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Losing 10,000 Farms a Year — And How to Reverse It with Brian Reisinger
151 Plays6 days ago
Are fewer, bigger farms putting our entire food system at risk?
That’s the warning at the heart of Land Rich, Cash Poor, the latest book by Brian Reisinger. In it, he explores the forces—technological, political, and economic—that have hollowed out rural America and made it harder than ever to keep a family farm alive. Drawing from his own multigenerational farming roots in Wisconsin, Brian traces how policy choices and market consolidation have left farmers squeezed—sometimes literally sitting on millions of dollars of land they can’t afford to keep.
In this episode, we dive into:
- Why the U.S. has lost over 70% of its farms in the past century—and what that’s done to rural communities.
- The role of technology and policy in fueling unnecessary consolidation.
- How farm crises, past and present, continue to push out small and mid-sized producers.
- The rise of land as an investment asset—and what that means for food producers.
- The growing divide between those who own the land and those who work it.
- Why America’s tradition of small landowners is worth fighting for.
- What scale-neutral technology and smarter R&D could do to level the playing field.
- How we create real economic opportunity for a new generation of small farms.
More about Brian:
Brian Reisinger is an award-winning writer and rural policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. Reisinger worked with his father from the time he could walk, before entering the worlds of business journalism and public policy, then going on to work as a columnist and consultant. He lives to tell the hidden stories of rural America and has been published by USA Today, Newsweek, Yahoo News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, PBS/Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life,” The Daily Yonder, RealClearPolitics, The Hill, and elsewhere. He’s given a TEDx talk on risks to our food supply, and appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal,” CNN, public radio, farm radio, and other outlets across the political spectrum. Reisinger’s writing has won awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, first place in the Seven Hills Literary Contest, a Solas Award, and more. He lives with his wife and daughter, and helps lead Midwestern-based Platform Communications, splitting time between northern California and the family farm in Wisconsin. Land Rich, Cash Poor is his first book.
Find him on X: @BrianJReisinger
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexandre Miller, who also wrote our theme song. This episode was edited by Drew O’Doherty.
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Transcript
Introduction to Farm Decline
00:00:00
Speaker
The ongoing, unabated loss of farms is a problem for all of us. And you can't have an industry just continue to consolidate on into perpetuity.
00:00:12
Speaker
The end of that is like a too-big-to-fail scenario. I mean, you know, do we want farming and ag and food to look like banking did in this country during the Great Recession? People think we aren't going to get there. Show me how we won't if we keep losing farms at the pace that we have. Show me how we won't.
00:00:29
Speaker
In season two of Agrarian Futures, we're starting with a simple question. How did we get here? Farms are disappearing. Land is getting harder to access. Rural economies are hollowing out.
00:00:41
Speaker
But there are people building better ways forward. Join us as we investigate what's broken in our food system and what it looks like to build something better.
Historical Context and Comparison
00:00:55
Speaker
So our guest today is Brian Reisinger, author of Land Rich, Cash Poor, where he talks about the historical decline of farms and farm numbers in the U.S. and weaves in his personal story with his multi-generational farm in Wisconsin.
00:01:10
Speaker
For the last century, we've been losing on average 45,000 farms a year. And with that, we've seen a fundamental reshaping of rural communities and rural economies. In this episode, we're really interested in talking to you about what has happened, how can we understand the historical forces that have led us to where we're at today, and and what are the possibilities for the future? And how can we think about rebuilding a more just, fair, and diversified food system?
00:01:34
Speaker
I'll let Austin kick us off with the first question. Brian here, I've been reading bedtime stories to my kids here lately because they're six and four, got two little boys. And we've been going through the Little House on the Prairie series.
00:01:47
Speaker
Set in the late 1800s, this is pioneer territory and they bounce around from different places. They're setting down roots and they're farming the lands. And at that point, I don't know how many people in the United States were farmers, but it was probably 50% farm families or 50% of families that were in some way engaged in farming.
00:02:07
Speaker
As we look at the agricultural landscape today, it's very different, right? I think it's less than 2% of the people in the United States are farmers who live on farms. ah So can you sketch out for us, where have we gone since those Little House on the Prairie days, which is only a couple generations away, if you think about it.
00:02:26
Speaker
It's a very different world that they inhabited, but it's really not that far removed from us in history. Should we go back to that? Should we have so many of us on the land and making our living by the sweat of our brow? We'll start off with some broad
Agricultural Shifts and Economic Impact
00:02:39
Speaker
strokes.
00:02:39
Speaker
What are some of the big things that have changed in the last 150 years or so Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks to you guys for having me. It's good to be with you. And I'm so glad that you guys are diving into this topic of what's happened to our rural areas because there's there's so much beneath the surface, not only that's happened in rural America and the places that kind of descend from those exact stories that you're reading your kids, but people i don't think have gotten their arms around how that affects the rest of America, you know how it affects every American dinner table and our economy and our culture in so many ways. you know When I think about that little house on the prairie comparison, it is so apt because we really started as a country recording the number of farms we had and kind of what was going on in American agriculture around 1850.
00:03:27
Speaker
At that time, the number of farms was going up, up, up. It was skyrocketing. And that sounds obvious in some ways because it's like well, yeah, we were out settling more land, right? and And on the other end of it, at some point, America was going to be settled and we were only going to have so much farmland on the continent and so, and, and companies, farms and companies and everybody competition, there was always going to be some consolidation, right? Like once you've got it all settled, like this the same is true of logging and ranching and anything that uses a resource, you're not going to stay at your height.
00:04:00
Speaker
Right. But we did see this incredibly precipitous decline. And so what happened is from about 1850 1920,
00:04:08
Speaker
The number of farms in this country were just skyrocketing. And part of that was because more land was being settled and the last parts of the country were sort of being farmed out, I guess, for lack better phrase.
00:04:19
Speaker
And part of that was because new types of farming were being discovered and it was really economically dynamic. So just to give you a brief example, in Wisconsin, where I grew up and where a lot of the the personal parts of the book stories are based, you know, this is the driftless region that wasn't flattened by glaciers. So like Kansas and Nebraska, great for planting wheat and other crops for miles and miles and miles.
00:04:40
Speaker
Wisconsin, really good soil, but like hills and valleys and not as much wide open. And so we farmed wheat in Wisconsin in the late 1800s, just like most other ag states did, because that was wheat was king at that time economically.
