Land Rich, Cash Poor: The Heartbreaking Collapse of the American Dream and a Family’s Fight to Survive

The gripping saga of Land, Rich, and Cash Poor, where Brian Reisinger unveils a century-long tale of resilience, heartbreak, and the shocking decline of the American farmer. From the rolling fields of Wisconsin to a world dominated by corporate greed and suffocating regulations, this is more than a family story—it’s a chilling wake-up call echoing across the Western world. As small farms vanish at an alarming rate—45,000 a year!—and global forces conspire to choke out the little guy, Reisinger exposes the hidden crises, from tariffs to COVID, that pushed his family to the brink. Yet amid the despair, a flicker of hope emerges: a sister’s bold vision, a father’s quiet courage, and a rallying cry for a revolution to save our food, our heritage, and our future.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
And we're going to talk to him about the COVID
crash and the Road to revival, couple of chapters that
are there. But as he talked about his experiences there,
he says, my great grandfather, his name is Reisinger, had
left pre World War one Europe and lost himself in
the rolling hillsides of southern Wisconsin, Settling in nineteen twelve

(00:21):
on our farm in a deep valley filled with rich
brown dirt. He and my great grandmother built a future
together as the depression gripped the country. Out of their
fourteen children came the eldest, my grandfather, Albert, who married
my grandmother. Their generation helped expand our family's dairy farm
up out of the valley and into the hills above,

(00:43):
and then his eldest, my own father, took over, feeling
like his father before him, that he had no choice
with what he was supposed to do with his life.
So he and my mom rose each morning to milk
the cows, bounced countless hours on the seat of a tractor, shoveled, carried,
and heaved until they expanded the farm further, still, buying

(01:04):
a third farm that was once run by my dad's
aunt and uncle, bringing the Reisinger family acreage to a
height of six hundred acres. My dad found, despite feeling
that he had no choice, that farming was his calling.
Each day it sank deeper down into his blood and
then his bones, until it was a part of him.

(01:25):
To me, he seemed to share the instincts of his
animals and to since the changing weather bearing down on
his crops. For forty five years, morning and night, every
day of the year, he milked fifty cows in our
old but sturdy red barn, sometimes rotating in more cows
and shifts when he could manage it to make it
a little more money, and harvested enough crops each year

(01:45):
to feed his herd and maybe sell a little on
the side. He and my mom built our family a
farm that was worth more than any point in its
one hundred year history, and gave my sister and I
choices that my dad never had for me to find
my own way, whatever it may be, and for my
younger sister to decide to take over the farm and
what had been a man's world. And each year more

(02:06):
people shrugged and told us little family farms like ours,
so much work for so small a milk check just
couldn't make it anymore. And so, as he points out,
been there for one hundred years, his father built it
to a pinnacle, but then the things that have happened
recently nearly took it down, and his sister had to

(02:28):
completely rethink the operation to try to keep the farm going.
So we're going to talk to him about that, the
effects of COVID, effects of tariff, and then what can
be done. And this is something that applies to all
of us, even if we don't want to farm, even
if we don't have it, we need to keep that
access to good food open. All right, Welcome back, And

(02:52):
the book is Land Rich and Cash Poor, and we're
talking to Brian Reisinger, and this is about his family's story,
but it is also something that's happening across the Western world.
We're seeing this happening, and the UK, we're seeing it
happening in France, We're seeing a lot of things happening
in America. But he's gonna speak to us about some
of the specifics that have happened when things really took

(03:16):
a downturn, and how his family has managed this. But
we also want to talk about what is coming forward.
Brian has an interesting background. He grew up in a
family farm in Wisconsin, and then he became a columnist,
a consultant. He's worked for a lot of large mainstream
publications like USA Today, Newsweek and others like that. So

(03:37):
he's really ideally suited to tell this story. He's lived it,
that's been a part of his family's history for one
hundred years, and now he is a writer, and so
he is able to articulate what has happened with them.
So welcome and thank you for joining us, and thank
you for this very important book.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
Brian, Hey, thank you for having me on. I appreciate
it's really good to be with you.

Speaker 1 (03:57):
Tell us a little bit about your family. An introduction
I read from your book. You're talking about your father
and mother and how they'd expanded the farm to the
biggest that had ever been, that bought the farm that
belonged to your aunt and uncle and everything, and then
things turned difficult.

Speaker 3 (04:14):
Tell us a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (04:16):
Yeah, absolutely, you said it exactly right. You know, we
were in our small farm, but through the generations we
had built it up to be able to make it.
And from my great grandparents to my grandparents to my parents.
It was each generation added a building block, and my
parents got it to that height, as you said, And
you know, in this almost in the same moment, things

(04:36):
began to decline. And I was lucky to grow up
with the middle class living that my mom and dad
fought for us to have and to be a college,
partially paying my way on newspaper hourly wages and partially
my parents helping. But at the same time we began
to see that farms our side just couldn't continue to
deliver that kind of a living. And what happened is
and the generation from my dad to us, the American

(05:01):
economy fundamentally shift the farm christ in the nineteen it's
played a big part of it, but fundamentally shift where
the medium and small sized farm really was in a
downslide and couldn't make it in a way that had
been possible in the past generations, even though it had
always been tough.

Speaker 3 (05:16):
You know, this is a story.

Speaker 1 (05:17):
My dad had a small business, and it was not
a farming business, but it was a kind of business.
I saw that regulations are going to choke it off
and it wasn't going to be able to continue with that,
and I have seen small businesses. So you know, when
we my wife and I began our business, it was
a service business, because that's the kind of stuff that's
left to us now, and even that is being choked

(05:39):
off to us everywhere. So your story is very relevant
because it's really the American experience. You know, for centuries
here it's been every generation has been better. Now we've
reached this and now it's been a sudden downturn. And
it doesn't matter really whether it's a farm or whether
it's a small business or even a service business. Forget
about manufacturing. You know, the Chinese competition and things like that,

(06:04):
but you can't even you can't do It's difficult for
Americans to really have a dream that they can pursue.
And so I like what you had to say in
terms about the road forward with this, But talk a
little bit about what caused that immediately, and you talk
about COVID, you talk about tariffs and other things like that.

