As U.S. Rep. Bruce Braley prepared to leave the Delhi farm home of Larry and Nancy Stover, Nancy (right) served him coffee for the road. Although the gesture was one of pure hospitality on the part of the Stovers, it pretty much guarantees a return visit by the Congressman, who will need to return the family's travel mug.

The meeting between Braley and about 30 dairy families, which took place in the Delhi farm home of Larry and Nancy Stover, was intended to be an opportunity for the Congressman to hear directly from those who are being impacted by federal policy.

“Rural America hasn’t shrunk much in size, but has shrunk a lot in influence,” Braley said to open to the discussion. “Iowa is going to lose another congressional seat in 2012. That means that we are going to lose 20 percent of our clout in Congress, and that is not an insignificant thing.”

Ben Blanchard, who owns a large dairy (by Iowa standards) with his mother and two brothers in Clinton County, presented Braley with financial statistics based on his own operation, which weren’t too different than the stories told by dairy farmers throughout the nation. In 2007, their farm was doing well financially, but began to see revenues deteriorate in 2008. By 2009, the farm was receiving some of the lowest prices for its milk that it had ever experienced.

“This is for our farm of 700 cows for a nine-month period [in each of those three years], and you can see the average monthly expenses and then I provided our average monthly break-even price,” Blanchard said. “So, when you compare that to the price that we are paid, you see if we made above or below the break-even point. In 2009, you can see that even though our break-even point was better than it was in 2008, the milk was significantly lower, which resulted in a $4.42 per 100-weight loss. That amounts to a monthly loss of $64,800 for our dairy farm. Looking at the nine-month period for this year-to-date, we’ve lost $582,000.”

Although many of Iowa’s dairy operations are smaller and operated by family only, the Blanchard farm, and other larger operations, has a significant outlay in employee costs.

“We pay in payroll $350,000 over nine months,” Blanchard said. “There are a lot of people in our community Charlotte and in Clinton County as a whole who depend on our dairy farm. … So, when we are hurting, the community is hurting.”

As Braley noted, the available workforce pool in rural Iowa is quite different today than it has been previously.

“The way I feel, and I know that others may not feel the same way, but there needs to be legislation to allow them to come over and not just on work permit or whatever for six months,” said Blanchard, who noted that his family employs more than 20 immigrant workers.

Legislation that would allow immigrants to come into the U.S. and work for extended periods of time needs to be developed, according to the farmers in attendance, because short-term work permits do not provide for consistency in training and maintaining a workforce. Otherwise the available workforce for the areas in which farms exist has aged, and the few younger workers have learned that they can make better paychecks for less manual labor by working in retail establishment such as fast food.

“This put the complicated issue of immigration right out on the table,” Braley said. “There simply are no easy solutions… it isn’t just in dairy, it is in a host of different businesses. And, unfortunately, because immigration is such a controversial topic, we don’t seem to be able to have a meaningful, rational discussion on how we solve these problems.”

Norm Voelker, a farmer from Ryan, said there also needs to be a federal change in how the E-Verify system punishes employers that are attempting to do the right thing by utilizing the system to verify employment status of people they hire.

“Make an incentive for the people who need immigrant workers — and we definitely need immigrant workers. I’ve changed my thoughts on that during the past five years,” he said.  “[Those who hire immigrant workers] need a way that they can go online and easily verify whether this person actually should be here or not.”

In addition to workforce demands, an immediate concern for dairy farmers is farm-retail price differences. In 2007, according to Blanchard’s figures, consumers were paying roughly $3.50 for a gallon of milk at the store while farmers were receiving $1.50 per gallon for their raw milk. In 2008, those figures held steady with the consumer price increasing slightly to $3.80 per gallon and raw milk prices also increasing slightly to $1.66 per gallon. In 2009, however, the prices went lopsided with farmers being paid 89 cents per gallon of raw milk while consumers paid $3.15 per gallon.

“We pride ourselves — we have high production levels — we feel we are a very productive dairy farm. But then, as you write these numbers out, it’s almost heart-breaking,” Blanchard said.

