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The accelerating disappearance of the American family farm · Cultural Wars | America Out Loud News

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  So let's get started with today's conversation.
• 2:16
  We're having our conversation today with award-winning author and rural policy expert, Brian Risinger, author of Land Rich Poor, My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer, The Truth About America's Most Detrimental and Overlooked Socioeconomic Crisis that we've maybe have ever faced, the loss of the family farm.
• 2:43
  Brian, welcome so much to the 10penny files.
• 2:45
  It's so good to see you again.
• 2:46
  Oh, it's so good to be back with you.
• 2:48
  I appreciate it and thanks for everything you do to highlight issues with our farms and food and beyond.
• 2:53
  Well, tell us about the origins of your life on a family farm.
• 2:57
  Yeah, you know, I grew up working with my dad from the time I could walk.
• 3:01
  Our farm was in the hill is in the hills of southern Wisconsin in the Midwest.
• 3:06
  And we were a dairy farm for more than 100 years, and we have faced all of the challenges that have been wiping out farms for a century.
• 3:14
  We've been losing farms in this country at the rate of 45,000 per year for a century, 45,000 a year.
• 3:21
  And if we continue to do that, we're going to lose the rest of our family farms within this generation.
• 3:26
  I'm 41 years old now.
• 3:27
  By the time my daughter, my little one-year-old girl is my age, will have lost the rest of our farms like I grew up on.
• 3:32
  And I grew up knowing this was happening.
• 3:34
  I didn't know the scope of the problem, but you you didn't have to uh to be uh an author yet as a little kid on a farm to know that your way of life was disappearing.
• 3:42
  People coming in the driveway saying this farm went under this farm sold.
• 3:46
  So when I got older and got the chance to pursue a writing craft farm, I want to understand why.
• 3:50
  And so I decided to tell the story of those hidden errors of history driving that disappearance, the impact it has on our food, our health, our economy, and weave that with our family story, surviving from the Great Depression through COVID and beyond.
• 4:03
  You know, you said you told, you know, I read your book.
• 4:05
  It was published uh what 10 2004, I believe, and it's gotten a lot of awards and a lot of accolades.
• 4:12
  It's really it was and it's really well written.
• 4:14
  In fact, there's stories in there that are absolutely heart-wrenching, you know, that you that really tell the story of the love of the land and love of the family farm.
• 4:22
  And you mentioned that statistic back in October of 2004, about 45,000 farms per year that are disappearing.
• 4:29
  Um, I would imagine it's worse now.
• 4:32
  What are your thoughts about that?
• 4:34
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 4:35
  You know, the the situation compounds itself every year and every decade.
• 4:40
  You know, we first began losing farms in this country um during the Great Depression.
• 4:45
  It was actually a couple years for that, an agricultural depression, and then a number of farms recovered a little bit as people fled the cities with the economic squalor that was going on, and then we pick right back up with it.
• 4:54
  And we have lost farms every decade since.
• 4:58
  And so this is something that's been compounding for a long time.
• 5:01
  It's us failing to handle economic crises the way we need to, not understanding how they affect the family farm uniquely.
• 5:07
  It's government policy from both sides of the aisle over the years, over the decades, you know, the establishment of the Republican Party as well as the Democrats and the left.
• 5:17
  And it's the uh way technology has moved agriculture forward, which is a good thing, but it's also been a double-edged sword, swinging back the other direction and leaving family farms behind needlessly.
• 5:29
  So there's been this drive for farms to get big or get out, and farms have either gotten bigger to survive or they've had to go by the wayside now.
• 5:36
  And at this point, it's reached crisis levels.
• 5:39
  You you and your listeners know this.
• 5:42
  We have an insecure food supply that can have sudden shocks to the system that send food prices spiraling on top of the fact that many people are questioning the health of our food system and what's for dinner, and it affects our national security.
• 5:56
  It affects um for folks who care about the environment that affects the land and the environment.
• 6:01
  It affects every uh facet of our life if we don't have a sustainable food supply that that's grown by you know free Americans operating small businesses trying to trying to do something they care deeply about, which has been the ethic of this from the beginning in our country.
• 6:17
  What's really driving this crisis?
• 6:19
  Is it really economic that small farmers can no longer really afford to farm the land?
• 6:25
  I grew up in rural um north central Ohio.
