Maureen Koehl - Stories

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Ralph Koontz - National Farmer Organization

 

 

Ralph Koontz - National Farmer Organization

With the strikes going on at our Capital with the state employees, I thought I would tell you about the time that my Daddy, along with a huge number of other farmers went on strike by not shipping hogs for several weeks.  It had been a chilly spring and I do remember that officers of the NFO (National Farmers Organization) had organized a chapter in the Greene County Area.  We had a pretty good sized chapter, and The Beams brothers, Chick Spangenberg, and a lot of our neighbors had joined.  They held their meetings in Roodhouse and it was a lot of fun for Dixie and me, because we had a lot of friends to visit with while our Parents met.  But the spring had been so chilly, that crops didn't get in till late, and we lost a number of baby pigs when the sows farrowed because they kept going into labor outside, and not in the farreling shed.  The farmers nationwide were all pretty much in the same boat, the middle man was taking such a huge cut, that farmers were barely able to keep their heads above water.

I do remember Daddy walking outside one night really upset because he didn't know how he was going to get the gasoline for the tractors to get the corn in.   He would smoke or chew on that corn cob pipe of his, and pace up and down, (like someone else we know).  Anyway, at the next meeting the NFO decided that they would try to do a strike, and not ship hogs or cattle to the stock market until prices went up, and the middle man stopped taking such a cut.  Daddy being a little more practical than some of the officers in the NFO said he didn't think it would make much of a difference with the middle men, but that maybe some people would become more aware of where their meat did actually come from.  Now remember this was way before the internet, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones, etc.  so the only way of getting the message out was by phone trees, and knocking on doors.  So Grandma Ruthie, and we girls took rides in the car and told people what the farmers were going to do.  And the ST. Louis Post Dispatch came up and did a newspaper report on it.  It was fairly effective I think for the first two weeks, and maybe even for a month or so.  I don't think that we shipped any of our hogs for several months.  But some good of it came, when we started selling apples that fall, we had a number of people tell us that they had been made more aware of what was going on.  I remember one man in particular stood in the packing shed and puffing on his big fat cigar, told Daddy that "what the country needs is more farmers willing to speak up."

 
That was an interesting summer for me, I think I would have been 8 or 9, maybe 10 and all sorts of things happened that summer.  I do know that the FBI started a "file" on the NFO and its chapters.  I don't know if it was individual, but I do know that it made Daddy really MAD!  More to follow.

Submitted by: Maureen Koehl, February 18, 2011