The man who led the U.S. through the farm crisis of the 1980s | GABEL

My favorite interview last week was 90-year-old Illinois farmboy John "Jack" Block. Block was former President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Agriculture from 1981 until 1986, the worst of the domestic farm crisis. He recently published a memoir, "Pigs, Politics and Persistence: The Life and Legacy of John 'Jack' Block", which I read nearly in one sitting before begging for an interview.

I have a keen interest in the farm crisis of the 1980s, which is not widely documented, and I have been collecting audio interviews with those who have tales to tell with lofty goals of writing about the era. The stories that mark the 80s on the nations farms and ranches run the gamut from farmers from southeastern Colorado joining a tractorcade to the nation's capital to bankers being shot in cold blood by anguished farmers who lost everything.

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While secretary, Block's son and father operated Block Family Farms and he said he saw the farm's equity plunge by half during the 80s, even though they were among the lucky ones who had little debt. The "seeds of the crisis" were sown, he said in the 1970s, when Soviet grain purchases drove up prices and hopes. He said farm incomes rose, land prices were bid up by speculators, and farmers were told to borrow more and produce more. When the dollar was overvalued, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates and farmers were left overextended, without a major trade partner, and facing interest rates near 20%.

Though Block was at the helm during that time primarily known for hardship, there are a number of major accomplishments that also mark his time as the head of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Block said President Reagan invited him to California to discuss a potential cabinet position and the two agreed their first goal was to end the Soviet grain embargo enacted by President Jimmy Carter to punish the Soviets for their 1979 invasion of Afghanistan.

Russia had long been an excellent trade partner, Block said, because they purchased a lot and always paid cash. The embargo failed because the Soviets found other countries to purchase grain from — Canada, Australia, Argentina and Brazil — and no longer needed American grain.

Even members of Reagan's new cabinet, notably Casper Weinberger, Secretary of Defense, and U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick took a hard line and opposed lifting the embargo. Block said lifting the embargo was one of Reagan's campaign promises in farm country and keeping the promise was what ultimately led to it in April of 1981.

Block said the embargo would have been lifted earlier had Reagan not been shot on March 30.

One of the major programs Block brought forward as part of the 1985 Farm Bill was good for dairymen, but bad for beef producers. At the time, there was an overabundance of dairy products languishing in warehouses and Block designed the Whole Herd Buyout to reduce dairy production at the ground level. Dairy producers were invited to exit the business for five years and their herd were exported or slaughtered and they were paid by the federal government. Large numbers of dairy producers participated and the program rolled out faster than expected, with 15,000 dairies participating. It leveled out the dairy products, but drowned the cattle market in beef. Block said Oklahoma producers told him they went from earning $62 per hundredweight for calves, to $6 per hundredweight, a loss of $250 million in Oklahoma alone. The National Cattlemen's Beef Association sued the USDA for flooding the market, which resulted in changes that settled both the cheese and beef situations.

The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) is administered by the Farm Service Agency within USDA and it pays farmers to convert highly erodible or environmentally sensitive areas to native grasses, trees and riparian buffers. It's not uncommon to see CRP fields standing where plows may have operated in decades previous. The CRP program doesn't take appropriate farmground out of production, but puts to use what ag producers learned from the driest years.

Block said the CRP program concept had been tossed around in the 1950s. but when the 1985 Farm Bill was discussed in 1984, he said many of his own staff questioned whether it could succeed. Its original iteration called for a three-year commitment to resting the land, while Block wanted a 15-year production stop. Block found the funding within the Farm Bill to pay producers 50% of the cost to landowners for installing conservation measures.

Block said he, just as every Ag secretary has and does to this day, struggled with public criticism of the huge USDA budget and the federal government handouts to rich farmers. The Farm Bill is comprised today of about 70% nutrition program funding to programs like Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). To demonstrate recipients received ample assistance from nutrition programs, the Block family went on food stamps for a week and Block even carried a brown bag lunch with him on flights. The press had a heyday. They were even further riled when ketchup was classified as a vegetable, which made great fodder for Reagan detractors on late-night television. Ketchup or not, he said when he left Reagan's cabinet, he helped get a grip on spending, reduce regulations, and expand trade all while navigating difficult times for ag producers and rural communities.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region's preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state's oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state's 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children's books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.