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[APPLAUSE] NANCY PADDOCK: Well, thank you very much, and I'm happy to be here today. It's very interesting to have a chance to read some poems to a Farmers Union Convention. And so I think I'll just start out with a poem that I got from one of our couples in Ohio. This is apparently a true story about a farmer that actually, they rented their land from. And I've tried to get this true story as accurately as possible. But you know, there's a little bit of poetic license in there too. It's called Shoes. Is that better? OK.

He said, you could always tell town kids from farm kids because town kids had shoes. And told of walking behind the plow, barefoot on the curling furrow, or stubbing dusty toes on hot stones all the way to town. Later, he rode an Allis-Chalmers four-wheel drive high above the sweat and dirt and never missed a farm show, pacing before the big machines that were shiny as new wingtips.

Against all advice, he bought a disk that wouldn't work his ground. And to his big round baler and hydraulic pickup, he added a stack wagon that lined up four-ton loaves along his fence. Because he said, it looks awful good. The last thing he did was to go into debt for a combination rotary mower and hay conditioner and a self-propelled field sprayer with air-conditioned cab. Now he's dead, and his yard, ready for the auction, looks like a farm show. All that machinery just like new for his kids to sell, lined up like shoes that didn't fit. OK.

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Well, I think there is a lot of pressure to have a lot of machinery. And sometimes, it does get people into bad situations like that. And like I say, that is a true story. And I guess one of the things that is so interesting about working with the American Farm Project is we do look at just what is going on with the whole rural scene and try to figure out what is important about farm life. Is it the new machine or is it somehow being able to stay on the land? Is it the way of life in farming, or is it the amount of money that can be made from it?

This other poem that I'm going to read is also based on a true story, and I'm sure that this maybe touches pretty close to home to all of you. The title of it comes from somebody that you've all heard of, I'm sure, Earl Butz. And he was fond of saying, get big or get out.

And when I was thinking about this poem, I also happened to find a thing in Isaiah which goes like this. Woe to those who add house to house and join field to field until everywhere belongs to them, and they are the sole inhabitants of the land. So I guess that was going on back then too.

And so I've sort of put that at the beginning of this poem and the rest of it. I've tried to put into the voice of a farmer who is feeling this terrible pinch. OK. I don't know if I've succeeded or not, but try to imagine then that I'm a man. Last week, my neighbor came, flashing his credit, moaning how he's got to buy me out.

He says, a man can't live on 1,000 acres anymore. What I can't buy, I'll rent. He's not the first one who wants to chew me up, tear down my fences, rip out my grove, and plow straight as an interstate through my yard. He says, I've got to get bigger to pay off the Steiger, the new grain bins. He wouldn't have needed if he'd stayed small.

He says, I've got to grow more because the surplus drives the price right into the ground. No amount is enough for him. Always reaching for more with empty hands. Eyes hard on the neighbor's place while he's losing his own. Why, the winds left me half his farm already. Maybe he just wants to buy it back. But whatever he can grab, he's planting road to road. You'd think it was war. And the enemy was every pheasant, every wind break and blade of grass, every other farmer trying to get by.

The last poem I'm going to read is about an auction. And this was in Burdock-- no, in Renville, Minnesota a few years ago or nearby. And you know, there's an awful lot of auctions. There's an awful lot of people that are having to leave the land. And it's kind of amazing how many there can be and how the towns keep getting smaller, and the farms keep getting bigger, and there are a lot fewer farmers.

And that's another thing that we're concerned with with the American Farm Project is what happens to rural communities when there aren't any people? What happens to the people that are left? They became isolated. They're almost in the same situation as the pioneers who first came out here, just a few people. And so we're thinking about human costs. Not just the economic costs but the human costs of such a situation.

And so in this poem, I call it Estate Sale. I was new to a rural area. I grew up in St. Paul. And I was seeing things in this rural area that I didn't have in St. Paul. I was seeing values and things that I wanted to get in contact with. And so at going to this auction, I was trying to buy something, which is of course, the American way. You always buy something if you want to get in touch with something else.

But that would somehow begin to make this connection for me, and that's what this poem is about. How can we get back in contact with the rural values that we're losing because the people are going? OK. Estate Sale. The furniture of her life spread over the yard for strangers. Eyes and fingers feel for something solid, some thread from the whole cloth of the past.

Polished brass bed, the heavy oak table and buffet. Her best China, Red Wing crocks, boxes of clouded zinc cap Mason jars, all for sale, all drowning in the quick litany of the auctioneer. What will you give me? He picks through sheets and towels with crocheted edges, grabs up an armload of quilt. What do I hear? $1? Come on. Do I hear $2?

