September 9, 2025 • 17 mins
George Noory and author Brian Reisinger explore the future of the agriculture industry in the United States, the increasing number of struggling independent farmers who have had to sell their land, and how this will pose a threat to the nation's food supply very soon.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back George Norrey along with Brian Reisinger. Brian,
at the rate our farms are disappearing ten years from now,
if we keep this pace going, what happens.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Ten years from now, we will be about twenty five
percent of the way there, George on wiping out the
rest of our farms in this country. It's kind of
shocking if you think about it, losing forty five thousand
farms a year for the past century. If we keep
doing that, what it means is in forty years we'll
have lost the rest of our farms. I'm forty years old.
By the time my little girl is my age, will
(00:39):
have lost the rest of our farm. So in ten
years time, we'll have lost another twenty five percent of
our farms, and we can't afford to keep doing that.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Are the farmers selling the land because they're making a profit,
or are they going out of business and they're getting
foreclosed on? What's happening to them.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
It's a little bit of all of those things. What
it means to be land rich cash poor in the
reason and we selected that title is because the farmland.
The value that farmland is going up, but the ability
to make a living on that land is going down.
That's the cash poor part. And so farm families they
face kind of a unimaginable choice. On the one hand,
(01:17):
they if they keep going and it keeps getting harder
and harder to make it each year, you know, these
moms and dads face day they're gonna have to other kids,
we can't make it anymore. We're gonna lose everything. On
the other hand, if you turn around and sell that land,
that solves your financial problem, but you lose everything else.
Because when you grow up on a farm like I did,
and we talk about this in the book, the farm
is not just your dad's job or your mom's job.
(01:38):
It's your home, it's your community, it's your heritage. So
they don't want to sell it because they would lose everything.
But if they keep going, they're going to continue to
make it harder and harder every year to make it.
So it's a real diveloment. It gets harder every generation.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
When they sell the farm land, what happens to it?
Do they turn it into a subdivision or do they
keep farming it.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
What happens. Yeah, yep. Some of it goes to developers
for subdivisions or for other urban sprawl. Some of it
goes to other larger farms because we got some farms.
You know, that pressure to get bigger, get out means
that some farms can't make it and they're getting out,
and other farms are getting bigger to survive. And so
that's why you see more and more of our farms
(02:19):
being sold to larger farms and in some cases corporate farms.
And then some of that land is going into the
hands of foreign adversaries, a variety of wealthy folks. Bill
Gates is a great, big buyer of farmland. So what
is common across all those categories is that we're increasingly
having less and less farmland and it is concentrated in
(02:41):
fewer and fewer hands, and that causes a lot of
risks for us.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
The farm land that let's say the Chinese owned, do
they manufacture food, Do they grow food and then send
it back to China?
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, in many cases they're just holding on to it.
In some cases they might be utilizing it and have
some companies that are doing certain things with it. But
what it's really about is two things. The Chinese are
very patient. The Chinese Communist Party is very patient, and
they're acquiring this land because over the long term they
want to be able to destabilize our food supply. And
(03:15):
also it is not a coincidence that the land that
they are acquiring in many cases is near military installations.
So they're making a long term bet on destabilizing our
food supply, which is a huge part of it's the
most basic form of security. And in the meantime they're
able to get close to military installations as well. So
it's a long term and a short term game to
(03:35):
destabilize the country.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Which comes to the shop, can't we just nationalize it
and take it?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
You know?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
It's interesting. I hope it doesn't come to that. And
the reason for that is because we have such a
proud history of small land ownership in this country. The
best guard against it is if we can solve the
underlying issues that are making harder for our farms to
make it. Because as our farms disappear and that farmland
gets concentrated in fewer hands, it becomes easier for a
(04:04):
foreign adversary to buy it, right because they can go
to one big land owner a corporation that owns a
bunch of farmland, and in one big financial deal with
a company that only has to answer to its shareholders,
they can acquire a whole bunch of land. If you
have American farmland owned by millions of small family farmers,
that is a guard against the Chinese. Try walking up
on the porch of a guy like my dad and
(04:25):
saying we're with the Chinese Communist party to buy your farm.
