[00:00:00] Speaker A: To the 232nd episode of the Atlas Society asks. I'm Jag. I'm CEO of the Atlas Society. I'm very excited to have author Brian Risinger, author of Land Rich, Cash Poor, My Family's Hope, and the Untold History of America's Disappearing Farmer. So, Brian, thanks for joining us.
[00:00:23] Speaker B: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate being on.
[00:00:27] Speaker A: So first question, which betrays my ignorance. What does squirrel taste like?
Some reasons. You know, the stories of you and your dad hunting for squirrels, the fact that I didn't realize that people eat and hunt squirrels for their meat shows exactly why this book is so needed.
[00:00:50] Speaker B: Well, you get the award for the most unique first question and you'll laugh at me. And maybe some people roll their eyes, but, you know, there's that old saying, it tastes like chicken. It actually both squirrel and rabbit are similar. It's kind of like the dark meat on a chicken. It's, it's lean, it's flavorful. It's best in like a stew or gravy. So my mom is the one who's best at cooking that up. But you're right, I mean, when you live close to land, and I know that hunting is not for everyone and some people are very enthusiastic about. Some people are not. But when you live close to land, you learn to care about the land and the resource. You learn to respect animals and, you know, that's part of our way of life a bit. During some of the tighter times, especially when my dad, mom were first starting out, he was hunting and trapping for meat just to kind of ease the farm budget during tight years in the farm crisis. So it's a, it's a fun. It's a fun tradition. It's a meaningful thing for us, too.
[00:01:40] Speaker A: So tell me a little bit about what's behind you there on the wall.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So behind me is over here, I guess are things about my personal life from when I grew up. I grew up in Sauk County, Wisconsin. Some things from high school and early stories and then kind of here over is all just different things that I've written. Notable moments, outdoor magazines where I wrote a story about my nephew and I on a hunt on the Cumberland Plateau.
New milestones when I got the chance to tell new parts of my dad's story. This one up here is me telling a story about my dad and experiencing the way that small family farms were left behind needlessly by technological innovation. That's actually one of the ideas that became a big part of the book. Land Rich Cash poor. So anything back there is a moment where I had a meaningful moment as I was building toward being able to tell more and more of our stories from rural America here.
[00:02:34] Speaker A: So tell us a bit about your first jobs on your family's dairy farm. How old were you, and what were the ways that you and your sister and all of those who came before you contributed to the functioning of the farm?
[00:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, it's such a crucial question farm kids don't get asked about very often. I was working with my dad from the time I could walk. Now, there's a difference between how useful I was and how hard I was trying. But I was working with my dad from time I could walk. And so, you know, I remember early on sitting in the wheelbarrow as he would be taking feed through the barn, wheeling it back and forth. And my first job that I remember is sitting on the pile of corn while he was feeding the cows. It was my job to scoop small amounts of mineral that were vitamins for the cows, and it was my job to sprinkle those on. So while he was taking his big scoop, I was taking the small scoop. And around that same time, it was my job to help spread hay. I was learning how to clean out the barn. All of these things. It progresses pretty quickly after that. By the time I was in third grade, I'd negotiated a wage with my dad to be doing chores before and after school. And that was all stuff that you did in addition to not only schoolwork, but if you were doing sports or something else, you had work that you had to do before or after and in between. And so, you know, you learn the value of hard work, you learn the value of earning what you have. And, you know, when you're. When you're a third or fourth grader and you know you're buying something you want at the store because you worked hard before sunup with your dad, you really value that.
[00:04:01] Speaker A: So let's talk about your family's history, how they. They got into farming, and how that has changed over the years.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: Well, as I think about the work that I did growing up as a kid, and many folks who aren't part of farm families are sometimes amazed to hear what you do when you grow up on a farm. It gets more and more incredible as you go through the generations. And I didn't realize this until I dove and I'd known some loose family stories. And I want to say that most farm families live the kinds of things that my family has lived. The difference between our family and so many farm families is that we decided to speak up. Most farm families keep your head down to get the work done. We're getting the work done. And my dad, mom, sister and I, and others throughout the generations, when I talked with them, decided maybe it was time to tell this story. So it began in the early 1900s. My great grandfather and great grandmother escaped Pre World War I Europe. They came to America to find a better life, and they decided to do that by digging their living out of the dirt. They started our farm in 1912. They spent their entire life paying off the debt it took to purchase that farm. They sailed into the Great Depression, which my grandparents grew up in. And my grandpa and my grandma grew up in two decades of poverty and climbed into the middle class. And we tell that story in the book. My parents took over shortly before the 1980s farm crisis, where America needlessly wiped out tens of thousands of farms because of mistaken government policies and all kinds of problems. My parents actually started their first year of marriage in a drought, and my mom still married my dad, and they went on to survive the farm crisis. And then my sister and I grew up during all of the changes that occurred through globalization of the 90s and onward, through the various recessions of the 2000s, through the COVID lockdown. And we've seen all of those challenges. So there are. We tell stories in the book of farm accidents, weather that blesses or threatens economic hardship, human resilience. And it's just an honor to be able to tell those stories. And we decided we want to do it in an honest and raw way. So we deal with a lot of challenges that we faced along the way as well.
[00:06:02] Speaker A: So how challenging? I mean, given that you have this very long family history stretching back over a century, how hard was it for you personally to seek a career trajectory beyond your family's farm? And when did you realize that you wanted something different for yourself?