• 6:28
  Uh, we I grew up on an 80-acre farm, and then my father had purchased a hundred-acre farm kind of down the road that we rented out to someone who wanted to farm it.
• 6:38
  And um, and I know that that it was it was it was a good additional income.
• 6:43
  My father was a chiropractor, and so he was kind of a resident farmer.
• 6:46
  We didn't, we raised horses, we didn't, you know, go out and and and plow the land.
• 6:51
  But uh times have changed so much, just on the cost of equipment, the cost of gasoline, the cost of maintenance, um, and the drop in the in the prices in the commodity prices of corn, bean, and wheat, which are the main commodities that we produce in the heartland of America.
• 7:08
  Is this crisis of of of small farmers selling out to the big conglomerates?
• 7:14
  Is it mostly an economic issue?
• 7:17
  It's mainly an economic issue, and it's driven by the conditions in our economy, those economic crises, the the government policies and the technological issues I'd mentioned, combined with the fact that we've moved into this globalized world.
• 7:30
  And so the farmer, whatever their size really is the little guy in their economic picture in terms of the forces that they're dealing with, the people they're buying from and selling to, et cetera.
• 7:40
  The farmer is usually the small one in that economic chain.
• 7:44
  And so as our American economy becomes dominated more and more by large uh players dominating industries, uh, that creates that pressure for farmers too.
• 7:54
  Everyone's keeping up with the Joneses.
• 7:56
  And so those farms that got big got that way working to survive, and those farms that fall by the wayside got that way either because they couldn't make that transition or or didn't want to and wanted to hold the line against that, and you've got perfectly good.
• 8:08
  It's it's really a perversion of the market, I should say too, by all these forces because you got perfectly competitive, perfectly hardworking, adaptable family farms doing their best, but they just don't have the economic scale.
• 8:21
  And so they have to get bigger or or get left behind at some point.
• 8:25
  And that's been happening at a rapid clip now for decades.
• 8:29
  And isn't part of it too the loss of young people on the farms.
• 8:33
  I mean, because his farming historically in this country had been, well, even before this country was even formed, was a multi-generational pride in being a farmer and raising food and and um animal husbandry and things like that, but that there's really no exit strategy now for the older farmers that are say in their 60s or 70s and are not wanting to to grind it out every day, year in and year out.
• 8:58
  And the younger people who are going to white-collar jobs somewhere off in the city.
• 9:02
  It used to be to blue-collar jobs, but now they're going off to more white-collar jobs, and they they don't want to be, they grew up in that, and it and it's not a heritage to them.
• 9:13
  It's more like a burden to them, so they don't want to stay behind and become a farmer like dad and granddad.
• 9:19
  Is part of it the the fleeing of the brain trust there.
• 9:23
  You know, I'm so glad you asked about that.
• 9:25
  That has been one of the foundational issues for a long time.
• 9:29
  It really kicked in uh with the close of the Great Depression and the close of World War II, especially as our economy shifted from rural to urban.
• 9:37
  That was a big driver of it.
• 9:39
  What I would say at this point is the pendulum has really begun to begun to change.
• 9:45
  Um, farmers, aging farmers are still having challenges trying to find who's going to take over the farm.
• 9:51
  That's for sure.
• 9:52
  But I don't think it's because we've just got people fleeing that rural economy nonstop now.
• 9:57
  Um, I think about people like my nephew.
• 10:00
  There's all kinds of 4-H kids, FFA kids who would proudly take over grandpa's farm or dad's farm or their uncle's farm down the road or the farm that their grandma ran for years after grandpa passed, whatever it may be, but they're not being told that there's a bright economic future.
• 10:14
  You know, we've lost a lot of the kids who weren't going to farm.
• 10:18
  My family, we wrestled with this, as you know from reading the book.
• 10:21
  My sister's one of the heroes of the story because she had the talent for cattle and crops take over the farm.
• 10:26
  And I was pulled toward writing, even though I loved my roots.
• 10:29
  And so I've wrestled with this exact issue.
• 10:32
  And I've come back around, and I not only tell our story, but I help our farm on the business side, and I'm trying to help plot the path forward while also helping out in the farm yard and fields when I'm back.
• 10:42
  But my sister being that successor was such a crucial thing for our family.
• 10:46
  I think there are a lot of young kids out there who would do that, but they don't have guidance counselors telling them that that's a good career move.
