off his farm equipment. Four augers, three tractors, two forest-green trucks with his name stenciled on the side, all gone with the crack of a gavel.
“I was tearing up inside but trying to hide it,” he says. “It was a tough day, but I expected it to be.”
It also was a necessary day. Nelson is heading for bankruptcy and trying to get his derailed life back on track.
“I never really had to go look for a job before,” he says. “Letting go of what I’ve done all my life and realizing that we’ve lost everything . . . it wasn’t where I wanted to be when I got to be 54.”
The proceeds from the Nov. 19 auction will ease some of Nelson’s financial pressures, and that’s an enormous relief to him.
“It’s like going in for surgery,” he says. “No one wants to do it. But it has to be done.”
That analogy has special meaning because Nelson had a mechanical valve implanted in his heart this year. He says emotional stress created by five years of poor crops, poor weather and poor prices exacerbated his health problems.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow even though you keep telling yourself it’s not your fault,” he says.
To help cope with his losses, Nelson sees a psychologist and takes antidepressants--candid admissions in these farm fields, where emotional anguish and money troubles are closely held family secrets.
“I have enough self-confidence where it doesn’t bother me to say I’m in trouble,” says Nelson, who has discussed his turmoil on TV and radio. He even appeared on a talk show the morning of the auction.
Nelson’s money troubles are partly rooted in some big purchases made in recent years--a $146,000 combine, for one--as he expanded, farming 2,500 acres of owned or rented land. He says he was advised to get bigger or get out.
Now he’s out. And his debts are big.
“I hated to be the one to lose it all, the one to sort of break the chain,” Nelson says, glancing at living room photos of the three sons who he hoped would be the fourth generation to tend the land.
Nelson’s grandfather, Ovie, homesteaded this corner of the Red River Valley more than 100 years ago; his father, John, followed, and after his death, Lowell left college to take over the same wind-swept fields just 10 minutes east of the North Dakota line.
He has many memories here: hunting sparrows with a BB gun as a boy, pounding nails to build the house he lives in, hoisting his sons into his pickup while they were still in diapers to take them with him on grain delivery trips to Duluth.
“I don’t know how we get so attached to a piece of dirt,” the lanky farmer says with a rueful laugh. “It’s going to be here long after I’m gone. But losing a farm? . . . I can’t tell you how I’ll eventually feel.”
He pauses, then finds the word.
“Heartbroken, I’m sure.”
Nelson quit months before the federal bailout, though he knows any payment would have fallen far short of keeping him afloat.
But it could help other struggling Minnesota farmers.
A survey of 81 federal Farm Service Agency offices conducted before the $8.7-billion aid package was approved found 6,300 of about 80,000 growers in the state would probably not farm next year.
That number will drop because of the money but it’s “a tourniquet on a bleeding arm,” says Tracy Beckman, the agency’s state director.
Nelson works as a long-haul trucker but hopes to find a job that will keep him home more often. A few days before the auction, he found himself crying while driving back from Georgia.
But the day after the auction he was back on the road--this time for a speech to troubled farmers. His how-to-cope message is simple:
“Don’t punish yourself. . . . Don’t let it destroy your life. . . . If I can survive, they can too.”
