Emmer’s poster children for reform: not your typical farm family

Amos and Amon Baer are unlikely figures to find themselves at the center of the governor’s race. But in recent weeks the names of the Clay County farmers have been mentioned repeatedly by Republican nominee Tom Emmer at campaign events.

During this month’s gubernatorial debate on TPT’s Almanac program, for instance, Emmer brought up the plight of the Baer brothers as a prime example of the state’s overly burdensome regulatory framework. The GOP challenger bemoaned that it would take $40,000 and two years of bureaucratic wrangling to expand their hog operations in Minnesota. Instead the Baer brothers simply went across the border to North Dakota and were up and running within six months.

“Today that operation has a payroll of $1.4 million,” Emmer said during the debate. “Government needs to get out of the way. Streamline the regulatory process. Let people realize their dreams.”

Such anecdotes are common rhetorical tools on the campaign trail, a means of putting a human face on an otherwise tedious topic. But the Baer brothers are hardly your standard, struggling family farmers. They are part of a renowned, multi-million dollar farming operation that started, literally, from scratch some five decades ago.

A problem with authority

Allen and Edna Baer arrived in Minnesota with 13 kids in tow after being kicked out of a Hutterite community in North Dakota for insubordination. (Allen, according to one account, “wondered a bit too loudly why Heinie, the leader of the community, never helped to wash dishes, and he was told to leave.”)

The family borrowed $3,000 from a family member and purchased a 240-acre slab of unproductive farmland just east of Moorhead. Eventually another kid was added to the brood. In 1966, after dabbling in insurance, Allen Baer built his first henhouse, with room for 12,000 birds. It was so successful that he constructed another one the next year, with twice as much capacity. Two years later he added a third facility, this time with room for 80,000 hens.

The rise of the Baer farming operation is chronicled in the 2003 book The Changing Scale of American Agriculture, by University of Minnesota geography professor John Fraser Hart. In a section titled “The Boisterous Baer Boys,” Hart notes that when Allen decided to retire in the early 1980s, the agricultural operation had to be split up among four of his sons because they were always at loggerheads with each other. The acrimonious process of dividing up the assets took four years. “The father raised them to challenge authority,” said Hart. “The family are fascinating characters.”

Despite the upheaval, the operations run by the various Baer brothers continued to grow. By 1999, Joel had 250,000 hens, Jona had 325,000 and Amon had 310,000. Their farming interests also expanded into hogs and turkeys, and into North Dakota and South Dakota. These days, a third generation of Baers continue to expand the operation.

But Amon Baer, who describes himself as a libertarian as well as an Emmer supporter, insists that the regulatory climate in Minnesota is increasingly driving the family’s operations across state lines. In the last decade, he’s helped start a pair of 5,000-hog operations in North Dakota and estimates that 90 percent of the family’s business growth has occurred outside of Minnesota during that time. He hopes that Emmer’s adoption of the Baer family’s story will lead to changes in his home state.

“It’s the permitting scheme that has been set up in Minnesota that is the problem,” Baer told Capitol Report. “It’s not specific to chickens; it’s not specific to dairy; it’s not specific to hogs. I really hope that by him using that story, somebody someplace will sit up and take notice and say, ‘Gee, maybe we have been a little too tough on the livestock industry.’”

Baer’s complaints about government bureaucracy are nothing new. He’s been chafing at the strictures of government for years. In the late ‘90s, he repeatedly banged heads with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency over a composting facility the family was operating. “Amon Baer sort of goes out of his way to pick fights with folks,” said Hart. “That’s part of his DNA.”

“It’s not like we’re shutting down hog production here”

But not everyone agrees that Minnesota’s regulatory mandates are putting an undue burden on farmers. In fact, the length of time required to obtain a feedlot permit has decreased dramatically in recent years. In 2004, it took an average of 151 days to obtain such a permit, according to the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. By last year that waiting period had dwindled to an average of just 48 days.

There’s also little evidence that Minnesota’s livestock industry – and hog production in particular – has suffered in comparison to other states in recent years. The state has the third-largest hog market in the country, accounting for roughly 11 percent of the total swine production, ranking only behind Iowa and North Carolina, according to statistics maintained by the United States Department of Agriculture.

“We continue to crank out a lot of hogs,” said Wayne Martin, who works with hog farmers through the University of Minnesota Extension program. “It’s not like we’re shutting down hog production here by any means.”

Other sectors of Minnesota’s livestock economy are equally robust. The state is the top turkey producer in the country and ranks tenth in cattle and calves. Overall the state has the eighth-largest livestock market in the country.

But farming, and the hog market in particular, have undergone seismic changes over the last three decades. In 1984 there were more than 400,000 hog farms in the United States; last year there were fewer than 65,000. Those operations that have survived have either gone into niche markets or grown exponentially larger. In 1994, hog operations with more than 5,000 animals constituted less than 30 percent of the market; by 2008 that figure had risen to nearly 90 percent.

Paul Sobocinski, a hog farmer in Wabasso and an organizer with the Land Stewardship Project, says Baer and Emmer are misguided in blaming government bureaucracy for struggling farms. “It’s not regulation that’s driven [livestock producers] out of business,” Sobocinski said. “It’s lack of fair prices that’s driven them out of business. It’s the packers gaining more and more control and the lack of open, competitive markets.”

The Baers have also made their share of enemies in Clay County and beyond as they’ve continuously expanded their agricultural holdings, often with sharp elbows. Some people in the area find it preposterous that they’re now being held up as pitiable victims.

