February 8, 2001

Plains Folk: Unwanted Bread

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

Two plains states have commonly swapped the title of "Breadbasket of the Nation" (leading wheat producer) back and forth over recent years: Kansas, the winter wheat state, and North Dakota, the spring wheat state.

Wheat is central to the symbolic identity of each state. A recent exhibit of the Kansas State Historical Society explored the symbols of wheat–from flour sacks to stained glass church windows–in depth. My father's gravestone in Barton County is inscribed with a sheaf of wheat. One of the metal wheat bouquets that adorn the lampposts of my old home town bears an inscription in his memory.

Since I work now for the state of North Dakota, I was delighted to discover that state statute once required the legend "Buy Dakota Maid Flour" (product of the state mill) on all official documents. (I've since devised my own stationery bearing the slogan.) I'm proud to be associated with wheat and with the two great wheat states of the plains.

What if, though, nobody wants the product of the breadbasket? That's the premise behind a new book by Sheldon Green and James Coomber (published by the Institute for Regional Studies, North Dakota State University). It's called "Unwanted Bread: The Challenge of Farming and Ranching."

If Thomas Paine had not already used the title, then I think Green and Coomber's book might have been called "Common Sense." It contains, along with their interpretive essays, 50 interviews with farmers, ranchers, and others who work with them in North Dakota–although the compilers state that the situations described are characteristic of the plains from Texas to Canada, not just North Dakota.

Some of the interviewees are celebrities, if we have such things as celebrities in North Dakota–former governors George Sinner and Ed Schafer, psychologist Val Farmer, balladeer Chuck Suchy, poet Bill Lowman, philosopher Fred Kirschenmann, co-op organizer Bill Patrie, buffalo man Ken Throlson. Others are people you never heard of, but who talk plainly, sometimes poetically, and always with common sense about the state of farming on the plains.

Some of these folk, like Rob and Jeri Dobrowski, did the sensible thing by giving up farming; Dr. Farmer often counsels such people in transition. Others, like Chuck and Bill, found sources of off-farm income. Still others embraced value-added enterprises; Mike Warner is one of these, and it's stunning to hear him, a visibly successful agri-businessman, speak of trade policy in angry rhetoric that might have come from the mouth of an overalled hayseed Populist in the 1890s. Most of Green and Coomber's informants are not angry. They are just getting along.

You have to like these people. They are not the whiny advocates who grab headlines, the nut cases who cuss the government on talk radio, or the snake-oily salesmen of Jerusalem artichokes. Every one is someone you would choose to sit beside at a potluck. And I should add, Green's photographs of them are downright compelling. This is a beautiful book.

In the end, though, I feel restive. Let us regard this compilation of common sense, Unwanted Bread, as a baseline. To understand the loss of farmers on the plains, we have to dig deeper than, perhaps even ignore altogether, agricultural economics. To envision a future here, we have to license ourselves to rise above common sense. As Sheldon Green says, the Great Plains are in transition again.

(Tom Isern can be reached via mail to Minard Hall 412C, NDSU, Fargo ND 58105-5075, or via e-mail to isern@plainsfolk.com )

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, isern@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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