Klayton Lohr rolls up the barn door on his family’s farm in Devon, Montana. Outside, golden wheat fields stretch to the horizon in every direction.
"This back combine belonged to my great uncle, and the front one is my grandpa’s, and they’re from the early 40s," Lohr points out.
Lohr, who’s 30, is the fourth generation running this 3,000-acre grain farm. He says his deepest fear is that he’ll be the last.
"The tough thing is, you've got a 115-year-old farm, and I'm looking at the potential that it could end with me."
Lohr says the price of fertilizer is the highest he’s seen in 11 years, and wheat prices keep dropping.
It’s been three weeks since the government shutdown began on October 1. Farmers like Lohr haven’t been able to get help from local federal Farm Service Agency offices. The agency is commonly called the FSA.
Eric Belasco is an agricultural economist at Montana State University.
"They don’t have an FSA agent to go to if they have questions about enrolling in programs or if a particular program has a payment that needs to be sent out. All those things would be problematic with them being closed," he says.
The FSA runs programs like crop insurance and mortgages. It also issues loans farmers use to cover planting costs, and then pay off after they sell their harvests.
Bill Bickle is Chief Credit Officer for Stockman Bank of Montana, which works with the FSA. He says his bank is having conversations with the agency and Montana’s senators, "to resolve this so that the FSA will at least sign-off on routine administrative acts."
Bickle says crunch time for farmers needing capital won’t come until early spring.
Local FSA staff, still furloughed, can now execute “core duties” 23 days into the shutdown. The USDA initially said it would bring back two employees per office after day 10 of the shutdown.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s partial reopening of FSA offices nationwide will help farmers access $3 billion in existing aid.
Farmers say some of President Donald Trump’s trade policies are preventing them from accessing markets where they can sell their crops for good prices. Bickle says farmers still have one big cushion.
"Land prices, pretty much across the board, so far, have remained high," he says.
Back on Klayton Lohr’s farm, he’s firing up a bright yellow vintage tractor. He says the idea of selling his land is cold comfort. And as president of the Montana Grain Growers Association, he’s concerned about the mental toll these challenges might take on his peers.
"Not that that's where my mind is going, but I said when you look at the debt of your farm, and you look at your life insurance policy payout, you go, 'well this could get them back to even.' I understand, I do."
Lohr says the government reopening would help farmers get through another year. But they’d rather be independent.
"It's very sad that we've reached that state in agriculture where we can't make it on our own," he says.
For Lohr, if it really came down to it, he says he could sell all his farm equipment to pay what he owes the bank. But that would be the end of his career as a farmer.