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, I think it was always there to a degree. Growing up, I loved where I was from. I loved my roots. I loved growing up in the country. I didn't have the cattle, the talent, excuse me, for cattle and crops like my dad didn't like my sister does. And I was always searching for what is it that I need to do? And I think every human being has something that they're geared for, they have the talents and passion for. And mine was words. And I think I did when I really realized it was actually a really meaningful turning point in our family. Every farm generation has a chance and a time that they have to step up. And When I was 14, my dad became very sick. He had some internal bleeding, dealing with some digestive issues that turned out had also to do with cancer. He had a very serious operation. And my mom sat me down, and she said, you know, we've got, you know, a guy down the road, guy named Ed Widener, who was a mechanic who'd grown up on a farm. Ed's gonna come help. But, you know, Ed has family of his own. He's got a job of his own to provide for. Excuse me. Get a little emotional just thinking about it. And. And she said, you're gonna. You're gonna have to help him because he can't do everything. And I had been working with my dad by then for a good 10 years, but I was only 14, and I stepped up and had to do a lot of the work of a man at that time. And, you know, the irony for me is, although I was so proud to do that, it's also what drove home for me that it wasn't my calling. And it was shortly after my dad came back to work. And I think at that point, he had hoped that maybe this meant that I really would have turned the corner and would be the kind of, you know, son ready to take over the farm that he needed. And that was. That was the year that I realized that it wasn't. And so I later talked to my dad about that and went on to pursue a writing career. I'm grateful now to have come back around to tell our stories. I'm involved in the business side of the farm, and all farm kids get thrown in tractors on their days off. And so I'm happy to be part of it from that standpoint. But for a long time, I carried that guilt around in that sense, that I was the first son in our family on my dad's side, to go to college. I was an honor. I was also the first eldest son in four generations not to farm. And I carried that around and learned how to deal with that. And I guess I'm still maybe learning and maybe writing the book and telling the story is a little bit of a chance to lay some of that down.
[00:08:35] Speaker A: Partly therapeutic. All right, great to see all of our regulars here and a lot of positive feedback so far. I want to remind everybody that we will be taking your questions, so please go ahead and type them into the comment section. We'll start off with one by my modern Gault asking Brian, what do you think is the leading cause for generational farms fading away Are younger generations less interested in taking on the family business?
[00:09:02] Speaker B: That's such a great question. And you're right to raise the issue of young people. I think that it's an element, but I think that the root issue goes back to the crushing of economic opportunity that our country has done for farmers. That's happened in various ways. Economic, political, and technological decisions that we've made, mistakes we've made throughout the history of this issue. But more recently, what we're dealing with is that the cost of production, the cost of what it takes to produce our food are going up, up, up. And the prices that farmers receive may go up, may go down, but they almost never keep pace with those increasing costs. And there's a drive toward greater and greater economic scale at all costs that is a result of that. There are ways that we could have mitigated that. There are things that we can still do about that, but that is a crushing force. What it means is that so many of our family farms do not have the kind of opportunity that the next generation ought to have had. For a long time. Even though my great grandparents and grandparents and parents came through many crises, the American farmer was still climbing. Now, farms were disappearing at that time, and many of the problems we deal with now were taking root then, but there was still opportunity. There's less and less of that opportunity that ties into young people. I see where I'm from, my nephews, all kinds of kids very interested in agriculture. They're part of FFA, they're part of 4H. And then what do they do? They go work in the trades. They go to the military. They work in maybe agriculture, but not farming directly. They might go off to college. All those things are honorable things to do. But they're not pursuing farming, not because they're not interested in it. They're not pursuing farmer because there's no economic opportunity there. You know, nobody has a guidance counselor in high school telling them, hey, you know, you got to go into farming. You know, they're getting all of these other forces and pressures, and, you know, they want to be hopeful about their life. They're trying to figure out what they can do to contribute and move forward and have their hard work contribute towards something. And farming has been a dimming light in this country for too long for them to see that that's an option for them in many cases.
[00:10:58] Speaker A: All right, Alan Turner asks, have government subsidies aided or hindered farming? What about farming regulations?
[00:11:06] Speaker B: It's a complicated answer. I'm going to take regulations first, because that's a little more straightforward. Generally speaking, as so many listeners of this show are going to know, regulations add cost. There are times and places for regulations, but the level that they've reached with our federal and state governments across the country is so often the case that it is adding cost and not necessarily providing the benefit that it was supposed to or their unintended consequences. And it is the smallest farms, the big farms have to deal with that, too. But it is the smallest farms who don't have the army of accountants and lobbyists and lawyers to navigate this or the economic scale to absorb that cost. So oftentimes, it's ironically the family farms that suffer the most through that. Now, the part about subsidies is more complicated, and I will say that I am a person who thinks that we should have as much of the market directing what's going on as humanly possible. There is an argument for some level of government support for the issue of uncontrollable weather factors and things like that, some baseline for our food supply, but not in a way that involves picking winners and losers, not in a way that involves having farming responding to incentives that aren't market incentives, but they're government incentives. What we have right now is we have subsidies that have been built up in so many ways, and our government has never really gone through and reformed them fully. So you could argue for or against a particular program in one case or another, but that's almost irrelevant because what's happening is they're being piled on top of one another, and they're often contradictory, and they steer toward particular types of industries or particular types of farms. And then on top of that, as many people who listen to the show know, also government over time will be prone to abuse and favoritism as well. So are they functioning the way they should? Are they contradictory? Are they, you know, being abused or being utilized for favoritism? All of those things are problems that have piled and compounded over the years. So we have a situation where the farmer, some farmers are simultaneously dependent to some degree on that income from government subsidy, and they sort of need to do that to have some sort of a stable income, and yet they want to be doing other more entrepreneurial things in our economy, and there are not enough opportunities, not enough market for that. And one of the reasons for that is the way that the government has twisted the situation over decades upon decades.
[00:13:17] Speaker A: So, circling back to regulation for a moment, you know, there is a. The case of, you know, big tech companies that actually welcome regulation because they've got the legions of lawyers to handle it. And they almost welcome it because it's a way of guarding against competition because the smaller startup competitors can't afford to employ that level of, you know, compliance control. Do you, do you feel like there's any suspicion that some of the bigger players might actually welcome the regulation as well? Do they actually even see smaller firms as competition or is it a different dynamic?