“It isn’t that they’re poor farmers trying to get by,” said Robert Ronsberg, whose family owns property in Skree Township adjacent to where the Baers unsuccessfully attempted to get a permit for a hog barn in 2007. “They’re millionaires trying to make more millions.”

Political passions also run in family

Not all of the Baer brothers went into farming. Elam Baer became one of the state’s leading GOP political operatives. He was a crucial player in Jon Grunseth’s 1990 gubernatorial bid, overseeing the campaign’s financial operations. Another key, young advisers on that doomed effort: Tim Pawlenty, who was then running for a seat on the Eagan City Council.

That relationship resurfaced in headlines more than a decade later after Pawlenty was elected governor. Roughly six months into his first term, it was revealed that Pawlenty had spent nearly two years on the board of a telecom company that was later accused of shady business practices. The president of the firm? Elam Baer. Pawlenty received $4,500 a month, and some $54,000 in all, to serve on the company’s board, but refused to provide any evidence of work he’d performed for the company.

Baer defended Pawlenty’s role in the telecom firm at the time. “I don’t think there was a month that went by that there wasn’t some [work]. Some weeks would be busy. Some weeks would not be busy,” Baer told the Associated Press. “I think I got good value for what I paid.”

Elam’s not the only Baer brother with an interesting, non-agricultural background. Zenas Baer is an attorney who also served two terms on the Hawley City Council. He’s represented murderers, Native American tribes and his family’s farming interests in court cases through the years.

But Zenas has garnered the most notoriety for a seemingly quixotic pursuit: the elimination of routine male infant circumcision. For more than a decade he has been filing (largely unsuccessful) lawsuits against medical institutions in an attempt to eradicate a practice that he refers to as “genital mutilation.”

“Why the hell are doctors fiddling with a normal, healthy newborn male?” he wondered in a 2003 interview with City Pages. “To make him more perfect? That’s the bizarre thing about it.”

Rebuffed on hog facility

In 2007 Baer Hogs applied for a conditional use permit to build a 51-foot by 408-foot hog finishing barn in Skree Township. The facility was designed to hold 2,400 hogs, each weighing between 55 and 300 pounds. These animals were projected to produce a remarkable amount of manure: an estimated 432 cubic feet per day – or 172,550 cubic feet annually. This animal refuse would be contained in an eight-foot-deep concrete holding tank.

The plan encountered fierce resistance in Clay County, largely owing to concerns about groundwater contamination from the manure. Robert Ronsberg’s mother lived directly adjacent to the proposed facility. His father had recently died and he was appalled that Baer Hogs had picked that moment to push for the hog barn.

“They’re not trying to be good neighbors at all,” charged Ronsberg. “They’re just trying to roll everybody over.”

Local zoning battles are often where feedlots run into serious problems. Residents understandably cast a wary eye on livestock operations that will produce tons upon tons of manure annually. “The problem is that the people who dislike the new livestock operations will use any stick they can pick up to beat them with,” said Hart. “They don’t like change.”

In some surrounding states, most notably Iowa, there is little local regulatory oversight of livestock operations. This results in a much more permissive environment for large-scale feedlots. A “Livestock Advisory Task Force” put together by the Pawlenty administration to study permitting issues in 2004 advocated adopting a similar scheme for Minnesota, but ultimately was rebuffed.

“The large corporate entities would like to see the ability to go anywhere in the state of Minnesota and do whatever they want to do,” said Sobocinski, of the Land Stewardship Project. “Those decisions normally are best left up to the local community. They can decide what makes sense here, what benefits us economically and what’s something in our community [that] we can live with.”

When the Baer Brothers’ proposed hog barn came before the Clay County Planning Commission in May 2007, opponents packed the government center in Moorhead. It was a contentious hearing. Zenas Baer, representing the agricultural firm, portrayed it as a family operation under siege from unreasonable neighbors. Near the end of the hearing he told the crowd that he felt like a “pariah,” according to minutes of the meeting.

Ultimately the 11-member body rejected the application for a conditional use permit. The principal reason, they said, was concern that high groundwater levels in the area would lead to contamination from the manure. The Clay County Board of Commissioners subsequently ratified that ruling unanimously. Baer Hogs appealed that decision to the courts, but was rebuffed.

Marvin Blakeway, a member of the Clay County Planning Commission, says it wasn’t a difficult decision to deny the permit. “It was almost a no-brainer to me and to the rest of the board,” Blakeway recalled. “I don’t think there was any bias on anybody’s part. … We’re supposed to look after the general welfare of people in Clay County.”

But to Amon Baer it was a prime example of why he expects most of his family’s business expansion to take place in North Dakota and South Dakota in coming years. He calls the environmental concerns a “ruse” that opponents can exploit to thwart business development. “We want to be able to continue the family farming operations,” Baer said. “It just frustrates you to no end.”

One Response to “Emmer’s poster children for reform: not your typical farm family”

1. Sheila Kihne Says:
   August 26th, 2010 at 9:25 am

   My goodness-

   Would you guys EVER investigate the welfare family that Dayton lived with? He uses this antecdote all of the time on the campaign trail but I’ve never seen one “journalist” ever investigate the real story.

   Exactly how long did he live with them? Where do they live now?
   Are they still on welfare?

   Of course nobody will ever ask- Dayton’s been running for office for almost 30-years and it’s amazing that we know very little about him.

   Of course we’ll know every detail of Tom Emmer’s life and any antecdotes he shares on the trail will be fully investigated.