Excerpt: ‘Land Rich, Cash Poor’: One Family’s Multi-Generational Struggle to Stay in Farming

The following is an excerpt from author Brian Reisinger’s Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. Unearthing hidden history from the Great Depression to today and weaving it with the four-generation fight for survival of Reisinger’s family on their farm in southern Wisconsin, Land Rich, Cash Poor reveals a crisis that today affects every American dinner table. Alois Reisinger was the first generation, buying the farm after escaping pre-World War I Europe. Albert was his son, the eldest of the second generation, who grew up farming in the Great Depression.

The path to the middle class began in the valley, and it was a stiff climb. Up the steep and winding road, away from that spot where Alois first looked upon the farmyard and fields beyond. Albert and then his siblings for years afterward journeyed upward, finding as they came around the bend and leaned into the final hill that the sunrise was waiting for them, more visible with each step as they journeyed closer to the horizon. Further and further up the road, finally the sunrise peaked up over the edge of the earth and beamed its golden rays across the countryside, great shafts of light extending in every direction. And there was a choice, standing at the top of the hill in the golden-orange glow of the morning light—toward the endless possibility of town or deeper into the life from which they’d came.

Yet another hill to the north, gentler in slope, led to another farm. There was the bright red barn, a white farmhouse, and surrounding out-buildings, all of it sitting in a cup in the land, nestled among the hillsides rolling onward for miles. This was the first stop on our family’s path to the middle class: a second farm for the next generation. Here on the hill, the sun rose earlier than in the hidden valley below, more eager it seemed to extend its light upon this corner of the world than on their original homestead. The fields curved with the shape of the earth more naturally, less treacherous than some of the hillsides the brothers and sisters knew from down below. But not all was gentler and richer. Sunnier mornings and easier hills, yes, but tougher ground with rocks close to the surface in the clay soil. And on the hill the wind roamed more freely. While the wind was good for drying fields when the crops needed it, it also blew dust in work-worn faces and ushered in great storms that filled the wide-open sky above and split it with lighting and shook it with thunder. The world on the hill moved in ways it didn’t in the valley.

Albert lived in the white farmhouse facing the sun and the wind and the rain. He was a bachelor, seeing if he could make it here while his parents farmed in the valley. This neighboring farm on the hill had been foreclosed upon once already, and Alois had taken out debt to buy it after years of penny-pinching in 1935, then sold it to Albert in 1940—lending his twenty-seven-year-old son a financial hand that also came with the responsibility to make good and pay the farm off.

Albert’s face still harbored the quiet eyes and sly smile, when he smiled, and he was handsome in those years. His hair was dark brown—although it began to thin and retreat up his forehead early in life—and a long straight nose sat almost noble atop the filthy overalls. He was not an especially tall man, but he was lean and work-hardened in those early days, with big farmer’s hands. The hardship had marked him, in those and other ways. Inside, the house was spare. There was a sink in the kitchen with a pump atop it in place of running water, and an old stove. There was no indoor bathroom. Wood sat stacked in the woodbox and in the woodshed outside to heat the stove and the house. The countertop in the kitchen bore bruises from where Albert had fastened it—nailing it down with a hammer, instead of gluing it like he ought to have done. Albert had seen too many families lose their farms in the Depression and wanted to pay his off before he was married. He boasted about the wife he would take one day, saying he wanted to make sure he “got the coop before I got the chicken.”

However, Albert’s family knew also that he was afraid of the world beyond, as he looked upon it from the porch just off the kitchen. He could see the sunrise start to the left in the east and knew that soon enough it would fill the sky and light the fields where his livelihood sat buried. Under the sink was generally a bottle of booze, the liquor hot and thick in his throat. He drank it any time of day, and he bought it by the case.

This was the American family farm as the 1930s turned to the 1940s: on the precipice of prosperity, with irreparable change underway that would introduce new risks to farm families through good and bad economic times alike. While the reasons for the continued trouble were many, most boiled down to an emerging threat that was uniquely difficult for farm country and would last for decades to come—the problem of vanishing labor. Many farms were still facing the lingering effects of the Depression into the 1940s. When the recovery fully took hold, it was tied to World War II, initiating a draft that sapped most of the American economy of the workforce it needed. In farm country, however, the challenge was even deeper. The sons and daughters of the American family farmer were leaving home in droves, not only because of the war but also because of job opportunities and the wide-open world the city offered a generation of children raised up in rural hardship.

In 1940 a majority of Americans—57 percent—still lived in the country, but rural America was destined for a transformational fall.Those in rural areas who didn’t face the draft saw an increasingly diversified economy rife with opportunity. America was on its way to becoming the industrial giant needed for the war effort, and to fuel broad prosperity in the years afterward. This postwar economic expansion was capping a massive shift already happening, away from agriculture and toward manufacturing, the service industry, and government.² That kind of economic expansion moved people—away from rural areas and toward urban ones. Kenneth Johnson, a rural demographer at the University of New Hampshire, said in an interview that the overall rural population wouldn’t fall in raw numbers until the twenty-first century, but the share of America’s population tilted from rural to urban far earlier.

