In October 1985, Jim Hightower sat down with C-SPAN for an hour-long call-in show. He was Texas Agriculture Commissioner, two years into his first term, already making enough noise that C-SPAN wanted him for their States of the Nation series. The topic was supposed to be farm policy; it turned into something broader.
The farm crisis of the mid-80s was real and ugly. Commodity prices had fallen below the cost of production. Rural banks were failing. The factories that built farm equipment were laying off half their workers. Hightower put it plainly:
“The people who are going out of business today are people who are the full-time, medium-sized, fully mechanized family operator — the entrepreneur who has become efficient, productive, competitive, innovative, and broke. They’ve done everything that the free enterprise system has asked of them, but they cannot get a fair price for their commodity.”
He also had a joke about it:
