In mid-December 1977, after several years of strong farm profits, advances in technology and record crop yields pushed prices down. Much the same as today, the costs of inputs like fuel, seed and herbicides had increased. At the same time, farmland values had fallen and taken farm equity with them, leaving bankers less than enthusiastic to lend money to ag producers. Producers who had already leveraged their equity to borrow money, were seeing their interest rates rise into the neighborhood of 20%. Fixed-rate loans were off the table, and those who were able to borrow, did so at the mercy of a variable interest rate.

There had been talk of strikes and calls to organize farmers to stop selling products in December if commodity prices weren’t supported to allow farmers to cover the cost of production and earn a reasonable amount of profit. According to Dinse and Browne’s “The Emergence Of The American Agriculture Movement, 1977-1979” (1985), Great Plains Quarterly, the American Agriculture Movement was borne out of café conversation in Campo, in the southeast corner of the state.

Bud Bitner, George Bitner, Alvin Jenkins, Darrel Schroeder, Gene Schroeder and Van Stafford spoke over coffee about the need for a farm spokesman who had a thumb on the pulse of agriculture, a boots-on-the-ground spokesman as it were. According to Dinse and Browne, farmers recognized the farm economy was shackled not only with low prices for their commodities, high costs of production and an unresponsive government, but they were represented only by a few farm groups they said were out of touch with the needs of actual production agriculture. The 1977 Farm Bill offered price supports only to incentivize large-scale production and it left many producers out in the cold.

As the story goes, a truck driver overheard the group and told them, “I wish you farmers would stop bellyaching and do something. I’m sick of hearing it and bellyaching is all I ever hear from farmers.” From that moment, rotary phones began ringing and the call to action spread across the region faster than even gossip could have.

The group could be found any given Sunday in rural communities in Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Nebraska and Iowa speaking to producers and urging them to organize and demand price supports and parity. Spurred on by the positive reception to the group’s message, the original organizers hosted a rally that brought out 140 producers. With calls for a strike to boycott the sale of all farm commodities until federal law backtracked from the last two omnibus farm bills and guaranteed 100% parity in prices, the group organized a rally in the county seat of Springfield, where the turnout was about 700 from multiple states. The next rally two weeks later in Pueblo saw approximately 2,000 protestors from both coasts, along with U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland and plenty of television cameras.

The calls to strike didn’t pan out, but tractorcades to Denver, Dallas and eventually to Washington, D.C., were organized. On the 20-plus-day drive to the capitol, tractors bore hand-lettered signs reading, “Bergland Theory: storks bring babies, rabbits lay Easter eggs, supermarkets produce food, and farmers raise hell,” “I wish I were a puppy dog and Carter was a tree,” and “pushing for parity.”

Tensions were high in January and February of 1979 when more than 5,000 farmers descended on D.C. and were corralled at the National Mall. Once it became clear the farmer protesters weren’t violent, residents brought their children to the Mall for tractor rides, families took farmers to their homes for dinner and brought them back to the camp. And when a snowstorm socked the city in, officials allowed farmers on tractors outfitted with blades out of the concentrated area to remove snow from city streets.

Some of the protesters remained in D.C. until April, knocking on legislators’ office doors daily with printed bullet points. One farmer said they hadn’t come that far to waste time or play. As tractors rolled back to farms to begin planting, some farmers stayed behind to disc and reseed the grass of the Mall from the Washington Monument to the Capitol.

After the tractorcade, there were some price supports for commodities put into place, but that win was quickly overshadowed by the 1980s farm crisis that bankrupt tens of thousands of farmers across the country. Certainly, the situation created by high interest rates and low commodity prices was also to blame in the 1980s, but Carter declaring an embargo on Russia, a major importer of U.S. grains as well as overenthusiastic ag lenders and borrowers created more of a wreck.

Today, agriculture is still a game of razor thin margins and there is still more than a fair share of bellyachin’, but surely we can recall lessons learned from history when the perfect storm clouds begin to build.

Rachel Gabel writes about agriculture and rural issues. She is assistant editor of The Fence Post Magazine, the region’s preeminent agriculture publication. Gabel is a daughter of the state’s oil and gas industry and a member of one of the state’s 12,000 cattle-raising families, and she has authored children’s books used in hundreds of classrooms to teach students about agriculture.