By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 17, 2003; Page A01

GERALDINE, Mont., Nov. 16 -- A cold, nerve-rattling wind, the kind that can make a passer sick to his stomach. That's what the coaches from Geraldine High, whose boys had won 11 straight by keeping the football on the ground, were praying for in the state championship game.
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Six-man football is what they play in towns as small as Geraldine, population 284. From Montana to the Dakotas and south to Texas, six-man football is a socially sanctioned intoxicant. On Friday nights and Saturday afternoons, it numbs the pain of demographic decline across the Great Plains.
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Six-man football was invented in Nebraska in the 1930s as an antidote for the declining populations and empty wallets that came with the Great Depression. It blossomed on the plains until the mid-1950s, but wilted with the Baby Boom and good crop prices.
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... [P]erhaps the most important reason for the depopulation of Geraldine and eastern Montana is a 15-year-old federal subsidy that pays farmers to grow native grasses on their land, rather than grain.

Called the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), it was intended to remove fragile, easily eroded land from production and stabilize crop prices by reducing the amount of grain that farmers grow.
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The CRP, however, has also had the unintended consequence in Montana of emptying small-town schools, according to farmers, bankers and local federal officials. In a perverse way, they say, the CRP is a major booster of six-man football. Geraldine reverted to six-man just three years after local farmers began signing up for the program.
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