Speaker 1: Pushkin. One day early last spring, my producer Ben came
Speaker 1: by the house with a lime green box. All right,
Speaker 1: so this is the farming game. All right, the farming game.
Speaker 1: I find a stick or pease guys, so everyone gets ten.
Speaker 1: I'm so daunted by long instructions of board game. They're
Speaker 1: not that long. They'd lose the princison small. Okay. I
Speaker 1: may not love long instructions, but I do love a
Speaker 1: good board game. The game board had fifty two squares
Speaker 1: all around the edges, a calendar, each square a week
Speaker 1: of the year. Like all board games, it was something
Speaker 1: of a time capsule, history in a box. This season
Speaker 1: of the last archive, we're talking about common knowledge, the
Speaker 1: things everybody knows, and farming used to be the most
Speaker 1: common sort of knowledge. How to grow the food you eat,
Speaker 1: how to live on the land around you. That kind
Speaker 1: of knowledge used to be held in communities and families,
Speaker 1: passed down from one generation to the next, or from
Speaker 1: one neighbor to another. But far fewer people know that
Speaker 1: stuff now. When people lose that kind of knowledge, they
Speaker 1: lose a sense of their own place in the world.
Speaker 1: This game isn't just about how to save the farm,
Speaker 1: but about how to save farming. Nice, Okay, So the
Speaker 1: object of the game is well, so it's kind of
Speaker 1: like it's it is to win, it's to make enough
Speaker 1: money farming that you can quit your job in town.
Speaker 1: But it's more than anything, just like not to lose,
Speaker 1: because you sort of it used like start in depth
Speaker 1: and then it just gets worse. The story of the
Speaker 1: Farming Game is one of the craziest stories I've ever heard.
Speaker 1: It's got everything in it, the sixties, geodesic domes, cows.
Speaker 1: So this episode Been is going to tell you that story. Ready, Ben, Ready,
Speaker 1: imagine a place, a barn in the lazy fields of
Speaker 1: your mind, line with shells cluttered with clues, stocked with
Speaker 1: millions of dollars in play money, and all these little
Speaker 1: plastic farmer figurines the boards laid out over on the table.
Speaker 1: I guess I'd better roll these dice. Let's see brings
Speaker 1: me to fall. The second week of October nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: So step through the sliding barn door into an apartment
Speaker 1: living room, start of the semester at the University of Colorado, Denver.
Speaker 1: Move in day. Yeah, it was a two blocks off campus,
Speaker 1: a little teeny apartment. We flip coin, who gets the bedroom,
Speaker 1: Who sleeps in the living room? Oil, I slept in
Speaker 1: the living room. That's George Rohrbacher, inventor of the farming game,
Speaker 1: but not yet at this exact moment, he's creating something
Speaker 1: entirely different. I was in the midst of making a
Speaker 1: fringe suede jacket. I had done some things for a
Speaker 1: guy and he owed me some money. Didn't have any money,
Speaker 1: but he does have a couple of pieces of suede
Speaker 1: that are, you know, right off the cow kind of pieces.
Speaker 1: I'd visited George and Colorado where he lives now, and
Speaker 1: he got out the jacket. Okay. The guy that I
Speaker 1: got the suede from had the most outrageous color of
Speaker 1: suede I'd ever seen, or have seen since. This is
Speaker 1: like a lurid green, purple, lime, green, purple, and orange.
Speaker 1: I believe it was the fringe zone this arm that
Speaker 1: I was cutting. There's your timestamp, nineteen sixty nine, the
Speaker 1: war in Vietnam, anti war protests on campus, Woodstock, George
Speaker 1: and the amazing technicolor suede jacket, which I should say
Speaker 1: it's got like a tuxedo. It's a one of a kind.
Speaker 1: Let's just put it. It's pretty awesome. Oh and tails.
Speaker 1: I'm telling you this not only because the jacket is
Speaker 1: a wormhole to the nineteen sixties, but also because that
Speaker 1: moment with George in his living room slash bedroom was
Speaker 1: the moment his life changed. The sewing was hard work,
Speaker 1: and he gotten hungry for a blt problem was he
Speaker 1: had the bacon, but he didn't own a frying pan.
Speaker 1: He was contemplating this when all of a sudden he
Speaker 1: looked out the window and saw a girl walking by
Speaker 1: on the balcony. Wow. He thought she was gorgeous. He
Speaker 1: also thought she might have a frying pan. And I
Speaker 1: was making a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich and with
Speaker 1: nothing to do. Well. This is prior to the invention
Speaker 1: of microwaves, and the only way you cook bacon is
Speaker 1: in a frying pan. And once you get the taste
Speaker 1: of bacon in your head, it's hard to get it's
Speaker 1: hard to get it about. Yeah, George drops the Swede
Speaker 1: jacket and heads next door. I was in the apartment
Speaker 1: on the phone when there was a knock at the door.
Speaker 1: That's Anne, the girl from the other apartment, also a
Speaker 1: student at the University of Colorado. She answered the door,
Speaker 1: he said, can I borrow a frying pan? She's on
Speaker 1: the phone. Yeah, sure, And I handed him the frying
Speaker 1: pan and he said, I'll bring it back. She gets
Speaker 1: back on the phone and closes the door, and I
Speaker 1: just stand there, just stunted. I was thinking, I want
Speaker 1: to get to know that guy. Well, first off, she's beautiful,
Speaker 1: I mean beautiful, and she had this long honey brown hair.
Speaker 1: She had long hair down to his shoulders head, a
Speaker 1: big beard. Basically, the outside world said there was a
Speaker 1: hippie and he had on overalls and he drove a
Speaker 1: sort of old purple pickup truck and not not only
Speaker 1: beautiful face, but one of these people. After talking to him,
Speaker 1: where you realize the heart inside is every bit or
Speaker 1: more beautiful than the outside. I mean you could just
Speaker 1: or I could just feel it immediately. And the joke
Speaker 1: is I always say I had to marry him to
Speaker 1: get my frying pan back. An Roarbacker, co creator of
Speaker 1: the farming game. First thing George told me the story
Speaker 1: of that game is a love story. Anne went Georgia
Speaker 1: frying pan, he made his blt and then later that
Speaker 1: night he went back over to Anne's apartment, So George
Speaker 1: came over and it was my roommate and I and
Speaker 1: George proceeded to get really high and tell the entire
Speaker 1: movie of King Kong, how it was made, and you know,
Speaker 1: just all of the nuances of where it fit in society.