It's not going to happen. So those small individual landowners,
they're a force field of bulwark against letting the Chinese
or other adversaries get their hands on our farmland.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That is truly dramatic, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
It's incredible. It's really a shocking thing. I was amazed
as I was investigating the issues driving the disappearance of
our farms, that it reached that farm its impact. I
knew it was affecting our food, but not only the
price of our food, the health of our food, but
also the security of our country. All of it rests
on making sure that we keep this tradition of small
(05:01):
family farms owning land in this country alive.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Brian, are we still paying farmers not to grow crops.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That's such a good question. That was something that really
was born in the Great Depression, and we explored that era,
and it is true that there were massive programs that
were paying farmers not to grow crops, and that was
a goal because they were trying to bring the prices
up for farmers. Now, ironically, the government was doing that
at a time when people were also starving, and so
you know, a lot of these programs were contradictory are
(05:32):
deeply problematic today. There are some conservation programs. I wouldn't
say that they're quite as much paying farmers deliberately not
to grow to limit the food supply so much as
there might be programs that pay farmers to have certain
types of land and conservation for limited periods of time,
things like that. So there's some smaller programs that are
(05:53):
kind of relics of that era, But the whole sale
trying to stop farmers from growing food as kind of
apply and demand type of scheme is something that thankfully
we haven't done for a few decades in this country.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
You believe we can turn this around, though, don't you.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I do, And the reason for it is the resilience
of our farm families. I think about people like my dad,
who you know, at the age of eight, he stepped
up to do the work of a grown man after
my grandpa slipped and fell off a corn crib and
broke us back. We tell the story in the book,
and my grandpa got back up on his feet and
he was okay, But not before my dad started the
(06:31):
workman and carried it out for the rest of his life.
And now my dad right now he's asleep. It in
just a few hours, he's going to be awake, and
I can bet you that the first place is going
to be is on the back of track or doing
his work. He loves the way of life. And so
that kind of resilience is not unique to our family.
We picked our heads up from the work and decided
to tell an honest story about the economic upheaval and
(06:51):
the struggles of farm families. But every farm family has
stories like that, and so that resilience is a real
reason for hope. And there are things we can do
to turn the issue around. And so if we can
harness that resilience of the American farm family, to me,
that's the reason for endless optimism. If we are willing
to change direction in this country.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
One of my biggest investment regrets Brian as selling my
one hundred and fourteen acre a horse farm I owned
an Illinois beautiful anyway.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
It is such a hard choice for families and landowners
because there's economic pressures to it and other reasons. And
at the same time, it's just an incredible thing to
own a piece of God's creation and know that you're
able to live close to the land.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
And I had about fifty acres of plowable land that
I rented out to another farmer. You would pay me.
I didn't have to do anything. He just gave me
a check.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Well, I'm glad that you had that opportunity to do
that and to have that property and to work with
a local farmer. You know, that's an example of folks
working together to keep our farmland in the right hands.
And I'm glad you had that opportune that experience.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Does the government look at this as a crisis or not.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
No, the government doesn't understand it. Traditionally, neither political party.
This is one of the other shocking things. Traditionally, both
the establishment of the Republican Party as well as the
Democrats have in one way or another over and over
made different mistakes or deliberate decisions that have wiped out
our farmers. And today I think we're talking about the
(08:25):
issue more than we ever have before. More people, more
members of the American public care about where their food
comes from, and we're trying to raise the alarm bells.
But in general, policymakers don't understand what's going on on
the farm on the ground in this country, and they
don't understand how it's tied to our food supply. So
I think we really need to continue to sell those
(08:46):
alarm bells, because again, we're still marching toward wiping out
the rest of our farms in the next forty years
if we don't make a change, and that means people
on the right the lesson. Everywhere in between are people
that don't fit any particular box looking at this issue
honestly and making sure they grab our pulsemakers by the
lapels and make sure that they're looking at this issue
(09:07):
in a way that they haven't.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Ryan in the United States, where the regions where the
best farms are.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Well, I'm biased on that Georgia, and I have to
be honest, I say the Upper Midwest, where I grew
up the driftless region of southern Wisconsin in particular, and
that's the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin. But who's driven
alongside the Mississippi and other parts of the state. But
in general, set my bias aside the Midwest and the
Great Plains of America. Although they're not the only places
(09:36):
that have a rich tradition of farmland, the Midwest and
the Great Plains are not only some of the best
farmland in the country, but some of the best farmland
in the world. California also has an amazing amount of
beautiful fertile land. Their government is making it more challenging
for farmers there even than it already is. But the
land that we have in those parts of the country
(09:58):
are not only strong America, but it's some of the
best land that you'll find on the globe.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
And you mentioned fertile. Just how fertile is the land.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, it's incredible what you can do and the way
that different reeds of our country have found different niches.