(06:25):
They're really kind of the immediate causes of what was
happening and that crisis for your family. Tell us a
little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (06:32):
You hit on it exactly right. A family, farms, a
small business, and small businesses of all kinds have faced
different variations of what farms face. Farms I think faced
a lot of unique challenges that had a confluence that
really tell those story well. But to your point, there
was a lot of parallel experiences. What happened is we
moved into the nineties. You know I was growing up
in the eighties and nineties. Is we moved into the nineties,
we had the family farm suddenly confronting a world that

(06:55):
was so much bigger, defined by bigger business, bigger god,
bigger markets, all of these different things. And that was
the latest chapter in kind of a progression. So from
the we really began to lose our farms actually in
the nineteen twenties, believe it or not, one hundred years ago,
and we've been losing farms at the rate of forty
five thousand a year on average ever since. And there

(07:16):
are economic crisis reasons, you know, crises that we didn't
understand how it affected the farm on the ground. There
are political reasons, mistakes by our political leaders, and there
are technological reasons. All those issues have been piling up
for dang near a century, and then when we got
into the nineties, all those compounding forces combined with this
emergence of the family farmer really being a little guy

(07:40):
in a way that blew out of the water all
the past challenges, and so we had what's going on
in the global trade. We had a lot of agriculture
markets that have become broken. We have bigger and bigger
industry surrounding farming requiring that everyone else get bigger, and
those all of those things kind of hit. We had
all these forces from years past, and so next thing,

(08:02):
you know a farm that you know, in the nineteen eighties,
dairy farm, the midpoint for a dairy farm was about
eighty cows, and our farm milk fifty cows for a
lot of our history, so we were on the small
end of medium. You know, alpha midpoint David is twelve
hundred cows eighty up to twelve hundred. And it's not
just dairy, it's all types of farming. So that's the

(08:23):
acceleration that we saw in the nineties and two thousands.

Speaker 1 (08:26):
Wow, it's that kind of consolidation. I mean, we've seen that.
You take a look around even in the retail trade.
You see the fact that in the nineties, you know,
Romney and other people started putting together things like staples
and stuff like that, driving out hardware stores with home
depot lows. And so what we see is all these

(08:46):
different retail segments even now being replaced by these giant
corporations that are financed from Wall Street, and they essentially
have an unlimited amount of money. And they're almost like
the federal government in the sense, as long as they've
got a good story to tell somebody unlimited financing. And
it's really difficult to compete against something like that when
we're in business. We are in a video business, and

(09:07):
we had to compete against Blockbuster, who operated for the
entire time that we were in business. They operated at
a loss. Well, we can't operate at a loss, you know,
and we can't get money from Wall Street. And so
that's the situation that we're in. But you've also got
with the farms. It seems to me like recently there's
been a tremendous turn in Europe, especially where they're coming

(09:31):
after the farmers, where they used to protect them. Everybody
used to realize, hey, we need to be able to
feed our own people here, and so we're going to
protect the farms, even if we've got to subsidize them.
Now they're at the point where and it's not just
the farmers, but especially the farmers, where they're going to
come after them because they are land rich and cash poor.
The tax policies of inheritance things which really fall on

(09:52):
all small businesses, especially the farmers that have to be
forced to sell their farms in order to pay for
the taxes when the the parents die, they can't continue
it from generation to generation. And they're directly challenging them
with tax policies, they're directly challenging them with environmental policies.
As we saw in the Netherlands, there seems to be
a concerted effort to get rid of the farms. What

(10:15):
do you think is really going on here? It seems
to me like they want to consolidate and own everything
and they want to feed us soil and green out
of the labs.

Speaker 2 (10:25):
Well, that's where it's going to end if we don't
do something about it. And you know, I mean, and
here's here's the reality. I think that I think that
political leaders on all sides of the political spectrum have
not understood what's going on on the ground on our
family farms and some of the things you're talking about
now the tax policies and environmental policies farmers. You know,
farmers want to do smart things with their money, and

(10:46):
farmers want to do things that would be good for
our soil, for our water, for our natural resource. So
there's ways for all these people to be able to
work with farmers. I think something that's happened with some
of the folks that are pushing a lot of those
anti farm policies is they've convinced themselves that the only
farms out there are the great big farms. And we
can talk about the big farms, and we wrestle that

(11:06):
with that in the book, and I try to talk
honestly about some of the pros and some of the
cons about that. But a lot of people out there
that are attacking from the convinced themselves that it is
big farms out there and that's it. Well, what the
reality is. Even though we've lost seventy percent of our
farms in this country, and even though the farms that
are left are struggling, the thing that people don't realize

(11:27):
is eighty eight percent of them are small family farms.
And so people say, how can that be? I don't
hear about those farms well, what's going on is those
folks are working two to three jobs. And that's farms
like ours, where people are working the land and they
are also working you know, you know, working factory ships
or porn concrete, or working construction site or you know,
got another small business on the side, whatever the case

(11:48):
may be. They're working two or three jobs in the
farmer's supplemental income. So what we're doing when we attack
farming is the biggest farms have the money and the
resources just like any other larger business, to absorb those attacks.
The smaller farms are the ones that are going to
get hit and going to get wiped out. So a
lot of the people who are doing this, if they
realize that they're shooting at the small farms, they might
rethink it because those are the types of farms that

(12:10):
for decades, to your point, people really wanted to make
sure that we treasured and cherished, and they can be
part of the solution for many of our food and
environmental problems as well.

Speaker 3 (12:20):
Well.