For more than 100 hours of work, I can't resist. Bid $10 to take home the pieces of a life bound together. A patchwork of tiny flowered baby clothes, splashy apron paisleys, tired blue stripes of a husband's pajamas. A pattern of her own, created with patience of the slow, silent mending of wounds.

Women's work, made to be used, worn out, to keep us warm. Because my mother and my grandmother did not make quilts, I'll sleep tonight beneath the stitches of a stranger who sleeps beneath the ground, and the thread, unbroken, passes on to me. Thank you.

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JOE PADDOCK: As with Nancy, I'm very glad to be here and honored to be here at your state convention. I've enjoyed a lot working in Southwestern Minnesota with rural audiences and people, and it happens to be where I came from. I grew up in Litchfield, Minnesota. Living in Lynd now and working with the American Farm Project, which seems to me to give me a chance to work on what I most value in life, those sorts of values that I was able to grow up with.

In the American Farm Project, we have a subtitle to the American Farm project where we say it's roots, values, and challenges. So I'm going to read a poem or two for each one of these particular segments. And of course, I think quite often, when we try to decide where we should go in the future, we really don't know unless we look at our past and decide what was best in it. And so I think that's a good reason for looking at our roots.

And I had the rare privilege of doing an oral history project in Olivia, Minnesota. We did a book there called The Things We Know Best. And a lot of people told me some great stories there. And one of the persons who told me the story, and I'm sure that probably, there's a person or two in this audience who knows him as a fine man by the name of Lawrence Stoddard.

And he told me a story about his grandmother. How when she first arrived in this place a little north of where Olivia is now, there were no other women around for miles except one. And she was so lonely for contact with other women that this other woman who lived, say, two or three miles away would meet with her about once a week on a hilltop about halfway between their farms. There was only one problem. They didn't speak the same language.

So I got into thinking about what that must have been like. And it seemed to me also symbolic of how people from different walks of life of any kind, when they get together, how do they communicate when they don't, in some way or another, speak the same language? So I just call this The Meeting.

Two women past the noon of their lonely lives, before the turn of our century, met weekly under a circling hawk on a hilltop between their farm homes on the bleak Minnesota prairie. There was no other woman for miles. One spoke Norwegian, the other Bohemian. A black and white dog lay between them, sometimes whimpering as they tried across prairies of difference, with smiles and intense light from their eyes, to exchange small particular things from their lives, picking cabbage worms and potato bugs, stripping feathers for ticks, nursing children, churning butter, darning socks, starting barrels of kraut, boiling fat for soap, catching a pitcher of blood from the cut throat of a hog.

Small particulars, froth from the surface of inner rivers, dammed through silent days, loosed now in the movement of hands hungering in the air. They chuckled and clucked but could not quite loosen their bodies to dance their lives for each other. And the black and white dog whined as if something in his brain too knew of an immense effort toward speech. The two women then said their different goodbyes, till the next week, a strong formal handshake. And the hawk-swept sky, as they strode back through tall grass to their homes and their men, was luminous again.

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Of course, we don't always like to deal with what's a serious problem like, let's say, rural isolation or something like that. We'd like to also enjoy what we feel are really the positive things about rural life and to celebrate those things and intensify our feelings about them. And one of the things that we've always enjoyed, and this particular poem that I'll read you now is sort of in between roots and values, and I'll call it a values poem.

But one of the things we've always enjoyed is rural storytellers. The old time storytellers that you can find almost in any meeting. Or maybe if you hang around the pool hall or someplace like that, you'll hear stories of the sort I'm going to read to you now. And these are the sort of things we value and the sort of things you don't often find, I find at least during the periods that I've lived in the urban world.

And a fellow by the name of Delmar Debout from Milroy, Minnesota told me this particular story, and I'll just call it Frogs. And it deals with the time when there are a lot of prairie potholes left. And in the fall, sometimes when the frogs came down from those potholes to the bigger lakes where they would winter, they got pretty thick. OK?

At that time, there was still a pothole over every hill. And the frogs in the fall swarmed like maggots in the carcass of a dead horse. Sometimes, after the coming of the cars, they had to get out the blade to scrape the slick of crushed frogs off that road that circled stork-like.

One sunny Saturday afternoon in late September, more than 40 years back now, down around the bay, about 15 town kids began to herd frogs up from the water's edge where they lay, dozing in the sun by the thousands. Big, heavy leopard frogs that would stretch 9, 10 inches from nose to toe claw. They herded them slowly up over Anderson's pasture hill.