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh my god, this guy is nuts.
Speaker 1: I mean, he literally told the entire movie. If you
Speaker 1: ask him a story, he has to go back to
Speaker 1: the very beginning, until every detail from the very beginning. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's a strange. That's a strange topic to
Speaker 1: spend the evening talking about with the woman that you're
Speaker 1: gonna ask him marry you in a week and a half.
Speaker 1: But it must have worked. That's Wednesday. Thursday, George walks
Speaker 1: and to class and writes her a poem. Friday, they
Speaker 1: get on a plane to Seattle to meet Ann's parents. Saturday,
Speaker 1: George gets in a long argument with her dad, a
Speaker 1: businessman and veteran, about Vietnam. A week later, George and
Speaker 1: Anna decided to get engaged. This is where I want
Speaker 1: to be, this is who I want to be with.
Speaker 1: It was instantaneous. It was just an knowing that he's
Speaker 1: my partner, he should be my partner and we should
Speaker 1: do life together. Just before Christmas, the square that kicks
Speaker 1: off play on the game board. They tell Anne's parents
Speaker 1: they're getting married. They were not overly excited about George.
Speaker 1: Her parents were horrified, But George and Anne won't change
Speaker 1: their minds. Sometimes you just know. The weeks passed by
Speaker 1: in a haze. Lucky rolls. Only sixes, classes, missed, exams taken,
Speaker 1: papers and poems written, ringing round the board till it's June.
Speaker 1: George graduates and he and Anne get married. It's the
Speaker 1: summer of nineteen seventy. They decided to take a trip
Speaker 1: around the country just to see where and who they
Speaker 1: wanted to be. George comes from a family of doctors
Speaker 1: and academics and always figured he'd be a professor, but
Speaker 1: plans change. Anne had been working as a cleaner, and
Speaker 1: they had saved up a thousand dollars. They loaded up
Speaker 1: George's purple Dodge pickup truck and set off. They drove
Speaker 1: through thirty seven states over the course of ten months.
Speaker 1: As they wandered, they got fascinated by a new movement
Speaker 1: of going back to the land. We had gotten interested
Speaker 1: in the dream to the degree that we decided, well,
Speaker 1: neither one of us has ever lived in the country,
Speaker 1: maybe we want to do that. In the nineteen seventies,
Speaker 1: the environmental movement was coming of age. The First Earth Day,
Speaker 1: the founding of the EPA, the most substantial legislation to
Speaker 1: protect our natural environment, came all in a rush. You
Speaker 1: heard all about that in the last episode. People weren't
Speaker 1: just worried about what we put into our rivers and air,
Speaker 1: though they were worried about what we put into our bodies.
Speaker 1: I think that a very great date deal of sickness
Speaker 1: is because of the refined foods. I think we're literally
Speaker 1: at the mercy of the people who take all the
Speaker 1: minerals and vitamins out of the sugar and out of
Speaker 1: the flower. The organic food movement took off. Between that
Speaker 1: and the mounting feeling that we were killing the earth,
Speaker 1: a lot of people, especially young white college students, started
Speaker 1: looking for a way to reconnect in our uncertain nuclear future.
Speaker 1: The homesteading movement is once again gaining ground. They wanted
Speaker 1: to be self sufficient. They read magazines like Mother Earth
Speaker 1: News and Whole Earth Catalog, books like Buckminster Fuller's Operating
Speaker 1: Manual for Spaceship Earth and Adele Davis's Let's Get Well.
Speaker 1: They ate vegetables raw from their gardens and cooked gypsy
Speaker 1: soup from the Moosewood cook Book. They sang songs like
Speaker 1: Joni Mitchell's Woodstock, I'm gonna cambach on the lane, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna try and get NHow. Americans have been going back
Speaker 1: to the land since the nineteenth century, but those early
Speaker 1: movements were typically a response to economic crises. The settlers
Speaker 1: were romantic but also practical, living off the land subsistence farming.
Speaker 1: That was one way to be sure you wouldn't starve
Speaker 1: when the next panic came. Also, it made for a
Speaker 1: lot of good books, movies, and of course old timey
Speaker 1: radio shows like The Grandbes Green Acres Martha Martha. Let's
Speaker 1: face it, the price of food wouldn't be any problem
Speaker 1: to us if we'd done what I wanted to do
Speaker 1: five years ago and bought a fart. But the nineteen
Speaker 1: seventies back to the Land movement was different. It wasn't
Speaker 1: a response to an economic crisis like the Great Depression.
Speaker 1: It was the expression of an ideal. The back to
Speaker 1: the Landers wanted to make things and live in sustainable communities.
Speaker 1: Some people just wanted to live in nature, but George
Speaker 1: and Anne wanted to farm, and all of a sudden
Speaker 1: an opportunity fell into their laps. A friend of Anne's
Speaker 1: parents bought a duck hunting club in Washington State. They
Speaker 1: needed a caretaker the club, not the ducks. Basically, it
Speaker 1: was four rooms, a bathroom, a bedroom, a living room
Speaker 1: in the kitchen. Opened the door the place. It was
Speaker 1: full of dead bugs and mosquitos. The house and the
Speaker 1: duck club was a shit hole, and it was hot,
Speaker 1: and it was miserable. There's really no other way to
Speaker 1: describe it. Were like, what the hell, We'll take it.
Speaker 1: The club was in a town called Toppenish in the
Speaker 1: Yakima Valley. The Yakima is some of the most fertile
Speaker 1: farmland in the United States. It can grow a spare
Speaker 1: us apples, hey, corn, wheat, barley, mint, grapes, peaches, pears,
Speaker 1: and cherries. The kind of land it takes eons to make,
Speaker 1: worn by day and cool in the evening with plentiful sunshine.