In California, it's especially fertile for fruits and vegetables, fresh
produce as well as nuts, cashewes. All throughout the Great Plains.
It's very fertile for different types of wheat and grain
corn as well. And when you get up into the
(10:29):
Upper Midwest I'm from, it's fertile for all those things
wheat and corn, et cetera. But the interesting thing about
where I'm from is that because we got those beautiful
rolling hills and plunging valleys, we don't have as much
wide open farmland. And so that's why Wisconsin became in
America's dairy land, because we didn't have the big, wide
open land that you needed to grow as much wheat
(10:50):
as possible. You can grow beautiful wheat there, but you
don't have those wide open fields to grow as much
as possible. So we couldn't compete quite as well on
wheat or other things like that. But what we could
do is grow n uugh as to feed cows and
make those cows healthy and able to produce a whole
lot of milk. So those big rolling hills when you're
driving through southern Wisconsin is the reason that Wisconsin became
(11:10):
America's dairy land, because we had fertile land to feed
our animals and that was a more efficient way to
do it.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Do cows and beef take up a lot of land.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
You know, they take up some. But I think that
there's something that a lot of the American public knows
that maybe doesn't pass the smell tests, so to speak.
A lot of people who care about our environment, which
by the way, people who farm care about our environment
as well, and people who care about our environment and
farmers can work together solve so many problems. But there's
a lot of talk about old farmers and farmland are
pluting our environment. You know, that doesn't pass the smell test.
(11:44):
When you think about your average American city, the amount
of exhaust and small and things coming out of those cities,
I think that that is choking out our environment a
lot more than cows standing on a beautiful green pasture.
If you ask me, I think most people in America public. No,
that's true as well.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Companies like Tyson with their chicken farms, where are they
raising them?
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, you know, they have their own facilities and they
also contract with farmers, and they're an example of something
that's happening all across our economy. Sometimes people want to
talk about one company or another, but what I say is,
you know, industries all across all sectors of the American
economy have become more and more defined by large players,
(12:29):
and so the food companies are working to keep up
with the rest of our economy. The agrobusiness companies are
working to keep up with the food companies, and the
farmers have to work to keep up with the aga
business and food companies. So that's another of the reasons
that you see. You know that pressure to get bigger,
get out family farmers are facing, and it's actually something
that companies of all kinds face in our economy.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
What about produce from places like Mexico? Is that safe?
Speaker 3 (12:55):
It's such a good question. There. There is good food
that can come from other countries, but we have too
much of it coming in and it is sometimes very
much at risk. Now, the ideal would be that we
are producing our domestic food supply because it's safer. It's
more secure for us. We know that our country can't
be held hostage by anyone who wants to withhold food
(13:17):
from us. But the reality is that we're importing far
more food than that. The agricultural trade deficit. I'm going
to pick a number that's between the Biden and Trump
administration so that people know I'm being nonpartisan about it.
The agriculture trade deficit was about forty two and a
half billion dollars near the end of the bidenministration beginning
of the Trump administration. That means that we're importing forty
(13:39):
two and a half billion more dollars in food than
we are exporting. And it's kind of crazy if you
think about it, because we're wiping out our farms at
forty five thousand years, so we're wiping out our domestic
food supply, and we're depending more than ever on imports
from foreign countries. Now it makes sense to buy kiwis
and bananas from other countries, food that we can't grow here.