Holsteins on Larry and Nancy Stover's farm could be seen through the kitchen window as dairy farmers gathered inside to discuss low milk prices. The Stovers are the third generation of their family to dairy farm on this piece of land near Delhi.

Larry Stover, who hosted the meeting in his home, is a fourth generation dairyman who runs a much smaller operation than the Blanchard family. On a typical day, he milks 90 Holsteins on the same farm that his family has run for three of those four generations.

“I think probably every dairy farmer in the country has taken equity off the balance sheet in order to keep going, to pay the bills,” Stover said. “And, in some instances, they’ve had to borrow more money to pay the bills — probably in a lot of instances. Other than that, you just try to do the best you can. You don’t dare skimp on too many costs because your cows won’t be there when the price comes back.”

Dairy farmers have recently experienced small increases in their milk prices, although they continue to be paid well below production costs. An informal poll by The Iowa Independent of those attending the meeting with Braley showed an average payment of $11.16 per hundred weight. Most operations require at least $14 per hundred weight in order to break even.

Most farmers, as Stover explained, have borrowed excess money to continue their operations, with the hope that the small increases are an indication that prices will continue to rise. The reality is, however, that the markets are being propped by incentives through the U.S. Department of Agriculture that include large commodity buys and herd culling. As a result, banks that have offered additional loans to dairy farmers are beginning to fear for their investments. Some banks are requiring that dairy farmers, who often cut their corn for livestock food, harvest it by combine it instead so that the crop can more easily be sold if the loans go south.

“I would like to say that this is just supply — just an over-abundance of supply. But at the same time, you have to think that everybody has to feed their kids,” Blanchard said. “Dairy products are one of the most nutritious things that you can feed to your families. I understand that exports are down and that people are hurting all over the world. Between here and there, one thing that I feel is that somebody’s got to be making that money because people are still paying it. I don’t know if they have reasons behind it, but when a processor is making record profits and we’re hurting and struggling to get by every day, it makes you really think.”

More than anything else, the dairy farmers who have made it through this extremely rough patch want assurances that the market which governs their price will not continue to be as volatile.

“The price of milk is starting to come up a little bit and, on the futures, it looks somewhat promising compared to where we’ve been,” said Doug Fairbanks, who farms near Anamosa. “A lot of us are established dairy farmers, so we’ve lived off some of our equity, and we’ve burnt that equity this summer. Those resources are tapped. Our lines of credit are full. If this corrects itself for six months or a year and then it happens again… it will devastate the dairy industry. … Just because you are still in business doesn’t mean that you’ve come out of this OK.”

Braley said that he received a great deal of information that will help him as he advocates for rural America in Washington, D.C.

“I’m a firm believer in the safety-net approach to agricultural commodities,” Braley told The Iowa Independent after the meeting. “When the bottom drops out of the marketplace, there have to be protections in place to continue our safe food supply. … I think most of the people here are interested in an opportunity to continue to do what they love and know that the federal government is not going to promote policies that will drive them out of business. And, at that same time, to have a safety net in place if they are at risk of losing their entire operation.”

In addition, Braley said that it is time for the government to start breaking up monopolies in the dairy industry and provide stricter oversight to ensure that the market is not being manipulated.

“We have deregulated so much that we have abdicated our oversight responsibility in many of these federal agencies, and we need to restore the public confidence that somebody is keeping an eye on speculators whose profit motivation is bad overall for the American economy,” he said.

When asked to picture farm life, many people invision idyllic settings like the ones painted by reknown Iowa artist Grant Wood. The true realities of farm life, however, are often isolation, depression and hopelessness.

The Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network, authorized (but not funded) by the 2008 farm bill, would create a national crisis hotline for rural workers and also mandates additional behavioral health services in geographically rural regions. While some states have hotlines and some capacity to provide behavioral health services designed for agricultural workers, others have nothing in place.

Statistics show that the presence of such services can reduce rural violence and suicides, which are currently on the rise.

