Farm  financial experts have reassured me that it isn’t the 1980s all over again. Times are are hard, but it's not as bad as during the 1980s ag crisis.

Interest rates are low.

Land prices don’t look like they are going to collapse.

Farmers made a lot of money last couple of years and most were careful to save some of it.

Farmers and ranchers aren’t going to go broke in mass, they say.

There is not going to be big spike in farmer suicides.

Bankers aren’t going to have to worry about getting shot.

That all may be true

But two angry people called me this week in response to column I wrote in the Dakota Farmer magazine about a loan restructuring program announced by the Bank of North Dakota. I said the BND program was a bad idea. Maybe it was okay for natural disasters and other acts of God, I wrote, but not for farmers who didn’t save money when times were good.

The callers were pissed. They said they were in deep financial straits through no fault of their own. How dare I oppose a program that would help them?

They didn’t buy high priced land.

They didn’t buy lots of new machinery.

They didn’t borrow too much money.

Costs had just gone up and grain prices had gone down so much that they were losing money. They said they can’t figure out how to cover land, seed and other costs and have enough to live on this year. Crop insurance – which once almost guaranteed that you couldn’t lose money grain farming – was busted. There is a big gap between costs and the coverage.

“What are we supposed to do?” they wanted to know.

I didn’t know what to say to them right then on the phone. But I do now. And it is probably going to make them angrier:

Maybe you should give up the farm.

If you can’t make any money, why do it?

I expect most of you who farm are getting hot under the collar now, too. Yes, I understand the ties you have to the land. My wife and I have lived 30 years on same patch of land in the Red River Valley and raised three sons here. It’s only nine acres, but production from it – and rented land – helped put our kids through college. Our boys are grown and scattered all over the country and we need to sell the "farm" and move to town, even to just be closer to the grandkids. But even though we have had a realtor out, we haven’t been able to actually sign an agreement to put the place on the market.

So if you decide that you have to somehow, someway stay on your farm, I understand. But quit worrying about how unfair the situation is. Quit trying to figure out who to blame. Quit hoping for a government or bank program to come along and help you out.

You need to find new ways to make money. You need to custom farm. You need to work for a neighbor. You’ll need to get a job in town and farm at night or on weekends. For sure you’ll need a winter job, raising livestock maybe, or working in town.

Jobs in rural North Dakota and South Dakota are hard to come by, though. Maybe you will have to move to Fargo or Sioux Falls – or Minneapolis, or Omaha, or even further.

A North Dakota Master Farmer and his wife I interviewed a couple years ago had to get jobs in town in the 1980s to make ends meet. But the economy got so bad they lost the town jobs, too. So they moved to Phoenix, Ariz., in the winter and worked temporary jobs there and came back to North Dakota to farm in the summer.Though they lost most of the land they were renting and had bought, but they held on to the machinery and eventually got back into farming and prospered. Today, they are transitioning a large, successful grain operation to their son and his family.

For some of you, 2016 may very well be like the 1980s.

That’s the hard truth and it sucks

But farmers and ranchers survived the 1980s. You can get through today's crisis, too.