Persistent Progressives: The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union

Persistent Progressives

Persistent Progressives

The Rocky Mountain Farmers Union

John F. Freeman

University Press of Colorado

Boulder

© 2016 by University Press of Colorado

Published by University Press of Colorado

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Printed in the United States of America

The University Press of Colorado is a proud member of Association of American University Presses.

The University Press of Colorado is a cooperative publishing enterprise supported, in part, by Adams State University, Colorado State University, Fort Lewis College, Metropolitan State University of Denver, Regis University, University of Colorado, University of Northern Colorado, Utah State University, and Western State Colorado University.

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ISBN: 978-1-60732-432-4 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-60732-433-1 (ebook)

The University Press of Colorado gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union toward the publication of this book.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Freeman, John F. (John Francis), 1940– Title: Persistent progressives : the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union / John F. Freeman. Description: Boulder : University Press of Colorado, 2015. Identifiers: LCCN 2015025345| ISBN 9781607324324 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781607324331 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Rocky Mountain Farmers Union—History. | Agriculture, Cooperative—Rocky Mountains Region—History. | Farmers—Services for—Rocky Mountains Region—History. | Farmers—Rocky Mountains Region—Economic conditions. | Family farms—Rocky Mountains Region—History. | Farmers—Political activity—Rocky Mountains Region—History. | Agriculture and politics—Rocky Mountains Region—History. | Progressivism (United States politics)—History. | BISAC: HISTORY / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY). | TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Agriculture / General. Classification: LCC HD1485.R62 F73 2015 | DDC 334/.6830978—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015025345

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Cover photograph: Harvesting organic seed garlic, Avondale, Colorado, courtesy, Dan Hobbs.

My reader may wish to know what constitutes a good farmer. I think that the requirements of a good farmer are at least four:

The ability to make a full and comfortable living from the land;

to rear a family carefully and well;

to be of good service to the community;

to leave the farm more productive than it was when he took it.

Liberty Hyde Bailey, 1911

Contents

Map of Colorado

Preface

Acknowledgments

1. The Setting: Ideological and Physical

2. Getting Started: Local Roots

3. Building the Organization

4. Jim Patton’s Legacy

5. Forging Alliances

6. New Generation Cooperatives

7. Farming and Urban Life

Epilogue: Farmers and Foodies

Bibliography

Index

Courtesy, Ronald K. Hansen.

Preface

The present-day traveler on Interstate 25 from Wellington north of Fort Collins to Castle Rock south of Denver may catch glimpses of an occasional wheat field or cornfield but would see none of the market farms that once filled the valleys of the South Platte River and its tributaries flowing out of the Front Range. During the early 1900s, agriculture ranked first among sectors that made up Colorado’s economy. Today, agriculture accounts for less than 1 percent of Colorado’s gross state product, with livestock and livestock-related crops making up three-fourths of that 1 percent. Hidden by these statistics, however, is a story that features a little-known association of agriculturists committed to the well-being of family farmers and, through various forms of cooperatives and cooperation, poised to lead a renaissance of sustainable agriculture in the Rocky Mountain region.

As someone old enough to recall the cherry orchards west of Loveland and with a lifelong, if somewhat sentimental, fascination with farming combined with an interest in rural communities that is both historical and participatory, I found myself one day in the agricultural archives at Colorado State University in Fort Collins searching for either an individual or an organization that could serve as a topic for a history that encompassed my interests. To my pleasant surprise, the archives had recently received the records of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union (RMFU) and, what’s more, they had been well catalogued.

Little has been written about the history of agriculture in the region since Alvin T. Steinel, an extension specialist, wrote a History of Agriculture in Colorado (1926) to commemorate the state’s fiftieth anniversary. Robert G. Dunbar, while a history professor at Colorado State, contributed a fine essay on Colorado agriculture to Leroy Hafen’s Colorado and Its People (1948). Longtime Colorado Union Farmer editor George L. Bickel wrote an idealized history of the RMFU (1978); and Charles Henry Livermore prepared a first-rate dissertation (1976) on James G. Patton, preeminent leader of the National Farmers Union, that included discussion of his formative years in Colorado. The present work takes a holistic view of the RMFU, focusing on agriculture and rural life within the context of ever-increasing urbanization.