Speaker 1 (12:21):
You know, as you point out in your book, I'll
just read the Senate here for you, but both parties,
both political parties, used food as a weapon abroad, just
as economic catastrophes of our own making were unfolding at home.
And that's true. I mean, we use them as you know,
put terrafs on. And so what happens. One of our
major exports, of course, is agricultural product. So the farmers

(12:42):
got hit with Trump's tariffs, and then we had Biden
do sanctions and so forth, and we had the COVID
stuff happening in the middle of that. Was that the
point at which things got super difficult for your family,
because you begin your book talking about your dad, who,
as you and the the quote that I read, grew
up on the farm and it, you know, just kind

(13:04):
of worked into his entire life to the extent that
he was one with it. And how depressed he was
at the fact that he had to sell off his
dairy cows in order to keep the farm going. Was
that what happened was that crux there at that point
in time.

Speaker 2 (13:19):
You know, it was really the nineties and two thousands
that pointed us in the direction of becoming smaller and
smaller relative to the rest of the economy. And what
happened during COVID, to your point, is when COVID hit
and you know, depending upon the situation and the perspective
the spread of the virus and or the government's response
to the virus that did was it put farms through

(13:43):
a last additional shock. And for our farm, what happened
is we were continuing on. And I don't know how
long my dad would have continued on working the farm,
even though the economic scale wasn't there for a dairy
farm anymore. He might have gone on forever if he
hadn't gotten so sick with COVID. And I know there
are a lot of people who had different experiences with COVID,
lighter cases and different things like that, and there's a

(14:05):
lot of discussion, debate and difficulty around how cautious should
we be, you know. But in any case, my dad
got a case that he was older, he was sixty nine,
and he got one of those cases that sends you
to the hospital and they're talking about they're having ventilator
conversations and things like that. Right, So he got up
from that and he survived it, and he just looked
at it and he said, Man, if something had happened
to me and I hadn't come back, we would have

(14:27):
had a farm that wasn't in any shape to move
forward for the next generation. He'd gotten it through his generation.
He'd ran his race right, and we had no debt.
We owned the farm free and clear, and it was
what does the next station want to do with it?
And if something had happened and you know, what would
we have done?

Speaker 3 (14:43):
You know?

Speaker 2 (14:43):
And so he knew that he couldn't continue like milking physically,
and then we needed to evolve the business model and
the way that my sister and he could work on
into the future. So COVID for us really was kind
of a final shock to the system, and it was
a shock to so many people because we had a
situation where farmers could tell their goods.

Speaker 3 (15:01):
Yeah, oh, it's crazy. It was absolutely crazy.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
Yeah yeah, yeah, destroying the food on the farms while
the shelves were empty. And we've seen a lot of
that stuff, and this idiotic approach to bird flu as well,
where they test one bird with a PCR test and
then if they get one positive, they kill millions of them.
But you know, there's also maybe some other things that.

Speaker 3 (15:21):
Are going on.

Speaker 1 (15:21):
As I've reported, You've got situations where these these big
gigantic egg corporations have already been brought up on charges
and had to pay tens of millions of dollars to
General Food and all the rest of these companies that
they were fixing the price. And so there's a question there,
you know, it's like what is going on.

Speaker 3 (15:43):
Here with this?

Speaker 1 (15:43):
Or we look at the foreign situation with the Chinese
buying up pork. For example, in North Carolina where I
used to live, they went in and bought these different farms.
RFK Junior had a great video explaining exactly how they
were taking over all the different pork farms and things
like that.

Speaker 3 (16:01):
So we have these.

Speaker 1 (16:02):
Massive corporations, We even have foreign countries that are interested
in getting a stranglehold on our food. And then at
the same time, you got a lot of people who
just want to have they want to monopoly on everything.
That's that's really seems to be what is happening.

Speaker 2 (16:18):
Yeah, you're absolutely right, and you're hitting on a really
important part of what's happened to our food supply. So
we saw it during cold we're seeing it right now
during bird flu, which is the disruption of our food supply.
And the reason that so you know, you can talk
about bird flu and like, okay, in this case, should
we have euthanized as many birds as we did, or
you know, you can talk about the individual responses on
the ground, but here's the thing. Whatever the response is,

(16:38):
the impact on that on our food supply is outsized.
And the reason for that is because our food industry
is so concentrated that our supply chain is one. So
if we hadn't been wiping out forty five thousand farms
a year for the past century, and we had more
businesses of more kinds and more sizes to your point
on small business involved in the purchase and the processing
and the transport and the and the wholesale and the

(17:01):
retail of our food, if we had more links in
that chain, there'd be more ways for the food to
get from the farm gate to the dinner table, including
direct sales from farms to consumers for those folks who
want to do it that way. But because we've been
wiping out farms, and because we've been hammering the egg
and the food industries as much as we have, the
reality is that our supply chain is very vulnerable. So

(17:21):
you got in COVID, you got this almost dystopian situation
where farmers can't sell their goods if they can it's
for our lower price. In the basement, consumers can't find
the food they need. If they can, it's higher prices
through the roof. Same things happen with the eggs right now.
Bird flu does not have to have the impact that
it's having, but it is so disruptive because if you
have one distribution center that goes down because of something

(17:42):
like that, that really affects the supply eggs in a
really big way, in a way that it wouldn't if
we had many small operators in many parts of the country.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Oh yeah, absolutely. You talk in your book about the
commodity trap. Talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 2 (17:54):
Yeah, you know, that's something that the community I grew
up near and so many fall into. And what happens
is when you start out, and you know this as
a business guy, when you start out with a new
industry or a new business idea, you might be selling
something that's a little different and it could be a
sophisticated product, or it could be just something that you
do a little differently, a dish that a local restaurant

(18:14):
prepares in a way that sets them apart. It's high
in innovation and it's lower and its availability over time
an industry gets more mature, and a lot of this
stuff is natural, but we fall into it in an
unnatural way, so it gets more developed and evolved, and
you know, at some point, you know, growing the people
in Iowa will get mad at you for this, as

(18:34):
a wisconsinin the corn the field corn in Iowa and
wild Corner and Wisconsin very similar, right, they'll say, no,
A commodity is a product that is basically very similar
regardless of who's producing it. And there's certain things and
goods that make sense to produce that way. But what
happens is if an entire industry farming, an entire community