“How many deaths will it take?” asked Mike Rosmann, executive director of AgriWellness, an Iowa-based nonprofit that promotes accessible behavioral health services for underserved rural populations. “[This] leaves farm people with fewer options to deal with mounting stress. It is especially true for livestock and dairy producers, although the picture is much bigger than just those industries because grain prices are declining and costs of production are rising above the value of products in the marketplace.”

U.S. Sens. Tom Harkin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa pushed for the creation of the stress assistance network as a part of the farm bill. Harkin, a Democrat who chairs the Senate Agricultural Committee, had requested $5 million be provided to the program during appropriations debate. Grassley, a Republican, and Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson of South Dakota also argued for “appropriating the maximum amount possible” in a letter sent to the agriculture appropriations subcommittee in May.

“Farming is one of the most stressful and dangerous occupations in the United States,” Grassley said in December 2007, while urging members of his own political party to stop their attempts to block inclusion of the network in the farm bill. “There are environmental, cultural and economic factors that put farmers and ranchers at a higher risk for mental health problems. Stress is agriculture contributes to rates of depression and suicide that are double the national average. This is true even in good times for farmers.”

Indeed, as senators who opposed creation of the network were quick to point out, the agriculture community at the time of the farm bill debate was flourishing. That is unfortunately not the case today as farmers brace against overall economic decline, suffer massive product price reductions and battle against misinformation about disease. Under these circumstances, and without a safety net, health care professionals are worried that the nation will once again witness breakdowns within agricultural communities similar to those seen during the 1980s farm crisis.

“The consequence of all of this is that there will be mounting frustration,” Rosmann said. “There is also a greater likelihood that more and more people will be frustrated to the point that they are going to do something because they feel like government isn’t listening. We have to have parity of behavioral health care for rural and urban people.”

The appropriations bills will now be taken into a conference committee where the differences between them will be reconciled. During the appropriations conference process, according to a spokeswoman in Grassley’s office, congressional rules do not permit funding for an item that was not previously contained in either the House or Senate versions of the bill. If the conference committee did attempt to include the funding, any member could object — and, given the debate during this item’s authorization in the farm bill, some lawmaker probably would.

“I worked very hard to put the Farm Stress Assistance Network in the farm bill,” Harkin said during a conference call Thursday morning with reporters. “It was attacked … during the farm bill debate, but we persisted and got it in. I just haven’t been able to get funding for it yet. The Republicans would not sign off on my efforts on this.”

There is also some speculation that funding could be included in overall health care reform, but such inclusion would likely be left to a newly created health care committee through recommendations from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

In that type of scenario, the U.S. Department of Agriculture would have much less influence in terms of ensuring urban-rural parity. Further, if health care reform does not include a public option and/or if preventive behavioral health services like the stress assistance network aren’t considered essential services, already cash-strapped rural families would be more likely to have to pay additional premiums to access insurance coverage for such services.

“I’m disappointed that the agriculture appropriations committee failed to see the positive benefits of this program,” Grassley said in a statement to The Iowa Independent. “Farmers continue to see drastic market swings and difficult weather patterns. The assistance of the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network would be a tremendous help to many feeling the impact of problems out of their control.”

The fiscal 2010 Agriculture, Rural Development and FDA Appropriations approved by the Senate includes nearly $101 billion in mandatory spending, an increase of roughly $13 billion from what was enacted in 2009, and just over $24 billion in discretionary spending, an increase of roughly $2.5 billion from 2009. The House bill calls for nearly $23 billion in spending, an increase of roughly $2.3 billion from 2009. The appropriations bill funds nutritional programs, food and drug safety initiatives, international food aid, USDA research and rural development programs.

Reitsma wrote two notes before shooting himself. One was to his family. The other was a four-word note to the bank’s local branch manager: “Welcome to the kill.”