As an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt, I have found it heartening to follow the successive stages of progressivism exhibited by leaders of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. Starting as a populist protest movement against land speculators, wholesalers, and monopolists—in sum, the vices of modernization—it has become, not unselfishly, an advocate for sustainable agriculture and renewable energy, all the while not neglecting its founders’ ideological commitment to economic and social equity for all.

The religious and political eccentrics who started the farmers union in Colorado believed that family farmers, industrial workers, and urban laborers felt dispossessed; that was at the time when the US Census Bureau first counted more Coloradoans living in urban than in rural areas (chapter 1). An ideology that favored direct democracy, combined with the reality of vast geographic distances and the state’s diverse topography, constrained the farmers union to begin as a confederation of union locals, each serving social as well as economic functions. The statewide organization sought to provide supportive services such as fire insurance, assistance with organizing cooperatives, and political advocacy on behalf of members (chapter 2).

Without question, Jim Patton was the preeminent farmers union leader, viewed as hero and mentor by his successors at both the state and the national level. As president of the Colorado Farmers Union and later as president of the National Farmers Union, he put the entire organization on solid financial footing, based on fees for providing insurance services to members, and he aligned the organization’s platform with the cause of social democracy. Imbued with utopian ideology, he envisioned the farmers union as providing economic security for its members through cooperative enterprises. As an organizer and a pragmatist and in view of agriculture’s shrinking share of the nation’s wealth, he saw that the vitality, indeed, the very survival of the family farm depended first and foremost on the understanding and support of consumers—that is, the broader electorate (chapter 3). Patton attracted to the Colorado Farmers Union two experienced farmers union operatives, Harvey Solberg and C. E. Huff, to take on the tasks of increasing membership, strengthening member services, and further securing financial stability for the organization. Their most ambitious business enterprise, the Farmers Union Marketing Association, meant to give members greater control over the marketing and processing of their raw products, thus a greater share of the food dollar. The fact that all those ventures—most notably, a large grain elevator and feed mill facility, a fruit and vegetable cannery, and a flour mill—eventually failed should not detract from their noble intent, the potential value of their efforts, and the lessons to be learned (chapter 4).

After a difficult interregnum, the Colorado Farmers Union, which by then had expanded to include New Mexico and Wyoming, took the name Rocky Mountain Farmers Union and elected John Stencel, its young education director, president. Stencel represented a new, more pragmatic generation of agricultural leaders. A consummate agricultural politician, Stencel valiantly sought to revitalize county chapters, union locals having withered; and he deftly led the organization during a radical farmers’ revolt by supporting the radicals’ goals but not their methods. In marshalling the electorate against non-farm corporate ownership of agricultural lands, Stencel built alliances with the religious denominations serving rural communities. Likewise, against the threat of unfettered development along the Front Range and around mountain communities, he developed alliances with conservation groups (chapter 5).

Following Stencel as president, Dave Carter sought to demonstrate that the organization’s mission, as well as its economic and social goals, were more pertinent than ever given the continuing struggles of family farmers, the lack of universal access to healthful foods, and the pressing need to protect soil fertility. In his view, increasing consumer demand for locally grown foods provided the key to the survival of family farming. Carter took a special interest in organic farming. To assist RMFU members in the San Luis Valley who farmed organically out of financial necessity, Carter and the RMFU invested substantial effort in helping to establish Ranchers’ Choice as a so-called new generation farmers’ cooperative, processing and marketing lean, organically grown kosher beef. Similarly, the RMFU helped create the Mountain View Harvest Cooperative to enable wheat farmers on the eastern High Plains to partake of the profits of post-harvest processing by purchasing a commercial bakery, which grew rapidly into a nationwide supplier of par-baked breads. Under Carter’s leadership, the RMFU attracted the Cooperative Development Center, funded by the US Department of Agriculture, to extend the cooperative model to the revitalization of rural communities, to help with the revival of low-income urban neighborhoods, and—perhaps most important—to assist a new generation of agricultural activists, regardless of whether they were farmers union members, in organizing themselves for economic success (chapter 6).