(14:00):
But if it's beef, tomatoes, other things, we have the
ability to supply that food here, and what we should
be doing is making sure we're doing that. Instead, it's
almost reading like a doomsday movie script. You know, you're
wiping out your domestic food supply and depending more than
ever on foreign countries. That's not a way to have
a secure country.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
How much land does some families need to grow enough
food to sustain themselves.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
You can do that on just a few acres. A
family that has five to ten acres can not only
grow I mean, one big garden can supply a lot
of what a family needs. But if you have five, ten,
twenty fifty acres, you have the ability to grow the
food that you need and sell some of it. And
actually this is one of the areas of hope for
(14:45):
our farms. Some of the small farms, really small farms
are finding ways to be economical. So it's the biggest
of the big farms that had to get bigger get out,
and then it's many of the smallest farms that are
finding ways to be economical. The farms that are really
having challenges and getting wiped out the most are the
ones that are in the middle, those farms that are
big enough to have a lot of expenses, but not
(15:08):
big enough to have the great, big economics of scale
of the bigger operations. So those small farms that are
actually an area of hope that I hope we can
find some lessons from.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
How much of the land Brian needs to be fertilized.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
That's a really good question. Most of our farmland in
America needs to be fertilized from the standpoint of growing
the crops that our government incentivizes, the most oddity crops, soybeans,
corn things like that. And there's a lot of traditional
farms like the one I grew up on that grow
those crops and products because it's what's available to them
and are working to transition over to new alternative crops pasturis, chickens,
(15:43):
and other types of things where we can grow fresh
local food. So you have a lot of farms that
want to transition off of the types of crops that
require those hard chemicals they call them. We've got to
shift toward more biological, more natural substances for u center fields,
and we also have a shift away from traditional crops
toward more fresh local food. A lot of farms want
(16:06):
to make that transition, but they don't necessarily have a
market yet to sell these other crops products. They're kind
of stuck in these broken markets growing these traditional crops
that if you want to be able to compete on,
it requires that you use those chemicals so that you
can keep up. So I am hopeful that our country
is able to transition away from that toward fresh local food,
(16:27):
but it requires changes in government policy, and as it
stands right now, you have to use a lot of
chemicals in some cases for farms to be able to
make it. I'm not saying that's right or the way
we want it. It's a reality that a lot of
farms face.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Grade the Food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Nah, you know, I would give them probably a B
minus give us. I give them a little bit better
grade than our country has overall on protecting our farms.
The safety level is all right in this country. But
the real problem goes back to something you asked me
(17:04):
about earlier, which is we have all this government and
we still have unsafe food. We can have fewer food recalls,
we can have safer food in this country and more
nimble government, and we've kind of got that backwards right now.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one am Eastern, and go to Coast tocoastam dot com
for more
Now here's a highlight from coast to coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back George Norrey along with Brian Reisinger. Brian,
at the rate our farms are disappearing ten years from now,
if we keep this pace going, what happens.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
Ten years from now, we will be about twenty five
percent of the way there, George on wiping out the
rest of our farms in this country. It's kind of
shocking if you think about it, losing forty five thousand
farms a year for the past century. If we keep
doing that, what it means is in forty years we'll
have lost the rest of our farms. I'm forty years old.
By the time my little girl is my age, will
(00:39):
have lost the rest of our farm. So in ten
years time, we'll have lost another twenty five percent of
our farms, and we can't afford to keep doing that.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
Are the farmers selling the land because they're making a profit,
or are they going out of business and they're getting
foreclosed on? What's happening to them.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
It's a little bit of all of those things. What
it means to be land rich cash poor in the
reason and we selected that title is because the farmland.
The value that farmland is going up, but the ability
to make a living on that land is going down.
That's the cash poor part. And so farm families they
face kind of a unimaginable choice. On the one hand,
(01:17):
they if they keep going and it keeps getting harder
and harder to make it each year, you know, these
moms and dads face day they're gonna have to other kids,
we can't make it anymore. We're gonna lose everything. On
the other hand, if you turn around and sell that land,
that solves your financial problem, but you lose everything else.
Because when you grow up on a farm like I did,
and we talk about this in the book, the farm
is not just your dad's job or your mom's job.
(01:38):
It's your home, it's your community, it's your heritage. So
they don't want to sell it because they would lose everything.
But if they keep going, they're going to continue to
make it harder and harder every year to make it.
So it's a real diveloment. It gets harder every generation.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
When they sell the farm land, what happens to it?
Do they turn it into a subdivision or do they
keep farming it.
Speaker 3 (01:58):
What happens. Yeah, yep. Some of it goes to developers
for subdivisions or for other urban sprawl. Some of it
goes to other larger farms because we got some farms.
You know, that pressure to get bigger, get out means
that some farms can't make it and they're getting out,
and other farms are getting bigger to survive. And so
that's why you see more and more of our farms
(02:19):
being sold to larger farms and in some cases corporate farms.