[00:14:02] Speaker B: I think that that is something that exists in industries all across the American economy. And the issue of regulatory capture, where a player from an industry is able to get their arms around the arm of the hand of government so strongly that they're able to steer it in their favor, I think that's a very real thing. The other thing that's going on is that's just one of a legion of anti competitive practices that really large organizations can do. And I want to be clear, this is not just happening in agriculture. The reason this is happening partially is because it's happening all across the American economy. Most of our industries are dominated in one form or another. And so the food companies are keeping up with the rest of the economy. The ag companies are keeping up with the food companies, the farms are keeping up with the ag and food companies. And so we still have many small farms in this country because of how deep of a trend, tradition that was and the tradition of small land ownership and entrepreneurship in this country. But so many of them have gotten bigger, trying to survive, sort of keeping up with the Joneses in a way that really spends our entire country, our entire economy. And you're right, although it happens in many forms, regulatory capture and using government, the arm of government to your own benefit is something that absolutely happens in industries all across. And I think that's something that farmers face.
[00:15:12] Speaker A: So on the other side of the spectrum of small landowners, how do you feel view Bill Gates becoming the largest landowner of farmland in America, buying up over a quarter of a million acres across 17 states?
[00:15:27] Speaker B: Well, I hope he does something with it that is meant to ultimately put land back into the hands of more people. I think we're in a better place when we have more small actors competing in any particular space. I can't say I know what's in his heart, mind and what he wants to do. But I think it's alarming anytime we have a trend, which we have had, where we go from a tradition of many small landowners or many small entrepreneurs, many actors competing naturally, to something being concentrated into a few hands. And so I think that we really need to be careful about where we're going when we do that, and the people who end up having their hands on large amounts of farmland, I think they need to be bearing in mind it's not simply a financial investment, but it is the land that sustains us. It is ultimately our food supply. And also farming is. And that, by the way, affects the health of our food, the price of our food, the availability and security of our food. But also I think that the American farmer and small business and entrepreneurship in this country means something to people culturally. So it's not only the farms that feed us, but it's a part of ourselves that we lose if the people who end up holding a lot of farmland aren't good stewards of it and don't ultimately find a way for that to go back into the economy in a natural way, in my view.
[00:16:37] Speaker A: Any thoughts on China's purchasing of farmland in the US should we see that as a threat?
[00:16:43] Speaker B: That is absolutely alarming and that is prone to some of the same forces, but additional far more nefarious impacts. So as we have gone now, when we had the height of the large number of farms in this country was in the early 1900s, it was about 6.55 million farms. We now have less than 2 million. So we've lost 70% of our farms. That's a rate of 45,000 per year on average for a century. When that happens and you have farmland that is not owned by as many small hands, but it is owned by fewer, larger organizations, it's much easier for a foreign adversary like the Chinese to come in and with one deal, make a deal with an organization that cares only about shareholder value, may not even have anything else at heart, and in one fell swoop, they're able to get large amounts of land. Now, the Chinese have over 300,000 acres at this point, and we have seen the amount of farmland owned by foreign countries grow by 15% in just two years. It's still a relatively small amount, but it's growing exponentially, in part because of this phenomena of the disappearing American farmer. To add to that, they're not only getting their arms around our food supply, which is something we should be concerned about economically and national security wise, but they're buying farmland near military installations. And I think we're all smart enough to know that that's not a coincidence.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: All right, a question from kingfisher21. The UK farmer is really facing a threat to their entire livelihood due to new inheritance tax law. Is there anything like that threatening the American farmers?
[00:18:15] Speaker B: It's a great question. I certainly Hope that there aren't new tax threats like that on the horizon. But America, although we in some ways have a system economically and politically that is free of some of the things that you'll see in Europe, we still have, you know, a mixed economy that has a lot of real challenges. The inheritance tax, the death tax, is a real challenge and problem for family farms. And I think this is a familiar concept to so many of us. But for what it is worth, we have farmland that is taxed as property, for property taxes. We have income from that farming operation that's taxed as income as a business. And then that land, at the moment when a family is at its most vulnerable, when the older generation has passed away and that land is passing to the next generation, there's a death tax that can in many cases be so crushing that the next generation can't afford to keep that land. The tax burden is so high that they have to simply turn around and sell that farmland for development. They get some money out of that, but they lose so much. And that goes back to the dilemma that family farms have, which is as it gets harder and harder to make a living each year, you are heading toward facing that moment where the farmer maybe has to say to his kids, I don't know if we can make it anymore. And the flip side is the other thing you can do is you can sell the farm. And when you do that, you lose everything else. Because when you grow up on a farm, it's not only your mom or dad's job, but it's your home, it's your community, and it's your heritage. In our case, four generations, and there are many that go much further back than that.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: Jackson Sinclair asks, has new farming equipment and technology hindered more than helped farmers? Any thoughts on the quote, right to repair case against John Deere? That is not a case I have heard of.
