A 1930s Balance Sheet

One Farmer’s 1930s Balance Sheet

What was it like to live on wages of a dollar-a-day – or less? What did it cost to buy gas for your Model T or Model A car? If you were farming, what did it cost to buy a team of horses or some new-fangled hybrid seed corn? Were these hybrids going to be worth it when your seed before was free, picked from your own fields?

If you look through an account book from the time – like Millie Opitz’s father-in-law’s account books – you might be able to tell. “He kept track of everything,” Millie says. In those details, we can now see what daily life was like during the Depression. In 1928, before the Depression, Otto Opitz was fairly well off, earning over $2,500 that year. By 1933, his income dropped to $430 for the year. The next year, the national per capita average income was only $375. So, on the face of it, it looks like Otto was doing all right. But that $430 was income before accounting for the cost of farming. When those expenses are taken into account, he lost money in 1933.

In 1928, Otto spent around $2,000 for farm and living expenses, leaving him with a profit of $500 for the year. Four years later, with little money coming in, he cut back on spending, totalling only $735 in expenses. Still that left him with a net loss of more than $300.

Looking at the monthly figures can give us some idea of the pattern of economic life on the farm. There were three months in 1932 when Otto recorded no income at all. In the years before and after the Depression, he faithfully totaled up each month’s and year’s figures. But he stopped adding up the figures during the mid-30s.

In December 1928, Otto also spent $64.64 to order a radio from the Montgomery Ward catalog – possibly as a Christmas gift for the family. In the same year that a car cost him a total of $576, the radio was a significant expense.

LeRoy Hankel remembers what it was like to live on a dollar-a-day. “You could buy a lot of groceries for a dollar,” Leroy says. But he was not willing to buy things on credit. “Whatever money you got, that’s all we’re going to spend.”

LeRoy and other farmers probably didn’t want to buy things on credit because they had seen what happened to debtors when hard times hit. They had seen the foreclosure sales when farmers could no longer make their payments.

In fact, throughout the decade of the 30s, more and more farmers had to sell out and become tenant farmers again – working the land that the bank or someone else owned.

• In 1930, 52 percent of the farmers in Nebraska owned their own land.
• By 1940, less than 47 percent of them did.

The rest of rural America saw similar declines in ownership.

One of the things that affected a farmer’s bottom line a lot was transportation. From the time that European settlers began moving west on, agricultural produce was most often sold to the hungry people in the nation’s cities to the east and west. Railroads had been the usual way to move grain and cattle to market. But that changed during the 30s. Walter Schmitt remembers how the trucks took over as more and more roads were built.

As transportation systems grew, more and more American agricultural products were sold all around the world. Carla Due knew that world events had a direct impact on her family’s farm.

Written by Bill Ganzel of the Ganzel Group. First written and published in 2003.