Of all the expensive machinery Tom Giessel worked during the 2017 wheat harvest, his favorite sits in the office of his home. It’s a microfilm machine, the kind found in a high school library. Giessel uses it for his work as the historian of the National Farmers Union, the nation’s second-largest farm group. It’s the best investment he ever made, he says, and it sits in his office where faded bound books of old newspapers are stacked ceiling high and row after row of square white film boxes are packed into a cabinet. Today’s history lesson: one of the worst farm depressions to ever hit the U.S., which struck during the 1980s. “I remember in the early ‘80s what happened and how it happened,” Giessel says. “I went back, I’ve done some research, and tried to do some parallels and comparisons.” In the 1980s, thousands of farmers lost their land, ag banks failed and Main Street businesses in farm country went belly-up. Today, Giessel worries that history is repeating itself. Farmers face
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