00:04:52
Speaker
but we couldn't plant as much wheat per acre as these other states to the west and to the south. And so Wisconsin had to find its niche and it found dairy because with fertile soil, you could grow crops to feed cows. And that was a really you know potent way per acre to be able to be successful. So there was new, like dairy milking cows wasn't new, but doing dairy on the kind of scale that Wisconsin would
Technological Influence on Farming
00:05:13
Speaker
do was new. And some of the some of the research and the the methods and technology so america was both settling its land and discovering new types of agriculture or new ways to do old agriculture that was really birthing whole new industries and when we hit 1920 that's a crucial turning point because the great depression hits in 1929 but 10 years before that much of rural america was in an agricultural depression and that's kind of forgotten to history
00:05:39
Speaker
And we hit that and the number of farms declines. The number of farms briefly goes up during the depression because a bunch of people who went off to the city couldn't work find work in the city, came back to the farm. But then the farms got hit again in the depression and the number went down and it has never gone up or stopped going down since. It has fallen. So basically for a century now, we've been losing farms. And so that's kind of the broad arc of what we saw happen. And you're talking about a timeframe from the 1850s, that was rugged and difficult, but also very entrepreneurial and very dynamic. And families were going from dirt poor to middle class because of agriculture.
00:06:15
Speaker
And we hit the depression era generally, and that script flipped and never really unflipped. Brian, can you explain to us a little bit what the effect has been of that continuous loss of farms over the last century to the rural economy and to the rural landscape of the United States? I'll give one little touch point just from my experience is my dad grew up on a small dairy farm in southern Minnesota, and he talks about how when he was young,
00:06:48
Speaker
there were so many churches and grocery stores and schools in his little community. And if he goes back and visits it now, it's sad because there's a fraction of the the institutions that that were there and were the foundation of the community are gone because there's just not enough people to support the the churches and the grocery stores and all of those things that were there because instead of having 20 farms,
00:07:15
Speaker
the same same amount of farmland is being farmed, but there might be two farms that are running it. So that's an example that I have from just from my own experience. Can you share a little bit more about what that looks like on a larger scale and then maybe from your own personal experience as well?
00:07:31
Speaker
Yeah, totally. There's so many ways to break it down. What has occurred is the loss about 70% of our farms in this country, 45,000 a year on average for a century. And We went from about 6.5 million farms at the height in that 1920 era when we were kind of hitting the height of the entrepreneurial opportunity to less than 2 million now.
00:07:55
Speaker
And you know when I hear you talk about your dad's experience, I feel a little bit like you guys are reading our multi-generational mail. Because I went back and as Emma said, you know with the book, we look at the hidden areas of history driving this disappearance and weave that with our family's story kind of from the depression to today.
00:08:10
Speaker
we go back a little further pre-depression. And when my grandpa's generation was growing up in the depression, there were about 16 people per farm in the United States. Every farm you had, there were about 16 people.
00:08:22
Speaker
And the wild thing is people kind of know this, but it's still worth saying, because it still blows your mind when you stop and think about it. 16 people was kind of a farm family at that time. My grandpa grew up 14 brothers and sisters, two parents. So they were that, literally they were the, I guess the average nuclear family.
00:08:37
Speaker
as far as farm families are concerned. So 16 people per farm. It would go on to be dozens of people per farm, hundreds of people per farm, right? like It's like it's infinitesimal now, the comparison.
00:08:48
Speaker
And so those are the numbers, but what's the impact of those numbers? We have had farms disappearing for a century. We have had rural communities shrinking really for 60 to 70 years.
00:09:01
Speaker
lot of these communities were built by the farms and they have had other components to their economy for sure, manufacturing and other things. And that's good. You want diversity, economic diversity, but the building of these communities by those farms and then the disappearance of those farms started off this shrinking of our rural communities.
00:09:19
Speaker
So that by the time we get talking about like the disappearance of Rust Belt jobs, right. And things like that. And we get talking about kind of the loss of economic hope and the moving in of drugs into rural areas, kind of you know replacing economic prosperity.
00:09:33
Speaker
All that stuff began when we started losing our farms. And so that's what we've really seen is we've seen a hollowing out. And I say that as someone from there, as someone who when I'm, you know, as I split my time back and forth between Wisconsin and and California and live on the family farm when I'm in Wisconsin,
00:09:49
Speaker
I'm proud to be able to go back there. I'm proud my family's there. I'm proud of the little town that we have there that still is there. And there's resilient people there. But at the same time, there used to be multiple grocery stores. Now it doesn't support one. You know like you see that. And there's communities like that over. There's towns where people are like, we used to have two barbershops and three implement dealerships and three grocery stores and eight taverns. And you know now there's one tavern.
00:10:13
Speaker
and a convenience store in the corner and a stoplight that we don't need. You know what I mean? And so it has this economic hollowing out. And I think it's read a lot of frustration in rural America. you can take in all kinds of directions, you know, but basically as the economy has gone up and down in America,
00:10:32
Speaker
there's There's two economies. There's one for kind of everyone, and then there's one for rural America that even as there are ups and downs in unemployment and other stuff, and good times and bad, there's still this overall kind of, in general, decline going on.
00:10:46
Speaker
And that really began when we started losing our farms. In the book, you talk about consolidation and in particular, the role of technology education. enabling consolidation. And you kind of argue that there's a period for which maybe that, you know, that was a good thing. Obviously, you know, you said 16 people per farm, 50% of people, you know, engage in agriculture. Like maybe that was too much. And maybe like up to a certain point, technological innovations that could mechanize agriculture to certain extent, free up some people to go do other things was a good thing.
00:11:17
Speaker
But that Probably somewhere around the 1970s, we started to see that maybe go too far. Could you talk a little bit about that and like the double edged sword of kind of technological innovation?
00:11:29
Speaker
Yeah, that's such a key question. And it also goes back to Austin, something you were talking about in terms of what has occurred here and how far did it need to go, right? Because at one time, almost every family in America was growing its own food. And there's some beauty to that. And there's some good things, like have a garden, right? For sure.
00:11:46
Speaker
And like, if you can if you can farm and you can start a new farm in this country, do it because we need you to do it. But Like we had a time in this country where every family was breaking its back. Almost every family, except for really upper classes, were breaking their backs to feed themselves.
00:12:00
Speaker
So to Emma's point, the advancement of technology allowed us to have farmers taking on more acreage and more animals with fewer people breaking their backs to do it. And that meant that the American economy could progress. Not everyone had to be spending every one of every day producing and growing food.
00:12:19
Speaker
And that allowed us to have other people go off into other sectors the economy and and the economy would become more dynamic and all these things. And the household budget for food, used to spend like half their money on food.
00:12:31
Speaker
Now it's like less than 10%, you know? So this was mankind advancing and that and that was very natural. What happened and what it came to a head around the nineteen seventy s is This technology that was allowing us to take on more acres and more animals, there was a certain period of time where we were losing a lot of people leaving the farm, going to the city.