Speaker 1: An American Eden, George and Anne started a garden off
Speaker 1: the shack near the creek and got jobs in town.
Speaker 1: George is a teacher Anne as a bank teller. On
Speaker 1: the weekends, George helped out at a cattle ranch and
Speaker 1: learned about taking care of livestock and riding horses. There
Speaker 1: was something that struck a chord inside me that said,
Speaker 1: this makes sense. Well, it's like you eat something new
Speaker 1: and it just boy, that was really good. He left
Speaker 1: his teaching job to work more with the farmers in
Speaker 1: the valley, learning all he could about farming. Anne stayed
Speaker 1: on at the bank. They got cattle and ate the
Speaker 1: food they grew from their garden. We not only like it,
Speaker 1: but we're doing well at it. I think this is
Speaker 1: how we want to live. I came home one day
Speaker 1: from work and George said, A found a farm. It
Speaker 1: was twenty seven acres in the Yakima Valley on sale
Speaker 1: from an improbably named Widow. Her name was Leifa Fields.
Speaker 1: They bought Lefa's place, and over the years their farm
Speaker 1: did so well. They got bigger and expanded. They had
Speaker 1: walnut trees and apricots in their garden, mint and alfalfa
Speaker 1: in the fields. Their conquered grapes went to Welch's Juice
Speaker 1: and their sweet corn to del Monte's. They worked eighteen
Speaker 1: hours a day, seven days a week, at the farm,
Speaker 1: at the bank, at the feed lot. They were rediscovering
Speaker 1: a whole way of life that was new for them,
Speaker 1: but old hat to a lot of their neighbors, and
Speaker 1: the community helped them find their way. They had their
Speaker 1: first child, a baby boy named Blake, and they were happy.
Speaker 1: And basically since we left the Duck Club, we had
Speaker 1: been on a roll where things were getting better and
Speaker 1: better and better. The early nineteen seventies, those back to
Speaker 1: the land years were amazing for American farmers. I didn't
Speaker 1: know any farmer who had gone broke, gone broke his
Speaker 1: back in the des Bowl era, that stretch of farming prosperity.
Speaker 1: It happened under one man, in particular, Nixon's Secretary of Agriculture,
Speaker 1: Earl Rusty Butts, Indiana born, raised on a farm in
Speaker 1: the nineteen tens. Here's Butts. I don't want to go
Speaker 1: back to the good old days. I only want to
Speaker 1: go forward. Whether Butts was really taking the country forward
Speaker 1: or backwards was something people would come to argue about.
Speaker 1: He was a friend to big agribusiness, also to Republicans.
Speaker 1: He kept a wood carving of two elephants, having sex
Speaker 1: in his office. Why because he said he was trying
Speaker 1: to make Republican voters multiply, and he had a terrible
Speaker 1: sense of humor. In the postwar decades, increasing farm productivity
Speaker 1: had already driven down the number of farms and increased
Speaker 1: their average size. Now Butts wanted to take the trend
Speaker 1: even further. He wanted to supersize American agriculture, and he
Speaker 1: got the chance. In the early nineteen seventies, just as
Speaker 1: George and Anne were buying their first farms, the Soviet
Speaker 1: Union had just gone through a patch of terrible weather.
Speaker 1: If they were going to eat, they needed to import crops.
Speaker 1: The Soviets bought up a quarter of the American harvest,
Speaker 1: billions of dollars in US grain and soybeans. Wheat prices
Speaker 1: rose enormously, farm income hidden all time high. Butts had
Speaker 1: found a global market for American crops. He told farmers
Speaker 1: to get big or get out. Agribusinesses thrilled to the
Speaker 1: spike in demand for their new herbicides, machines and fertilizers.
Speaker 1: Bigger modernized farms meant bigger sales. Our challenge is not
Speaker 1: to go back to morning effacian ways. Our challenge is
Speaker 1: not to put more people back on the land. Our
Speaker 1: challenge is to adapt to the change in situation which
Speaker 1: we find ourselves. Butts's vision was part of the reason
Speaker 1: farming knowledge began to ebb away. The emphasis on efficiency
Speaker 1: of growing as much as you possibly could came at
Speaker 1: the cost of older, more sustainable practices like crop rotation
Speaker 1: and plant diversity. Instead of small amounts of several crops,
Speaker 1: you got thousands of acres of just soybeans, another farm,
Speaker 1: all corn. Butts's vision was not exactly the back to
Speaker 1: the land dream, but George and Anne still benefited. A
Speaker 1: lot of farmers did. At least at first, the value
Speaker 1: of farmland skyrocketed. Farmers were living well, The family farm
Speaker 1: was becoming more like a factory, and the family farmer
Speaker 1: took out loan after loan, uneasy credit to expand, which
Speaker 1: is why when George saw a thousand acre ranch for sale,
Speaker 1: he thought, why not fourteen miles out of town, four
Speaker 1: miles from the next door neighbor, and you can see
Speaker 1: the Milky Way, and it just felt just absolutely right,
Speaker 1: and we said, this is where we want to raise
Speaker 1: our kids. The thousand acre ranch was surrounded by canyons,
Speaker 1: ninety five miles away from their old farm, across the
Speaker 1: Sadus Pass, fringed by timber, off the Cascades Mountains, at
Speaker 1: the breaks of the clicatat river, where the rocky land
Speaker 1: pulls away from the water. They called it the Brake's Ranch.
Speaker 1: The day they saw it, they made an offer. The
Speaker 1: next day they got a call. So the house burned down.
Speaker 1: It is one gone electrical fire. Consider that this place
Speaker 1: is ten times the farm George and Anne have ever worked.
Speaker 1: Consider that the farmers selling it are doing so because
Speaker 1: they've fallen on hard times. And consider that the house
Speaker 1: is now burned down. This I think was a sign
Speaker 1: from the universe about what was to come. George and
Speaker 1: Anne had the chance to fold up the board and
Speaker 1: walk away, but that's no way to play a game.
