The farmer's lawyer The North Dakota nine and the fight to save the family farm

Sarah Vogel

Book - 2021

In the early 1980s, farmers were suffering through the worst economic crisis to hit rural America since the Great Depression. Land prices were down, operating costs and interest rates were up, and severe weather devastated crops. Instead of receiving assistance from the government as they had in the 1930s, these hardworking family farmers were threatened with foreclosure by the very agency that Franklin Delano Roosevelt created to help them. Desperate, they called Sarah Vogel in North Dakota. Sarah, a young lawyer and single mother, listened to farmers who were on the verge of losing everything and, inspired by the politicians who had helped farmers in the '30s, she naively built a solo practice of clients who couldn't afford to p...ay her. Sarah began drowning in debt and soon her own home was facing foreclosure. In a David and Goliath legal battle reminiscent of A Civil Action or Erin Brockovich, Sarah brought a national class action lawsuit, which pitted her against the Reagan administration's Department of Justice, in her fight for family farmers' Constitutional rights. It was her first case. A courageous American story about justice and holding the powerful to account, The Farmer's Lawyer shows how the farm economy we all depend on for our daily bread almost fell apart due to the willful neglect of those charged to protect it, and what we can learn from Sarah's battle as a similar calamity looms large on our horizon once again.

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Subjects
Published
New York, New York : Bloomsbury Publishing 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Sarah Vogel (author)
Physical Description
xxi, 407 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781635575262
  • Cast of Characters
  • Preface
  • Prologue-The Call
  • Part I. The Sowing
  • 1. The Platform
  • 2. The First Farmer
  • 3. Cottonwood Haven
  • 4. Cut, Slash, Chop
  • 5. The Starve Out
  • 6. A Little Bit of Nothing
  • Part II. The Growing
  • 7. The Organizers
  • 8. Problem Case
  • 9. The Farmer's Lawyer
  • 10. Here Once the Embattled Farmers Stood
  • 11. Time to Make Some Law
  • 12. Exhaustion
  • 13. Competency of Counsel
  • Part III. The Reaping
  • 14. Bitter Harvest
  • 15. If We Eat, You Shall Eat
  • 16. Springing the Trap
  • 17. Unity
  • 18. The Dead Chicken Argument
  • 19. The Front Steps of the Courthouse
  • 20. Nothing but the Truth
  • 21. Wouldn't Bill Langer Be Proud
  • 12. Discovery
  • 23. The Biblical Injunction
  • Part IV. The Saved Seed
  • 24. There Is One Bright Spot Where the People Rule
  • Epilogue-Strength from the Soil
  • Postscript
  • Acknowledgments
  • Image Credits
  • Notes
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

The 1980s were a devastating time for farmers in the U.S. A combination of high interest rates, land speculation, and a grain embargo against the Soviet Union resulted in staggering losses. This David and Goliath story tells about nine farmers who launched a class-action lawsuit in North Dakota against the Farmers Home Administration, a federal lending agency threatening foreclosure on many multigenerational, mid-level family farms at the time. The titular farmer's lawyer herself, Vogel spins an engaging, suspenseful, and often heartbreaking account of her bumbling performances as an untested trial lawyer. Sympathetic bailiffs and court clerks helped her with technicalities; her father, a former North Dakota supreme court justice, offered advice; and an understanding judge led to success at the state level--and an addition of over 240,000 additional plaintiffs once the case moved to the national level. The final decision resulted in changes in federal laws. Vogel is a good storyteller, and this stirring account is testimony to her continuing work as a strong advocate for America's farmers.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A lawyer recalls her battle to prevent the Reagan administration from running indebted farmers off their land in this feisty debut. Vogel, a former North Dakota agriculture commissioner, was lead counsel in Coleman v. Block, an early 1980s class-action lawsuit against the Farmers Home Administration, a federal agency that made loans to farmers. Prodded by the Reagan administration's ideological opposition to handouts to farmers, the agency cracked down on borrowers who fell behind on loan payments, and pressured them to sell their farms to repay loans (and foreclosed if they refused); cut off credit for basics like livestock feed; seized farmers' income and froze their bank accounts; and violated laws in denying loan-payment deferrals. Vogel sets this appalling story of a politicized bureaucracy run amok against a rich portrait of North Dakota farm life and its political tradition of rural solidarity. (She encountered a darker side of that when right-wing militias fomented violence against foreclosures.) Her travails as a single mom, falling hopelessly behind on her own bills, add a vivid subplot. The result is an engrossing legal saga and a rousing tribute to prairie populism. Agent: Mackenzie Brady Watson, Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency. (Oct.)

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A lawyer recalls how a group of mistreated farmers stood up to the U.S. government--and forced changes in federal law--by joining forces in a class-action lawsuit. Few people today may recall the severity of the nationwide crisis that led to the Farm Aid benefit concerts and eventually to the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which curbed some of the injustices that fueled it. This welcome refresher course focuses on a pivotal class-action lawsuit by farmers (Coleman v. Block), blending courtroom drama with a memoir by the plaintiffs' lead counsel, a young single mother who not only had never tried a case, but hadn't set foot in a courtroom. Vogel had returned to her native North Dakota from a government job in Washington, D.C., when farmers began contacting her about unfair or illegal actions by the Farmers Home Administration, a federal agency that made loans to family farmers. Pressured by the Reagan administration to slash farm aid, the agency dealt harshly with farmers who fell behind on loan repayments, often because of drought or other natural disasters. It emptied farmers' bank accounts, seized money they needed to feed their cattle or families, and foreclosed on those only one payment behind on real estate debt. It also failed to give farmers proper notice of legal actions against them and turned hearings on their grievances into kangaroo courts run by people who'd been involved in the unfair actions against them. Vogel lost her house while representing the farmers, most of whom couldn't pay her, but she saw impressive displays of rural grit and solidarity and later became North Dakota's first female agriculture commissioner. Though this memoir lacks the literary flair of books like Jonathan Harr's A Civil Action, it's a brave attorney's clear and thorough story of the power of collective legal action that belongs in every law library. A well-documented eyewitness account of egregious injustices to family farmers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.