(18:55):
that's based on one industry slide into that where now
your whole economy is just based on producing corn the
same way that every other community in every other state
that produces corn does it. Well, then the only thing
that you can do to be able to make more
money and survive as things get harder and as the
economy has its ups and downs, is you produce more
of it for cheap. And it's good to be able

(19:16):
more efficient to produce more of something for cheaper. That's
a good thing, But when that's the only card you
can play and you don't also have innovation doing something new, different,
or having a new thing that people are willing to
pay money for. You don't have economic growth an opportunity.
You're just sliding into this kind of downward spiral where
the only thing you can do is produce more of
it for cheaper and that's it. And what happens is

(19:37):
that squeezes out industry, That squeezes out small businesses. And
consolidation is a normal thing. Shifting towards commodities is a
normal thing. But when you go so far that there
are so few operators who can make it, And by
the way, when you've got misunderstured economic crisis and faulty
government policy and technology tilted against the little guy, all

(19:57):
three of those things making it worse. Now we've got
kind of this unnatural, unholy shift where it's not normal competition,
it's not normal consolidation. It's a completely twisted market that
is tilting the tables against American entrepreneurship.

Speaker 1 (20:11):
Oh, I agree, yeah, And so the question is, you know,
what do we do about that? When I look at
the I look at engineering because I was also worked
for a while in the semiconductor industry, and what we
saw was the commodification of like memory chips, for example,
and it wasn't too long. At first the memory chips
were oh, this is you know, we've gone to integrated

(20:31):
circuits and instead of board level stuff, and so this
is a real innovation. But then it became you know,
commodification happened, and so then it became who could produce
it more efficiently? And so these Asian countries are doing
a very good job of doing that and doing it cheaply,
and so it essentially drove the US country companies out
of that, but they were able to succeed by going

(20:55):
to CPU design and things like that. We see that
now with Nvidia. You know, they're they're very six usole
because they have focused on some innovative, specialized thing. But
how does that translate? You know, I can see how
that works with technology, but how does that translate with food?
Because food is fundamental, like you point out, you know,
corn is corn. You know when you go different places,
how are you going to escape that commodification thing?

Speaker 2 (21:18):
If I come to you, if I come to you
looking with a crazy innovative apple, you may not want
to eat it, right.

Speaker 3 (21:23):
That's right.

Speaker 1 (21:23):
Well, they have produced some of those, and you're right,
I don't want to eat them, Yeah, the genetically modified ones.

Speaker 4 (21:29):
Yeah, but Bill Gates is doing some of that in Yeah,
I got to grow naturally out of the ground. But no,
you know, the way that it works is actually the
intersection of agriculture and technology.

Speaker 2 (21:40):
So this ties back to your exact point. So when
I talked about economic crises, government policy and technology tilting
against us, here's what happened with farming and food and technology.
We stopped having what is called scale neutral technology in
this country. Meeting a large farmer, medium farmers, small farm
could all have different sizes and types of that technology

(22:01):
that's scalable for them, it's affordable for the small farms,
impractical for them to integrate.

Speaker 3 (22:05):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:06):
We stopped doing that kind of in halfway through the
twentieth century. And here's why farm wages were much lower
than factory wages. And we had a big challenge with
a lot of people moving from rural areas to urban
areas to chase you know, industrial jobs and making sense.
But we needed to have farms be able to grow
and keep up a little bit. So some of that
technology helped farms be able to take on more acres

(22:28):
and more animals or fewer people breaking their backs do it,
and it allowed farm wages to grow. It allowed us
to not have to depend on labor quite as much,
and it also meant that fewer people had to grow
their own food. So at some point technology that helped
farms just kind of be able to produce more and
get a little bigger was a good thing. But the
mid twentieth century we got to the point where we

(22:49):
kind of balanced that out that wasn't needed anymore. So
now the technology that's made to just make farms bigger,
more and more field roles, more and more animals packed
into a building, all that's doing is making it so
that big farms can get bigger, and it's not something
that a small farm can do because it doesn't make
sense for them or they can't afford it. You got
to take out too much debt to build a big
building or whatever it is for the small farmer. And

(23:10):
so we lost that scale neutral technology that we could
have a large, medium, and small farms doing different things
in our economy, and you had perfectly good medium and
small farms that were competitive other than they couldn't afford
that next technological innovation, so they fell behind even though
they were efficient, hard working, resourceful, scrappy in some ways.

(23:31):
As you know, sometimes small businesses are more innovative because
they got a little freedom to figure something else out
or take a different risk that a bigger one isn't
going to. You know, So innovators can come from all places,
but not if the technology is tilted against certain players
in the market.

Speaker 1 (23:44):
And now you've got the situation with you. John Deere
is pretty famous about this and coming in and saying,
you're not going to be able to.

Speaker 3 (23:50):
Fix your tractor.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
You know, a farmer is always a jack of all
trades and being able to do that. And so I
guess if you're a large farm concern, you don't really
care about that. Yes, I don't want to fix my
tractor anyway, so fine, I'm with it. But if you're
a small farmer, that becomes a real barrier to being
able to own and operate that. And so you know,

(24:13):
sometimes that technology can be twisted and used to make
it more difficult. Instead of being an assistance, it makes
it more difficult for them as well.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Yeah, you know that's right, And look, you my dad
probably drives John Deere Green tractors, you know, and that's
been a brand in our family for a long time.
And the reality is that I think it's actually in
the interest of all of the companies that exist in
our food industry, in our egg or business industry, in
our manufacturing and show all of the different industries intersect

(24:43):
with that culture. I think it's in their interest to
be long term to be able to build continue to
build machinery that could be used by farms of all sizes.
Because here's why. If we don't do that, if we
keep losing farms at the rate of forty five thousand
a year per year for the next century, likely like
we did in the past century, we're going to lose
most of our remaining family farms in the next forty years,

(25:03):
just mathematically speaking. And so those great big farms that
people are taking shots at, whether they should be doing
that or not, those are going to be the only
ones left now. That is fewer customers for suppliers, that is,
fewer customers for buyers that you know, all of the
larger agriculture and agribusiness and food companies, they at some
point need to have a robust farming sector, and we

(25:25):
can't have farming. I guess, you know, for lack of
whatever phrase get to the point of being too big
to fail. It really doesn't benefit these other industries to
not have a robust farm sector that's got some economic
diversity to it, with large, medium and small farms alike
operating and playing different roles and being there, especially during
supply chain crises and other things like that.