• 10:51
  You know, so these are kids that are going off to the military, they're working in the trades or going to college, those are all noble things to do.
• 10:58
  But a lot of them might love to farm if they thought they could get a shot at it, but they're they're afraid of what to do with their lives next because of this dark economic picture we've left for our family farms.
• 11:07
  Yeah, I think that's true, because if you've grown up in it and you've seen your dad struggle, and you've seen um, you know, the the pressures of the economic pressures and the I've always thought that farmers were such heroes because the biggest thing that they fight against is a variable they can't control, which is the weather.
• 11:27
  You know, it's too much rain, not enough rain, you know, they can't get it's it's cold too long, they can't get the crops in.
• 11:34
  I mean, I I watched it for years because I grew up in it.
• 11:37
  And I've always thought that they were such a hero to take on all of the things that go along with farming, and then they have the biggest variable of all that you have no control over, just being weather.
• 11:50
  So I can imagine why the younger generation, you know, the the Gen Z who are the 15 to 30 year olds are like, how can I do this?
• 11:59
  How can I make a living?
• 12:00
  I see my father and my grandfather have grown up with the struggle, and I don't want that struggle.
• 12:05
  So that economics is really a big deal.
• 12:08
  Um, how do you think we can change that reflection?
• 12:11
  Is it have something to do with the with the um the the crop the cost of the the crops to the farmers of how much it costs to make the to make the corn, wheat, and grain and to raise a cow or a sheep or a pig, and then because right now, you know, we go to the grocery store and food costs are like through the roof.
• 12:30
  You know, one steak is like $30.
• 12:33
  Um I have a friend that lives in Austin, Texas that was that one that was going to buy a roast for a uh uh for like six people, so not huge, six people for Thanksgiving, and it was 150 dollars.
• 12:46
  Now, that increase in how much we're paying for at groceries at the grocery store, that money's not going to the farmers or to the cattle raisers.
• 12:55
  Where's that money going?
• 12:56
  Yeah, correct.
• 12:57
  That's a really good question.
• 12:58
  It's a good observation.
• 13:00
  So you're right, the farmer isn't putting more money in their pocket or the small ranchers to put more money in their pocket.
• 13:04
  The first thing that's going on is that the food in this country, by the time in most cases, by the time it's getting to your dinner table, it's changed hands many times from the farm gate to the dinner table, um, bought up by um buyers, distributors, you know, goes through processors, goes to retailers, you know, over and over.
• 13:22
  And so there are a lot of hands getting a cut of that money before it gets back to the farmer.
• 13:27
  And some of that's natural economics.
• 13:29
  Um, but then the other thing that's going on is that farmers are also facing higher prices.
• 13:34
  So not only are they not getting a lot much of that money that that is reflected in the higher price, but they've got higher costs for seed, feed, fertilizer, energy, what have you.
• 13:43
  So what I always say to people is that when your hardworking American family is facing a crunch, your hardworking American farmer is facing the same kind of crunch.
• 13:50
  We're in league together in that.
• 13:52
  The farmer isn't making more money and is facing their own version of that crunch, all the costs that any household is, plus what it takes to run a small business that's based on the land.
• 14:02
  You know, I think that more and more people are becoming much more conscious about the food that they're eating.
• 14:07
  I think Secretary Kennedy, you know, being the head of HHS and trying to get the food additives out of the food and you know, to do some things to change the food pyramid that recently happened and things like that.
• 14:19
  People are really wanting to as much as possible go to farmers' markets and to buy local.
• 14:25
  Is that helping the small American farms?
• 14:28
  It is.
• 14:29
  It's part of the picture for sure.
• 14:31
  So there's a couple different layers of this, but the first one is direct to consumer.
• 14:35
  When more people care about where their food comes from, it creates more opportunities for the American farmer to sell their food directly to those consumers through farmers' markets, through online marketplaces.
• 14:44
  Um, maybe uh they're selling um, you know, at a at a local permanent market, uh specialty store, whatever it might be.
• 14:51
  The other thing that we need, we need more of that.
• 14:53
  We need more of that to grow.
• 14:54
  We need people to accept what it means to shop for food seasonally, where some things are available sometimes a year and sometimes other.
• 15:00
  There's a convenience factor to the debt that some people may not like, but there's also, oh, this is in season now.