00:12:50
Speaker
And some of that was natural, but it was also getting to the point where like some of the farms were having a hard time you know having the workforce they needed because it still really took a lot of kids to run a farm, basically. And so they needed technology that could that could allow for farms to operate with less labor.
00:13:06
Speaker
And so that was sort of the the next phase of that progress. And that was needed for a little while. But what happened is farm wages and factory wages eventually balanced out a little bit so that there wasn't such a strong pull, like we weren't going to lose farm labor forever on into the future.
00:13:22
Speaker
And so we didn't have to have our technology continue to be focused on how can farms get bigger and bigger? You know, how can they how can they take on more animals, more acres, more animals, more acres? That was really the guiding light for all of our technological advances or most of them. and it still is today.
00:13:37
Speaker
You get to around the 1970s or so, it didn't need to be like that anymore. There wasn't the economic pressure as much other than our country simply wanted more food more cheaply and wasn't paying much mind to the disappearance of farms that had been going on for half a century by then, for 50 years back And so we kept on with this technology that really was only about allowing farms to get more and more scale.
00:14:00
Speaker
And so what that means is you are beginning at that point to leave behind medium and small farms that don't need to be left behind. In other words, we don't have to have the farms getting bigger and bigger for economic reasons anymore. We're able to supply the food that we need.
00:14:14
Speaker
We have addressed the economic forces that were pulling workforce off the farm. So why? Why continue to have technology that only pushes bigger and bigger? Well, it's because our kind our country just basically had a policy of saying like, we just got to rush off into the future and we weren't thinking about the consequences.
00:14:30
Speaker
And so... We should have been pursuing what's known as scale neutral technology, right? Which is technology that can be applied and is affordable for small medium sized farms as well as large.
00:14:43
Speaker
And we didn't. And so perfectly efficient, perfectly competitive, perfectly useful farms continued to get left behind by technology that just wasn't suitable for their operations. So basically midsize and small farms were given a innovation handicap that we didn't need to give them.
00:14:59
Speaker
Can you give us some examples of that scale neutral technology? I'm thinking poly wire for electric fencing and chicken tractors or something like that that can be done very well with small farms as well as with larger farms. But I'm sure you have a lot of other examples.
00:15:14
Speaker
Totally. Those are super good examples. Some kind of big, clear ones from different eras. In the 70s, we still had some skilled neutral technology, right? But it was it was less and less and less waning and waning. Some of the last real skilled neutral technology for small dairy, for instance, was a pipeline system to pump milk from a cow's udder, straight from cow's udder to the cooling tank in the milk house.
00:15:35
Speaker
My parents had 50 cows, that used to be mid-sized in this country it's now very very small in this country they were able to install a pipeline that revolutionized their system increased sanitation increased efficiency and the savings from installing that paid for itself within a few years right so it's a risk and the farmer has to put a little money out for sure and that's appropriate you got some skin in the game but it's something that makes economic sense right And after that, it really became if you want to continue to move your dairy operation forward, you're going to have to build a parlor.
00:16:05
Speaker
And a parlor is where you go from couple dozen cows to a couple hundred or several thousand or tens of thousands of cows. Right. So nothing wrong with someone who wants to build a parlor. And there's plenty of midsize and small farms to still do that. And there's plenty of farms that got bigger that have good operations still.
00:16:18
Speaker
But the point is the technology was basically foisting upon parlor. farmers saying, you want to do this. You have to take out a monstrous amount of debt, greatly expand your operation, and you're setting yourself up for 30 years of exponentially growing the scale your operation if you want to stay in business.
00:16:37
Speaker
So those are some examples. Today, with AI, we have all kinds of things. We could have an abundance of small, what they call modular vehicles that can go do things in fields. And it could be small farms might buy one or two, right, to cover their rows.
00:16:52
Speaker
And then larger farms could have many of them. We can have that kind of, that's scale neutral. um Or we can have monstrous equipment and, you know, banks of screens like Houston, we have a problem NASA kind of thing. They can only work for a great big farm. We've had this choice since the 1970s, like basically every day.
00:17:11
Speaker
And we continue to have this choice every day. There are many forces that kind of play into it, including geopolitics, government policy.
Policy and Economic Pressures
00:17:19
Speaker
In the 1970s, you also had under President Nixon, the policy of get big or get out. I think it was the USDA secretary that talked about that. And and kind of this like relentless treadmill where basically farms were forced to invest and take on a lot of debt to get bigger or they were going to become insolvent.
00:17:36
Speaker
From what I understand, that led in the nineteen eighty s or is part of the reason that led to the the farm crisis. Could you talk a little bit about the role the farm crisis played in in this evolution and maybe also what you experienced on your own farm?
00:17:48
Speaker
There's really three big drivers that I found that have made our farms disappear. One is technology that needlessly left small, medium-sized farms behind. The other was what you just talked about, governmental policy. And then the third was really the way that when economic crises hit, we didn't understand how they were affecting the farms on the ground, let alone our food supply. The period of time you're talking about kind of hits both of those last two, governmental policy and and us misunderstanding economic crises. So what happened in the farm crisis is...
00:18:17
Speaker
We had, and and this also, by the way, it also exhibits mistakes by both political parties in America over time. Both parties for a long time had been in one way or another incentivizing farms to get bigger or get out for a while.
00:18:31
Speaker
The Nixon administration said pretty overtly what had been kind of an unspoken approach by both parties for a little while. But what they were doing is they were encouraging farms to get bigger, get out because they wanted as much American food production as possible, partially because they were viewing food as a weapon. That was another one of Earl Butts' phrases, food is a weapon.
00:18:49
Speaker
He, again, said something that really both parties kind of believed in practice, whether they whether both wanted to say it or not, which is to say Nixon opened up the Soviet Union for American grain sales. and that was a huge opportunity for farmers, swung it wide open.
00:19:05
Speaker
And government programs were also encouraging farmers to take out more debt to be able to get bigger and bigger. So that's what happened in the first part. And then the second part, what happened is the ah American economy kind of got overheated in different ways and inflation started to get out of control.
00:19:21
Speaker
And so just like we saw in more recent years, there were efforts to raise interest rates to bring inflation down. And when you raise interest rates, you make debt more expensive. And the other thing that happened around that time is that the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
00:19:34
Speaker
So President Carter, feeling the need to take strong action against the Soviet Union for doing something America didn't like, put in place the grain embargo. In other words, shutting the market, the nicks in an open. So just for those keeping score at home, we have, regardless of party, because it's such a scramble, right?