And then some of that land is going into the
hands of foreign adversaries, a variety of wealthy folks. Bill
Gates is a great, big buyer of farmland. So what
is common across all those categories is that we're increasingly
having less and less farmland and it is concentrated in
(02:41):
fewer and fewer hands, and that causes a lot of
risks for us.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
The farm land that let's say the Chinese owned, do
they manufacture food, Do they grow food and then send
it back to China?
Speaker 3 (02:53):
Yeah, in many cases they're just holding on to it.
In some cases they might be utilizing it and have
some companies that are doing certain things with it. But
what it's really about is two things. The Chinese are
very patient. The Chinese Communist Party is very patient, and
they're acquiring this land because over the long term they
want to be able to destabilize our food supply. And
(03:15):
also it is not a coincidence that the land that
they are acquiring in many cases is near military installations.
So they're making a long term bet on destabilizing our
food supply, which is a huge part of it's the
most basic form of security. And in the meantime they're
able to get close to military installations as well. So
it's a long term and a short term game to
(03:35):
destabilize the country.
Speaker 2 (03:37):
Which comes to the shop, can't we just nationalize it
and take it?
Speaker 1 (03:42):
You know?
Speaker 3 (03:42):
It's interesting. I hope it doesn't come to that. And
the reason for that is because we have such a
proud history of small land ownership in this country. The
best guard against it is if we can solve the
underlying issues that are making harder for our farms to
make it. Because as our farms disappear and that farmland
gets concentrated in fewer hands, it becomes easier for a
(04:04):
foreign adversary to buy it, right because they can go
to one big land owner a corporation that owns a
bunch of farmland, and in one big financial deal with
a company that only has to answer to its shareholders,
they can acquire a whole bunch of land. If you
have American farmland owned by millions of small family farmers,
that is a guard against the Chinese. Try walking up
on the porch of a guy like my dad and
(04:25):
saying we're with the Chinese Communist party to buy your farm.
It's not going to happen. So those small individual landowners,
they're a force field of bulwark against letting the Chinese
or other adversaries get their hands on our farmland.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
That is truly dramatic, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (04:41):
It's incredible. It's really a shocking thing. I was amazed
as I was investigating the issues driving the disappearance of
our farms, that it reached that farm its impact. I
knew it was affecting our food, but not only the
price of our food, the health of our food, but
also the security of our country. All of it rests
on making sure that we keep this tradition of small
(05:01):
family farms owning land in this country alive.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Brian, are we still paying farmers not to grow crops.
Speaker 3 (05:10):
That's such a good question. That was something that really
was born in the Great Depression, and we explored that era,
and it is true that there were massive programs that
were paying farmers not to grow crops, and that was
a goal because they were trying to bring the prices
up for farmers. Now, ironically, the government was doing that
at a time when people were also starving, and so
you know, a lot of these programs were contradictory are
(05:32):
deeply problematic today. There are some conservation programs. I wouldn't
say that they're quite as much paying farmers deliberately not
to grow to limit the food supply so much as
there might be programs that pay farmers to have certain
types of land and conservation for limited periods of time,
things like that. So there's some smaller programs that are
(05:53):
kind of relics of that era, But the whole sale
trying to stop farmers from growing food as kind of
apply and demand type of scheme is something that thankfully
we haven't done for a few decades in this country.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
You believe we can turn this around, though, don't you.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I do, And the reason for it is the resilience
of our farm families. I think about people like my dad,
who you know, at the age of eight, he stepped
up to do the work of a grown man after
my grandpa slipped and fell off a corn crib and
broke us back. We tell the story in the book,
and my grandpa got back up on his feet and
he was okay, But not before my dad started the
(06:31):
workman and carried it out for the rest of his life.
And now my dad right now he's asleep. It in
just a few hours, he's going to be awake, and
I can bet you that the first place is going
to be is on the back of track or doing
his work. He loves the way of life. And so
that kind of resilience is not unique to our family.
We picked our heads up from the work and decided
to tell an honest story about the economic upheaval and
(06:51):
the struggles of farm families. But every farm family has
stories like that, and so that resilience is a real
reason for hope. And there are things we can do
to turn the issue around. And so if we can
harness that resilience of the American farm family, to me,
that's the reason for endless optimism. If we are willing
to change direction in this country.
Speaker 2 (07:09):
One of my biggest investment regrets Brian as selling my
one hundred and fourteen acre a horse farm I owned
an Illinois beautiful anyway.