Speaker 1 (25:44):
You know, well, I agree, we look at it, and
we all understand that this kind of consolidation of everything
is not in our best interests. But it is the
interest in the obsession with the people who aren't doing
the consolidation, and they've got so much money. So what
do we do to push back against that? Because you
address that in your book as well, and want to
give people a positive vision of things that can be

(26:07):
done that we are not necessarily helpless about. That would
what are some of the things that you talk about
in terms of helping smaller farmers to survive.

Speaker 2 (26:18):
Yeah, well, these are things that I found as we
looked in the book at the hidden airs of history
driving the disappearance, and we even that with my family's
story of survival from the depression. Today, I found just
places where it seems like we made a choice in
our country that we didn't have to, So can we
make a better choice next time? These are things that
right left in big small industry, outside farming, inside farming,

(26:40):
all trying to find things that we could all find
a way to agree on, and there's a number of things.
The first is we need to have a research and
development revolution in this country. We don't have enough research
and development that is done to figure out what's that
next great innovation for farming for agriculture, and when we do,
to the point of our prior discussion there, it is
technology that really is to it against the medium and

(27:00):
small sized farms. So we need a research and revolution
where we've got more innovation happening and more innovation reaching
more farms. That involves private sector and that involves public sector.
The next thing that we need to do is we
need to make sure that we have fair markets internationally
and domestically, and that means that getting it right on trade,
meaning we get tougher to wipe out some unfair trade
standards and things that have made global trade. While free

(27:22):
trade is good, it needs to be fair trade. So
we've got to address that, and then our domestic markets.
To your exact point, we have to have an economy
set up that allows small business, the individual American entrepreneur
to be able to thrive in addition to larger industry.
And then the third thing, there's more, but the third
kind of basic concept is that we all need to
orient ourselves around what can we do to create more

(27:45):
opportunities for farmers And that means the farmers being willing
to move from some traditional crops and products into new
crops and products, figure out what is it that they
can shift off of because they've got these broken markets
that they depend on and there's a certain amount of
income there, so you kind of continue to do what
you know because you know you can make some money
there enough it keeps diminishing, but it's something, and you
don't have a market for other things. Well, farmers need
to be ready and willing to make some changes as

(28:06):
we have a growing market for those people who care
more than ever where their food comes from, and then
those people need to act on that caring about where
their food comes from. We need more people who are
willing to buy locally and regionally from farmers willing to
buy in specialty food markets willing to go to farmers'
markets and local butcher shops and permanent outdoor markets and

(28:27):
patronize CSAs and things like that in addition to the
normal places buy their food. Can't expect everyone to just
throw out the way they buy their food, you know,
but we can all take half steps. So if everybody's
doing that, it can really help. So if we do
those things, we have a research development revolution, make sure
our markets are fair, and we make sure that we
have farmers and consumers moving in this direction together to

(28:50):
where people care where their food comes from, we can
begin to see some changes, and I hope we do it.
But the challenging part about it is that it requires
all of us to do a little something a while.
We're all jumping in the water at the same time
and sure to get people.

Speaker 1 (29:03):
That yeah, yeah, you know, when I look at these situations,
you know, the farmers in France, or the farmers and
the Netherlands or something like that, and they're pushing back
against you know, in the Netherlands, they're banning fertilizer.

Speaker 3 (29:14):
You know, what are you doing this for?

Speaker 1 (29:16):
You know, and they're and they're protesting, and I'm looking
at it and it's like, Okay, so the farmers are
doing this, but the people who eat the food are
just kind of sitting on the sidelines like, well whatever,
you know, Uh, you know, my food doesn't come from
a farm. It comes from a box, you know, or whatever.

Speaker 3 (29:31):
You know.

Speaker 1 (29:31):
There's this total disconnection that they are going to be
fed by this or not fed by this, depending on
how this comes out to me. It seems like, you know,
there's this There's also the situation I talked about how
I think that it was Joeanne's fabrics. It was a
huge thing because women used to make their own dresses, right,
and women used to also be interested in cooking, you know,

(29:53):
or men as well, and so we were losing this
interest and doing things ourselves. The big part of that is, Hey,
I just want to buy something that is preprocessed food.
I stick it in the microwave and eat it, you know,
fast food, even if it's a fast food that we
get out of the grocery store. Now, maybe people are
going to start looking at this and start to realize that,

(30:15):
you know, that's going to negatively affect their health. There
seems to be a big disconnect about that. If they
were concerned more about what they eat. They might be
more concerned about learning how to cook and things like that.
But it seems like, you know, we got this huge
hurdle to get over because we've become so pacified and
so dependent and so really just lazy. You know, we

(30:35):
don't want to make our clothes, we don't want to
cook our food. We don't want to know how to
grow our food even or where it comes from. And
it seems to me like that's a big part of it.
I did a video a few years ago. It was
for a farm association. We talked about locovares, you know,
instead of a carnivore, you know that's going to eat meat,

(30:55):
somebody's eating locally. And there's great stuff that's out there
in the farm to table stuff or you know, farm
to market type of things, but people have to want that.
And right now, that's really kind of the only innovation
that I'm seeing as a consumer is that some farms
are out there trying to sell high quality food to people.

(31:19):
But it also comes at a price, and that's a
bit of a problem as well, because then it becomes
kind of this designer food, and only a few people
can afford that, So you know some Is there anything
that you're aware of that people are taking a slightly
different path to try to do things in terms of
direct from the farm to the consumer, because that's that's

(31:40):
a real issue, and of course government regulation is a
big part of stopping that in many cases as well.

