Bill Ganzel. The "cave" on Harvey Taft’s farm. North of Falls City, Nebraska, June 1975

[Harvey was one of the original members of the FSA-sponsored cooperative farmsteads and bought most of the land and buildings when the program ended in the early forties.]

"I’ve enjoyed it all. I wouldn’t have missed it for anything, and I wouldn’t want to go through it again. It got to where you couldn’t buy a job in the thirties when the Depression hit—got rough. It got to where I was working for a fellow for a dollar a day putting in about fourteen hours a day. He comes to me and wanted to hire me for the season. He said he’d give me $17 a month. He says he could hire a man for that.

"I says, ‘Well, you’d better go hire him, because,’ I says, ‘I can’t. Less than a dollar a day, my family can’t live. I know, I tried it too long.’

"So he says, ‘what will you do?’

"I says, ‘I can sign on the relief.’ So I did. I got $2.44 a day on relief and a grocery order. Then they built this project here and I was selected for one of the families to move on this farmstead. Ten families moved on this eighty acres and had about seven acres apiece, vegetable farming. We built the caves after we moved here.

"After four years we quit vegetable farming and they organized us in a nonstock co-op. But the other men didn’t co-op with me. They wouldn’t help me when the hay needed put up. They didn’t help shock the grain. I blew up. I says, ‘I’m done with this co-op.’ But some big shots came here and they wanted to sell me a farm out of this. So I told my wife, I says, ‘We’d better just stay right here.’ And we stayed.

"I sold out when I was sixty-five, fourteen years ago. I sold out to my son Cleo, here and just reserved my home. I don’t own a thing but my household goods and my automobile. I got everything the way I wanted it when I got old, only that I’m left alone."

—HARVEY TAFT