Speaker 3 (07:19):
It is such a hard choice for families and landowners
because there's economic pressures to it and other reasons. And
at the same time, it's just an incredible thing to
own a piece of God's creation and know that you're
able to live close to the land.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
And I had about fifty acres of plowable land that
I rented out to another farmer. You would pay me.
I didn't have to do anything. He just gave me
a check.
Speaker 3 (07:45):
Well, I'm glad that you had that opportunity to do
that and to have that property and to work with
a local farmer. You know, that's an example of folks
working together to keep our farmland in the right hands.
And I'm glad you had that opportune that experience.
Speaker 2 (08:01):
Does the government look at this as a crisis or not.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
No, the government doesn't understand it. Traditionally, neither political party.
This is one of the other shocking things. Traditionally, both
the establishment of the Republican Party as well as the
Democrats have in one way or another over and over
made different mistakes or deliberate decisions that have wiped out
our farmers. And today I think we're talking about the
(08:25):
issue more than we ever have before. More people, more
members of the American public care about where their food
comes from, and we're trying to raise the alarm bells.
But in general, policymakers don't understand what's going on on
the farm on the ground in this country, and they
don't understand how it's tied to our food supply. So
I think we really need to continue to sell those
(08:46):
alarm bells, because again, we're still marching toward wiping out
the rest of our farms in the next forty years
if we don't make a change, and that means people
on the right the lesson. Everywhere in between are people
that don't fit any particular box looking at this issue
honestly and making sure they grab our pulsemakers by the
lapels and make sure that they're looking at this issue
(09:07):
in a way that they haven't.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
Ryan in the United States, where the regions where the
best farms are.
Speaker 3 (09:13):
Well, I'm biased on that Georgia, and I have to
be honest, I say the Upper Midwest, where I grew
up the driftless region of southern Wisconsin in particular, and
that's the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin. But who's driven
alongside the Mississippi and other parts of the state. But
in general, set my bias aside the Midwest and the
Great Plains of America. Although they're not the only places
(09:36):
that have a rich tradition of farmland, the Midwest and
the Great Plains are not only some of the best
farmland in the country, but some of the best farmland
in the world. California also has an amazing amount of
beautiful fertile land. Their government is making it more challenging
for farmers there even than it already is. But the
land that we have in those parts of the country
(09:58):
are not only strong America, but it's some of the
best land that you'll find on the globe.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
And you mentioned fertile. Just how fertile is the land.
Speaker 3 (10:07):
Yeah, it's incredible what you can do and the way
that different reeds of our country have found different niches.
In California, it's especially fertile for fruits and vegetables, fresh
produce as well as nuts, cashewes. All throughout the Great Plains.
It's very fertile for different types of wheat and grain
corn as well. And when you get up into the
(10:29):
Upper Midwest I'm from, it's fertile for all those things
wheat and corn, et cetera. But the interesting thing about
where I'm from is that because we got those beautiful
rolling hills and plunging valleys, we don't have as much
wide open farmland. And so that's why Wisconsin became in
America's dairy land, because we didn't have the big, wide
open land that you needed to grow as much wheat
(10:50):
as possible. You can grow beautiful wheat there, but you
don't have those wide open fields to grow as much
as possible. So we couldn't compete quite as well on
wheat or other things like that. But what we could
do is grow n uugh as to feed cows and
make those cows healthy and able to produce a whole
lot of milk. So those big rolling hills when you're
driving through southern Wisconsin is the reason that Wisconsin became
(11:10):
America's dairy land, because we had fertile land to feed
our animals and that was a more efficient way to
do it.
Speaker 2 (11:17):
Do cows and beef take up a lot of land.
Speaker 3 (11:21):
You know, they take up some. But I think that
there's something that a lot of the American public knows
that maybe doesn't pass the smell tests, so to speak.
A lot of people who care about our environment, which
by the way, people who farm care about our environment
as well, and people who care about our environment and
farmers can work together solve so many problems. But there's
a lot of talk about old farmers and farmland are
pluting our environment. You know, that doesn't pass the smell test.
(11:44):
When you think about your average American city, the amount
of exhaust and small and things coming out of those cities,
I think that that is choking out our environment a
lot more than cows standing on a beautiful green pasture.
If you ask me, I think most people in America public. No,
that's true as well.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Companies like Tyson with their chicken farms, where are they
raising them?