[00:19:55] Speaker B: That is a great question. The answer on technology is that it can and should be a solution for farms of all sizes, including small farms. It is not. Right now, we have reached the point of diminishing returns on our technological innovation, and here's why. For a long time, we had technology that was moving. We talk about this in the book Going back Decades. We had farm technology that was making it so that farms could take on more acres and more animals with fewer people breaking their backs to do that. At some point, that was a good thing because it was society progressing right. At one point, everyone used to grow their food, and then we started to move away from that. But people were still paying about half their household budget for food. As farm became more efficient because of that technology, it got to the point where, you know, Americans spend about 10% of their budget on food. Generally speaking, that got worse here in recent years, but generally speaking, that was the case. Now here's what happened in the 70s and 80s. We got to a point where farm labor had caught up to manufacturing labor in terms of wages. And so we no longer had to have technology was helping farms get bigger and bigger because we were losing labor to the city. And so there had to be ways for farms to get bigger to keep on feeding the country, but those wages balanced out. So there wasn't a need to continue with this technology that really tilted toward large farms. We used to have more of what's called scale neutral technology in this country. And what that means is it's technology that could work as well for large farms as medium and small farms. It would. For a smaller farm like ours, it would do what my dad calls penciling out where he can say, okay, if I purchase this technology in five years, in 10 years, it pays for itself with efficiency. Right? So we used to have more of the technology that could gear towards small farms. And we really stopped producing that in the way that we needed to in this country. Whether it was government or whether it was private sector research and development, it really focused on how do we get bigger, bigger, bigger. And that was really the north star. And so we had farms that were efficient, we had farms that could play a role. We could farms that could have niches. We had farms that could withstand economic hardship, but they couldn't withstand technology tilting the tables against them as well. So in that way, technology, although it's both a help and a harm, it has reached the point of diminishing returns. And we need to gear it toward helping farms of all sizes if we want to stop this issue of the disappearing American farmer. Now, on the issue of right to repair, that is such a good question. And the right to repair issue is very real. Different people have different solutions to it. But what basically what it means is growing up my dad with a wrench and, you know, he could fix the tractor or he'd go down to the mechanic down the road. You got to be able to do that because if you have a breakdown, it halts the entire farm operation. So many tractors and implements now are so incredibly sophisticated that no mechanic could do it. Not even your average computer programmer could do it. You have to be someone who works with these companies and is very, very specialized. Now, some Folks have gone after legislation or litigation to try to remedy that. I know the American Farm Bureau Federation has worked to work with John Deere to try to find a partnership to be able to have a way that their producers, their farmers can have access to what they need to be able to get their tractors fixed. But it's a real problem. We do need to make sure that the advancement to technology, whatever the solution is, we need to make sure that the advancement of technology and tractors doesn't go beyond the means of your average everyday farmer to be able to fix it. Farmers are skilled and resourceful. My dad is a farmer, a carpenter, a plumber, an electrician, a mechanic, all of those things. But if we have the technology going in a way that, number one, is tilting against small farms needlessly in the big picture and then in the smaller picture with right to repair advancing to the point that you really have to have an advanced degree in that particular product and have been part of producing it to fix it, that's artificial economic limitation. It keeps people from being able to compete naturally in the market.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Candace Morena asks, have farmers been harmed by the shakeup of the fertilizer market due to the war in Ukraine?
[00:23:36] Speaker B: Absolutely. Increasing fertilizer is one of the issues that touches on what I talked about in terms of the increased cost of production. So farmers are constantly dealing with higher prices in seed, fertilizer, energy. All of those production inputs and the prices that they get for their goods are not necessarily king base and usually aren't. And so fertilizer is absolutely very serious issue. And the disruption in the global markets has been a real problem. There's no doubt about that.
[00:24:02] Speaker A: All right. Elation asks, in your studies on disappearing farmers, have you seen any positive trends of new farms or people that weren't farmers before, but getting into farming?
[00:24:16] Speaker B: I have. I have. I want to say that getting into farming is more difficult in this country than it ought to be. A farm family like ours that had land that goes through the generations, generally what happens is the new generation purchases the farm from the old generation. That's the old generation's retirement plan. So Farmers don't have 401ks. What they do is they pass the farm onto their the next generation, that generation buys it from them over time. And so, you know, a farm family that is transitioning the farm from one generation to the next, that new generation has a major financial burden to take on in order to take over the farm. When you are not in a farm family that isn't fortunate to have had great Grandparents that paid off the debt from the bank and cleared the mortgage to then be able to sell it free and clear to the next generation to, to find land, to buy or to lease that land. That's an additional expense that makes it even harder. Now, despite those challenges, there are reasons for hope. And there are new types of farming going on. We still have nearly 2 million farms in this country. People are shocked, often hear that 96% of them are family farms. And what we have is we have great big farms, we have medium sized farms that have been almost wiped out. We have many small farms that have been wiped out. But then on the smallest end of the spectrum, there are some producers of fruits and vegetables. They call them market farms, where, you know, these are the farms that go to farmers markets and things like that. There are a growing number of those farms and that is fueled in part by the number of people in this country who care about where their food comes from. Now, that is very small scale. They also operate on very tight margins. It's not uncommon for those farms to lose money a couple years, get to the point where they can make money, make it for a few years, and then just reach that cliff where they can't really keep doing it anymore and they're not making enough money to justify it, so they fall off. But there's a growing number of those farms. We need to figure out what can we do for those farms to flourish more, have more opportunity, and for the other remaining small, medium sized farms to be able to take some of what's working there and apply it on a broader scale.
[00:26:06] Speaker A: Talk about ways in which various administrations throughout history have used America's farm bounty as a kind of gambit in foreign policy, whether as a weapon against enemies and adversaries or in assistance of an ally.
[00:26:27] Speaker B: Yeah, you know, that is something that both our political parties have done. The establishment of the Republican party and of the Democratic party have done that. And there's a perfect example of it heading into the farm crisis. I tell the story in the book of my parents surviving a drought their first year of marriage. They got through that without having to take out debt. They hadn't done that. They hadn't steered clear of having to take out debt in that instance. They would have gone into the farm crisis with debt and we may have well been wiped out between tens of thousands of other farms that were wiped out in that fashion. There are a number of things that caused that crisis. But one of the things is exactly what this question refers to, which is we had a situation where the Nixon administration had secured a deal for American farmers to sell large amounts of grain to the Soviet Union. And this is something that both parties had supported in various ways. And the idea was that, quote, food is a weapon. Nixon's ag secretary said that at the time. But it's a maxim that both parties embraced. And the idea was that by supplying food to the Soviet Union and getting them dependent on us, farmers were not only pursuing economic opportunity for themselves. We're providing a diplomatic tool to the American government. The American government could use that as a hammer, say, hey, you need us to feed you, so we need you to do this, we need you to do that. So it's used in the battle against communism, which, of course, so many Americans are united behind the idea of the battle against communism, particularly in that era. But what happened is we then turned around and had a situation where the Russians didn't listen, didn't comply, and they went ahead and invaded Afghanistan, even though America told them at that time, don't do that. So now, President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, tried to wield that weapon, that food weapon, and he put in place, of course, the embargo, including the grain embargo, against Russia. Now, that didn't ultimately change their behavior. They found other places to buy food from. And what ended up happening is you had farmers who had done more and more growth of grain, had grown, had built in capacity for these markets, and suddenly the markets that the government had opened for them were shut down by that same government. And so what farmers really learned is that when food is a weapon, farmers are really the collateral damage in that battle.