Speaker 1: And we've been rolling fives and sixes since the day
Speaker 1: we got off the bus. I said, well, let's go
Speaker 1: for the place and we'll build a house. They negotiated
Speaker 1: the price down and bought the land and also fifty
Speaker 1: head of cattle. A neighbor lent them a trailer to
Speaker 1: live in, and George started to solve the whole house
Speaker 1: situation In a very George way. Well, it's like the
Speaker 1: fringe jacket, you know. And there was a contractor in
Speaker 1: Yakima who was actually building two geodesic domes at the time.
Speaker 1: For the uninitiated, a geodesic dome is a structure popular
Speaker 1: in the sixties counterculture, involving lots of triangles fit together
Speaker 1: in the shape of a dome, and you can put
Speaker 1: the walls in tie anywhere you want them because they're
Speaker 1: not holding up the roof. The roof is holding up
Speaker 1: the roof. George was a dreamer. He believed everything could
Speaker 1: be done, and he was right. He was right most
Speaker 1: of the time. They bought the dome Easter weekend of
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy six, with their one year old looking on.
Speaker 1: George and Anne put up the forty five foot structure
Speaker 1: triangle by triangle with a bunch of friends. They moved
Speaker 1: into the basement, plywood ceiling, concrete floors, with a drain
Speaker 1: in the middle, a hose to draw water from the spring,
Speaker 1: and absolutely no heat. You talk about back to the land,
Speaker 1: we're back only six years earlier. They've never farmed in
Speaker 1: their lives. Now they own a thousand acres miles from
Speaker 1: the nearest person, surrounded by mountains, spiritually, geographically, financially, they
Speaker 1: were way out there. The trouble with games of chance
Speaker 1: is when they go your way, you think it's all
Speaker 1: about you. You're lucky, or you're special, you've got the
Speaker 1: hot hand or the mightas touch. But if you roll
Speaker 1: the dice often enough, your average moves towards the middle,
Speaker 1: and if you've started high, you're gonna get laid low. Well.
Speaker 1: All of a sudden, a place that normally gets five
Speaker 1: to thirty inches of rain, we got four inches of rain.
Speaker 1: There wasn't enough hay to feed the cows, and instead
Speaker 1: of thirty five bushels of wheat per acre, they made ten.
Speaker 1: It was nineteen seventy seven. Something like this was happening
Speaker 1: to farmers across America. Prices were down, costa rising with inflation,
Speaker 1: and farmers were having to take on more and more
Speaker 1: debt just to survive. In the pit of my stomach,
Speaker 1: the bottom is falling out. They had their second child,
Speaker 1: a boy named David, and so year seventy nine kicks in.
Speaker 1: We get two and a half inches of rain. Disaster.
Speaker 1: The crop failed, the farm was failing. Anne took a
Speaker 1: job far out from the ranch and things were going
Speaker 1: badly for everyone. George could sense it in the local
Speaker 1: store at the feed lot. But the middle of May
Speaker 1: and she gets out of there, and I've just come
Speaker 1: in for dinner, and she lets the kids loose in
Speaker 1: their room, and she comes up to me and she says, Honey,
Speaker 1: I'm pregnant again. We both knew that it was a
Speaker 1: slim chance. We were staying that this. We were gonna
Speaker 1: have to admit the experiment failed and we were gonna
Speaker 1: have to give it up. Anne and George owed more
Speaker 1: in interest on their debts than they could make in
Speaker 1: a year. They were living in an unfinished house with
Speaker 1: two kids and a third on the way. Spring turned
Speaker 1: to summer and it was time to cut the hay.
Speaker 1: George bailed by moonlight when the duke came up and
Speaker 1: the dried out crop had a chance of sticking together.
Speaker 1: On July seventh, nineteen seventy nine, he got up at
Speaker 1: three am and stepped outside. There's no other lights other
Speaker 1: than starlight above and the lights of my tractor. I'm
Speaker 1: as as alone as a man can be, crushing pressures,
Speaker 1: no way out kind of pressures. I am at fault
Speaker 1: for this disaster. What what can I do? And for
Speaker 1: some strange reason, I have no idea how or why
Speaker 1: this blanked into my head. This problem I'm in would
Speaker 1: make this hell of a subject for a board game.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back. It's nineteen seventy nine. Family farms
Speaker 1: across America are in trouble. One farmer in particular is
Speaker 1: taking it pretty hard. Crop prices are just total shit.
Speaker 1: George Robacker, farmer in trouble, crushing debt, failing farm. Baby
Speaker 1: on the way. It's three am, and he's out in
Speaker 1: the field, not asleep, but still dreaming about a board game.
Speaker 1: I finally get done bailing. Hey, eat breakfast, Go down
Speaker 1: in the basement, get a scrap of sheet rock and
Speaker 1: a framing square, and draw myself a game board picture.
Speaker 1: George alone in the basement of his geodesic dome, surrounded
Speaker 1: by thousands of acres of failing farmland, scratching out a
Speaker 1: board game on a loose piece of sheet rock. There
Speaker 1: is a fine line between genius and insanity, or sometimes
Speaker 1: no line at all, And it occurs to me that
Speaker 1: those four sides could beat the seasons. Okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 1: The sun is high overhead now, sapping the last moisture
Speaker 1: from the alf Alpha. There are cows to feed, work
Speaker 1: to do, but George is riding the lightning. He can't
Speaker 1: stop inventing farmer figurines. Debt from the bank the Yakima
Speaker 1: Valley at the center a board game about how miserable
Speaker 1: it is to be a farmer. I didn't go back
Speaker 1: out to the field, I didn't eat lunch. And and
Speaker 1: comes home and it's pretty warm, the kids are fried,
Speaker 1: and she walks in the door, and I just literally
Speaker 1: can't wait for the kids to get out of the
Speaker 1: way to tell her, I've just discovered the trap door
Speaker 1: the way out of this mess. It had just come
Speaker 1: like full out of his head. Here was this game,
Speaker 1: and we got to do this, you know, this is
Speaker 1: what's what's gonna save us. And she gave me a
Speaker 1: look like, are you frigging crazy? A board game. One
Speaker 1: crazy thing that's gonna see the other crazy thing. The
Speaker 1: game works a bit like Monopoly. It starts when you
Speaker 1: inherent land from your grandfather. Ten acres of hay and
Speaker 1: ten acres of wheat, each represented by a little vinyl
Speaker 1: stamp with a bale of hay or a wheat on it.