When asked to picture farm life, many people envision idyllic settings similar to this fall plow scene painted by renowned Iowa artist Grant Wood. While such images are often accurate, they also obscure the real stresses that make up the daily lives of rural residents. (Photo courtesy Deere Art Collection)

Stories like Reitsma’s are becoming more frequent in states like California, Maine and Colorado. Experts say Midwestern states like Iowa are better prepared to deal with rural mental health problems, but the risks are still high.

“To farmers there is a real kinship with the land and livestock,” explained Dr. Mike Rosmann, executive director of AgriWellness. “Ownership of a family farm — sometimes a farm that has been in the family for generations — is the triumphant result of a multitude of struggles. Losing the farm or the livestock is viewed as an ultimate loss, one that brings shame to the generation that has let down its forebearers and has dashed the hopes of successors.”

The psychological attachment farm families feel for their land and livestock is one of the lessons of the 1980s farm crisis — a time when farmer suicides and rural violence made front page news across the nation. Back then, Iowa and Nebraska, two states severely impacted by the farm crisis, developed crisis hotlines designed specifically to serve the needs of agricultural workers. Today, in the wake of natural disasters and in the midst of economic uncertainty, the hotlines are experiencing a spike in activity, likely helping to prevent more tragedies.

The Sowing the Seeds of Hope program provides behavioral health services to uninsured, underinsured and other at-risk farm and ranch families and ag workers in seven states. Despite droughts, floods and ongoing economic challenges to family-sized farm operations, the suicide rate has not increased in states that have these services.

AgriWellness and Iowa State University Extension jointly sponsor the Iowa-based Sowing the Seeds of Hope hotline, which serves rural people in seven Midwestern states. It is the nation’s largest crisis help line for agricultural workers, and the calls are coming more often than they did even a year ago.

Though many of the calls the hotline has received from Iowa have been related to the impact of last year’s floods, Rosmann noted that, “More recently, we have seen an uptick in calls that are related to market prices for swine and dairy.”

“In addition to the 20-percent increase in calls [when comparing the first four months of 2008 with the first four months of 2009], the content of the calls is changing,” Rosmann said. “The callers are reporting much more severe economic turmoil, more mental health symptoms and significant increases in mental stress.”

In times of inclement weather — for instance, severe storms, floods or droughts — the hotlines experience increased activity. The callers in these situations, according to Rosmann, are distraught but do not have the “intensity” of the callers during tough economic times.

“You probably aren’t seeing as many [suicides] in the states, like Iowa, where we have hotlines,” he said. “The hotlines have the effect of reducing the isolation and they create a vehicle people can use to contact someone. We don’t have quite as many suicides in any of the states where we have the hotlines and have other additional support services. [We have heard] that there were two suicides reported out of North Carolina, where there is no hotline. The same is true of California — there is no hotline there — or in Colorado.”

The statistical evidence of suicide reduction creates a good argument, he said, for why Congress should approve funding for the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network that was authorized as part of the 2008 farm bill. The network creates a national crisis hotline for rural workers and also mandates additional behavioral health services in geographically rural regions.

There is insufficient data that examines suicide by occupational group, but several studies have demonostrated that suicide by farmers differs somewhat from suicide patterns by urban residents. The table above illustrates how farmers, if they decide to take their own lives, often align themselves with the cycles of farming. (Source: AgriWellness)

Federal officials, including U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, have signaled their awareness of the ongoing problem, but additional solutions may be hard to come by. “I’ve talked to farmers whose loved ones have committed suicide over this. I do understand,” Vilsack said during a rural community forum this week in Wisconsin.

Despite Vilsack’s recognition of what’s happening in rural communities, he said that he does not see many opportunities for additional federal intervention to turn things around. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which recently approved $760 million in new farm loans, is considering restructuring loans and providing temporarily higher support payments, but ongoing discussions in the halls of Washington, D.C., will provide little comfort for agricultural families who field daily calls from creditors. Even if the idea is implemented, it is unlikely to be enough on its own.