[00:28:26] Speaker A: All right, speaking of presidential administrations, President Elect Trump won the rural vote by even higher margins than he did in 2020 and 2016. What are some of the chief concerns or aspirations that are driving rural voter affiliation with Trump's populist brand?
[00:28:48] Speaker B: You're touching on a really key thing. And I think it's important for anybody, whatever they think of any particular administration or any particular party or politician, understand, which is that rural areas that power a lot of the vote in key swing votes, key swing states, excuse me, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, places like where I'm from, the rural vote is where there was such a movement consistently across those states that really helped deliver the White House. And so for those people who do or don't like that, it's important to understand it. And the reality is that what drove that was economic angst and a deep, deep, deep economic discouragement and frustration. So we all know that there's an economy that has Its ups and downs. Growing up in rural America, although people still have jobs and although I was lucky to have a middle class living, so many things are slipping away. The farms have been slipping away for a century now. The communities that were built by the farms have been shrinking for decades and the jobs have been disappearing for decades. And economic hope's been replaced with addiction and all kinds of other challenges and problems. When you live in a place like that, the economy in America may be going up and down, but your economy, the rural economy, is just generally going down. So we really have two economies in this country. And I think that's something that so many of our leaders haven't realized. And so when people in rural America were reacting to economic conditions, higher inflation, and other issues that many voters in many walks of life were responding to, for the people in rural America, it was not only about rebelling against those economic conditions that they were facing right now, but it was about also pushing back on a status quo that they feel has left them behind for decades, for actually a century at this point, if it's a farm community. And so that deep discouragement, that sense that the economic status quo has left them behind is really what's driven so much of the support for President Trump in rural areas.
[00:30:32] Speaker A: Speaking of the incoming administration, thoughts on how potential mass deportations of illegal immigrants might impact farming.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: Like many issues, it's a complicated picture for farmers. There are certainly, I think, a lot of people in rural America who support making sure that we have a good, strong legal immigration system system and want to have the border secured. There's also a large amount of labor that many farms depend upon on. The farm I grew up on really didn't depend upon that. There are many small farms in this country that don't depend on that because they are small and they just aren't a full time income for their families. That's the problem. They're on a growing entrepreneurial business. But there are many, many, many farms that do depend on immigrant labor, particularly larger farms. And so one of the issues that we'll have is that farms have to figure out how they're going to be able to harvest their crops and products in an affordable way if they don't have the labor that they need. Now, the obvious answer, and it's obvious to anybody who's outside of the halls of government, is to have some sort of legislation passed that allows for a securing of the border and a legal immigration system that supplies the amount of workforce and labor that America needs and provides economic opportunity to hardworking people who want to come to this country. That's the obvious answer. But because Congress has for decades now been unable to do that, this congressional gridlock is so commonplace that people look at this like it's an intractable problem. The only reason we're in this ridiculous position is because our government leaders aren't finding a way to actually solve the problem. They're just finding a way to beat each other up with it.
[00:32:01] Speaker A: Okay. Candace Morena asks another question. How did Covid and the lockdowns affect farmers? And maybe also how it affected your family. Family personally? Because I could tell there was some debates behind the scenes there.
[00:32:18] Speaker B: There were. There were. So it had a. It had a. A mammoth impact, and it showed the vulnerabilities of our food system. To share our context on that, my dad got a very serious case of COVID The kind of, you know, Covid and how it was handled is. Is controversial. And. And many people had minor cases and things like that. And I've experienced that other. Other people have. My dad had one of those cases that sends you to the hospital and. And puts you at risk of needing a ventilator and, you know, requires real medical attention. And so we live through that. And we had to figure out a way for my sister to carry the farm forward. I ended up taking care of my dad when he got out of the hospital. My sister ended up continuing to carry the farm for it. When you have a major figure on a farm like that laid up, it can halt the farm's operations. And so my sister found ways to keep our farm moving forward. But what we were dealing with with is something that farms across the country are dealing with, which is that prices were dropping because our supply chain was locked up. And so you couldn't sell your goods and products as easily as you otherwise would. Now, this touches on the really dystopian situation that we have with our food system right now. Many of you remember that in grocery stores, you couldn't find the food that you wanted, and if you could, it was much more expensive. Now, how is that happening at the same time that farm families like ours are struggling to sell their goods? We were able to sell our goods because there were enough small cheese factories in our area that were buying from different places, but many places were completely shut off. Many places had milk processing plants that were telling you, you're gonna have to dump your milk. That happened with beef. That happened with produce. So how do we have a world where consumers can't buy the food they need or it's more expensive that they can. And farmers can't sell the goods that they have, or it's much more low price in the basement if they can. And there's all this food being wasted. There was produce destroyed, there were animals euthanized, there was milk dumped. How do we have that happening? It's because we have a supply chain that is vulnerable. We, at this point, we talked about having industries that are dominated by large players. Right at this point, we have so many industries across the American economy that are like that, that our food system is very integrated. There aren't enough paths for the food to get from the farm gate to the dinner table. So if you have a large distribution center that shuts down or something like that, it can lock up the supply chain and suddenly the farmer can't sell his food and the consumer can't get the food. Now, that's the COVID crisis, and it was a real problem. And it's one of the reasons that food prices were through the roof for the past couple years. But it isn't just a moment in time. This happens all of the time. Whether it is bird flu driving up the price of chicken or eggs, whether it is invasive pests, whether it's weather events, whether it's global crises, we have all kinds of things that have that kind of shock to our system all the time. So the vulnerability of our supply chain is part of the reason that the price of food is going up. Covid was sort of like the massive stress test that revealed this, but it's something that plays itself out over and over and touches on a real problem that we have to address.
