The phone in Lowell Raun's pickup warbles. He punches up the speaker, and the buyer in El Campo reports the bids for a 50,000-pound shipment of rice. Raun jots the figures on a computer printout he has wedged between his hip and a Styrofoam cup he keeps nearby to collect the brown liquid politely known as nectar of Redman.

Raun grows rice on just over 1,800 acres of anvil-flat land outside El Campo. His world is both small and large. Half the day he acts locally. He rigs a laser to measure the grade on this 50-acre field as it slopes to the south. He attends a committee meeting in El Campo and stops to taste a rice recipe his wife is testing for samples to be dished out in grocery stores.

Once the Rauns' rice is hauled to the cooperative rice warehouse for drying, storage and sale, however, it is out of their hands. From there, it enters a corporate stream to be milled and processed with tons of other farmers' rice.

Half the day Lowell Raun thinks globally. He checks on the world market for rice. He wonders about the closed markets in Cuba and Iran and scans for what farmers will plant in Vietnam and Thailand.

His vision is absurdly minimalist, as Raun levels his fields to the fraction of an inch. And it is impossibly large, as he calculates his business against the patterns of world trade and the vagaries of federal agriculture policy.

The grand theory of national agriculture policy, established in the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act, was that government should get out of the business of supporting private agriculture.

The country began reducing subsidies and price supports for farmers. Farmers were asked to innovate, experiment and find prosperity in a world market. The government gradually began to phase out crop subsidies. According to Freedom to Farm, rice farmers will live fully in the "free market" by 2002.

Lowell and Linda Raun have held up their side of this free-market bargain. The Rauns have planted new crops. They've created their own brand selling organic Jasmine rice at the groceries represented by dozens of colored pins Linda has jammed into a map of Texas. Lowell has cut costs, reducing the number of workers on his farm even as he's increased acreage.

The theory, however, has been a flop. The high prices for rice and other grains that looked so stable in 1996 collapsed like a punctured tire. The world price for rice these days, Lowell Raun says, is $4.50 per hundredweight, less than half what it was when Freedom to Farm was passed. If he had to sell his rice at that price, Raun says, "I'd have to shut down."

Not that this issue has made much of an impact on the presidential campaign. In the three debates between Vice President Al Gore and Gov. George W. Bush, exactly one question has been asked farms and farmers. Tuesday night in St. Louis, Gore said he thought Freedom to Farm had been "mostly a failure" and that he would construct a "safety net" for farmers. Bush didn't address Freedom to Farm, saying instead he wanted to "open up markets" and remove the federal inheritance tax.

The candidates spent two minutes each talking about farmers, then it was on to other issues, like the Middle East, Social Security and taxes. To farmers like Lowell and Linda Raun, however, farming isn't a debating point. It's a dance that lasts a lifetime.

A VACATION INSIGHT

Linda Raun married her big brother's best friend. Lowell was the grandson of a rice farmer, a Nebraskan who came to El Campo in 1913 and flooded his first rice field two years later. Lowell and Linda went to high school here and then on to Texas A&M.

The college sweethearts married in 1975 and "started farming right away," Linda says. For 14 years, they grew conventional rice, selling their grain to the big buyers – Uncle Ben's and Comet. But "the market was getting harder and harder," Linda says. They thought their land could support corn or milo, but its sandy soil was best suited for rice. "We were looking for some way to diversify," she says.

The Rauns found it on vacation. They were in Washington state and saw signs for organic foods, organic stores, organic restaurants. "We ran into organics everywhere we went," Linda says.

The Rauns figured everything on the West Coast eventually would reach the sausage and pinto bean belt of South and Central Texas. So they came back to El Campo with the idea of growing organic rice. Moreover, instead of just plain rice, they'd grow Jasmine, a nutty'tasting "aromatic" rice. "We'd be doubly different," Linda says.

The Rauns started with 30 acres of organic Jasmine in '89. Today, they still grow their 30 acres but also contract with nearby farmers to grow 400 acres of organic rice. They have their own label – Lowell Farms – and their own system of distribution. They set up tasting stations at hippie-turned-yuppie grocery stores. They have a Web site, of course.

There are Lowell Farms' hat in the company's headquarters in El Campo, and Lowell Farms magnets and Lowell Farms gift packages. It's all cute stuff and fun in the way it seems like fun to start your own business.

But this is a serious undertaking, one that is part of a mad scramble by individual farmers who are attempting to hang on to their ancient occupation despite dipping world markets and a federal agriculture policy that has yet to find a balance between brutal free markets and wasteful subsidies.

So far, the organic market has been good for the Rauns and El Campo farmers. Lowell Farms pays $15 for each hundred pounds of organic rice, almost double what farmers receive for conventional grain. But the benefit for the Rauns is in the stability of grocery store prices. Although the price for raw rice has dropped in half over the past few years, "in 12 years on the grocery shelf," Lowell says, "we've never lowered our price."

The little sacks of organic rice with the homey Lowell Farms logo now account for a fifth of the Raun's income. It's not dirt farming, but it's not bad.

NO CONTROL

"Fifty percent of a rice farmer's fate is how well he grades his field, his production," says Abner Womack, director of the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute at the University of Missouri. "And 50 percent is what's happening outside their kitchen window, where they don't have any control."

Lowell Raun sets a laser at the center of one field. The grader on the back of a modern-looking tractor adjusts to the level beam, moving up and down as Raun drives across the field. High spots are scalped down, and Lowell drags the excess dirt to build up low spots.

The flatter the field, the less water it takes to keep flooded during the two and a half months rice grows. By using laser leveling and by tinkering with his irrigation ditches, Raun has been able to reduce the water he uses from 42 inches a year on each acre to 26. And although he hired five people to run a 1,000-acre farm 25 years ago, he now plants and tends 1,800 acres with three workers.

Inside the kitchen, the Rauns are taking care of business. The world outside their window, however, is a patch of cockleburs.

Prices for all grains have been disastrous since 1997, according to Womack. Congress has passed extraordinary appropriations in the past three years that have doubled the support payments under the 1996 Freedom to Farm Act. Both Womack and Raun expect new legislation to pass before support payments go to zero in 2002, but no bill has been passed yet. Under the 1996 bill, price supports are scheduled to drop another 20 percent in 2001.

Not surprisingly, the number of acres of rice planted by Texas farmers has dropped from 345,000 just before Freedom to Farm to 211,000 this year.

Meanwhile, the market for organic Jasmine rice has grown large enough to attract the attention of the big boys. Linda and Lowell expect the large rice marketers to begin packaging their own exotic rices shortly, so even that relatively stable source of income may soon become tousled. "Now he's taken on a bigger issue," Womack says of the Rauns. "Now he's got Uncle Ben staring him in the face."

Lowell Raun is undaunted in the way small-town, small-business people sometimes seem too stubborn to quit and too hard-headed to now they can't beat the system. Has Raun considered who would be best as president?

Not much, he answers. He doubts either party's candidate has broken a sweat thinking about farmers. A nutria scampers in a hole in the levee. Raun spots the rodent and says, "They're not as bad as they used to be because the alligators have come back."

He accepts world markets, even knowing what they bring. "The low standard of living in those countries is driving the world market price way down," Raun says. "We're competing with Vietnam and Thailand. Am I saying we need to be protected? No, I'm not going to say that. Farmers know how to compete. I think we can make it. I really do."