00:19:50
Speaker
We have the federal government opening up a great big market and saying, take out more debt, take out more debt. And then within a few years, we have the federal government slamming that market shut and saying, we're making your debt more expensive.
00:20:01
Speaker
And you can agree or disagree with each of those individual decisions for different reasons. I don't think the intention of the federal government to do this, but what happens is when you do those things in such succession, you are basically forcing firms to get bigger and then making it devastating for them to have done so.
00:20:16
Speaker
And so that's what kicked off the farm crisis. And my family, my parents got married just before the farm crisis. So 1976. And we tell the story in the book. And this is example how we kind of weave our story with what's going on. So my parents got married nineteen seventy six in in the hills of southern Wisconsin. There was a drought that year.
00:20:33
Speaker
Somehow my mom still married my dad through all of this, but their crops were getting choked. um The corn wasn't coming up through the ground. They got one crop of hay. Usually you get maybe four crops of hay. They got one crop of hay and they could tell by the second one that they were not going to get another. It was, it was spiny. It was wispy.
00:20:48
Speaker
It was like dust bowl era type stuff. Like the, the top soil was blowing away. My dad could put his finger a couple inches down into the earth because the ground was cracking and they weren't going to have the feed they needed to feed their animals.
00:21:00
Speaker
And so if that happened, what they would have to do is they were going to have to buy feed and that might've meant they had to go into debt. Now what ended up happening is luckily my dad banded together with a local farm neighbor, an old man who actually had farmed as a neighbor to my grandpa back in the day. So this old guy was like kind of a throwback.
00:21:19
Speaker
And he said he was too old to work his fields and he didn't really need whatever was coming out he didn't need. And so they did what, you know, what we call farm country going halves where my dad does the work and he can have half the crop.
00:21:32
Speaker
You know, this old guy's name's Leo and God bless him. He said, you take more and then we'll settle up later. We'll settle up later. Well, there was no later. My dad would come back. And I remember this guy because he was still alive when I was a kid. And he would sit there and he had these knee high sun drop pops that he would drink.
00:21:47
Speaker
and he And he smoked these these palm oil cigarettes. He had like train conductor overalls on. He's like from another era. And one day he just told my dad, I don't want your money. Take it and go.
00:21:58
Speaker
And he was kind of grouchy, you know, and he gave my dad a candy bar on the way out to let him know everything would be okay. and And the point was like, this neighbor just made that sacrifice.
00:22:10
Speaker
And by banding together and and through hard work, my parents avoided debt. in 1976. And if they hadn't, if they'd gone into the late 70s, early 80s, taken on debt, they could have been wiped out just like tens of thousands of farms that were wiped out by the debt that in many cases was foisted upon us by our own government.
00:22:29
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's such an incredible example of the perfect storm, the farm crisis, and and just like the the multiple kind of factors that come together to just create chaos for for the farmers.
00:22:40
Speaker
We'll get into more hopeful solutions soon. But to talk of a more recent trend that also alludes to the title of your book, Land Rich, Cash Poor, over the last 20 years or so, we've seen emerge another trend, which is this kind of growing discrepancy between the value of land and the income that farmers are able to make off of that land.
00:23:02
Speaker
Could you talk a little bit about that and kind of how that's affecting agriculture today? Yeah, totally. So this dilemma of land-rich cash pour has sort of existed for the small landowner in America from the beginning in one way or another as a concept, but it's on like hyper, super turbocharged jet fuel steroids,
00:23:23
Speaker
now, you know? So the idea is the cash poor part is you're working the land and grinding a living out doing that is hard and gets harder and harder. And there isn't a lot of money around, even though you're sitting on land that's very valuable.
00:23:37
Speaker
And so you can hold onto that land and try to make a living, risking that you may not make a living and you may reach a point where you have to look at your family and say, we're losing everything. Or you can turn around and sell it because it's valuable to do.
00:23:52
Speaker
And there's a financial return on that, but you lose everything else if you're a farm family, because your farm is not just your dad or mom's job, but it's your home, it's your community. it's In our case, it's our heritage for four generations, many families even longer. you know This is land that like, you know in our case, great grandpa,
00:24:10
Speaker
crossed an ocean to get and spent his life paying the debt on so that we could own it free and clear. And then each generation since has bought it from the prior generation. Right. So every generation has you know bled for this land.
00:24:23
Speaker
So that's what it means to be land rich, cash poor. It's so hard to make a living holding onto it, but you sell it and you know everything else is wiped out. And now I guess to answer your question about today, I mean, the value of property is so incredibly high.
00:24:35
Speaker
And the price of farmland is so incredibly high. And it's such a coveted asset that everyone from Bill Gates to China are trying to get their arms around as much of it as possible. It is in some ways harder than ever to make a living as a so farm farm. I was lucky. I grew up, we had a good middle-class living. i worked my way through college at newspapers and other jobs, but my dad, mom were able to help me through too.
00:24:57
Speaker
And that wouldn't be possible on a farm our size today. And farms our size, the families are working two to three jobs with farming being supplemental income. Yeah, I mean, it's such a ridiculous situation that I think the general public doesn't understand that you have farmers and ranchers sitting on land that has value in the millions of dollars, sometimes in the case of ranches, like tens of millions. And it's pretty much impossible to make you know, a fair income that can support a
Investment and Ownership Challenges
00:25:27
Speaker
family.
00:25:27
Speaker
So it's this really strange paradox. Totally. I think this comparison is is useful. i think in real estate, a rough rule of thumb is that if you buy a house for, let's say, $200,000, that you'd rent it out for $2,000. So 1% of what you buy the house for, if you're going to be the landlord, you're going to rent it out. And that's $2,000 per month, right? However, if you buy a piece of land, let's say that's for $10,000, you're going to rent it out probably for 1% annual basis.
00:25:57
Speaker
on an annual basis So on the one hand, it's 1% per month. On the other hand, it's 1% per year. Like the the amount of rent that you would get from that land, it's never going to pay back the purchase of that land. So it makes very little of sense from ah like an investment perspective. Like there's not a whole lot of money that that land can generate and hence be worth renting or in the case of a farmer actually earning and keeping and keeping that as cash flow. and So people are are buying land, not because it's a an asset that's going to give them a lot of cash returns, but because it's an asset that they're literally not making any more of, right? It's a very secure asset. And that's why you have a lot of people coming in who have no intention of farming and buying land, sitting on it and leasing it out, not intending to make any money off of it, but knowing that it will continue to go up in price. Is that right? Yeah.
00:26:52
Speaker
Totally. Like, look, if your job or your profession is something else, or you have investments and and income that are apart from what it takes to make a living on the land, coming and buying farmland is a great thing to do. And it's a rich man's game.