Speaker 2 (31:47):
Yeah, you hit the nail on the head, and I
think that there is reason for hope, but there's a
lot of work to do. And what I mean by
that is we had this kind of paradigm that's set
up where you know, the cheap food was the stuff
that you could buy off the national supply chain in
all the normal conventional ways that we buy it in
package and all that, and then the other healthier food

(32:07):
and the food for those who cared where it came from,
was just more expensive. Right, here's the reality. While there
are still truth to that. The other thing that's going
on is we've got this supply chain vulnerability that's driving
up the price of conventional food. And that's happening at
the same time you've got more and more farmers realizing
that we need to take the local food movement out

(32:27):
of the corners and out of the more affluent areas,
and it spread it further to more people buying them
more of that way, so you got more people interested
in that at a time when our conventional source of
food are more expensive than ever. Eggs is a really
good recent example. For the same reason we talked about
bird food, and the same reason that much of our
food got more expensive after COVID, we get these supply
chain disruptions where this great, big supply chain that can

(32:50):
provide any kind of food you can imagine anytime a
year any part of the country. That's a miracle, but
it is a boler you know, and it's these it
hits these shock waves where suddenly there's spikes and prices
of food. So if that's happened at the same time
that farmers and consumers are thinking more and more about
where their food comes from, and farmers are innovating more
and consumers are getting more creative in terms of how

(33:11):
they buy their food, we may have a world where
balance this out a little bit and people get some
of their food that is, you know, from another part
of the country because that's the only place that it's grown,
just like bananas need to be imported, you know, and
there's a role for that. And then people also get
a lot more of their food from local regional sources,
and farmers can sell into those local region sources where

(33:32):
they're selling you know, fresher local food. They can also
sell into specialty food markets. A good example is Wisconsin cheese.
So Wisconsin got surpassed by California and milk production in
the nineties around the same time that I was talking
about the farmer becoming the little guy. That's what happened
is the great big farms in California that we're bigger
than Wisconsin, could produce more milk for cheaper but Wisconsin said,

(33:52):
wait a minute, we still have a lot of dairy
farmers left, even though they're suffering, and we have a
lot of small cheesemakers, So let's specialize and withhsen is
the only state that has a master cheesemaker program. And
that's why you'll see Hooks cheese from you know, right
near where I grew up in Wisconsin. You'll see that
in California and Texas and all over the place, because
that's a special cheesemaker. They sell something special and unique.

(34:13):
It's their variety. So we need more farms selling locally
and regionally, and more farms selling into markets that have
these specialty foods where people who care, you know, about
that food just a little more can buy something that
really fits their taste.

Speaker 3 (34:28):
Well, that's great.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
You know when you look at the title of your book,
you know, land rich and cash poor. That is the
leverage that they're using in many cases to drive the
farmers out. And so you know what is it that
you know, how do we how do we avoid that?
As the as the cash keeps going further and further down,

(34:50):
the temptations for all these people just to sell out
and shut it down. We've seen that with a lot
of the people who've been severely damaged by the USDA's program,
a mass culling of chickens. It's like, okay, I'm done.
I'm just going to sell the land and get out
with this. You know what, what do we you know
what what can be done about that? Of course tax
policy and some other things like that.

Speaker 2 (35:10):
But yeah, absolutely, you're absolutely right. Language cash for that dilemma.
For people who haven't read it or studied it, it's
a simple concept, which is it's harder and harder to
make money make a living on that land when you
own it, but it's worth a lot if you were
to sell it. And so the dilemma that farmers face
is each year gets harder and harder, where dad and
mom are, you know, fearing that they're going to face

(35:30):
they where they have to say to the kids, we
can't make ends meet anymore. And the alternative is they
can sell it. And when you do that on a
family farm, you lose everything else because a farm isn't
just your mom or dad's job. It's your home, it's
your community, it's your heritage. So that's the dilemma. Farmers
are locked in the whole amount of this land that
means more to them than anything, and they make less

(35:50):
less money each year. And so the problem that it creates,
to your exact point, is it makes people think farmers
are wealthy. You know, you could have land, it's worth
about a million dollars, but the living that can be
made on that land is getting squeezed out and is
really very modest and probably at this point doesn't full
time income for the family anyore. They're probably working two
or three jobs. So having that land on paper and

(36:12):
having the tractors on paper, yeah, you could go sell that,
but that's one little mini bonanza for one generation of
the family, and you know, in the next generation the
family will level out and have you know what are
they going to have, Well, they lost the land, they
lost their heritage, they lost their way of living, and
so you know, farmers really are not in a position
of being wealthy. They're in a position of being a

(36:37):
working class with a target on their back. And so
then what do we do about that. One issue is
the inheritance tax. Are absolutely right. You've got land that
has been taxed as property and has been taxed whenever
there's money made off of it from an income standpoint
or a sales standpoint, and then they tax it again
at the family's most vulnerable moment. You know, the older
generation has passed away. The next generation that would have

(37:00):
normally probably bought the farm from the prior generation is
now inheriting it. But if they have to pay a
mass at tax on that on top of how hard
it is to make a living and the fact that
that's happening at a time when their family is going
through a really difficult time. There are so many families
that have no choice but to sell the farm, and
it gets sold for manner and gets sold to a

(37:21):
millionaire or whatever the situation is.

Speaker 1 (37:24):
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely, And we've seen that here locally
as well, with a local dairy had that same situation death.
And now there's there's a couple of dairies that were there.
Now there's just one. We still go there to get milk,
but the other dairy and other farm has just been
chopped up to a lot of retail. By the way,
let me show people that the book cover here at

(37:44):
land Rich Cash for My Family's Hope and The Untold
History of the Disappearing American Farmer by Brian Reisinger. You know,
when we look at this in your own personal example,
tell us a little bit about what your sister did
after you have this dairy farm has been built up
over a century, many generations, and then times to get tough,

(38:05):
you have to sell off the dairy cattle there. But
your sister has continued. What has she done?