Speaker 1: There are six farms in the center of the board,
Speaker 1: each named after a real place in the Yakima Valley,
Speaker 1: and you've got one of them. Around the edge of
Speaker 1: the board is the calendar ear blocked off by harvest times,
Speaker 1: your hay cuttings, cherry harvest, livestock sales, and so on.
Speaker 1: You begin with five thousand dollars in debt with a
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars line of credit. The goal is to
Speaker 1: make enough on your farm that you can quit your
Speaker 1: job in town, which at the start is the only
Speaker 1: way you're staying afloat. It is a punishing game. Typically
Speaker 1: your debt only gets worse in the winter. You can
Speaker 1: buy more seed or livestock or equipment, but it almost
Speaker 1: always costs more than the cash you have on hand,
Speaker 1: so you have to borrow and eventually either pay it
Speaker 1: back or declare bankruptcy. But that was farming. Had to
Speaker 1: have the debt. It is punishing. It's not fun all
Speaker 1: the time, so we had to do balance make it
Speaker 1: be possible. They spent every night working out the mechanism
Speaker 1: of the game, playing it again and again. They put
Speaker 1: everything they'd learned about farming into it. In harvest seasons,
Speaker 1: you roll the dice to see how good your crop is,
Speaker 1: check the harvest rate chart for prices per acre, and
Speaker 1: then pull an operating expense card that tells you how
Speaker 1: much it's going to cost to harvest that crop. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you land on a farmer's fate square and you have
Speaker 1: to draw a card to see how your lux breaking.
Speaker 1: Often something bad happens, tractor malfunction, grain embargo irs, garnishing
Speaker 1: your wages, mount Saint Helen's erupting. All these things that
Speaker 1: could happen to you in the game, all of them
Speaker 1: had happened to George, Anne or one of their friends
Speaker 1: at some point. It's a perfect model of the family farm.
Speaker 1: It's also the story of their lives. But just like
Speaker 1: when they got into farming, George and Anne had absolutely
Speaker 1: no idea how to manufacture a board game. And at
Speaker 1: the time we just thought we needed a printer. We
Speaker 1: just thought we needed a box make your role. It
Speaker 1: turned out nearly every part of the game needed to
Speaker 1: be manufactured by a specialist. The folding cardboard came from
Speaker 1: Los Angeles, the acreage stamps from New Jersey, the dice
Speaker 1: from Rhode Island. One company prints the money, a different
Speaker 1: one makes the gameboard art and another makes the board backing,
Speaker 1: and the family still had to cut out each individual
Speaker 1: play dollar in their basement, and our four year old
Speaker 1: would put a rubber band around them for us. It's
Speaker 1: August nineteen seventy nine. As George worked on piecing the
Speaker 1: game's supply chain together, farmers around the country were sounding
Speaker 1: the alarm about a coming crisis and agriculture. The tractors
Speaker 1: are traveling in a caravan, honking horns, waving flags, and
Speaker 1: sporting posters in an attempt to gather more support for
Speaker 1: farmers across the country. Farmers drove their tractors to Washington,
Speaker 1: DC that year to protest falling prices and rising costs.
Speaker 1: They called it a tractorcade. Most farmers were facing a
Speaker 1: version of George's problem. They were overleveraged, underpaid, and unable
Speaker 1: to explain the complexities of their situation to voters who
Speaker 1: mainly cared about keeping the price of groceries down. The
Speaker 1: situation was only getting worse all the while George was
Speaker 1: building his own lifeboat. It's September. If George and Anne
Speaker 1: were going to make any money, they needed to go big,
Speaker 1: so they sold half their Cows took out a loan
Speaker 1: in order to run of ten thousand games. When we
Speaker 1: say we met the ranch on it, we did board
Speaker 1: games sell best at Christmas. December was only three months away.
Speaker 1: Anne was due at the end of November. The middle
Speaker 1: of September turns into the end of September, and the
Speaker 1: end of September turns into October. But making the game
Speaker 1: is only half the work sewing without reaping. What are
Speaker 1: the questions, of course, when you're producing ten thousand copies
Speaker 1: of a board game is how do you sell the
Speaker 1: dams it? In case you hadn't noticed, George is a
Speaker 1: born salesman. He sent a letter hitching the game to
Speaker 1: President Jimmy Carter. Three weeks after I said the letter,
Speaker 1: I got a mimiograph letter from underling of an underlan
Speaker 1: saying essentially, thank you for whatever you sent to the
Speaker 1: White House. Have a nice day a bum roll. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: George has started writing ads for farm magazines with information
Speaker 1: about how to order the game, and the orders started
Speaker 1: to trickle in. And then George had an idea for
Speaker 1: a Hail Mary Hallo Americans. This is Paul Harvey, stand
Speaker 1: behype on you. Paul Harvey was a radio broadcaster who
Speaker 1: was especially popular among farmers. Everybody listened to him on tractors, trucks,
Speaker 1: and bus radios. Probably there is no radio program American
Speaker 1: cattle have heard more of. George dashed off a letter
Speaker 1: to Harvey and slipped in a copy of an article
Speaker 1: about the game from a local newspaper. The days passed,
Speaker 1: and then miraculously, Paul Harvey talked about it on his show.
Speaker 1: Harvey's archives are a bit of a shambles, so I
Speaker 1: couldn't find the broadcast to confirm for myself. George and
Speaker 1: Anne didn't hear it directly either. They found out about it,
Speaker 1: they said, because all of a sudden their games started
Speaker 1: to sell de lurs, and Western Farmers said that Paul
Speaker 1: Harvey spoke about it, and so they all want one
Speaker 1: in their store. Western Farmers Association was a big chain
Speaker 1: of farm stores. It was late November and the game
Speaker 1: was moving. George hitched a horse trailer to his pickup
Speaker 1: and loaded it up with games to bring to the stores.