You would have thought it was wind through grass sweeping ahead of them, herded them up onto the road into town, herded them with real care. Losing a few here and there but maintaining the mass. Some guessed 5,000, some 10. And at the corner of Sixth, they turned them, losing maybe 40 dozen, which bounced on over Hershey's lawn, confusing the bejesus out of their old basset hound Monty, who after sniffing and poking with his paw, sat down and hauled at a thin silver sliver of day moon in the sky.

Old Mrs. Andrew said she first heard a sound like 5,000 hands patting meat. And when she looked up the street, she saw these kids, serious and quiet with a gray brown wave like swamp water to their knees, rolling along in front of them. Mrs. Andrew said, now you never heard a word from a single one of those kids. They were silent and strange with that hazel way of rolling along in front of them, just that patting sound times 5,000. I'd tell you it made the gooseflesh roll up my back and arms.

The boys claimed later that they had no plan. But when they came alongside horse Nelson's Fix-it Quick Garage, which contained maybe a half dozen broken down cars and horse, and Alan, his son, and Wendy Jeffers, one kid barked, bring them on in. And they turned that herd of frogs on a dime. They were herding easy by that time. And ran them through the entrance way.

Young Gemma Dean grabbed the handle of the sliding door and rolled her shut. And those kids vanished like 15 rabbits into whatever weed patch they could find. Well, hell, you can imagine. Wendy was on his back, working upward on a spring when those slimy devils started sliding all over him. They say he most near-tipped that model laying on its side getting out of there.

And horse, who was no doubt nearly through his daily pint of peach brandy, dropped a camshaft on Alan's toe and ran and hid in the can. And Alan, who had been mean and noisy from his first squawk on, began hopping one-footed amidst that froth of frogs. And you know how they have a way of climbing up the inside of your pants. All wet and with those scratchy little claws.

Alan slammed, banging whatever came to hand, tipped a couple cars from Jack's and screamed, I'm going to get Kevin Klimstra for this. Well, 43 years have passed, but those frogs have never quit rolling from the tongues of people around town. It's one of those stories you learn early, and carry with you, and measure the taste of life by till the day you die.

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Moving more strongly into the values section of what we do with the American Farm Project. Nancy and I, as he mentioned, are really into land, and I value it really highly. I was an environmental writer for a while. And it came to me that agricultural environment is really the most important piece of environment we as human beings have our hands on. And it's extremely important to deal with it, and care for it, and love it.

And sometimes, it's very hard for us not to think of land as just a commodity, as something worth $2,300 an acre or something like that. But it's also a lot more. Given piece of land out there is all of the life that's ever existed in that particular place and all the potential for future life. We go into it, and we come out of it, and all life does that.

And thinking along those lines, I wrote a poem once called Black Energy. Life is seething in this soil, which has been millions of years in the making. It has been forever in the making. A mingling of untold billions of bodies of plants and animals, grasses of this prairie, buffalo and antelope grazing down into roots and back again into the sun. Birds and insects, their wings still hum in this soil. And this warm drinks sunlight and rain and rises again and again into corn, and beans, and flesh, and bone. The quick bodies of animals and men risen from this black energy.

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The final piece I'm going to read to you deals with our future or what we call challenges in the American Farm Project. And one of our big challenges, I think, is to keep people out there on the land. And I know that in the National Farmers Union last year, the theme for their convention was saving the small family farm.

And I remember listening to a Minnesota Public Radio program in Minnesota about six months ago. And a man from Sperry Rand Univac had been going out and talking. I think he talked at Southwest State, where we're housed, where our offices are. And talked a little bit about what the farm of the future was going to be like.

And when I heard him talking about it, I didn't like it very well because there didn't seem much room for farmers there anymore. And so I wrote a poem to get that out of my system. Says, Sperry Rand sends out a man to sell its vision of the future. Farmer Brown says the man from Sperry Rand will have a machine the likes of which you've never dreamed but is being tested right now.

It'll do it all. You won't plant taters. You won't plant cotton. You won't plant corn and beans. You'll plant cookies. Everything you need to make cookies. And the cookie machine's got a brain and will roam the land, tilling the soil with microwaves and spitting intellectual capsules which will feed your soil everything it needs as it needs it.

And come cookie time, they'll all be wrapped in paper made from leaves and waste of plants. Come cookie time. I added a little trailer onto that because it didn't seem to me quite set enough, and it goes this way. Farmer Brown's but a metaphor, of course. A sort of scarecrow or full page ad for some brother to Sperry Rand. Farmer Brown's not needed in this plan. Thank you.

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