ResoluteReader: Sarah Vogel - The Farmer's Lawyer: The North Dakota 9 & the fight to save the family farm

Tuesday, August 26, 2025

Sarah Vogel - The Farmer's Lawyer: The North Dakota 9 & the fight to save the family farm

In the early 1980s rural America was devastated by economic crisis. Tens of thousands of small farmers were seeing loans called in, land values collapse and debts mount. Thousands of family farms were foreclosed, farmer suicides rose and rural communities were destroyed. It was the worst crisis for rural America since the Great Depression of the 1930s. But unlike the 1930s there was no support for the family farmer. Ronald Reagen, the new neoliberal US President was elected on the back of promising to cut the deficit and government funding. One way the government could save money was through calling in loans from farmers who had taken out multiple loans they could not afford. The line from Washington, and from the bureacrats at the Farmers' Home Association, was that these farmers were greedy, frivolous and lazy. The FmHA, the government body that was supposed to protect and support farmers, had become the vehicle for their destruction.

Of course the farmers were not lazy, stupid or greedy. Quite the opposite. They were hardworking families that had offered loans on the promise that the economy would not decline. Rather than greed driving their loans they were the only way to continue. Many had multiple jobs, worked all hours, had never had a holiday and lacked cash to buy food. Driven by policy from above, the heartless FmHA bureaucrats were systematically driving farmers to the wall, selling their farms off to pay off debt and destroying communities.

Into this situation steps Sarah Vogel. She was a lawyer with pedigree. Her father and grandfather were also lawyers. The family's involvement in North Dakota agriculture had seen them support the Non-Partisan League, the 1920s left social movement of farmers which had fought hard for legal protection and the rights of farming communities. The NPL hadn't just lobbied. It organised thousands of farmers across the US, putting them on the streets to protest and, crucially, opposing auctions. The early chapters of Vogel's book celebrate a movement that refused to let farmers lose their farms at auction, collectively bidding pennies to keep the bankers away from their homes. Crucially though the NPL had won a series of legal victories that ensured government protection for farmers in hard times. When drought, storm, or economic crisis occured the government was supposed to step in. Now the opposite was happening.

The farmers who approached Vogel knew her as someone who would stand up for them. Vogel quickly realised that the processes that the FmHA was using to foreclose were morally repugnant, but crucially they also broke the regulations and the law. She was able to fight and win a class action that enshrined these rights and processes in law, blocked foreclosures and prevented the FmHA from continuing, returning it to a body that protected farmers.

The story of this case is told in detail in this wonderful book. Vogel is a remarkable woman. She fought the case with almost no money and no experience. A single parent she lost her home, her phone was cut off and she relied utterly on the kindness and support of others, including her father. She details how she constructed a case that would become a national action to protect thousands of farmers, while juggling being a parent and coping with the stress of little money. But what drives her is the sheer gall of the government, the lies and hatred of the FmHA bureaucrats and their lawyers and the injustice of what is happening to communities. She is also remarkably progressive. In the class action she makes sure that there are Native American plaintiffs, detailing the particular issues facing farmers of colour and those from indigenous communities.

I have no legal insights, so some of the processes Vogel describes are a little opaque. But this doesn't matter. The book reads like a John Grisham legal thriller - down to her luck in court, her opponents who are almost caricature's of evil lawyers and the support of the community. Her victory was a real boost for millions of people facing destitution from a cruel Republican government. The book is also full of amusing insights into North Dakota, the second smallest US state by population, and dominated by religious conservatism and small agricultural communities.

Vogel is able to win through perserverance and luck. Extraordinarily it was actually her first case - and the win changed US law. But she really wins because in this specific case the law was on the side of the ordinary person. As Vogel emphasises the laws were won threw the struggles of farmers and agricultural workers in previous generations. Without the fights of the NPL in the early 20th century, Vogel would not have had a case. It is an important point because our side cannot trust the law. We cannot rely on the state. But having knowledgeable and symapathetic lawyers can ensure that we can fight within the system as well as against it. This is, of course, a point that Vogel also seems to understand even if she is not quite so explicit: after their victory she sends a framed print of an old NPL poster to her fellow lawyers, linking their struggle back to the past.

But the story is more than a history lesson. Today in the US Donald Trump's tariffs and his economic policy threaten millions. In 1979 most farmers in North Dakota voted Reagen, who then turned on them. The same happened at the last US election when US farmers voted overwhelmingly for Trump. But the forces that were threatening the family farm in the 1920s and 1980s are returning. As Vogel explains, using an analogy of the whiffletree, the board on a ox team that is supposed to keep a plough on the right direction:

Today's whiffletree of agriculture policy is pulling too far toward the side of industrial-scale and corporate farm agriculture and too much in favour of massive seed, feed and chemical agribusiness. Further, the reings to the plow are being held by politicians who are okay with a crooked whiffletree because of the donations they get from those who benefit from it. As the Nonpartisan League farmers understood almost a century ago, the financial incentives of corporations providing "inputs" (patented seeds, ferilizers, pesticides, insecticides, credit and so on) do not necessarily align with farmers' well-being.

In the 1980s Vogel has to deal with the right-wing and neo-Nazis in rural America. Then they were a fringe, but a growing one. There's a satisfying moment when she disrupts a Nazi meeting for farmers. Now those forces are ever stronger and it will need more than legal arguments to deal with them. As Vogel says, "we can straighten the whiffletree by looking to the past... the shift to bigger and bigger farms and 'corporatised' farming is not inevitable."

It is a powerful argument, but one that will have to be relearnt in rural America (and there is a powerful if forgotten tradition of this). I expect that Sarah Vogel's book will be read widely among North Dakota farmers who owe her such a lot. Hopefully it can teach a layer of American farmers and agricultural workers that struggle can win. But that's not to downplay the incredible courage, dogged perseverance and self sacrifice of Sarah Vogel herself, who showed that if you fight, you can win - no matter how powerful your opponent.