Time Frame: 1929-1945

In 1932, farm families watched prices hit extreme lows: 15 cents a bushel for corn, three cents a pound for hogs, two and a half cents for cattle. And with prices well below the cost of production most farmers knew that, sooner or later, they might lose everything.

John Vermazen: Some lost the farm and we had two farms near us that renters would rent. Now I don’t know if those people had originally been land owners, but they were farms you didn’t have a chance in a snow storm of making a living on and people would come and maybe last one or two years and then they’d move on to somewhere else. Nobody particularly looked down on them. They didn’t know but what they’d be in the same situation themselves pretty soon.