00:27:07
Speaker
You know what i mean? and you can hold that land and you can use that land to be able to go out and take out debt because it's great collateral. You can sell that land at key times and make massive returns.
00:27:19
Speaker
You can lease that land out to people. You can, by the way, have certain types of crops on that land that allows you to benefit from different types of subsidies and all kinds of things that make it a wise investment.
00:27:32
Speaker
If you're trying to make a living on that land. The economics of doing that are so hard that you are holding on to this incredibly valuable asset just by the skin your teeth. you know yeah And that's what people, I think, don't realize. And we haven't even gotten into the issue of of government subsidies. And we we could, if you guys like. But irregardless, people see farmers owning land and they see the big tractor it takes to do some of the work.
00:27:56
Speaker
And they hear about the government subsidies and think, oh, the farmers are doing fine. The economics of making a living as a farm are so hard and the price of land and what it takes to do that work is so incredible that a farmer is worth a ton of money on paper that he will never realize unless he sells all of that. And if you hold onto it, you're living in this incredibly grinding thing. Now, it's also a beautiful way of life, right? And we're passionate about rural America i' and passion I'm passionate about my roots. And so there's lot of beauty to it too. And so i don't want to make it sound like it's just you know destitution, but there's real economic hardship to it.
00:28:35
Speaker
That's even for people who grew up on a farm and were able to inherit a farm, like a farmland or get it at a family discount. In many cases, people who didn't grow up on a farm and want to get into farming, like good luck, especially if you want to get into something that is more capital intensive, whether that be grain farming or dairy farming or ranching that requires just a lot of land. Like that's that's going to be a really, really hard thing to do.
00:29:01
Speaker
And it seems that we're going towards a a direction that's maybe a little bit medieval feudal, where there's a separation between land owners and the farmers who farm the land, who can't necessarily afford, in many cases, to own that land.
00:29:18
Speaker
they will lease it. I'm sure there's upside to that. People who are really skilled at managing the land can manage that land for many, many more people and not have to acquire the land.
00:29:30
Speaker
There's going to be winners and losers in that. Do you see that same reality of a dissection of landowners and farmers? And what do you see are some of the the downsides of that transition that we're going towards?
00:29:43
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, as you said, there are in the individual short term, like there are times where like a farmer can't afford to own land and being able to lease it from someone who does own it can be an opportunity to get your foot in the door or can be a way to be able to continue farming if you can't afford to keep land yourself. You know, so I'm not saying like every single time a farmer is leasing land, it is like serfdom bondage, right?
00:30:06
Speaker
However, America had something kind of unique happen in its history. And this is not an idea of mine. it is one of many, many historians and researchers that I read as I was researching the book.
00:30:19
Speaker
But America had a a little bit of a unique thing, which is that the land here in this country was on a path to end up in many small hands, right?
00:30:30
Speaker
So now, by the way, there's the whole issue of native tribes that were here and all of that, that is an entirely additional story to be told and Arab history to be discussed and debated, right?
00:30:43
Speaker
But suffice to say, what happened in America, as opposed to other parts of the world where land was you know brought into the hands of people, is rather than being held by large landowners from the very beginning who held all the power,
00:30:55
Speaker
the land ended up in the hands of the many. And so we have a tradition of small land ownership in this country, in farming, in ranching, in logging, in so many of the building blocks of so many of our industries.
00:31:08
Speaker
There've always been bigger landowners and and you know and companies getting bigger and and some companies going away and some new ones sprouting up and winners and losers and all that for sure. But one of the basic building blocks of our economy was small land ownership.
00:31:23
Speaker
And that is what allowed us to have such an incredibly dynamic agricultural sector. It's what has allowed us to have such an incredibly dynamic economy in general and why America and small business and just the rise of entrepreneurship and new possibilities, new opportunities, because land and other assets can turn over and move from one hand to another amongst many, as opposed to being held forever by the few.
00:31:49
Speaker
And so you know bat that ties into farm history, but so much of the rest of our economic history. And so we're losing that. It's not totally gone, but we're perilously close to losing it. And I think it's going to shift a lot in the next 10 or 20 years or so, because a lot of you are talking about the great land transition, like the average age of a farmer is 65. And a lot of them don't have anyone to take over from them for for all the reasons that we've talked about. And so I could see 10 years from now outside investors, if you don't call it that, owning much more land than they do today.
00:32:22
Speaker
Totally. If we don't find a way to make it more economically viable for farms to continue on under the you know the care of the next generation of American farmers and small landowners, we are going to lose most of our family farms in the next couple of
Future of Family Farms
00:32:38
Speaker
decades. If you take that number, that 45,000 per year on average for the past century, been doing that for a hundred years.
00:32:45
Speaker
If we continue that pace for the next 40, That's enough to wipe out most of the rest of our family farms. We have nearly 2 million farms left in this country. And there's hope in this number because 88% of them are small farms. People are surprised to hear that.
00:32:59
Speaker
It's true that there are a lot of large farms out there and that they produce a lot of food. But 88% of the farms out there are still small farms. And these are the farms that families are holding on to by working two to three jobs. You know, you got families that are working construction sites or guys that are pouring concrete, moms that have, you know, jobs off the farm and everybody's farming.
00:33:17
Speaker
And that's how they're holding on. And if we lose 45,000 farms a year for 40 years, we're going to lose most of those 88% of our small farms. And most of those 2 million farms will be gone. And it's you know it's only going to be the few left. So basically, we could see all this happen in the next generation, which, by the way, when you think about what you just said about the oldest generation aging out, that is a perfect recipe to make sure that we do remain on pace to do that, unfortunately.
00:33:49
Speaker
So what are some of the solutions that you envision that would help us keep and retain and maybe you start to make up some of the some of the losses that we've had in our small farm populations?
00:34:00
Speaker
There are a number of them. They all center on the idea of creating new entrepreneur opportunity for our farms in a sustained way. What I mean by that is there haven't been a lot of new possibilities for what farmers can do with their land for a while.
00:34:18
Speaker
You know, in the early 1900s, when my great grandpa and then my grandpa and grandma, when they were all coming along, Wisconsin was emerging as the dairy state. But farmers were milking cows and raising fruits and vegetables and raising pigs and sheep and geese and chickens. And they didn't need to be doing all of those things. But there was a lot of things they were doing. And they were able to hedge their bets when milk...
00:34:39
Speaker
You know, wasn't selling too good. They could sell a couple of mature pigs, you know, and like, you know, and the and they had the ability to kind of do a couple of different things at once and see also what was going to emerge. What were the emerging markets, you know, that were going to be strongest for them?