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Talked about when your dad was sick. You're caring for him and your sister really stepping up to. To run the farm. Were there any particular challenges as a woman running a farm? I mean, she's running it now, so I don't know. Doesn't seem that. That common.
[00:35:14] Speaker B: Yeah, no, absolutely. She absolutely has faced those challenges, and she's come up through what is, I would say, kind of ironically a man's world. And the reason I say ironically is back in the day, in the early 1900s, my great grandma, my grandma, they were women working alongside of their husbands, working alongside the men in the fields, doing the work of men. And so in many ways, farm country was showing that women could do the work of men long before Rosie the Riveter is concerned. But as we move through time and as economic opportunity faded in rural areas and as our country's focus shifted from rural areas to urban areas because people were moving There really weren't trailblazers whose stories were told in farm country about, you know, breaking that glass ceiling like we have in academia and corporate America and so many places in the American economy. And so, although ironically, women have been doing the work of men in farm country for decades, women like my sister in the modern era, they are coming in and trying to take over farms when there haven't been trailblazers showing that women can do this. And so she's really a trailblazer, I would say. She has had men that she has encountered who would come into the yard and be trying to sell a product to my dad, and they wouldn't even look at her, answer questions, let alone realize that she was part of the decision. She's had times where she went to go get machine parts and people said, shouldn't a man be getting this? She's had people who haven't taken her seriously when she's trying to negotiate them with them for business. And all of those things, you know, they pile up. And it's maybe not overt hostile sexism, but it is a kind of barrier that, you know, tells you you're not supposed to be here. And I'm really proud to say that my sister's overcome that. And she just kind of adopted the attitude of if they don't want to do business, they don't want to respect me, they're not going to do business with me. And she always had the backing of my dad. And people began to realize that if you didn't deal with my sister Malia rising or you weren't going to be dealing with the rising or far.
[00:36:59] Speaker A: Well, we were talking about Atlas Shrugged a little bit before we jumped on the show. And of course, there's that famous scene where Dagny, she was 14 when it occurred to her that women do not run railroads and some people might resent it. Then she said, to hell with that and never thought of it again. So, you know, are there any parallels between people going Gault and farmers disappearing?
[00:37:29] Speaker B: There absolutely are. And I think, you know, Atlas Shrugged was my introduction to Ayn Rand. And I read that as I was kind of transitioning from the rural economy to the urban economy as a business journalist working in Nashville. And I realized something, which is that the place of production in our country, the people who are producing, the people who are contributing something meaningful to society, is not always equivalent to how our society is rewarding things. Sometimes that's because of government and other things getting in the way and twisting what we incentivize in this country. But whatever the case, I think we have a situation where farmers have been putting in the work, producing food affordably, often at below cost, and have been doing this for so long that we're in danger of farmers shrugging. And perhaps part of that is what we're experiencing is that great shrugging, because we have economic forces that are wiping out farms for decades. And there are people in farm country who have made the choice they've had to make, where they've had to sell their land, have had to move on from farming. We cannot be in a position where we continue to have farmers feel that their productivity, their production, their contribution is society, is not meaningful to us. Because if that happens, it will continue to contribute to the disappearance of our farms. And the math is actually very shocking. Although we still have 2 million farms in this country, and although 96% of their family farms, there's reason for hope in that we also have less than 2 million farms. And at the rate of 45,000 a year, which is the average rate of disappearance we've had for the past century, if we have that for another 40 years, we will essentially wipe out the rest of the family farms in this country. And I suppose that might be one of the closest things that we could see in this country to Atlas shrugging if we were to lose the family farms that feed us.
[00:39:03] Speaker A: All right, my modern Gault, obviously clearly inspired by Atlas Shrugged, asks many Americans eat cheap, heavily processed foods. Any thoughts on how to improve, advocacy for fresh foods and more support for smaller farms?
[00:39:20] Speaker B: Well, it's a great question. We're seeing more energy around this than ever before. More people care about where their food comes from than ever before. Some of the reason for that is because. Because of. In the wake of COVID some of the issues that we talked about, what we really need is we need every American in this country to take a step toward purchasing their food in a way that creates more opportunity for our farmers. I always say, don't ask our politicians or don't ask someone else, anybody really. Do you support the farmer? Because you'll get the hands, they'll shoot up in the air. Of course I support our farmers. More than 70% of the American public trusts our American farm families. But our consumers, none of us really are making enough of our decisions around what will create new opportunity for our farmers. Now, here's the issue. It used to be that the food that was much cheaper was the heavily processed food in all of the American economy was heading in that direction, and it was wiping out farms the reality is that the food from our current food system, as we talked about earlier, has been increasing in price so much that our current food system really isn't all that affordable. There are times where you can buy something from, you know, a traditional place to get your food, and then you can go to a farmer's market or somewhere else and you can find an affordable alternative. Sometimes it's more expensive, sometimes it's less expensive. So we're not getting that affordability out of the traditional food system anymore. So what we need to be doing is everybody taking steps, full steps or half steps, toward knowing where their food comes from, buying food that they know ties back to the opportunity for an American farmer. Now, we can't just blow up our current food system, either because it provides a need and we'll have food prices go through the roof if that happens. But we do have the ability for consumers to say, I'm going to buy some food from farmers markets or from the local butcher shop, or I'm going to go to my grocer and I'm going to ask them for local options, because many of them are willing to carry it if they know that there will be demand for it. And so doing more of that is something that can really help. We also need government policy to change. We need to remove barriers that stand in the way of new economic opportunity and entrepreneurship for farmers. We need to make sure we have fair and competitive domestic, international markets. We need to make sure that technological innovation, to the point of our earlier conversation, is the kind of innovation that brings along farms of all sizes and doesn't turn against small farms. If we can remove some of those governmental and societal barriers and we can have this moment where people care more about where the food comes from than ever, we have more people stepping toward that. We can begin to transition our economy in that direction. But farms are small businesses, and they need to have the demand there to be able to justify the cost of making that change and to survive the transition.