Iowa has not yet seen the brunt of the burgeoning mental health crisis, largely because it remains ahead of the curve on rural mental health issues. The Hawkeye State not only provides an outlet for stress with its hotline, but it also offers follow-up care to agricultural workers who need it. The Iowa hotline has about 37 or 38 providers who have been contracted to give follow-up support to callers, Rosmann said. That means that Iowa residents need only travel 30 to 40 miles to access additional services.

“For many people that sort of distance is actually preferable because some don’t want to see a provider in their own town,” he said. “This usually has nothing to do with quality of care at local mental health centers, but has to do with the perceptions of what others might say if a family is seen going to the local facility or provider. So there is a perception of stigma attached to accessing behavioral health services, but that varies from person-to-person.”

In other states, rural residents tend to have more difficulty accessing mental health care.

“It’s a very complex picture,” Rosmann warned before beginning to explain the problems surrounding behavioral health services in rural America. “We have seen in Iowa the loss of psychiatrists and psychologists in rural areas. There just aren’t enough. But, we are better off than some other states. South Dakota is just terrible, and in Montana there just aren’t any psychologists and psychiatrists in rural areas. Residents there might have to travel 150 or more miles to get a court-ordered neuro-psychological evaluation because of lack of access.

“The numbers of appropriately-trained providers of psychology, psychiatry and substance abuse counseling in rural areas is half that of the same professionals in urban areas — and it is worsening.”

Further complicating the access issue for rural Americans is that there are very few medical educational tracks currently available that train health care professionals about the specific concerns that are often seen in more rural settings. And, outside of the rudimentary knowledge provided within those few agricultural medicine courses, there is no national curriculum in place for behavioral health professionals who intend to service rural areas.

“You simply can’t provide the information these professionals will need during a two-hour lecture,” Rosmann said. “We need a whole textbook and curriculum on agricultural behavioral health, and that is one of the things that we are now undertaking at AgriWellness.”

The organization plans to offer a six-hour course to professionals as a part of its upcoming biennial convention next month in South Dakota. Rosmann said that while recent discussions regarding mental health parity in conjunction with national discussions of health care reform are “a noble goal,” they don’t necessarily translate to actual access in rural areas.

“Having it on the books doesn’t mean that it is going to be adequately implemented,” he said. “I don’t know if it is a goal we are going to be able to achieve easily because parity requires the distribution of professional providers in ways that are quite different then where we are at currently. So, we are going to have to somehow get providers into the rural areas, and we’re going to have to change the reimbursement structure. Both of those are hard to change, but they are proper goals in my opinion.”

“Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, discussed the issue at an AARP forum in Sioux City,” reports The Des Moines Register. “Huckabee proposed giving retirees a one-time Social Security payout.”

It’s a bold headline to be sure but we are still waiting to see the fine print. And Iowans had better start asking for it.

Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, is developing into something of the chattering class’s pick as heir to the “compassionate conservative” mantle. He’s drawing more attention from political reporters, and with a solid second-place finish in the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames in August and recent surging poll numbers in the Hawkeye State, Huckabee could be the Republican story in Iowa on Jan. 3.

But what do we really know about the substance of Mike Huckabee?

With a few exceptions — notably a detailed parsing of his policies and actual views by Iowa Independent contributor and American Prospect senior editor Garance Franke-Ruta – most media pieces on Huckabee have been of the stranger-in-a-strange-land variety as secular-footed writers have focused almost exclusively on his Christian faith, a just-folks political style and of course that that remarkable weight loss of more than 100 pounds. We know this Baptist minister can preach and play guitar. But how in the world will this Social Security payout plan work? Will somebody please get past the syrup and fork around in the pancakes.

At recent events in Iowa and during debates one of Huckabee’s most striking, even startling, comments has been this vague notion of the one-time Social Security payout. He made similar comments in a conference call with bloggers as well.

Huckabee’s campaign did not return Iowa Independent’s calls seeking more details on the plan, and a policy paper is either not available or not conveniently found in his promitional materials.