00:34:52
Speaker
Most farms have been locked into what they're doing now for many generations. And a lot of farms are locked into what I'll just say are broken markets, you know, corn, soybeans. I mean, our farm grows those things. We're also constantly experimenting with like, what else could we put in our ground? What other crop or product we grow? We're trying to figure this out. Right.
00:35:11
Speaker
But, you know, corn and soybeans and and and a lot of it's not picking on those crops. Most crops out there are in some way, A clear enough market that the farmer who's been growing it kind of can and should economically continue to do it because it's like, well, I know where to sell that.
00:35:30
Speaker
There's a market for it to some degree, but the price isn't enough to sustain our farms. We're losing farms. So it's a broken market. We're kind of just stuck in it. And people say, why don't they just do something else? And it's well... you know, you need to know that what you're going to plant and grow and produce is going to be something that people are going to buy. It's got to work for your land. It takes money to do that. Most farms are getting by by the skin of their teeth and it takes time and money to risk that. So how do we change that paradigm? How do we make it so that there's new generations of things?
00:35:57
Speaker
One thing is we need an R&D revolution in this country, and it needs to be scale neutral revolution to the point of our earlier conversation. So government research and development funding is at its lowest level since the 1970s. We need to find a way to make that more accountable and focused so that people can support increasing it.
00:36:14
Speaker
And our private sector R&D, which is really robust, there's a lot of R&D that is done, but it needs to focus on scale neutral technology. So the government stuff needs to come up and the private sector stuff that's already up and out there needs to focus in the right place. We need to focus all of it on what is scale neutral technology that can help all of our farms advance.
00:36:31
Speaker
And this is in the interest of the private sector companies that are out there, as well as the policymakers that are steering public R&D dollars. so Because like if you're a company out there and you right now you really maybe only deal with the biggest farms because it's most affordable for you economic scale wise, that's fine.
00:36:49
Speaker
But if we keep losing farms, you are going to lose suppliers and buyers. And you know like there's not going to be a sector to do business with at some point. In addition back to that, we have a vulnerable supply chain because there's so few ways for food to be grown and distributed in this country because of all that.
00:37:07
Speaker
So that's one thing. Another thing is we need to make sure we have fair markets and domestically and internationally. There's policy changes to make sure that they're competitive and that farmers of all sizes have a fair shot, not guaranteed outcomes, but fair shot.
00:37:18
Speaker
And then we need to have farms and agriculture organizing themselves around new entrepreneurial opportunities, new market opportunities. I'll just say one example really quick. Wisconsin in the 1990s to toot Wisconsin's horn got overtaken in milk production by California.
00:37:32
Speaker
And in fact, Wisconsin was on path in that generation from my dad to my generation to go from number one in milk production to number one in farm bankruptcies. Real problem. One of the ways that they fought it, and one of the reasons Wisconsin is still a place with a lot of small farms, despite all the losses, is because we decided we were going to be number one in cheese production.
00:37:52
Speaker
We're the only state in the country that has a master cheese program. So like we have small, artisan, skilled, craft cheesemakers who are sold ah across the country and renowned for that.
00:38:04
Speaker
And our farms supply that. And so Wisconsin said, okay, a hundred years ago, our niche was dairy. Now our niche is the cheese industry coming from dairy. So we need more of that kind of thing. Wisconsin needs more of those solutions. Every state in this country needs, we need dozens, hundreds, thousands of those ideas, right? Something like that can change things. So an R&D revolution, changing our policy to make sure there's fair markets and focusing on trying to find opportunities like that are the kinds of things that can begin to turn this around.
00:38:34
Speaker
So you tooted the horn of Wisconsin. I'm gonna toot my own horn for a second and and bring forward agroforestry as something that is ah a, let's call it a technology for now, just for the sake of conversation, that is very scale neutral, where we're planting not just any trees, not just random wild trees, but we're planting specific trees, whether it's chestnuts or hazelnuts or apples for markets, or you're planting trees that are there to feed the livestock. All of those are very
Innovative Solutions for Sustainability
00:39:01
Speaker
scale neutral. And most of our clients are very, very small farms.
00:39:05
Speaker
We're talking 30 to 100 acres or so. We're building off of grass-based dairies or grass-based beef operations. Grazing is a very scale neutral technique.
00:39:17
Speaker
Harvesting the plant material that's around your farm and turning that into meat or dairy or whatever it is. And agroforestry is really an untapped way to build additional diversification on that same farm? So let's say it's a grass fed dairy, but can we also reduce the exposure that that farm has to environmental factors? So whether it's heat stress or cold stress or the price of feed going up or down by using the right trees in the right places, And then can we also add maybe one or two additional income streams, whether that's additional tree crops or that we're feeding hogs off of the mulberry and persimmon oak trees that were planted on this farm. So now instead of just one market that they're relying on, they have two or three markets that can balance each other out.
00:40:03
Speaker
I was just going to jump off of that a little bit because something that you said, Brian, was in the interest of the private sector to invest in this scale and neutral technology because they need farms. But then, you you know, taking Austin's example of agroforestry as something that could use, you know, R&D like production.
00:40:20
Speaker
to dev develop trees that you know would could well be integrated into fields to provide extra feed for animals. I do think that there's like a ah challenge there in the dynamic where the technologies that would maybe be most beneficial to small farms might not be what is most profitable for large-scale industrial companies.
00:40:43
Speaker
Like no one is going to get rich off of developing a better tree to integrate with dairy. But people will get rich by investing in the latest, you know, deer tractor that can, you know, drive through you know, monoculture fields with with no person in it and can harvest the data and send it to the insurance company and then leverage that to, you know, make money off of the farmer in that way, too. So so I do think that there's a ah challenge there between kind of an agricultural sector that has never been fully in the private market like that is something that inherently requires
00:41:21
Speaker
government and kind of like public support being today in the grips of a maybe overly consolidated private market, profit maximizing space, if that makes sense.
00:41:36
Speaker
Yeah, totally. I think, I mean, in my view, there's sort of both things going on at once and there's tension. between them, but I think we kind of have to solve both. And what I mean is I'll take just what Austin was talking about for a moment.
00:41:49
Speaker
That's a great example of things that can make small farms more competitive by you know making their they're soil healthier, by giving them more you know, biodiversity, by strengthening against all things that you mentioned and allow them to develop, you know, unique product too. I mean, the beef grown on land like that, you know, and that's like a great thing. And that's a skill neutral technology. And there's so many examples like that. We need to have small farms have opportunities like that, more things they can do like that, where they can do that regardless of what's going on in the rest of agriculture. Right.
00:42:21
Speaker
We also have to fix what's going on in the rest of agriculture. And i think you're so right, Emma, that like the profit motive, which is a powerful thing in this economy and a good thing in some ways, can also lead us to be short-sighted.
