Tragedy hits U.S. farming

Press, 18 December 1985, Page 52

Tragedy hits U.S. farming

NZPA staff correspondent Washington The crisis afflicting United States farming has reached a tragic level with the deaths of four people in the tiny settlement of Hills, in the com belt state of lowa. The funerals were held for a respected banker, two fanners, and a farmer’s wife. Their deaths were recorded as three murders and a suicide. In the space of a few hours, the quiet Dale Burr, aged 63, killed Emily, his wife of 40 years, their neighbour, Richard Goody, and a bank president, John Hughes. Then, as the police moved in, he shot himself with the murder weapon, a 12-gauge shotgun. The deaths on the lowa prairie are being blamed on the economic crisis that has hit American farming. The United States Department of Agriculture estnnates that 214,000 farms be-

gan this year unable to pay last year’s bills, around 12 per cent of farms in a wide survey. The Rev. David Hitch, a Catholic priest in Hills, said that he had tried to reach out and counsel farmers in the Hills area hit by the financial crisis. ’’There’s a lot of depression and sadness out there, but they don’t come right out and talk about it,” he said. The debt “gets to be staggering after a while.” “The tough part gets to be when they don’t cover the interest, and they’re paying the interest on interest It gets tougher and tougher each year.” When Dale Burr went on his desperate rampage he had debts estimated at 3U5850.000. ’’Everybody understands why it happened,” said a store owner, Jerry Woner. a, "He’s 63, been on the -farm all his life and he’s

going to lose it. He’s got no other job so he decides to pay his debt to society and go out with a blaze of glory. Nobody’s going to say it’s right, but they understand what set him off,” he said. Burr had a 500-acre pig and crop farm on the corn belt. He was $400,000 in debt to the bank whose president he shot and had fought a court battle with his neighbour, Richard Goody, over a land purchase. The corn belt has the highest number of financially stretched farmers in the United States, 53,739, according to the U.S.D.A. The department’s survey found that it was the cash grain, general livestock and dairy farms that accounted for more than three-quar-ters of the 214,000 financially stressed farms. Sixty per cent of those farms were in the corn belt, lake states and northern factor in

those areas has been the steep drop in farm land values, down more than 20 per cent in 1984, compared with a national decline of 12 per cent. Prices for produce have been hit as costs have risen. A recent U.S.D.A. outlook paper said that in 1985 the American agricultural trade balance fell 40 per cent from 1984 to the second smallest surplus in 10 years. ’’The surplus will continue to shrink in 1986 as prices and export volume decline again,” it said. Prices in 1985-86 would be lower as world stocks increased, fed by world wheat production in excess of 500 million tonnes and the second consecutive year of record coarse grain and oilseed production.

So the future was bleak for farmers like Burr. He was not the first to take drastic action. In 1983, a Minnesota

farmer and his son who had lost their land, cattle and credit rating lured a local bank president and its loan officer to their abandoned farm.

They killed- both and the farmer then shot himself.

Last year, a Nebraska farmer was shot and killed after holding a special weapons squad at bay for hours.

In all, during the last three years, thousands of farmers, dozens of banks, and hundreds of rural businesses are said to have failed and other farmers killed themselves as a result of the farm crisis.

A University of Missouri sociologist said that the suicide rate among farmers was 30-40 per cent higher than among non-farmers. Police in Hills, a town of 600 people, said that Burr left a one-sentence note “indicating he couldn’t stand the problems any more.”