Farm to Family Connection - Commentary

FARM TO FAMILY COMMENTARY
---Select commentary from a weekly column by Curt Arens published in the Cedar County News, Hartington, NE

December 2006

Experience in Farm Policy

Dear Friends,
Sometimes it takes eyes of experience, folks who have been there, to help us see what we should be doing to work for a better future.

I had the great honor of interviewing over the phone one of those experienced folks, Bob Bergland - Secretary of Agriculture for President Jimmy Carter from 1976-1980 – from his family farm home in Roseau, Minnesota, near the Canadian border, for an article that will appear this Spring in a national farm publication.

Bergland, now 78 years old, has been fighting lung cancer with several strong courses of chemotherapy, but he told me that his doctors say it is now in remission. A family man, he and his wife now enjoy visiting their six children, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren as much as possible.

Before taking the Secretary’s post, he had served in Congress representing his rural Congressional district for seven years. While in Congress, Bergland said that he always felt that payments to the larger farmers would trickle down to the smaller farms. He thought at the time that a "one size fits all" farm program would help everyone equally.

To his credit, once he took the Secretary’s job he started questioning that strategy. He realized during his time in his cabinet post that although the stated goal of the farm program is to "save the family farm", only a small portion of farm payments were going, even in those days, to what were considered family-sized operations.

Bergland commissioned a study of the structure of agriculture called "A Time to Choose". The results of the study were startling to some folks in Washington. It found that farm programs were actually hastening the demise of the family farm because most of the payments were going to the "big guys". The program was making it more difficult for young farmers to get into the business as well.

Bergland said that the budget will probably dictate some limitations of program payments, even if legislators weren’t willing to make changes, in the upcoming Farm Bill battles.

He told me that he didn’t seek the Secretary’s position at all. He had only met Carter once before. But Carter’s Vice-President, fellow Minnesotan, Walter Mondale, was a good friend of Bergland’s. So Mondale called Bergland up and asked if he would meet with Carter in Atlanta to discuss the job.

Bergland had the meeting and agreed to a full background check. He returned to his Congressional post in Washington. A few days later his mother called him from Roseau. "Bob, what have you done?" she asked her son.

"What do you mean?" Bergland replied. "Well, FBI guys are crawling all over town, asking questions about you. You must have done something really bad," she told him rather upset.

"No, Mother, I’m just thinking about taking the Secretary of Agriculture job," he told her.

"No Bob, seriously, why are these guys here?" she said, not believing that her son might be one of Carter’s cabinet members.

So much for complete support from his mother.