RealAudio 28.8

The U.S. was once a nation of farmers, but now we're a country full of people who's families once farmed, so the story of foreclosure, bankruptcy, and the letting go of a lifestyle is not uncommon. One South Dakota family experienced all of that a decade ago. Their story is still an open wound filled with anger, defeat, revenge, and hope.

BILL WAS BORN AND RAISED ON A FARM in southeastern South Dakota. For 19 years, his life was measured by the weather and the sky as he worked the soil raising corn, soybeans, and livestock. Today it doesn't matter how much rain falls or how dry the land is as Bill goes to work in Sioux Falls, 45 miles from his family farm. His memories of the farm and recollections of losing it are still painful - and shameful. That's why Bill doesn't want his name used to tell this story.

Farming was all he ever wanted, and as a young man with a wife and two small children, he lived his dream. He's a large man with a hard exterior, weather-worn and full of opinions. Inside, he's angry yet hopeful. And he's extremely conscious about keeping his emotions and anger in check.

The troubles began for Bill 12 years ago during the heart of the 1980s farm crisis. He calmly refers to it as a time when he made 1970s decisions and the rules changed; that's also when the anger began.

Bill: For example, in the purchase of land: say if you purchased a piece of land and made a 20 or 30 percent cash down payment and financed a certain level - just to make it easy say a $100,000 - and you financed $70,000 of a $100,000, by 1986 that same land was worth $45,000 - $50,000. Well, all of a sudden the equity was gone, number one, and you were behind the eight ball as far as the loan was more against the land then what it was worth.

Economic conditions reversed in the early 1980s when interest rates rose and export markets declined. The financial stress turned to crisis when declines in commodity prices, income, and land values made it difficult for farmers like Bill to meet loan payments.

To help troubled farmers, Congress created Chapter 12 bankruptcy. Bill was one of the first to file.

Bill: Part of it - I've thought about it at length a lot of times - and part of it was a power play. I felt the banks were making a power play on me and didn't want to negotiate. I decided, I've got options too and that I can maybe stop this process for a while and reassess what's going on. I guess that's a part of it too.

It's hard, even 10 years later, for him to describe what it was like to dig out of debt and how hard it was on his marriage. He says it was hell.

Bill: There's things that happened, things that we went through that are never going to change. I almost destroyed myself with alcohol trying to cope. There's a lot of things that ... it was a tough period of our life, real tough.

Bill and Bonnie now live in town, just three miles from their farm. On the wall hangs a picture of the farm they once called home. Bill keeps it because it shows him on the tractor feeding cattle and his son playing in the sand pile near the house; a lifestyle he still treasures.

For Bonnie, those years were years of anger.

Bonnie: I got the overflow. When something didn't go right, I would get the worst of the overflow, part of it. But I didn't have to be in it in a daily confrontation like he was. Since I don't have that background, it wasn't like tearing my heart out. I couldn't see why you would keep hitting your head against the wall. I didn't see the point, so the struggle wasn't as emotional for me. I couldn't offer that help to him because I didn't feel it ... I knew it was there, I couldn't fix it.

Bill: It cost us thousands and thousands of dollars. When I look at it now, it was worthless. I enriched a trustee, I enriched a lawyer. I could just as well have that money in my pocket today. It got me nowhere.

As a new farm crisis jeopardizes family farmers, and the future of the Chapter 12 bankruptcy provision is in doubt, Bill looks at the choices he made. He wouldn't do it again - that way. For him, the struggle to save the farm was more destructive than the emotional cost it took to walk away.