While the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union as parent organization has continued its lobbying activities in favor of progressive legislation, the Cooperative Development Center has launched two new initiatives: the first to support efforts to grow food locally to augment the income of diversified farmers and the second to support renewable energy projects that provide supplemental income to commodity producers. By connecting to the local foods movement, the RMFU has positioned itself as the leading farm organization advocating for sustainable agriculture, bringing producers and consumers closer together, and, in the process, helping to incorporate agriculture into the urban landscape. By all accounts, the survival of family farming, and that of the RMFU itself, depends upon mid-size commodity producers diversifying their operations and shifting to more sustainable agricultural techniques and on small to mid-size vegetable and fruit growers, as well as specialty livestock and poultry producers, to meet the burgeoning consumer demand for safe, healthful foods (chapter 7).

At the outset of our story, a word about the term family farm: almost everyone favors it, laments its decline, and admits that the times have passed it by. But as we shall discern, aspiring young farmers and associates of the RMFU Cooperative Development Center will tell you that sounding the death knell is premature. For them, a family farm or ranch might be just that, or it might be a farm corporation in which the majority of stockholders belong to one family and at least one of them is managing the farm, or it might also be a group of unrelated individuals operating a small to mid-size farm. The National Farmers Union (NFU) has defined the term only generally: A ‘family farm’ is an agricultural production unit using land and other capital investments, operated by one or more farm operator families who reside on the farm, provide the management, take the economic risk, and do work (peak season excepted) required to operate the unit (NFU National Rural Policy, art.1-a). The Census Bureau and the US Department of Agriculture have sought objectivity by distinguishing farms according to physical size, gross farm sales, and gross cash farm income. But such data are useful only when considered in context. A 12,000-acre wheat farm operated by a single family on the eastern High Plains may provide more or less income than a 25-acre diversified farm in Boulder County or a livestock operation dependent upon public lands on the Western Slope. Some even use the term family farm to describe a lifestyle. For our purposes, family farm is used interchangeably with terms such as small farm, small-scale farm, even mid-size farm. It is becoming more and more widely recognized that the well-managed family farm serves as the model for sustainable agriculture.

We urbanites who view ourselves as food connoisseurs, foodies for short, much prefer organically to conventionally grown products and harbor a fundamental misperception that has affected public debate and could impede the very transformation of farming we all hope for. We equate organic farming with sustainable agriculture. In fact, the two are not interchangeable. To be called organic, a farm must be certified according to regulations approved by the US Department of Agriculture that are based on criteria set forth in federal legislation. Sustainable agriculture describes an approach that, though measurable, carries no certifiable label; like the family farm, it, too, can be described as a lifestyle. Organic farming can be a form of sustainable agriculture, but not all sustainable agriculture is organic. Some large industrial farms grow produce organically but not in a sustainable way; many small farms operate so as to sustain soil fertility but are not certified as organic.

At one time, all farming was organic. As the nation’s population grew and the world wars caused an ever-greater demand for foods, policy makers enacted laws that encouraged farmers to produce more while keeping prices low for consumers. It was not until the postwar years that the public began to understand the consequences of ensuring maximum yields over sustaining the elements—soil, air, water—that made those yields possible. Much to its credit, RMFU leadership intuited that the economic and social well-being of its members, small to mid-size farmers, depended upon sustainable farming. Less is generally more sustainable than more, which strongly suggests that family farmers indeed are the best stewards of the soil and thus the most cost-efficient producers of the nation’s food over the long term.

Acknowledgments

As the notes indicate, my research was based primarily on archival materials at Colorado State University. Thus I am most grateful for the assistance of Linda Meyer, archivist, and Victoria Lopez-Terrill, library technician. I also wish to recognize Dee M. Salo, interlibrary loan librarian at the University of Wyoming.

Current and past leaders of the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union graciously responded to my many inquiries and provided useful insights. I especially want to thank former presidents John Stencel and Dave Carter, Cooperative Development Center director Bill Stevenson, and former director Robert Mailander. Many thanks, too, to Chairwoman Jan Kochis and Virgil Kochis, President Kent Peppler, Executive Director Ben Rainbolt Jr., legal counsel Chuck Holum, Communications Director Bob Kjelland, and Scott Zimmerman in Wyoming. Special thanks to members of the liberal-artsy younger generation of farmers and part-time RMFU staff members Dan Hobbs, Eric Kornacki, and Harrison Topp who, in my judgment, best represent the future of the farmers union.