Others need to ask him for details, too. Mainstream media reporters and official Washington seem uninterested in the substance of his Social Security buyout idea. I contacted two Washington think tanks well versed in Social Security politics and neither was familiar with Huckabee’s plan. Of course, if Huckabee’s own buyout scheme has not moved past the scribbled-cocktail-napkin stage, no deeper analysis is possible.

But reasonable questions abound: How wealthy do you have to be to get the buyout? How will the amount of the buyout be determined? Based on your contributions to date? On your age? Will the buyout be subject to state and federal taxes? If so, at what level? And how would the plan affect the overall system which many Republicans (and a few Democrats) say will not be able to support all the Baby Boomers now moving into senior citizenship?

These are all questions Huckabee should answer, particularly in Iowa, a state with a graying population where Social Security isn’t just a theory, but a matter of the check’s in the mail (or not).

Chuck Hurley, a former state legislator and a leader among the state's religious conservatives, will head Brownback's "Faith and Family" committee. Hurley heads the conservative Iowa Family Policy Center, but he stressed that role is separate from his efforts for Brownback, with whom he has ties that date back to college days in Kansas.

A statement from the Brownback campaign: 

With the help of my Iowa Faith and Family Committee and the support of like-minded citizens across America, as president I will protect marriage and the family, preserve the role of faith in the public square, promote a culture that respects human life and appoint the Supreme Court Justice who will overturn Roe v. Wade.” (emphasis added)

So much for the lack of litmus tests…

The full list of supporters is below the fold. Readers are encouraged to give information in the comments section about anyone they are familiar with on the list (and not gossip, people, but analysis of their political or religious influence in the state).

Chairman:
Chuck Hurley, Des Moines

Members:
Rosemary Wilson, Ames
George & Carol Remer, Battle Creek
Brian Rosener, Bronson
Pat Anderson, Cedar Falls
Charles Daugherty, Cedar Rapids
Patricia Daugherty, Cedar Rapids
Theresa, Jerry, Josiah & Joel Lydon, Cedar Rapids
Judith Colgnhoun, Cedar Rapids
Scott Gilbert, Cedar Rapids
Dean Rothchild, Cedar Rapids
Bob & Patti, Kyle & Kelli Klaus, Cedar Rapids
Michael & Jeannette Frey, Cedar Rapids
Wendy Wilcox, Cedar Rapids
Jason Besler, Cedar Rapids
Dana Philips, Central City
Les & Liz Schofield, Clinton
Joe Ranney, Council Bluffs
Janice Sanderland, Davenport
Zac & Laura Stollenberg, Davenport
Kent & Karen Baxter, Davenport
Marilyn Anderson, Dayton
Nick Bal, Des Moines
Larry & Sara Morris, Des Moines
David Rubin, Des Moines
Shane Vanderhart, Des Moines
Nancy Ellinger, DeWitt
Brett Barker, Iowa City
Jeanne Jennings, Johnston
Randy Goodson, Marion
Garth Betry, Marion
Mark & Marie Scherbaum, Marion
Brandon Scherbaum, Marion
Sandra Goodson, Marion
Ric Lumbard, Marion
Jack McCullough, Monroe
Amy Russell, Mt. Vernon
Brad Russell, Mt. Vernon
Mark & Kay Flanders, Muscatine
Hannah Flanders, Muscatine
Anna Anderson, Muscatine
Brad & Danielle Schmidt, Muscatine
Joe & Joan Flanders, Muscatine
John Anderson, Muscatine
Bill Tvedt, Oskaloosa
Robin Chase, Palo
JoHann Twedt, Roland
Kateri Sevde, Roland
Donna Uhl, Sioux City
Dianne Winkel, Sioux City
Katherine Anfinson, Sioux City
Regina Ratina, Sioux City
Marge Stanek, Sioux City
Larry Myers, Toddville
Mark Bakker, Urbandale
Peter & Becky Johnston, Urbandale
Jordan Anderson, Washington
Gladys Heasley, Waterloo
Angela Wruche, Waterloo
Bob Deever, West Des Moines