Speaker 2 (38:10):
Yeah, my sister came forward with all kinds of innovative
ideas that are the kind of thing that give you
hope for the next generation, which is really what's going
to be able to move this situation forward through the crisis.
So my sister came to my dad and as we
were thinking about selling the cows because the economic scale
just wasn't working anymore and mobid hit us and all
of these issues. My sister began talking to my dad about,

(38:32):
you know, having what we call a diversified farm, and
so we raise now we raise heifers that become milk
cows on other dairy farms, so we supply those farms.
We raise beef that is sold to consumers, and we
also cash crop and we are constantly experimenting with new
types of livestock and new types of crops try to

(38:54):
figure out what's that next food product or what's that
next agricultural product that can make sense for us to do.
Finding is that it's working from the standpoint of where
we're hitting the income targets and my sister projected, and
it's just a not on going challenge because expenses are
always going up for farm. So we've found a path
forward the time being, and we're hopeful about the future.

(39:14):
But like every generation, it is always difficult and it's
unclear the future. So we're living this out as we go.
And you know, I'll just say one thing about my sister,
the really incredible thing about her is just her courage
and her spirit, and you know, a lot of people
root for her being a woman in a man's world
taking the farm over. And the reality is that she

(39:37):
descends from four generations of farm women who've done the
work of men for one hundred years. There's a lot
of independence. I don't know and use the word feminism,
but there's kind of a farmland feminism, if you will.
There's a lot of independence and strength from women who've
grown up in farm country. They just never they might
have been celebrated if they'd picked their head up from
the work to tell their story, you know. And my

(39:58):
sister's fourth generation of that, and so I'm incredibly proud
of her, and it's amazing to see where this goes,
and we all work on it together. You know, my
dad still owns it. My sister's working to take it over.
And for me, you know, I pursued a writing career
off the farm, and I'm grateful to be able to
tell our story and I help out a little bit
on the business side, and like any farm kid, when

(40:18):
i'm home, they throw me in a tractor on my
quote unquote day off. And I'm glad to be part
of it in that way. And we're trying to figure
it out as a family. But we couldn't do it
if it wasn't my sister leading the way on the
ideas for we need to do next.

Speaker 1 (40:32):
Well, it's such an important thing. It's a hard life
and it's not for everybody. But I was talking about
one family and a farm in Virginia and they were
talking about, you know how positive it was for the kids.
You learn a work ethic, you have to do things.
You have to do hard work as a necessity there.
You have to be able to be a jack of

(40:53):
all trades in order to make this work because again
you're cash poor with this, and so you have to
learn how to do things. You have to get out
and work hard. And that's a wonderful thing. But it's
also something that if we look at it a society
as a whole. Jefferson was very much focused on the
importance of a negrarian society, just from the standpoint of
political independence and not being so dependent on everything as

(41:16):
you are in an urban environment. I look at this
and I kind of wonder I've seen now, I've talked
to some farmers who have set up done like a
mentoring program. You know, they want to teach other people
how to farm. They can make a living doing things
like that. On the side, you know, even having people
come pay to come to the farm to learn how
to do things. And so there's a lot of people

(41:37):
out there who are I think, are interested in learning
how to grow some things, and they don't know anything
about growing them or how to take care of animals
or chickens now because of eggs, you know, So there's
an opportunity there. And I think once people start to
taste the better quality food, I mean, they really get
a taste for it.

Speaker 3 (41:56):
Right.

Speaker 1 (41:56):
Part of it is that they've grown up eating packaged food.
And may be if you get a situation where and
it might be out of necessity that people start getting
farm fresh food, they get a craving for it and
a taste for it, and they want to be able
to either support the people in the area or learn
how to do it themselves. So to me, that seems

(42:17):
to be the hope because people have to want this,
you know, they have to have to want a local
farm to market or farm to table type of experience.

Speaker 2 (42:26):
I think, yeah, well, here's the thing. You know, not
only does it taste better, you feel better you know.
I mean, yes, you know, I grew up in an
area where we had some types of fresh, local food
available to us, but there also wasn't a lot of
food awareness for a lot of the country for a
long time. And you know, you know, we didn't necessarily
have as many local stores as we once did buy from,
so a lot of people end up, you know, driving
down down the you know, thirty miles down the highway

(42:48):
to the big chain to get whatever's packaged. And so
I had a mixed experience with you know, on the
one hand, drinking milk straight from the ball tank, on
the other hand, having frozen pizza for dinner, you know.
And and things have really progressed where people of all
walks of life, in all areas, including an urban and
rural areas, care more about where the food comes from.
And my wife and I've made that shift as much

(43:08):
as we can. You can't get everything without going to
some of the conventional places. But you know, in a
lot of places, they're willing to carry more fresh look
food if they know people will buy it. But you
can do a lot and boy, you know, you feel better, Yeah,
you sleep better, you have more energy. It makes a
difference to grow something that that came up out of
the ground natural. It just it does at the end

(43:30):
of the day.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
Yeah, I know this last year, started doing our own
chickens eve before this bird flu thing happened, and then
my wife learned I started growing vegetables for a first
time we've done that, and it was just so much
better than anything we could get the grocery store, you know,
and so we really enjoyed it, and it's really kind
of built our taste for doing this type of thing.

(43:51):
And so that's really where my hope is that people
have to change. You know, we grew up in the sixties.
Everything was going more and more towards packaging and convenience.
So you get your TV dinner packaged and aluminum, you know,
you put in the oven, and then later on they
put it in something's non metal so you can microwave
it and everything and just and it tastes awful and

(44:12):
it's bad for you. And people are now becoming aware
of that. So we may have an inflection point where
people start to care more about taste and about health
than things like that, and that might work out for
everybody's benefit. Hopefully it will. Well, it is a very
interesting book, and really do appreciate you giving that hope
and those ideas to people. And it's a fascinating story too.

(44:36):
It's wonderful to have somebody talk about what it was
like growing up on the farm and to take a
critical look at the bigger picture that is happening to it.
And as I said before, it is something that we
can all relate to in a lot of different areas
because this consolidation is happening very rapidly and is happening
across all sectors, but in the farm in particular. We've

(44:59):
got to be concerned about that because that's what we
need to have to eat, and these people really do
want to just serve it to us from the lab
I mean, take it to the degree in the opposite direction,
and I'm starting to see a lot of pushback against that,
and so maybe that'll work out well for the for
the local farmers.