I also wish to thank Carolyn and the late Don Fehringer, their daughter, LuAnne, son, Randy, his wife, Marijayne, and Randy and Marijayne’s son, Sean, for their willingness to share memories. Members of the Fehringer family of Peetz have been active in the farmers union virtually since its beginning. County officers Jerry Hergenreder and David Lynch offered insightful commentary on the current state of the farmers union, as did Dawn Thilmany McFadden of Colorado State University, Jennifer Kemp of Boulder County Parks and Open Space, and Lee Swenson, former National Farmers Union president and former Rocky Mountain Farmers Union executive vice president.

For critically reading the manuscript, I am deeply indebted to my former community college colleague David A. Kathka, my philanthropic mentor, Reverend William E. Crews, Bill Stevenson at the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union, and the anonymous reviewers for the University Press of Colorado. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank all the staff members at the press for their genuine interest in the manuscript and their always friendly assistance. It is a rare pleasure to be so well taken care of by a publisher.

Finally, on a more personal note, in the course of my research I have become convinced that the mission and goals of the RMFU remain at least as relevant to farmers, ranchers, and consumers today as they were over 100 years ago. Thus in pointing out some of the organization’s failings and weaknesses, my hope is that this book will serve as a useful addition to debates on safe, healthful food and to the efforts to ensure a future for small to mid-size farms and ranches.

Persistent Progressives

1

The Setting

Ideological and Physical

At first glimpse, Crystola seems an unlikely birthplace of the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union of Colorado, later known as the Colorado Farmers Union and, more recently, as the Rocky Mountain Farmers Union. In general, when we think of farmers, we envision men and women cultivating the soil, growing commodity crops such as wheat and corn or market produce such as carrots and lettuce. In that sense, Crystola was not a farming community. In the 1860s stock growers had settled the area, sometimes called Trout Park because it was intersected by a mountain stream and surrounded by forest, a few miles north of Pikes Peak and less than a day’s horseback ride from the Cripple Creek–Victor mining district.

Crystola attracted what might be described politely as religious and political eccentrics. Henry Clay Childs and his wife, Catherine, originally from Vermont, moved to the area in 1876 and established a small livestock and sawmill operation. Known locally as spiritualists, they consulted their own crystal ball and sponsored séances with like-minded clairvoyants said to be in touch with the spirits of the deceased. A visiting psychic and self-styled professor named Wizard Kimball claimed he had located a gold lode by using his witching stick; that likely encouraged Childs to organize the Brotherhood Gold Mining and Milling Company. The company began by selling psychic location services to prospectors and launched a successful nationwide campaign to attract stockholders, which enabled Childs and his fellow spiritualists to build an ore-processing mill, purchase and develop a town site, and add a general store, school, post office, railroad station, and communal water system. Reorganized in 1899 as the Crystola Brotherhood Town, Mine and Milling Company, the company town attracted about 150 inhabitants, mostly from Boston and the East Coast. It remains unclear whether these newcomers were drawn by the lure of gold, the prospect of joining some sort of utopian colony, or both.¹

Among those attracted to Crystola was George B. Lang, the future first president of the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union of Colorado. He was born in 1864 on a farm in Greene County, Pennsylvania, a region known for its wool production; as a child he left with his family for Iowa well before the beginning of the boom in coal mining. Between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six, he taught school and worked as a newspaper reporter in Missouri and then returned to Iowa as state organizer for the National Farmers’ Alliance. How he learned about Crystola and what drew him there with his wife and son in 1906 is unknown. We can only speculate that, with the demise of the farmers’ alliance, he sought to continue his work as a farm or labor organizer and saw an opportunity in mining country. Presumably, his political and social outlook aligned with that of the Crystola brotherhood.