[00:41:38] Speaker A: So we touched on subsidies earlier, and I came across this interesting statistic that since the early 1990s, the acreage planted in the basic big four crops, corn, soybean, wheat, and cotton, has expanded. This is despite growing demand for different kinds of grains and varietals. Now, the reason, some might argue, is that subsidies are heavily skewed towards monoculture farming, growing a single crop on most or all of a farm's available acreage. Any concerns that such policies lead to less food diversity?
[00:42:22] Speaker B: Yeah, it's absolutely one of the issues, and it's absolutely something that's driven by subsidies. It's also driven by some of the global trade that we pursued. Although trade can be a good thing, we need to have fair trade, and we have trade that had been tilted toward really benefiting the largest players who can produce the largest quantities of the lowest cost item. And so that was many of those commodity crops combined with the fact that you have subsidies steering in that direction. Sugar is another example in our economy. So again, there's a discussion to have around what kind of government programs do we want to have. And I think everybody from all ends of the political spectrum, things they don't like about our current programs. It's also true that food, food like corn is a. Is a major staple. Soybeans are something that's a major staple of not only food products, but all kinds of other products. There's a lot of things you can do with soybeans. But we should let more of the market decide that and less of government decide that. Now, in order to change that, it requires reform of those programs. It also requires that we have growing market demand for other crops and products so that farmers can move toward those naturally in the market. It's a very important, careful thing, the type of reform that we need to do. But the current situation where we're piling government program upon government program and subsidy upon subsidy is causing all the problems we talked about, for all the abuse and favoritism, and this is an example of that. I talked to one economist who's a great free market thinker, and he said that right now our government programs are kind of like a fragile Jenga tower. They're piled on top of one another. And whether you like one block or another, you're not sure if you move one, if the whole thing will come down. And so we need to make sure that we're reforming these things. And that's one of the biggest challenges that we have if we want to make sure that farms can pursue new entrepreneur opportunity. And farm, excuse me, consumers can have more types of food from places where they know that it comes from.
[00:44:03] Speaker A: Here's a question from lock, stock and barrel. He's asking, have environmentalist groups caused trouble for small farmers? And also, what about the threat of eminent domain?
[00:44:15] Speaker B: Yeah. So environmental activism and farming, it is so amazing to me the degree to which it ends up being at odds when it doesn't need to be. In my mind, farmers care more about their land than anyone. And there's so much common ground between farmers and people who care about our environment. They, you know, care about soil quality because people care about environment, don't want it polluted. Same thing with abundant water supply, they don't want it polluted. Farmers also don't want it polluted. But also they need healthy soil to be able to have sustainable business operations. They need abundant supplies of clean water to be able to water their crops. And so there's massive amounts of common ground that we could have. I would say that it is the debate around our environmental issues and the way that it puts us at odds that has caused these problems. There are many, many, many types of answers that are, you know, really focused around government regulation that have to do with concerns about our climate, et cetera. That whether farmers agree with them or not, the reality is that they drive up costs for farms. And it is again, the small farms, the small entrepreneur who can't handle the cost of those regulations. The biggest operations are going to have the legion of accountants and lobbyists and attorneys to help them navigate those regulations and in some cases get exemptions and all kinds of things. But your small family farm can't do that. And so they deal with the crushing cost. On the issue of eminent domain, I will say that is a very challenging issue. No farmer likes anything that impinges upon his land. That is one of the more sacred things. And so in general, I'm in favor of private property rights. I think there's certainly been times, whether it's the railroads or whether it's electricity and bringing electricity to places like southern Wisconsin, there is eminent domain needed for that. And so there's a limited role for it to a degree. But certainly private property rights need to be respected to a much greater degree in this country.
[00:46:04] Speaker A: I would say, well, as Ayn Rand said, without the right to private property, no other rights are possible.
And so speaking of capitalism, what role do you see for market based solutions such as cooperatives or private investment and helping small farmers compete without relying on government support?
[00:46:25] Speaker B: It's a huge part of it. And co ops have been part of the solution. And they need to find ways to be parts of the solution out of the future. But back in the Depression when there were strikes around the price of milk and other things, co ops became much more powerful because what they could do is they could come in and they could say, okay, we're going to get all these farms together and we are going to sell our goods collectively and we're going to have better bargaining power. And by the way, we're also going to turn around and we're going to Provide services to our farms that we can purchase and bring the cost down. And that's still something that exists. Farms like ours does, purchasing from co ops and they play a really important, crucial role. We need more of that kind of private sector activity to be able to do more of that and to push back more because market power is absolute. Farmers deal with. But another example of this is the technology issue that we talked about. The reality is that we need private sector innovation in scale neutral technology. That technology I talked about that can benefit not only large farms, but also medium and small. And in my opinion, it is in the private sector interest, the real market incentive interest of companies of all sizes to be investing in research and development in technology that can allow them to collaborate with small farmers. Because if they're only able to buy from big farmers, that can achieve the scale that they need, which is a valuable thing. If they only do that, we're going to continue to have farms disappear to the point that we lose our family farms. We really only have. I mean, how many farms do we need in this country? Is it, is it 500? Is it 100? You know, where do you draw that line? And if we don't begin to find a way for companies of all sizes and types to invest in research and development that can allow them to be able to work with farms of all sizes, we're just going to continue to lose our farms and lose our food supply and they're not going to have any products to buy or producers to work with.
[00:48:11] Speaker A: So when we talk about the innovation that's needed, of course people make a lot of money when they identify problems that need solving, needs that are going unmet. So if we had any venture capitalists in the audience or people interested in a startup to solve some of these problems, what, what should they be looking for? What are some of the problems that a small farm faces that might potentially be able to be solved by a technology that has yet to be invented?