Speaker 2 (45:16):
Well that's my hope. And we did our best to,
as you said, take a look at these issues, honestly
wrestle with them where there was debate, and we did
our best to tell our story, you know, from the
depression to today, and that survival story of the things
we've been through. We did our best to tell it honestly,
the good and the bad. And my hope is that
we can we can tell a run on a story
that gets people thinking about these issues and gets us

(45:39):
all working to solve them together. And so I appreciate
the opportunity to talk about the book.

Speaker 1 (45:43):
And I agree, and I want to say one more
thing before we stop, and that is I thought it
was very telling that the very last chapter in your book,
or it's like kind of an appendix, you talk about
suicide and trying to get help. That's how dire things are.
And I've you know, we put it on what is
going on in India. You know, when Monsanto we go
in and use glyifaset and GMO seeds and everything, and

(46:06):
these farmers who are extremely poor, they then after they
use it one season, now they can't grow anything else
there and they've got to buy their seed from Monsanto
and they couldn't afford and they were losing everything in
massive numbers of suicides that were happening there. But with
all these other market forces that are there, that's just
how bad it is. And you know, of course, with

(46:28):
this rapid change that is happening now. That is something
that everybody needs to think about. Talk a little bit
about that and about the pressure that you saw on
your father and in your family.

Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, well, thank you so much for asking about that.
You know, the opening pages of the book and the
closing pages of the book deal with a story from
our family where, you know, the day after we sold
our cows, we were, as I said, shifting towards some
hope for some new types of farming we want to do,
but also selling the dairy herd that you milked morning
and night. It is akin to a death in the

(47:02):
family and for the farmer trying to figure out how
to move forward and whether we're going to make it
or not. There's that pressure, and then there's the pressure
of the generations that came before. You know, great Grandpa
escaped pre War one Europe, you know, to dig a
better living out of the Derek. Grandpa survived the depression.
Mom and Dad made it through the farm crisis. Why
can't I make it? That's the kind of the generational

(47:22):
pressure that builds. And my dad was staring down the
barrel of realizing that he had been the first in
one hundred years that wasn't going to be even milk
and cow's on our land, and we were grateful to
have our land and have a plan for the future.
But he still woke up asking himself, you know what
am I here for? And I had an experience with
my dad that we talk on the book where I

(47:44):
was standing there on the porch of a cabin that's
out back of the farmhouse where we both grew up,
and I was wondering whether he was thinking that, and
I found out in the course of talking for the
book that he was. And so here we were standing
right next to each other, we were a world apart
because all alone, he felt and I'm grateful that excuse me.

(48:06):
He I'm grateful that he continued on. And the way
that he did it was he thought about his grandkids,
you know, he started thinking about the next generation. He said,
you know, I got grandkids here, and I got to
teach him things. And he realized that the farmer goes
on whatever happens to the farm, because there's two words here.
There's family farm, there's the family part. And he focused

(48:29):
on that and it's the same thing that carries every
farm generation for which is think about the next generation.
And so I'm grateful that through that and through all
of us talking about it in a way that a
lot of farm families don't find themselves able to do,
we're able to bring them out of it. And I
asked my dad really candidly if we wanted to talk
about that book. We decided we were going to bear
everything in the book, but I asked him do we
want to admit that? And he said, yeah, we do

(48:51):
because I want other people who feel that way to
know that it isn't that way. You know that they
aren't alone.

Speaker 3 (48:55):
That's good, and that is a key thing.

Speaker 1 (48:57):
It is turning the father's heart to the children, right,
That is the restoration, That is the salvation of a culture.
If you think about the next generation, you prepare for them. Otherwise,
you know, we all get to a point where we say,
what's the point of this. Well, the point of it
is for the next generation. The love of the family,
creating the family, propagating that. That is the heart of

(49:19):
a civilization. And that's why the family farm, as you
point out, is so important. Really is well, thank you
so much, and again the book Brian's book, Brian Reisinger,
land Rich Cash, Poor My family's hope and the untold
history of the disappearing American farmer. And I would also
say the disappearing family that is happening. That is something

(49:42):
that really does build a family, and I think that
is one of the most important aspects of the family farm.
Thank you so much for joining us, Brian, It's been
a pleasure.

Speaker 2 (49:50):
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate anybody who
wants to find in rich Cash Park and do it
on Amazon or anywhere else online. Also independent bookstores all
across the country, and I just appreciate it anybody who
keeps the conversation going on these issues, and I appreciate
you shedding light on them. Thank you so much.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Be great, Yes, Amazon, Yes, in any independent bookstore, Thank
you so much. I want to cover some of these
comments here people had about farms before the program, and
so Brian de McCartney says, we love our little farms
here and we do our best to support them. Te
Norman Artists says, it doesn't require a large amount of
land to grow and raise at least some part of
your own food. Everyone used to have chickens in the

(50:25):
yard and all the old movies. May two says anyone
can grow food if you have a patio, a corner
of room, et cetera. You can grow food vertically. And
I think that's a real opportunity really for a lot
of these farmers. They've got a great deal of knowledge
that has been lost by the public in general. One
of the things that Brian was talking about was how
pervasive farms were in the early part of the twentieth century,

(50:47):
and you talked about how many of them have left,
but a huge number of huge percentage of the population
worked on a farm at least one way the other.
We've lost that nice of the storm. Farms, banks, retail stores, etc.
All being consolidated. The key to control is taking away
options and forcing consumers and only one or two choices.
They do it with rises and operating costs and regulations

(51:08):
tariffs will expedite this consolidation process.

Speaker 3 (51:11):
I agree. I agree.

Speaker 1 (51:13):
Well, thank you so much everyone for joining us. We
don't have time for more of the of the comments.
When person's talking about my mozzrello recipe, I'm I'm gonna
read that comment after the show. Thank you so much.

Speaker 3 (51:25):
Have a good.

Speaker 1 (51:25):
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