We also do not know the background of T. W. Woodrow. He is credited with inviting a small group of men to meet at Lang’s home on May 17, 1907, to form the first Colorado chapter of the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union. We can assume that at least some of the invitees were farmers or ranchers, as they would hold offices in the new organization. During the eleven months leading up to the first state convention of the farmers’ union, Woodrow organized local chapters in the rural settlements of Calhan, Falcon, Fondis, Ramah, Surber, and Yoder in El Paso County, Keyser in Elbert County, and La Junta and Vroman in Otero County. His successes as an organizer suggests that both the farmers’ union’s message and its grassroots organizational structure appealed to Colorado farmers and ranchers, though to how many is unknown. Neither the message nor the structure, however, was original with the farmers’ union.²

Without going too far back in time, it is worth noting that, following the Civil War, the United States entered an era of vast and rapid economic expansion made possible in part by technological advances such as Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper and John Deere’s steel ploughshares. The federal government provided financial incentives for big corporations, most notably the railroads, as it did for individuals and families through various preemption acts. The intent of the Homestead Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, was laudable—to enable any citizen to obtain title to unappropriated public land by residing on or cultivating that land for a period of five years and paying modest filing fees—but its actual impact on the settlement of the West proved not entirely positive. Most immediately, land promoters argued unscrupulously that one could sustain a family and produce surplus food for the market on 160 acres of arid land. Loopholes in the act combined with the US Congress’s inaction led to wild land speculation.

In opposition to land speculators and corporate monopolists and distrusting the intermediaries between their produce and their customers, farmers had entered into associations for mutual benefit that went beyond the role of traditional social and religious confraternities. The first such general farm group was the National Grange of the Patrons of Husbandry (the Grange). Founded as a secret fraternal organization in upstate New York in 1867, the Grange sought improvements in farm life and fought the perceived evils of modernism. Organizers started the first Colorado branch in Boulder in 1874 and quickly established sixty-nine other branches throughout the South Platte valley. The Grange declined almost as rapidly as it had begun, in part because of competition from the National Farmers’ Alliance and Industrial Union.³

Similar to the Grange, the farmers’ alliance began as a fraternal organization. Founded by a group of farmers and ranchers in central Texas during the 1870s, the alliance spread through the South and the Midwest, all the while expanding its mission. It sought to establish member-owned cooperatives as practical vehicles for eliminating intermediaries, controlling prices received for farm produce and prices paid for farm supplies, and providing farmers with their own mutual fire insurance company. By the time of its national convention in Cleburne near Dallas in 1886, the farmers’ alliance had become the leading farm organization in the nation. The Cleburne convention issued a series of demands to the federal government, among them to regulate railroad rates, impose heavy taxes on land speculators, and increase the availability of farm credit.⁴

Using the Cleburne platform, alliance organizers recruited irrigators in southern Colorado in 1888 and then moved to organize eastern Colorado just as farmers were turning from conventional to dry-land farming.⁵ By advocating stringent federal regulation of the economy, the farmers’ alliance national organization soon alienated the very farmers who sought more control over their products by banding together in cooperatives. The alliance platform became an integral part of the 1892 platform of the People’s Party, also known as the populists. In Colorado, the farmers’ alliance helped elect David H. Waite governor; but his support from industrial workers, his promotion of their economic and social agenda, and his ineptitude in governing—a characteristic of those in perennial opposition—alienated both farm and business interests. Close association with the People’s Party would lead to the alliance’s eventual demise.⁶

Just as the farmers’ alliance overtook the Grange, the Farmers’ Cooperative and Educational Union succeeded the alliance. The farmers’ union was formed in 1902 in the cotton country of northeast Texas, after a shadowy eccentric named Isaac Newton Gresham brought together nine men to charter the organization and to hire him as membership recruiter. Gresham had grown up on a tenant farm in Alabama and served as an organizer for the farmers’ alliance in Louisiana and Texas during the 1880s. When the alliance began to unravel, he became editor and publisher of the Point (Rains County), Texas, newspaper. Gresham’s nine recruits consisted of six Rains County dirt farmers, a tenant farmer/schoolteacher, a landowner and county clerk, and a country doctor.⁷

Like the Grange, the farmers’ union began as a secret society and spread rapidly. At the first statewide convention in February 1904, the ten men who had chartered the organization allowed delegates to draw up their own bylaws and elect their own officers, which meant the organization had two sets of governance documents. Six