[00:48:44] Speaker B: That is such a great question. Some of it pertains to what we were just talking about, but I'll get more specific about it. So artificial intelligence AI is an example of a technology that could go the way of favoring only big farms. Just think about like a bunch of great big machines being handled by one farm worker or one farm owner on one big farm with a big bank of NASA screens. You can imagine that world where it only benefits big farms. But if someone could find a way to bring scale neutral principles to AI for farmers, for one example is small modular vehicles that farmers can use to move through their fields and help with some of the field work. If they can be small and modular in a way where a large farm might buy 50 of them and a small farm might buy one or two of them, that's an example of something where there's a technology that farms of all sizes could adopt. Another area that's very rich is the issue of gene editing. Now science can be interesting and science can be scary sometimes. When you say gene editing, people think of Dolly the sheep and cloning. What I'm talking about is something more on the order of a more sophisticated version of hybrid corn. When we started inventing hybrid corn, we began to be able to grow it in more places. Gene editing is where you can naturally alter some of the genes of some of our crops so they can be grown in more places, more times of the year, and more climates. So in a world where you have some farms that are locked into growing a few types of crops and products because it's what they can grow on their ground and, and there's maybe a government support or a established enough market that they can justify growing that crop, but it really isn't a lucrative enough thing for them to be doing well. They're just barely grinding it out. Part of the reason they don't shift to new crops and products because there isn't necessarily a market, There isn't something they can turn to. Gene editing can be a whole new generation of crops and products that farmers can grow and pursue new entrepreneur opportunity with. And they could, by the way, meet the demands of consumers who want to know again, more of where their food comes from. So it also requires market demand from our consumers. But gene editing is one of those ways that we could find a way to link up that farmer who needs new opportunity with that consumer who wants a new type of food source. And so if someone can invest in scale neutral AI for small family farms and can invest in gene editing to find solutions for small family farms, that could be something that could make them money. And that could also allow small family farms to have new entrepreneurs opportunity as well.
[00:50:59] Speaker A: So let's say we have viewers that say, I'm convinced, I think that we need to do more as individuals to help us have a scale of different sized farms in our agricultural ecosystem. What are some actions that individual viewers can take other than first stopping by and buying your book? So we'll put that link up again.
[00:51:24] Speaker B: I appreciate that. Absolutely. I think that it comes down to thinking about the way that you vote with your dollars and with your Ballot. And so as you are going and buying your groceries, I'm not saying that everybody has to drop what they're doing and only buy from, you know, one CSA or something like that, but take steps toward it. You know, stop at the local butcher shop, stock the local farmers market, push for local options in your grocery store. Just try to diversify where you buy your food from and when you can buy something directly from a farmer, say a farmer who raises beef, and you can buy a cow or half a cow from them for the year, that kind of thing. Try to take those steps. And then when you're talking with your elected officials, have that same mindset in mind. Talk to your elected officials about what are you doing to create new opportunity for our farmers? That's a different question than what are you doing to support our farmers? They've all voted for some program that's supposed to help our farmers and the government. Right. But what are you doing to create new opportunity for our farmers? Maybe they have ideas, if pressed, if they don't have ideas, talk to them about your food sources and the types of food sources that you'd like to have instead, and talk to them about how they can pursue policy, hopefully policy that harnesses the market to do more of that. So those are some things that can be done. And we just really need to have elected officials who understand more of what's happening on our farms and how that ties to our food than we have right now.
[00:52:39] Speaker A: So tell us about your family's farm today. What are some of the changes that your sister and your father and you undertook to try and ensure its longevity? And are you feeling optimistic?
[00:52:54] Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's a great question. We milked cows for more than 100 years, our family did. And in spring of 2021, my dad decided to sell the cows. There were a number of reasons for it. One reason was that 50 cows had gone from being a medium sized farm to being a very small farm. And the ability to make enough money to persist on 50 cows was really becoming impossible. And so we had the choice of either getting much, much bigger, and some families have done that and added hundreds of thousands of cows, or to diversify our farm. We decided to diversify based on some ideas that my sister had and a business plan she and I worked on together. My dad sold the cows and turned toward raising cows for other herds, so heifers that become milk cows on other dairy farms, larger farm farms, raising beef for consumers, and raising a variety of cash crops. And some of the crops that we grow Our traditional crops. We've been talking about some of the crops that we grow. We're trying to always kind of find what could that next crop be that's worth experimenting with, with a few acres to see if it can be a new opportunity. So we're really a farm that's in transition from the old way of doing things, trying to find new ways of doing things. And I would say that we're feeling good, we're feeling optimistic in the sense that we're seeing that the income that we'd hoped we would have is there, but also the expenses continue to rise and community high. And so it's good to be diversified and to be having more than one way. You know, you can sell a herd of beef over here if something's going on with a crop price over there. And so that's good to be diversified. But all of these businesses are tight margins and that's not unique to us. Almost all farms have a very, very tight margin business, whether they're buying and selling many things or buying and selling one thing. And so we're hopeful, we're glad that we have our land. We're grateful that we can carry it on. So many farms that had to sell their herd also had to sell their land and lost everything. So we're grateful that we didn't do that. We're grateful that we have our land and we can still find a stake going forward. But things remain tight for family farms like ours and really all farms. And so the future is always a bit uncertain.
[00:54:48] Speaker A: Well, remaining grounded in gratitude is more empowering than embracing victims. So wishing you and your family much success with the farm and continued success in spreading this message with your wonderful book. So, Brian, thank you so much for joining us.
[00:55:10] Speaker B: Thank you for having me. People can find the book on Amazon anywhere online and also bookstores nationwide. I appreciate anyone who picks it up and just contributes to keeping this conversation going. Thank you for having me.
[00:55:21] Speaker A: Thank you. And of course, thanks to all who joined. Thank you for your great questions. It is the end of the year and if you haven't gotten in your donation to the Atlas Society, please do that now. You can make a tax deductible
[email protected] donate and next week I will be off. I'm headed to New Orleans to celebrate my parents 60th wedding anniversary. But Atlas senior scholar Richard Salzman and senior fellow Antonella Marti will host a webinar talking about what will they be talking about?
Talking about populism, what it is and how it has evolved. So I hope you will join us then. Thanks, everyone.