Speaker 1: That Saturday. Anne went into labor Well. Laura had the
Speaker 1: good sense and the courtesy to hold up until we
Speaker 1: got the lid on the box and Laura was born
Speaker 1: at home Sunday night at one thirty am. Meanwhile, word
Speaker 1: of the game had begun to spread through the Grange
Speaker 1: Halls farm magazines, even a story in the Washington Post
Speaker 1: just weeks later. Within six weeks we had sold seventh
Speaker 1: up to ten thousand copies. In the nick of time,
Speaker 1: it looked like George and Ann were going to save
Speaker 1: their farm. But that's after the break. In January of
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty, the Farming game was starting to take off.
Speaker 1: People magazine wrote it up. Anne and George started a
Speaker 1: company called the Weekend Farmer Company to manage it. But
Speaker 1: they needed this game to be more than a passing fad.
Speaker 1: They needed it to pay for itself and help them
Speaker 1: save their farm. So George worked up a new sales strategy.
Speaker 1: In the wintertime, there are farm supply shows all over
Speaker 1: the United States where farmers go to kick the tires
Speaker 1: on the new tractor whatnot. He decided to tour the
Speaker 1: farm shows selling the game. They bought an old fifteen
Speaker 1: passenger Dodge van and took out all the seats. If
Speaker 1: you packed it to the roof, it held twelve hundred games.
Speaker 1: George hit the road and so what I would do
Speaker 1: is I'm headed to Missoula, Montana, and I stop in
Speaker 1: every little town on the way there. In little towns,
Speaker 1: the people that manage the stores or did at that time,
Speaker 1: or the people that owned the stores, and you could
Speaker 1: walk in the front door and within a minute and
Speaker 1: a half be talking to the owner and find out
Speaker 1: if you could sell the game to the guy or not,
Speaker 1: and if not, you're back on the road five minutes later.
Speaker 1: This was how the Farming Game found its true audience,
Speaker 1: the die hards. Somebody would play with a friend and
Speaker 1: then that friend would order a copy. Eventually, George and
Speaker 1: Anne set up an eight hundred number. Soon a UPS
Speaker 1: driver was coming out to the farm most days, past
Speaker 1: the sign reading Primitive Road to pick up shipments of
Speaker 1: the Farming Game. In the summer, he'd bring the kids popsicles.
Speaker 1: The eight hundred number patched straight into the house and
Speaker 1: the phone rang off the hook. The phone was beside
Speaker 1: our so we answered it in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1: So sometimes you're talking the phone. Boy. It's a good
Speaker 1: thing you cannot see. There's no video that goes with
Speaker 1: this phone. George kept on the road to turn up
Speaker 1: new business, but as he drove around the country games
Speaker 1: in tow Agriculture had fallen into a death spiral. While
Speaker 1: farmers were growing on credit in the nineteen seventies, inflation
Speaker 1: was rising too, and the Federal Reserve decided to jack
Speaker 1: up interest rates to slow it down. Suddenly banks started
Speaker 1: calling in the loans they'd been so confident in years earlier,
Speaker 1: and the farmers couldn't pay. Within the span of just
Speaker 1: a couple of years, family farm income dropped by more
Speaker 1: than eighty percent. In nineteen eighty one, the USDA said
Speaker 1: about half the farmers in the country would eventually be
Speaker 1: driven from the land. But it wasn't just the farms.
Speaker 1: When they went all the small local businesses that sold
Speaker 1: them seeds for the fields and feed for their livestock,
Speaker 1: an ice cream and candy for their kids. They began
Speaker 1: to close. Two rural communities and family farms were falling apart.
Speaker 1: We had a nationwide economic crisis, which at the very
Speaker 1: same time was a nationwide family crisis, because at that
Speaker 1: time every farm in the United States had some family
Speaker 1: roots two or three or four five generations back. So
Speaker 1: you inherit this from granddad, and you're the dumpsome bitch
Speaker 1: who lost it. A lot of that land was bought
Speaker 1: by farm management companies corporations. We sometimes hire the broke
Speaker 1: farmers from the same farms back to work it. However
Speaker 1: bad it was for white farmers, it was worse for
Speaker 1: black farmers. They lost their land ten times faster. More
Speaker 1: than half a million people left rural America in a
Speaker 1: single year. Losing a job as one thing. Losing a
Speaker 1: farm is losing everything. It looked like death. And when
Speaker 1: you bury the farm, a big part of your heart,
Speaker 1: a big part of who you are about, big part
Speaker 1: of who your family is, is dead. But it's I
Speaker 1: can't go any deeper into that. The situation with bad
Speaker 1: loans and low prices has gotten so bad the nation's
Speaker 1: largest source of farm loans need big help and fast.
Speaker 1: Ninety three thousand mid sized US farms are deeply in
Speaker 1: debt and are on the verge of going broken. I
Speaker 1: had a gun in the pickup. The thoughts that entered
Speaker 1: my mind that maybe my family was better off with
Speaker 1: me gone alive. It was terrible. But as the crisis
Speaker 1: worse than, the farming game became a kind of advert
Speaker 1: becacy tool and a way for farm families to find
Speaker 1: some relief from their troubles. A North Dakota mental health
Speaker 1: program used the game to help farmers relieve stress and
Speaker 1: talk about their problems it while it became a body
Speaker 1: of knowledge, a chronicle of a disappearing way of life,
Speaker 1: but maybe also a way to save it. A lady
Speaker 1: in southern California whose family was in the citrus business,
Speaker 1: was given the Farming Game for Christmas, and when she
Speaker 1: played it immediately she saw the ability to teach the
Speaker 1: basic economics of farming and just the social superstructure in
Speaker 1: which the business is set. The lady worked for an
Speaker 1: advocacy group for women in agriculture. In the mid nineteen eighties,
Speaker 1: they decided the country needed to know about the game.
