Free Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do by Studs Terkel

say I’ve been real lucky in farming. My wife has helped me an awful lot. She’s worked ever since we’ve been married. My girl, she likes it and loves to get out on the tractor. Our boy really worked. He liked the farm and worked from the time he was old enough until he left. He graduated from Purdue last spring. From observing him from the time he grew up, I would say he’d make a good farmer. He’s in Georgia now. He’s in management training. He realized he could make more money in some other position than he can farming. I hope he isn’t putting money ahead of what he really wants to do. He says he likes what he’s doin’, so . . .
    It seems like if they once get out and go to college, there’s very few of’em do come back. They realize that as far as the future and the money could be made from farming, it just wasn’t there. So that was one thing that turned his mind away from it. Of course, he can always change. I’m hoping . . .
    I do believe farmers are going to have to band together a little bit more than they have in the past. Whether it’ll be through a cooperative or a union, I can’t say. The trouble is they’re too much individual for the rest of the country nowadays. You’re bucking against the organized country, it seems like. And the farmers aren’t organized, it seems like.
    The big complaint you hear is that when you take your product to the market, you take what they give you. And when you go buy on the other end, you pay what they say. So you’re at their mercy on both ends, more or less.
    I don’t like to—farmers really don’t want to, deep in their hearts—but when it gets to a certain point, there’s no alternative. ’Cause when a person gets desperate or is about to lose his farm, he’ll do about anything he wouldn’t do otherwise.
    I hate to look at it that way, if the farmer is part of an organization, that would take all the—I wouldn’t say enjoyment, no—but it’d be just like any other business. When you all had to sell at a certain time and all that went with it. But I believe it is going to come to that.
     
    POSTSCRIPT: “The family farm has never been stronger than it is now, and it has never been better serviced by the Department of Agriculture.” — Earl L. Butz, Secretary of Agriculture, in the keynote speech at the 51st National 4-H Congress (Chicago Sun-Times, November 27, 1972 ).

ROBERTO ACUNA
    I walked out of the fields two years ago. I saw the need to change the California feudal system, to change the lives of farm workers, to make these huge corporations feel they’re not above anybody. I am thirty-four years old and I try to organize for the United Farm Workers of America.
     
    His hands are calloused and each of his thumbnails is singularly cut. “If you’re picking lettuce, the thumbnails fall off ’cause they’re banged on the box. Your hands get swollen. You can’t slow down because the foreman sees you’re so many boxes behind and you’d better get on. But people would help each other. if you’re feeling bad that day, somebody who’s feeling pretty good would help. Any people that are suffering have to stick together, whether they like it or not, whether they be black, brown, or pink.”
     
    According to Mom, I was born on a cotton sack out in the fields, ‘cause she had no money to go to the hospital. When I was a child, we used to migrate from California to Arizona and back and forth. The things I saw shaped my life. I remember when we used to go out and pick carrots and onions, the whole family. We tried to scratch a livin’ out of the ground. I saw my parents cry out in despair, even though we had the whole family working. At the time, they were paying sixty-two and a half cents an hour. The average income must have been fifteen hundred dollars, maybe two thousand. 9
    This was supplemented by child labor. During those years, the growers used to have a Pick-Your-Harvest Week. They would get all the migrant kids out of school