00:42:34
Speaker
And I think that you know what we need from people who are leading agriculture companies in this country, including big ones, is to have the foresight to say, we're We can't keep losing farms at the same pace we have, because if we do in 40 years, like it will become finite, the number of suppliers that we have.
00:42:53
Speaker
And when you look at what happened during COVID, right? When you have one great big distribution center or one great big food processing center go down or one great big farm go down, it has an outsized impact on the supply of our food.
00:43:04
Speaker
And those industries went through hell. I mean, meatpacking industry went through hell trying to figure out how to keep their facilities open during COVID. right So like the companies, i would argue, and I'd be happy to you know to have the discussion with any leader of any one of these companies to say, like no matter how large you are and no matter how much economic scale serves you on some level,
00:43:30
Speaker
the ongoing unabated loss of farms is a problem for all of us. And one of the ways to help with that is to not only invest in the technology that it continues to allow scale and all of the monetization you're talking about, but that also makes it sustainable financially for farms of all sizes on some level to be able to continue because you can't have an industry just continue to consolidate On into perpetuity.
00:43:58
Speaker
You know, I mean, it sounds crazy to say, but like, it's kind of like the end of that is like a too big to fail scenario. I mean, you know, do we want farming and egg and food to look like banking did in this country during the Great Recession? People think we aren't going to get there. Show me how we want if we keep losing farms at the pace that we have. Show me how we want, you know.
00:44:17
Speaker
One current example of that might be like the the egg layer industry where you have this consolidation where you have individual farms have millions and millions of layers and one of them gets hit by avian influenza and they have to kill all the birds in that.
00:44:33
Speaker
And what we've seen over the last number of months, this is being recorded at the end of February, 2025. We've seen over the last number of months, the the price of eggs go through the roof. Now, if you had birds distributed all throughout the country on small flocks, however many dozen apiece,
00:44:48
Speaker
probably aren going to see the effects of the bird flu nearly as strong because the the risk has been spread out. So that's that's what the situation that we have now. And if we continue on with this consolidation, you could see like the too big to fail where you have just a handful of companies producing all of the eggs
Policy Dynamics and Opportunities
00:45:05
Speaker
in the country. Any one of those gets hit and the whole country feels it very, very strongly.
00:45:10
Speaker
Totally. And these are realities, whether people on the right or the left, whether they whether think consolidated industry has its advantages of scale to bring prices down, whether they think consolidated industry has gone so far that it's driving prices up, whatever whatever view people have of all these different forces, the reality is that supply chain vulnerability is real. you know And so with bird flu, what we are seeing is we are seeing the increase in prices because the scarcity is so pronounced.
00:45:35
Speaker
And part of the reason the scarcity is so pronounced is because we have supply chain vulnerability. So In investment terms, which is dangerous for a farm boy to be trying to talk in investment terms, especially a farm boy who went and had a writing career, meaning I'm a word guy, not a number guy.
00:45:49
Speaker
But it's just sort of like about spreading out your risk, right? Like, you know, to go back to a safer farm nomenclature, you don't put your ah eggs all in one basket. And right now our food system is putting all of our eggs in the big basket, you know, and we're just, and it's just about scale. And it's like, at the end of the day, we have to have our supply, our producers, our distribution, everything. we have to have the risks spread out. It can't be too concentrated or everyone, big, small, consumer, farmer, everyone in between will continue to face consequences. We're seeing sort of initial shocks of that.
00:46:26
Speaker
And it's it's only going to get worse if we don't begin to focus on what can we do to have more farms make it. So policy is pretty top of mind for a lot of people right now. And again, we're recording this end of February 2025. With the new administration, on the one hand, you have RFK, for better for worse, kind of talking about providing a an off-ramp for conventional farmers or that he's going to think about how to provide an off-ramp for conventional farmers into a more regenerative farming.
00:46:54
Speaker
On the other hand, you've had this rampant and kind of terrifying freeze of all government support to agriculture. I know you talk a lot and research a lot about policy. Could you tell us a little bit like what you what you view is going on right now and kind of what's emerging, what you're seeing emerging?
00:47:12
Speaker
In many ways right now, it's a little bit of a breathless time because there's so much happening is changing every day. But one of the things that I think is is true of this is that in in another way, this is kind of a representation of the timeless challenge for farming, which is that farming is always caught between political crosswinds, has always been.
00:47:30
Speaker
And every administration under every party has had things that are posing opportunities and things that are posing challenges. So I just think that's important for me to say, because i I was kind of surprised to find the degree to which that was true after looking at a century of family farm history and trying to figure what it's just like, oh my gosh, like we've been living this you know over and over.
00:47:53
Speaker
Right now, we're living it on a very fast flywheel you know because of how quickly the news cycle moves and and because of the amount of things that this administration is doing. I think that it is a time of both opportunity and challenge. The issue of people caring more than ever about where their food comes from is an opportunity.
00:48:09
Speaker
And if and on the ah RFK piece, if we can transition toward family farms growing more food products and more types of regenerative, you utilize more types of regenerative ag and supplying more local and regional and specialty food markets and things like that. If we can make, if we can allow farms to do that while recognizing that they're small businesses.
00:48:31
Speaker
that we can't simply mandate that to happen because they don't have the money to do that. But if we can allow them to transition gradually, farms to be able to put a couple acres in something, risk a little bit of money that they saved up the last couple of years to try a new crop or product, see if there's a market.
00:48:45
Speaker
And if we can meet that with more demand, continuing to grow from people who care more than ever where their food comes from. Like that demand is beginning to be there more, but it has to continue to grow, you know? So we need more people to move in that direction.
00:48:57
Speaker
So there's opportunity in all of that, but there's risk in it, right? too Because if we if we don't allow that to be something that is done in a way that like a small business could transition, they're just not going to have the money to be able to make those changes.
00:49:09
Speaker
Same thing with the tariffs. Farms are impacted by unfair trade practices, right? China and other countries have had impacts on commodity prices by buying so much of our American agricultural products and then suddenly dumping it and becoming unreliable. And then the currency cheating that they do and all these things do create problematic downward pressures on prices that farmers get.
00:49:34
Speaker
And so we do need to wipe out unfair trade practices at the same time. If you know America loses control of negotiations and suddenly we have so many countries you know especially foreign adversaries retaliating ah essentially against American farmers, that'll be a problem. I mean, too much of that happening means that farmers won't be able to sell their products abroad because tariffs from other countries are going to make it so hard to sell your crop or product abroad that the price is going to go down. It's a double-edged sword.