Speaker 1: They flooded the halls of the Capitol with hundreds of
Speaker 1: board games, one for each member of Congress, five and
Speaker 1: thirty five games in all, trying to explain what was
Speaker 1: happening to farmers. The board game didn't get any laws passed,
Speaker 1: but it was making its way out into the world,
Speaker 1: sharing the hardships of farming and the joy of it.
Speaker 1: Right when the country hit a crisis of understanding, schools
Speaker 1: began teaching the game in droves. According to George. More
Speaker 1: than three thousand classrooms in North America have used the
Speaker 1: game in one way or another to teach kids about
Speaker 1: what it means to run a farm. I talked to
Speaker 1: a slew of agriculture teachers and they all said the
Speaker 1: same thing. The game was a perfect teaching tool because
Speaker 1: it was fun and it was true. It got passed
Speaker 1: along one year to the next, spread from classroom to
Speaker 1: classroom like seeds on the wind. The Washington State Legislature
Speaker 1: passed a resolution recognizing the game's educational value. When the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union fell, the US Agency for International Development helped
Speaker 1: bring George and the game to Russia to help teach
Speaker 1: what privatized farming would look like. Over time, the game
Speaker 1: sold hundreds of thousands of copies. With the money from
Speaker 1: the Farming Game, George and Anne could keep their own
Speaker 1: farm running, a small oasis at the far reaches of
Speaker 1: the farm crisis. The house that we grew up in
Speaker 1: was built up around us. Laura Rohrbacher, the daughter who
Speaker 1: occasioned the Farming Game, She and the game they're the
Speaker 1: same age. I don't know if you heard the story,
Speaker 1: Like when I was born, there's this little nook in
Speaker 1: our living room and my dad was building it, and
Speaker 1: my mom said, Okay, I'm gonna have this baby, stop building,
Speaker 1: so clean up your mess. And then my dad never
Speaker 1: finished that little nook. You can still go there, and
Speaker 1: they're still like insulation sticking out around all the kids.
Speaker 1: Remember the phones, how the ring of the eight hundred
Speaker 1: numbers sounded different than the other two lines. The order
Speaker 1: sheets printed in triple kit posted by each phone ring
Speaker 1: all hours. So back then, like eight hundred number twenty
Speaker 1: percent just rang into our house and all the kids dispute.
Speaker 1: We're going off the wall like doing whatever were doing
Speaker 1: and just monkeying around, and my dad would yell before
Speaker 1: enco phone, it's a money call. It's a money call.
Speaker 1: Quiet down, And of course we wouldn't. And so then
Speaker 1: my dad's trying to take a farming game order on
Speaker 1: the phone as he's crazy. Noises are in the background,
Speaker 1: and we would hear him say, oh, congratulations, you're the
Speaker 1: ten thousand schollar this week or something. We're all celebrating
Speaker 1: here in the office, and it's just us kids yelling
Speaker 1: and screaming in the background. Farm kids are born into jobs.
Speaker 1: Farming game kids the same. When they got to be
Speaker 1: eight or so. They started taking the calls themselves if
Speaker 1: you didn't feel like taking an order, but you were
Speaker 1: the one closest of the phone, you know, your brothers
Speaker 1: would scatter and you'd beat the one standing there with
Speaker 1: a phone's ringing, so you'd answer the phone, Hello the
Speaker 1: weekend for her company, and your old voice. Yes, oh
Speaker 1: that's a great question, but this is a shipping department.
Speaker 1: Let me get you sales, and you put them on hold,
Speaker 1: and then you say, mom, the phones for you. The
Speaker 1: house was full of games, cardboard boxes for forts, hundreds
Speaker 1: of dice, millions of dollars in play money. But the
Speaker 1: house itself was a kind of wonderland too. At Christmas
Speaker 1: they'd get these gigantic twenty foot trees and nail them
Speaker 1: straight into the floor. They lived year round in nature,
Speaker 1: watching the seasons turn, shading one into the other. At
Speaker 1: each corner of the game board, you get just enough
Speaker 1: snow to pull the sleds out and sled down the
Speaker 1: horse pasture. You know that's right next to like this
Speaker 1: little creek that when the snow melts it fills with water.
Speaker 1: And you get to get to sticks and pretend they're
Speaker 1: fishing poles and then just pass out as the waterfall
Speaker 1: that pours down, and in the spring it rages like
Speaker 1: you gotta keep little kids away from it. And then
Speaker 1: by the end of summer it's totally dry and you
Speaker 1: just have like a rocky bet. I mean, there's just
Speaker 1: you can explore forever, just right outside the door. That
Speaker 1: life is why George and Ann but everything they had
Speaker 1: on the game a long shot to let them raise
Speaker 1: their kids in Nature ten Nature. They were an idiosyncratic
Speaker 1: farm family, but other farm families, even ones who didn't
Speaker 1: live in geodesic domes, have always been the game's biggest audience,
Speaker 1: And during those hard years when rural America was coming apart,
Speaker 1: they were playing it in so many kitchens, with the
Speaker 1: table cleared and the bright green of the Yakima Valley
Speaker 1: laid out under the ceiling lamp, the dark outside shrouding
Speaker 1: an ailing farm, the family imagining what a lucky role
Speaker 1: would feel like, or a bumper crop, or a bad
Speaker 1: thing you could laugh at instead of cry. Those moments
Speaker 1: are the game's true legacy, and they aren't recorded for posterity,
Speaker 1: but George glimpsed one of them one year during the
Speaker 1: crisis when he had left his family at the ranch
Speaker 1: to head out on the road selling the game at
Speaker 1: an agricultural exposition in Montana. And I'm sitting behind the
Speaker 1: booths waiting for a customer to walk by, and there's
Speaker 1: sort of a crowd of bill milling around. And at
Speaker 1: the back of this crowd was this absolutely gigantic guy farmer. Anyway,
Speaker 1: he is eyeball in the booth and eyeball in me,
Speaker 1: and I'm thinking, boy, what's on his mind. If it's
Speaker 1: not good, I don't want to be here. He kinds
Speaker 1: of pushes his way through the crowd and he comes
Speaker 1: right up to me, and he said, I want to
Speaker 1: shake your hand. And I am a hooked in a
Speaker 1: handshake with a oh about a six foot six, three
Speaker 1: hundred and fifty pound guy who could wrestle a steer
Speaker 1: and win. And he's crying. The man told George he
Speaker 1: was divorced with two sons. The oldest, a teenager, had
Speaker 1: been arrested not long before. When his son was home
Speaker 1: from jail and was over at his dad's house with
Speaker 1: his little brother, they pulled out the farming game and
Speaker 1: the three of them began to play. They were laughing
Speaker 1: and just being the kind of family you want to be.