The proportion of the population that was rural compared to urban began to plummet in the 1940s, he said, as the number of people migrating from rural areas to urban areas soared. And it was largely young people—the kind parents needed to take over the farm—who were leaving. In the 1950s and for decades afterward, rural counties experiencing depopulation nationwide lost an average of 43 percent of residents between the ages of twenty and twenty-four years old. Our family, and so many others in the hills and valleys beyond, would exemplify this shift. Years would pass before anyone would fully see what the move from family farm to urban factory would do to rural America.

There was great opportunity in this time, as well as grave risks that would further set the course of the disappearing American farmer. Prices for crops and farm products were on the rise in the 1940s: by 1947, the ratio of prices farmers were paid for their wares versus what they paid for materials they needed to produce—known as the parity ratio—reached its most favorable level since before the agricultural depression following World War I. Those who had made it through the years of Depression may have increased their holdings at an affordable price, if they were able to acquire a neighboring farm from a family or bank that was forced to sell. Some may have done so in rare moments when they felt they could take a risk, as Alois did in helping Albert get his start, while others may have waited until recovery took hold. And since many families had more children than they did farms, there was the opportunity for two tracks of prosperity: those who took over the farm from their parents or bought another local farm themselves, and those who left the farm to work in burgeoning industries, from manufacturing to food processing and beyond.

The lingering effects of the Depression, though, kept times tight for many farmers until they could put away savings and build equity in their farms. Many of the technological advances and modern conveniences that completely remade urban life, like electricity and running water, came to rural areas much later. Some parts of the nation’s farm states had electricity in the late 1930s as a result of rural electrification, whereas others didn’t until the 1940s. Jerry Apps, a prolific Wisconsin historian who grew up in the Depression, remembers his family’s farm not getting electricity until 1947. Electricity granted farmers electronic milking machines, refrigeration of milk at the flip of a switch, electrically powered elevators to move feed, and more, Apps said. At the same time, the types of tractors and machinery available expanded greatly, and more farms finally got running water in their homes. Apps’s father doubled the size of his family’s milk herd. Things were changing, however slow the pace.

“Farm people moved in that time from hopelessness to hope,” Apps said.

Still, there was the problem of farming’s vanishing workforce. The first, and most devastating, was the number of soldiers shipping off to war—primarily men, but also hundreds of thousands of women, while other women filled roles in industry left vacant by the war effort. American military personnel during World War II exceeded 12 million by 1945, many of them leaving behind jobs on the farm and in the city alike. More than four hundred thousand of them died. The risks to the country of having America’s farms deprived of crucial labor was well known, as evidenced by Congress passing legislation in 1942 instructing local draft boards to exempt agricultural workers from military service, if they could show their work on the farm was essential to the war effort.

Beyond that, and as part of a much larger underlying trend, was America’s shift from rural to urban. In some ways, that shift was less obvious, not only because it was separate from the trauma of the war but also because some farm families were so large that it was inevitable: A certain amount of children from farm country would need to find opportunity elsewhere. Johnson, the rural demographer, said it’s important to remember that the picture isn’t so simple as young people choosing to flee to the bright lights of the city. One trend driving long-term rural depopulation was the pull of opportunity in urban areas, he said, but the other was fewer jobs in rural areas as technology made farms more efficient with less labor.

Despite the need for some farm kids to find jobs in the city, the overpowering trend of sons and daughters leaving had long felt like a slow death to rural areas—a fear, it turns out, that was founded. Since at least the 1880s, young people leaving rural areas was a concern for many. The trend picked up in the 1940s and beyond and would become a crisis that would last decades. The simple fact is there were more farmers finding fewer sons and daughters to help with the labor and one day take over. Johnson elaborated on the impact of losing such a key demographic: When a rural area loses people in their early twenties, it means not only fewer workers and fewer successors for work-weary farmers but also fewer young aspiring parents to give birth to more young people. As the average age of a county increased, it sapped vitality—more deaths and fewer births, Johnson said, until more people were dying than being born. The problem proved impossible for some communities to reverse. …

Brian Reisinger is an award-winning writer and farm boy who grew up working with his father from the time he could walk. Albert was his grandpa. “Land Rich Cash Poor” is available in bookstores as of August 20, and online at Amazon, Audible, Barnes & Noble, and IndieBound via Bookshop.org, with more information available at brian-reisinger.com. Reisinger splits his time between northern California near his wife’s family and his family’s farm in southern Wisconsin.

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