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Anyone 50 or over will remember the 1980s farm crisis that choked the nation’s heartland. Family farm after family farm fell to the auctioneer’s block.

It was much more than the loss of a business, though. For many farmers, it was their inheritance and legacy threatened by Administrative Notice 580 handed down by the FmHA that accelerated payment schedules of borrowers behind on their payments or who had violated any agreement terms of their loans.

North Dakota attorney Sarah Vogel, in her exhaustively researched account, “The Farmer’s Lawyer,” tells the heartbreaking but later inspiring story of how she as a young lawyer fought and beat the federal government in the landmark class-action case Coleman vs. Block that originated with a lawsuit in which Vogel represented nine North Dakota farmers against the FmHA.

Read the full review on Sarah and The Farmer’s Lawyer here.

Excerpt from AG WEEK:

FARGO, North Dakota — In 1981, Sarah Vogel was out of her upper echelon U.S. Treasury Department job in Washington, D.C., because Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter for the presidency.

Vogel moved from Virginia back to Bismarck, North Dakota. She incorrectly thought banks might hire her for “advice,” much as she’d given advice to the Secretary of the Treasury. She and her son Andrew moved into a house on the Missouri River.

A financially troubled farmer-friend, Chuck Perry from North Dakota, now was traveling the country, raising funds for the “Farmers and Ranchers Protective League.” And he was promoting Vogel’s legal services to farmers in trouble with the FmHA.

In her book, “The FARMER’S LAWYER,” Vogel said she was “building a law practice for farmers who couldn’t afford my fees.” She was receiving child support, making only monthly minimum payments on all of her credit cards. She still owed $100,000 on the Virginia condo. Her loan was in default.

She held out hope she might get paid in these farm cases because Congress had passed the Equal Access to Justice Act. The EAJA said that if a citizen or small business sues (or is sued) by the U.S. and wins, the government should pay the winner’s legal fees.

In the “The Farmer’s Lawyer,” she describes how she accumulated a string of financially weakened clients.

Read the full feature, the second of a three-part story by Mikkel Pates, Agweek staff writer, about Sarah Vogel’s new book — THE FARMER’S LAWYER: The North Dakota nine and the Fight to Save the Family Farm.

 

Excerpt from: Civil Eats

In a true-life David and Goliath fight, lawyer and former North Dakota Agriculture Commissioner Sarah Vogel won a remarkable victory in the class action lawsuit she brought against the federal government on behalf of struggling North Dakota farmers facing foreclosure in the 1980s. Amid high interest rates and low crop prices, farmers were experiencing the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and many who had borrowed money through the federal Farmers Home Administration faced foreclosure. In her new memoir, The Farmer’s Lawyer, Vogel recounts the story of the hard-won battle. Her first-ever trial was fought despite much personal hardship—Vogel was a single mother who faced foreclosure of her own home and, serving financially struggling farmers, she was often paid in baked goods and frozen fish. Nevertheless, the trial drew national attention to the farm crisis, and Vogel’s striking success shaped her career. After she won, she became assistant attorney general, and later, North Dakota’s agriculture commissioner, the first woman elected to the office in the nation. Vogel’s inspiring legal battle is a call to action to fight for the injustices faced by many American farmers, and it also ensures her legacy: Congress later passed a law enacting some of the reforms she and the farmers she represented sought, including fairer appeal procedures.

—Naomi Starkman

Access Civil Eats: Our 2021 Food and Farming Holiday Book Gift Guide here

Excerpt from Lyz Lenz’s newsletter:

If you read one version of the story of America, [the farm crisis] happened by accident. Market forces drove American farms to a crisis in the 1980s. Catastrophic weather events plus Jimmy Carter halting grain shipments to the Soviet Union, resulting in surplus grain unsold rotting in barns, and farmers forced to take high-interest loans and unable to pay them back, resulting in widespread foreclosures, which devastated Middle America, in a way that is still felt today.

But if you read The Farmer’s Lawyer, a memoir by Sarah Vogel, the narrative completely changes. Vogel was a lawyer who worked for the Treasury Department under the Carter administration. When Reagan was elected, Vogel found herself an out-of-work single mother and moved back to her native North Dakota.

There she found a crisis. Hundreds of farmers were losing their homes and livelihoods to foreclosures that didn’t have to happen. The crisis was created by the new head of the Farmers Home Administration, Charles W. Shuman, who issued a directive titled “Administrative Notice 580” in 1981 to reduce loan delinquencies by 23 percent on average by March 1982. State directors were offered merit pay bonuses for foreclosures. The result was disastrous.

In response, Vogel became a de facto Erin Brockovich for farmers, filing a class action lawsuit that alleged that the government was illegally foreclosing on the farmers, failing to follow a 1978 deferral law. The law outlined that farmers should be offered a loan deferral if the circumstances of the foreclosure were out of their control. They weren’t being offered the deferral. What’s worse, even before the foreclosures, the USDA was seizing income, making it impossible for the farmers to feed themselves or their animals.

As she fought for the farmers, many of whom paid her in food, Vogel herself went into debt and faced foreclosure. Vogel was locked out of her office because she couldn’t pay rent, she wasn’t able to pay her phone bill and had to rely on her clients to loan her money. She describes carting her toddler son along with her to meetings, his crayons melting in the back of a car rented by a Time magazine photographer.

The case Coleman v. Block was filed on March 11, 1983, on behalf of nine named plaintiffs representing 8,400 North Dakota family farmers. The case resulted in an injunction prohibiting the USDA from foreclosing on 240,000 FmHA borrowers nationwide.

Read the full essay on the farm crisis and The Farmer’s Lawyer here.

The Bismarck Tribune:

 

Read the full feature on Sarah and The Farmer’s Lawyer here.