Many farmers forced to find new careers

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (MCT) - They're truck drivers, police officers, nurses and cabinetmakers.

And not that long ago, they were full-time farmers.

Increasingly, farmers are switching careers as the agricultural economy sinks to one of the worst levels since the Great Depression.

Farm foreclosures are on the rise, forcing career changes even as off-farm jobs are scarce.

Also, decades of hard physical labor have taken a toll on many farmers' health _ prompting a switch to other occupations.

Loren Gebhard of Platteville, Wis., suffered back injuries from years of barn and field work. At age 50 he was told to either quit farming or risk spending the rest of his life in a wheelchair.

"It gave me enough of a scare that I realized I had better get out," recalled Gebhard, now a supervisor in a cabinetmaking shop.

Like many farmers, he struggled with the career change. The only workplace he had ever known was his family's farm _ where he set his own hours and was his own boss.

"It was nerve-racking for somebody who never wore a watch to all of a sudden become a clock watcher" in an off-farm job, Gebhard said.

While he misses milking cows and field work, there are advantages of having a 9-to-5 job indoors.

"I don't mind it so much," especially in the winter, Gebhard said.

To make the transition from farming, Gebhard turned to a Wisconsin career-training program called Future Fields.

Funded with federal grants, the program ran for about 23 years and provided job counseling and training to 2,500 Wisconsin farmers. It was discontinued in June 2007 after year-to-year grants were exhausted.

Now, Wisconsin Agriculture Department officials are trying to revive Future Fields. They say the timing is right, given that a precipitous drop in farm product prices and other economic trouble have left many family farms on the brink of bankruptcy and foreclosure.

"A big challenge for farmers is they don't qualify for many social safety nets. And they don't get state unemployment benefits," said Paul Dietmann, executive director of the Wisconsin Farm Center, part of the Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection.

When they're forced out of business, "farmers have no income and risk losing everything, including their home. So they need to return to earning a living really quickly," Dietmann said.

Gebhard credits Future Fields with giving him a shot at another career. The program helped pay the first few months of his wages, giving his employer an incentive to hire him, and it also boosted his confidence in getting his first off-farm job.

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"Farming was all I knew how to do. It was all I had ever done," Gebhard said.

Mike Vondra of Platteville, Wis., also used Future Fields as a springboard to another career. He gave up full-time farming in 2001 after commodity prices tanked and left many farmers struggling to pay their bills.

With Future Fields tuition assistance, he earned a two-year degree in the electrical-mechanical program at Southwestern Wisconsin Technical College. After working two years for an electrical contractor, he switched careers again to work for a dairy equipment company.

But after farm-milk prices plummeted this year, Vondra was laid off from the equipment company. He's farming a little and waiting to be called back to his off-farm job.

"Everybody in this part of the state is basically in survival mode now," Vondra said.

Chris Kruel also quit farming during a previous recession.

Now he's a truck driver for the Town of Fennimore, Wis., a job that gave him his first paid vacation. His only connection with agriculture is renting some land and buildings to other farmers.

He misses farm work, but not the constant worries about commodity prices, the weather and other things out of his control.

"There's life after farming. You realize that once you get out," Kruel said.

Getting to that point, however, is hard for many people who have spent their entire lives on a family farm.

"They're born into farming, they're good at it, and it's all they ever wanted to do," said Beverly Loy, who managed Future Fields and is a farmer herself.

Loy helped hundreds of farmers make the transition to other careers, including nursing, law enforcement, welding and truck driving. Often, she said, the hardest part was getting people to accept that their farming days were over.

"And they had no idea what a resume was. They had never interviewed for a job," she said.

Men and women who harvest crops and tend to livestock are jacks-of-all-trades. They've learned to operate heavy equipment, repair things and run a business.

Once they're convinced that these skills are valuable off the farm as well, they do well in other careers.

"Truck driving was a natural for some of these guys," Loy said.

During previous recessions, some farmers took off-farm jobs to pay their bills and get health insurance. After spending eight hours a day on an assembly line, or driving a delivery truck, they went home to do farm chores.

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That's still a common way to keep farming, although it can take a physical and emotional toll on people caught between two worlds.

"You are tired by the time you get home, and the farm work is still waiting for you. Also, the weather complicates things," said Kevin Jarek, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agent in Outagamie County.

And now, farmers are competing with non-farmers for a dwindling number of jobs in rural communities.

At its peak, Future Fields had an annual budget of about $1.3 million. Career counselors, many of them farmers or ex-farmers, fanned out across the state and offered assistance in subjects ranging from landing a job interview to dealing with the emotional trauma of losing a farm.

Of the 2,500 farmers who went through the program, 80 percent found off-farm employment and 90 percent of those hired stayed on the job six months or longer, according to Southwest Wisconsin Workforce Development.

"Most of the folks continued to live on their farm. They just didn't use it as their primary income anymore," said Kathy Schmitt, a Wisconsin Farm Center community relations specialist.

Some farmers have lost the jobs they trained for, including a Boyceville, Wis., police officer laid off this month because of budget cuts.

That shouldn't discourage others from trying to switch careers, especially if they're at risk of losing their farms to foreclosure.

"Just sitting back and letting things happen to you is the worst thing you can do," Gebhard said.

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© 2009, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.