Speaker 3 (12:06):
Yeah, you know, they have their own facilities and they
also contract with farmers, and they're an example of something
that's happening all across our economy. Sometimes people want to
talk about one company or another, but what I say is,
you know, industries all across all sectors of the American
economy have become more and more defined by large players,
(12:29):
and so the food companies are working to keep up
with the rest of our economy. The agrobusiness companies are
working to keep up with the food companies, and the
farmers have to work to keep up with the aga
business and food companies. So that's another of the reasons
that you see. You know that pressure to get bigger,
get out family farmers are facing, and it's actually something
that companies of all kinds face in our economy.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
What about produce from places like Mexico? Is that safe?
Speaker 3 (12:55):
It's such a good question. There. There is good food
that can come from other countries, but we have too
much of it coming in and it is sometimes very
much at risk. Now, the ideal would be that we
are producing our domestic food supply because it's safer. It's
more secure for us. We know that our country can't
be held hostage by anyone who wants to withhold food
(13:17):
from us. But the reality is that we're importing far
more food than that. The agricultural trade deficit. I'm going
to pick a number that's between the Biden and Trump
administration so that people know I'm being nonpartisan about it.
The agriculture trade deficit was about forty two and a
half billion dollars near the end of the bidenministration beginning
of the Trump administration. That means that we're importing forty
(13:39):
two and a half billion more dollars in food than
we are exporting. And it's kind of crazy if you
think about it, because we're wiping out our farms at
forty five thousand years, so we're wiping out our domestic
food supply, and we're depending more than ever on imports
from foreign countries. Now it makes sense to buy kiwis
and bananas from other countries, food that we can't grow here.
(14:00):
But if it's beef, tomatoes, other things, we have the
ability to supply that food here, and what we should
be doing is making sure we're doing that. Instead, it's
almost reading like a doomsday movie script. You know, you're
wiping out your domestic food supply and depending more than
ever on foreign countries. That's not a way to have
a secure country.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
How much land does some families need to grow enough
food to sustain themselves.
Speaker 3 (14:24):
You can do that on just a few acres. A
family that has five to ten acres can not only
grow I mean, one big garden can supply a lot
of what a family needs. But if you have five, ten,
twenty fifty acres, you have the ability to grow the
food that you need and sell some of it. And
actually this is one of the areas of hope for
(14:45):
our farms. Some of the small farms, really small farms
are finding ways to be economical. So it's the biggest
of the big farms that had to get bigger get out,
and then it's many of the smallest farms that are
finding ways to be economical. The farms that are really
having challenges and getting wiped out the most are the
ones that are in the middle, those farms that are
big enough to have a lot of expenses, but not
(15:08):
big enough to have the great, big economics of scale
of the bigger operations. So those small farms that are
actually an area of hope that I hope we can
find some lessons from.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
How much of the land Brian needs to be fertilized.
Speaker 3 (15:21):
That's a really good question. Most of our farmland in
America needs to be fertilized from the standpoint of growing
the crops that our government incentivizes, the most oddity crops, soybeans,
corn things like that. And there's a lot of traditional
farms like the one I grew up on that grow
those crops and products because it's what's available to them
and are working to transition over to new alternative crops pasturis, chickens,
(15:43):
and other types of things where we can grow fresh
local food. So you have a lot of farms that
want to transition off of the types of crops that
require those hard chemicals they call them. We've got to
shift toward more biological, more natural substances for u center fields,
and we also have a shift away from traditional crops
toward more fresh local food. A lot of farms want
(16:06):
to make that transition, but they don't necessarily have a
market yet to sell these other crops products. They're kind
of stuck in these broken markets growing these traditional crops
that if you want to be able to compete on,
it requires that you use those chemicals so that you
can keep up. So I am hopeful that our country
is able to transition away from that toward fresh local food,
(16:27):
but it requires changes in government policy, and as it
stands right now, you have to use a lot of
chemicals in some cases for farms to be able to
make it. I'm not saying that's right or the way
we want it. It's a reality that a lot of
farms face.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
Grade the Food and Drug Administration.
Speaker 3 (16:43):
Nah, you know, I would give them probably a B
minus give us. I give them a little bit better
grade than our country has overall on protecting our farms.
The safety level is all right in this country. But
the real problem goes back to something you asked me
(17:04):
about earlier, which is we have all this government and
we still have unsafe food. We can have fewer food recalls,
we can have safer food in this country and more
nimble government, and we've kind of got that backwards right now.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
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