Farm crisis shapes Iowa producers who grew up in the 1980s

For about four years, Sean Dengler drove some 90 minutes each way from his home in Urbandale to his family’s farm in Tama to pursue his love of farming.

He would help out on his multigenerational farm with his father and grandparents when he could. But it wasn’t until he was out of college and his father was getting older that he decided to jump into agriculture and join his family tradition of farming corn and soybeans in January 2021.

Dengler split the farming work with his father for the first few years, but went into the industry on his own shortly after.

“I really enjoyed it if you took the money part out of it,” Dengler said. “I would do it every day.”

But between the high expenses of running a farm, the consolidation of Iowa farms and the “get big or get out mentality,” Dengler decided to leave his family farm in 2024, just four years after starting — marking an end to his family’s century-old farm presence in Iowa.

“It was the hardest decision I’ve ever made,” said Dengler, who was the fifth generation of Denglers to work on the Tama farm. He now works as a clerk at the Iowa Capitol and does some freelance writing. The most difficult part about leaving the farm was having the conversation with his parents.

“Just calling my parents and having that conversation with them and coming to terms with that was really hard because I could sense it wasn't a good idea to keep going, but I enjoyed it,” he said. “It's something I loved. I got to be my own and it's hard to give that up.”

Dengler, 33, isn’t the only Iowa farmer who has left the industry due to the pressure to consolidate as smaller farms closed and larger farms continued to grow. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s census data, Iowa has lost nearly 10,000 farms, marking a 10.1 percent decrease, down to 86,911 farms in 2022, from 96,705 in 1997.

Smaller family farms began going out of business in the 1980s at a faster rate when farmers nationally were facing high interest rates, a surplus of produce and not enough demand — leading to lower commodity prices, declining exports and rising farm debts. The farm crisis of the 80s led to wide-scale farm bankruptcies, the collapse of lenders and failures of rural business.

That came as the size of large commercial farms in Iowa has doubled in recent years, while smaller farms — typically family farms — decreased by 27 percent, according to research conducted by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach.

Living through the farm crisis has shaped how farmers approach agriculture nearly 45 years later.

A risky business

Like Dengler, Wendy Johnson, who owns and operates Joia Food & Fiber Farms in Floyd County, grew up in agriculture.

Although she was only 5 by the time 1980 came around, Johnson, 50, remembers how the farm crisis affected her parents’ Floyd County operation throughout the decade, particularly with how hard her father had to work to keep their farm afloat.

“I graduated from high school in 1993, so basically I was 5 years old to my teenage years through the 1980s. I never saw my dad,” she said. “He was always working.”

With her father’s long hours, Johnson said it made her question if she wanted a similar career.

“When you're a young person in school and one of your parents isn't there, it makes you wonder about being a farmer, like, ‘Do I want to be that person where I’m always gone, just always working so hard to stay afloat?’” Johnson asked.

And initially, she didn’t think that career path was right for her.

After she graduated from college in the Twin Cities in 1999, Johnson moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in fashion. But when her grandmother died in 2009, she took the leap to move back to Iowa and kick start her career in the agriculture sector.

But even after she moved back to Iowa, what she saw her father go through in the 80s has stuck with her decades later.

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Because she lived through the farm crisis during her formative years, one of the biggest ways the era shaped her own approach to farming is by being adverse to risk.

“I think the 80s really shaped me in a way to be very cautious in regard to finances and money in agriculture,” she said.

Johnson, who practices regenerative agriculture and raises livestock on her rural Charles City farm, said witnessing the pressures of the 80s made her a more conservative farmer in her decision-making, since “agriculture is risky to begin with.”

“Even with the safety nets and the farm programs, it's still a risky business because we don't control the weather and that is the majority of what controls what we do,” she said.

To help mitigate the risks, Johnson takes out only minimal debt.

“I work with what I have,” she said. “I try to add value to the to the farmland that we do own versus borrowing a bunch of money to buy more farmland or bigger equipment. It makes me very nervous to get into debt because you can't control what interest rates are going to do.”

‘Too many farmers don’t think like a businessperson’

Steve Robisky, who farms near Cedar Falls, was also hesitant to jump into the world of farming after watching the hardships his father went through during the 80s.

“I remember my dad at age 64 being forced into retirement and crying like a baby at a farm sale,” said Robisky, who grew up on a farm in Illinois before moving to Iowa.

About the same time his father was forced into retirement, Robisky was thinking about his own career. Instead of going into farming, he went to college and started a 35-year career working for John Deere.

But when he was about 38, he purchased his first piece of land instead of renting it, like his father had done years earlier.

“I bought mine all the old-fashioned way with very little down,” he said. “I signed a note, and scrimped and saved and dug into my pockets and made payments,” he said.

Robisky, 61, said he believes his parents struggled during the farm crisis because they didn’t own enough of their land. “It was too reliant on rented land, and I was never going to let some absentee landowner control my destiny,” he said.

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Aside from owning his own land, Robisky said that another way the 80s farm crisis shaped his work in agriculture is not only to approach the work as a farmer and conservationists, but also as a businessperson.

“I always saw people in the 80s say ‘We're going to grow corn and soybeans until we're just broke because it's what we do’ and I think that's a bad, bad strategy,” he said. “Great businesses entities, and even sports teams, have an ability to evaluate who they are (and) what their strengths are.”

Robisky — who owns about 700 acres in Eastern Iowa but hopes to expand to about 1,000 acres in the coming years — said he performs a “SWOT analysis” on his own farm, which helps decipher the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats he is facing.

“I learned something in the 80s, and that is that you need to be a businessperson. There's no difference between running an ag operation — whether it’s with mama cows, confinement hogs, a broiler house full of chickens or corn and soybeans — it's a business, just like owning a plumbing operation in town. Too many farmers don’t think like a businessperson.”

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Robisky said that farmers should take heed of the 80s farm crisis in making decisions, saying that the “brightest people I know study history.”

“There's not many of us out there that still remember the 80s. Some guy farming at 48-years-old today doesn't really remember, but might remember his grandpa talking about it. But when you forget about history, and it's easy to do because it's out of mind, right?” Robisky said. “I'm not sure that the influence of the 80s is driving many decisions today.”

Olivia Cohen covers energy and environment for The Gazette and is a corps member with Report for America, a national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues.

Comments: olivia.cohen@thegazette.com