Speaker 1: And anyway, this family of three men, two little ones
Speaker 1: and one giant one played the game every Sunday afternoon
Speaker 1: and left the game where it was on the table
Speaker 1: until the next time the boys came and then picked
Speaker 1: it up in the middle of the game. And anyway,
Speaker 1: he's still holding my hand, and he looks me right
Speaker 1: in the eye again, and he said, you say my boys,
Speaker 1: and then he turned around walked away. Farming is cyclical,
Speaker 1: like the seasons, the Farming game turned out to be countercyclical.
Speaker 1: Over the years, it became clear that it sold when
Speaker 1: times were worst. It's been in print ever since nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine, and sales picked up both during the financial
Speaker 1: crisis and the COVID pandemic. That first crisis, though, the
Speaker 1: early nineteen eighties is when George's fate in the games
Speaker 1: diverged from the fate of the American family farm. He'd
Speaker 1: been in lockstep with the trends of the day, the
Speaker 1: Butts agenda, getting bigger, buying on credit, planting fence row
Speaker 1: to fence row, and then watching it all come apart.
Speaker 1: But the game saved the Roarbockers, even while the farm
Speaker 1: crisis drove so many other small family farmers off their land.
Speaker 1: At the start of the twentieth century, nearly forty percent
Speaker 1: of Americans lived on farms. Today about one percent Due
Speaker 1: there are still family farms, just fewer and mostly bigger.
Speaker 1: And in George, they had meant to make a board game.
Speaker 1: They wound up writing a eulogy. Late last winter, I
Speaker 1: spent a weekend with the Roarbockers in Colorado. They still
Speaker 1: on the farm in Washington State. They live here now
Speaker 1: in a little town in the far southwest of the state,
Speaker 1: Mere a national forest. We talked for hours and hours,
Speaker 1: but on the last night there was one thing I
Speaker 1: had left to do, because we played the farming game
Speaker 1: me George and Laura, her husband Tim, and her daughter
Speaker 1: Vivian ten as hey An set it up. How my
Speaker 1: five thousand dollars. Everybody starts of course, that'sn't genius. Wow,
Speaker 1: what a great idea. We're gonna find out who admitted
Speaker 1: the game at the end of this, Yeah, take him
Speaker 1: out to the park. We began to play. I've never
Speaker 1: been a farmer, so with each bumper crop or farmers
Speaker 1: fate card I was learning some of the things George
Speaker 1: and Anne learned from their neighbors that their neighbors had
Speaker 1: learned from their parents. George, for his part, seemed to
Speaker 1: be learning some lessons for the second or third time.
Speaker 1: I noticed all you have leftist five hundred dollars. They're
Speaker 1: gonna go bankrupt in the first ten minute. Well, I
Speaker 1: do have a reputation of either winning or going brok
Speaker 1: and told me earlier that George either wins big or
Speaker 1: lose this big. That night, he was out of the
Speaker 1: game before he'd made it around the board twice. Now
Speaker 1: here's where your situation is. You're out of money. I
Speaker 1: got some troubles here. Watching George and Anne play together
Speaker 1: was like seeing the whole story in miniature. The dreamer
Speaker 1: and the pragmatist, two ways of thinking about chance. You
Speaker 1: expect the best or if you prepare for the worst.
Speaker 1: I had come to their story expecting it to be
Speaker 1: a story about the loss of agricultural knowledge that used
Speaker 1: to be the most common kind of common knowledge there was,
Speaker 1: And I thought when I set out that the game
Speaker 1: was just a very sweet way to share it again.
Speaker 1: But playing the game that night, I was thinking about
Speaker 1: games and risks and knows unknowns. George says farmers have
Speaker 1: to be optimists, otherwise they'd never planted a seed. The
Speaker 1: farming game is a model of farming, but farming is
Speaker 1: a model of life itself. They're good years and bad.
Speaker 1: You can prepare, but you can't control. You live in
Speaker 1: a world where things grow if you care for them,
Speaker 1: and if you're going to play games of chance, it's
Speaker 1: best to play them with someone else. That way, you
Speaker 1: win even when you lose. I'm going to buy some
Speaker 1: you can't. I was going to buy them last. Okay.
Speaker 1: This episode was written and read by Ben Natt of Haafrey.
Speaker 1: It's produced by Sophie Crane, Ben Natt of Haffrey and
Speaker 1: Lucy Sullivan. Our editors are Julia Barton and Sophie Crane,
Speaker 1: and our executive producer is Mia Lobell. Jake Gorsky is
Speaker 1: our engineer. Fact checking by Amy Gaines. Original music by
Speaker 1: Matthias Boss and John Evans of Stellwagen Symfinett. Our research
Speaker 1: assistant is Mia Hazra. Our full proof player is Robert Ricotta.
Speaker 1: Many of our sound effects are from Harry Janette Junior
Speaker 1: and the Star Jennette Foundation. The Last Archive is a
Speaker 1: production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show, consider
Speaker 1: subscribing to pushkin Plus, offering bonus content like The Last Archivist,
Speaker 1: a limited series just for subscribers, and add free listening
Speaker 1: across our network for four ninety nine a month. Look
Speaker 1: for the pushkin Plus channel on Apple Podcasts or at
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Speaker 1: to rate, share, and review. To find more pushkun podcasts,
Speaker 1: listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
Speaker 1: get your podcasts. I'm Jill Lapoor.