00:50:05
Speaker
I think that this the solution is not accepting those false choices. And I'll just briefly share what I mean by that on tariffs. We can draw a hard line on unfair trade practices and expand trade by having a targeted trade strategy.
00:50:20
Speaker
What I mean by that is rather than having these massive trade deals that have great big trade-offs, like multiple countries, dozens of products. It's like, it's good for the tomato growers, but it's bad for the beef producers. And, you know, because it's just like, how do you fit all those things together and make it good for every type of American farm?
00:50:35
Speaker
Instead, and this is something the Farm Journal Foundation, Stephanie Mercer, talks about, Focus on negotiating around one crop or product with one country and open up a market around that.
00:50:48
Speaker
Negotiate something that's fair for both countries on that and do that dozens, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of times with countries all across the globe. If you do that and you combine that with focusing on unfair trade standards, working to wipe those out, what you're doing is you are opening up many more markets while at the same time you're drawing a hard line that might mean the closure of some markets, right?
00:51:10
Speaker
And you make any one trade situation matter less. The other thing you're doing is you're increasing America's leverage, because if we're negotiating with one country on one product, it's like, well, you need something us, we need something from you. it's It's a simpler calculus, and we have much more to bring because we have such a massive production capacity. So that kind of a strategy could allow you to both draw a hard line and and and at times maybe use a tariff.
00:51:34
Speaker
to make clear where America stands while simultaneously opening up all kinds of other markets. So there's ways to reject the false choice. It's just very hard to do, you know, and it's hard to see if it's happening too, you know, because we don't know what the negotiations are until they're done.
00:51:51
Speaker
So kind of what concerns me on the policy front, this is a recurring theme throughout history, right? but it seems to be bringing to the fore even more so and now is that to do policy that's right by farmers and allows farmers to plan and and have that continuity is you need long-term thinking. You need people who are willing, people in policies, and this is across different parties, different across different administrations, and across really generations over time, is people who are willing and able to think in the long-term and set policies and set programs and take action, even if they're outside of the government, that are going to benefit people in the long-term rather than seeking...
00:52:36
Speaker
quick gains, ah short-term wins. And unfortunately, we just don't see enough of that. We don't see enough people thinking about the long-term health of the community, of farmers, especially of small farmers. And that's one thing that I like i want to see so much more of, but I'm i'm very aware that I will probably be disappointed at the level of long-term thinking that we're going to encounter. So ah in in the light of that, it's always a good ah good strategy to invest in resilience, invest in in being as little swayed by each new thing that comes, whether it's a good thing or a bad thing as possible. And so for farmers to be as resilient as they can be so that regardless of what's going on around them,
00:53:26
Speaker
that they can be solid and continue on and be in being in the work that is that is rewarding to them, that is rewarding to their families, and that allows them to continue to pass this farm down on from generation to generation.
00:53:40
Speaker
One more thing I can't help myself but ask is the crop subsidies, which ah you know also prevent farmers from being resilient because they're growing one or two crops because that's what you can get crop insurance on.
00:53:53
Speaker
What would you do if you somehow magically were given authority at the USDA, for example? like What would you do with respect to crop subsidies? Yeah, given the magic wand, you know, I think people right, left, inside farming, outside farming all have something to hate about our farm programs because they they've just been built and piled upon year after year, right? So what I would do is i would recognize that there is a massive amount of picking of winners and losers that has gone on over time in our country. And
00:54:25
Speaker
It's something that we have to address while at the same time recognize that like the basic idea of crop insurance or any other kind of mechanism of like some kind of a safety net for an industry that is so dependent on uncontrollable factors like whether there's like there's value to that concept. But the problem that we have is that we have so much subsidy built around certain types of crops.
00:54:44
Speaker
Well, at the same time, like, you know, over to neighboring Michigan, asparagus or blueberries, you know, like they don't get any crop insurance, you know what i mean? And so, well, doesn't the weather hit asparagus and blueberries too? You know what i mean? And so I think what I would do is,
00:54:58
Speaker
is find a way for us to diversify the way that that insurance works so that it actually functions as it should, which is a baseline safety net against uncontrollable factors, not as something that intervenes and changes the way an entire markets work to the benefit of some and to the detriment of others. And by the way, even to those that it benefits, to your point, Emma,
00:55:22
Speaker
to those that it benefits, it really locks them into those markets too. You know what i mean? it It's not like they're like, I'm only going to grow this for the rest of my life because I'm just, for some reason, committed only to this one crop. It's because it makes sense economically. The problem is it doesn't make enough sense economically for the farms to be able to prosper and continue in large numbers, right? So we're kind of trapping farms.
00:55:44
Speaker
And so I would greatly diversify the way our subsidies work. So it doesn't need to be a system that blows everything up and destroys all the farms that benefit from subsidies now. and But it it can be one that can allow for more paths to prosperity and to not have kind of broken zombie markets that have farmers that benefit from subsidies, but kind of don't, you know?
00:56:06
Speaker
Well, Brian, this has been a fantastic conversation, a wide-ranging conversation.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:56:11
Speaker
has been such a great way for us to understand better, and hopefully for our listeners to understand better the the sweeping history that we've had in in this country over the last century plus, and what our our small farms have looked like over time and where they are now.
00:56:27
Speaker
ah You've given such a great overview in this short conversation, and I want people to know that if this has been interesting to you, And if you want to learn more, that they should go pick up a copy of your book, Land Rich, Cash Poor, and read through that because there's so much more information in there and you go into so much more depth on all of these things that we've touched on and so much more. it's just a fantastic resource for people who want to understand truly Where are we right now and how did we get here?
00:56:55
Speaker
And really understand more what it's like to be a a small farmer in particular in this country and what life is like and what the what the the headwinds are that they face every day.
00:57:06
Speaker
So, Brian, thank you very much for your time and having this conversation with us. But even more so, thank you for all the work that you've done to bring to light the reality for farmers and then to share that with the world.
00:57:19
Speaker
Well, thanks so much. i appreciate it. And yeah, I mean, anybody who picks up Landridge Cash Bar, I'm grateful. You know, they can get on Amazon online, they get on bookstores nationwide. the The big thing I hope is just that we keep conversations like this going, you know, and i think that you guys are so right and you're doing such important work to, you know, shed light on not realizing in this country what's happening to rural America kind of how it affects everybody.
00:57:44
Speaker
And I think it's just so important. So I'm grateful for the chance to have the opportunity and I'm hopeful that we can all just work together to keep it going.
00:57:53
Speaker
Agrarian Futures is produced by Alexander Miller, who also wrote our theme song. If you enjoyed this episode, please like, subscribe, and leave us a comment on your podcast app of choice.
00:58:03
Speaker
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