[....] Martinmaas, whose family homesteaded this land in 1888, said his farm operation lost more than $700,000 last year. He’s had to put a moratorium on buying new equipment, and he’s stuck with grain bins full of soybeans, because China isn’t buying. Other farmers can’t pay their bills for the hay and grain they bought from him [....]
Martinmaas runs his farm operation — including Angus beef cattle, corn, soybeans, sunflowers and hogs — with his three brothers. He was born and raised in Orient, in a tiny house with no electricity or running water, one of 12 children of conservative Catholic parents. Now he lives with his wife, Becky Martinmaas, in a cozy house decorated in a lodge theme, with a gun room, workshop, horse barn, skinning shed and a salt-lick pallet out front, which Becky hand-painted in the colors of the American flag and the words “Let Freedom Ring.”
Married 31 years, they share a commitment to hard work and family, a love of sport shooting and hunting, and a distaste for coastal elites.
“I always say the West Coast and East Coast can each be a country and the rest of us will be just fine,” Martinmaas said from his kitchen table one recent Sunday, as Becky made butter biscuits.
“But they’d starve!” she said.
“Here in flyover country, we have everything we need — food, oil,” Martinmaas said.
“Except voters,” his wife responds.
Becky doesn’t share Martinmaas’s growing disillusionment with Trump. First, it was his abusive tweets — “I wasn’t raised that way,” Martinmaas says. Now, it seemed that Trump, whom he once embraced as the street-fighting outsider that farmers need, isn’t going to deliver on his promises to his rural supporters [....]