Biography

Marjean Sutter was born in 1935 near Huxley in Story County, Iowa. Her father did landscaping and her mother did baking for a fraternity in Ames. She graduated from Huxley High School in 1951 and began what was to become seven years as a secretary for an insurance company in Des Moines. While working, she met Donald Sutter, a farmer from Runnells. They married in 1958 and had three children. They first farmed with his parents, but then rented their own farms. The last farm they rented was near Pleasantville, south of Des Moines. They enjoyed the neighboring farmers and eventually bought the land from the owner on a contract basis. They eventually bought 400 acres of land in the area, had dairy cows, raised hogs, and worked the fields. To finance year-to-year operating costs and equipment purchase, they borrowed money from local banks and the Production Credit Association (PCA). They paid seven or eight percent on these loans originally, but by the 1980s, interest rates had reached twenty-one percent. They heard about PraireFire Rural Action on the radio and contacted the Des Moines office. Marjean Sutter began volunteering on the PrairieFirre hotline, she helped organize a 15,000 farmers rally in Ames, as well as a meeting between local farmers and the local PCA office. In 1984 they sold some of their equipment to cover their loans, but never lost their land. Between 1983 and 1986, Marjean Sutter organized almost weekly buses to take farmers to Washington D.C. to meet with legislators, directors of federal agencies, and farm organization representatives to lobby for the 1985 Gephard-Harkin Farm Bill. Marjean and Donald Sutter along with their son continued to farm over 2,000 acres of rented land in central Iowa and northern Missouri. The family farm, where her son and his children live, is the site of several large grain silos. Large grain trucks with the Sutter Family name on the doors loaded and left as we visited.

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