Tracing Farm Roots

Tracing My Farm Roots

            My farm roots are older than a majority of the people who live in Utah. My father’s family, Irish expats who immigrated to America at the end of the nineteenth century, built a home in Boston and stayed there for good. They were businessmen and militants who died in wars, were buried in France, while the rest of them maintained a thriving legacy on the east coast, but none of them were farmers. My mother’s fifth great grandfather, a young boy working on a farm in Denmark, was introduced to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints by a school teacher. Against his family’s advice, the young boy sailed across the Atlantic Ocean and made his way as a farmer in Nauvoo. This was the beginning of a farming line that lasted half a century, was broken by sales, the great depression, and restored again for twenty five more years.

            Elias Henry Jensen, or, as my mother knew him, Grandpa Curly, was a wheat farmer in Pocatello Valley, Idaho, but he didn’t begin that way. Somewhere along the farming line that came from a young Danish boy, the Jensen family made a healthy income with a furniture business. From a young age, Curly worked the store and learned the delicate language of negotiation. After he met and married Amy Grover, a farmer’s daughter from Salt Lake City, his new father-in-law, Arthur Napoleon Grover, offered to teach Curly everything he knew about wheat farming. Arthur believed that the farm would flourish under care of a salesman. And so it goes, Curly became a farmer.

            Ezra Taft Benson became an apostle of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in the summer of 1943 and Curly sustained him, knowing that, as a fellow farmer, Benson would understand the troubles and hardships that often approached the American Farmer. Curly believed that with a farming advocate alongside God, revelation could be fulfilled and life on the farm would run smoothly.

            Years passed and as Ezra Taft Benson remained in high church authority, he was also gaining national political recognition when it came to agriculture. When Benson became Secretary of Agriculture in The American Cabinet, Curly began becoming suspicious of his ideals.

In all the years Curly had been a farmer, the government had had a large hand in his wheat farm. Becoming a farmer after the Great Depression meant that one of the farmer’s main goals was to boost up national economy. As backwards as it might sound, on good crop years, Curly was sometimes paid to watch his late crops fail. The purpose of this was for the principles of supply and demand to sculpt the economy back to a healthy state. With less wheat, he could charge more money for the crop than abundance would allow for. Curly believed this was the right way to do things. Ezra Taft Benson opposed this practice because he believed it to be a large step in the direction of socialist America. Curly stopped sustaining Benson in both as a member of the American Cabinet as well as a religious leader. 

This story that my mother told me has me wondering how many other American farmers opposed the breakup of a law that would have required more effort for less profit. I find it interesting, too, that even before socialism paranoia of the late fifties and sixties, like Benson, government officials in American have always opposed socialism. I am led to wonder where the American farmer would be today without the influence of Ezra Taft Benson. Even though Curly did not agree with agricultural laws at the time, he abided by them, got back to work, and grew extremely successful crops.