• 15:05
  You know, it's it's the way that we used to eat in this country.
• 15:08
  But the other thing is having more market infrastructure sprout up for folks who want to buy and process and distribute local, regional, and specialty foods.
• 15:18
  So some of it is that fresh produce that can be sold directly.
• 15:20
  Some of it might be that special type of ancient grain that's going to go into the flour that can be used for you know the local bakery that that bakes bread, you know, far beyond anything you would find, you know, from your conventional, you know, proverbial loaf of sliced bread.
• 15:37
  And so, you know, there's all these specialty food markets that are also spreading up.
• 15:41
  So we need that demand to continue.
• 15:42
  And we need entrepreneurs, not only in farming, but in all different parts of the food supply chain to help create more small businesses that are working to get that new specialty crop or evolving things that farmers can grow to market because we need we have a lot of farmers who are stuck in markets that aren't necessarily growing anymore.
• 16:01
  And we need new growing markets.
• 16:03
  We can't guarantee the survival of every farm.
• 16:05
  And we shouldn't, you know, guarantee that this market's gonna operate this way forever.
• 16:09
  But what we do need to do is make sure that we have new entrepreneurial opportunity for our farmers in this country.
• 16:15
  And that hasn't been the case for too long in America.
• 16:19
  With the loss of our family farm, even though we still have the mega farms, you know, the really big industrial farms like with Cargill and places like that.
• 16:27
  And we've got the, you know, the terrible food lot, feedlot uh things that that raise our chickens and our cattle these days that are just horrifying.
• 16:35
  Um when people are trying to get away from that, how how big does the loss of the family farm?
• 16:41
  How does that impact our food supply when we've got these big mega conglomerates that are still providing food?
• 16:48
  And I, you know, I really want to put a focus on what real food is.
• 16:52
  When I go to the grocery store, you know, if you walk down the aisle, I I just feel like like all of this colored package stuff is screaming at me, I'm poison, I'm poison, I'm poisoned.
• 17:03
  As you're walking down the aisle, and I've frequently taught my patients, you know, really you should shop around the edges, which is where bread, dairy, all your meat products, eggs, and things like that.
• 17:13
  And the only aisle you're allowed to go down is the one that has laundry detergent and toilet paper, you know, shop around the edges.
• 17:20
  But we've still got huge big processing, big food companies, big ag that are create that are producing stuff that goes into the grocery store.
• 17:30
  How much uh impact on the on our on our food supply is it really happening with the loss of the smaller family farms?
• 17:39
  Yeah, it's a great question.
• 17:40
  You know, what's really going on is the way that the American economy has grown and consolidated over the decades and the way that globalization has helped drive that too.
• 17:48
  Again, you've got farmers that are needing to get bigger than they'd like to be in many cases to try to survive that.
• 17:54
  Um here's here's what's going on.
• 17:56
  A large amount of our food is is produced by that national supply chain that requires really large operations.
• 18:03
  Here's the thing that I was shocked by when I investigated this for the book and married our family's stories with the issues that were driving this.
• 18:11
  I was amazed to learn that of the nearly we've lost 70% of our farms, as I said, 45,000 a year.
• 18:18
  But of the nearly two million left, 96% of them are family operations, 88% of them are small family operations.
• 18:25
  And what's yeah, and what's going on here is we've got the families for Brian, that's that's really important.
• 18:32
  Repeat those stats again.
• 18:33
  That's Yeah.
• 18:35
  Absolutely.
• 18:35
  Of the nearly two million farms we have left, 96% are family operations still, and 88% are small family operations.
• 18:44
  Yeah.
• 18:44
  And I was shocked by that, even though I had grown up on one of these small and medium-sized farms and grown up around them.
• 18:50
  And what's going on is you have families that are holding on by working multiple jobs.
• 18:55
  So they might be pouring concrete or working a factory shift or um whatever the case may be running another small business and farming.
• 19:03
  And so what we need is for these family farms to be able to be growing entrepreneurial ventures again, the kind of farm that can provide a full-time living to a family so that they can focus on that, produce more food, create more options for our consumers rather than working two, three jobs just to hold on.
• 19:20
  How how do we how do we get that to happen?
• 19:23
  How do we increase the pricing of of food?
• 19:26
  Well, it's not that we should increase the prices of food.
• 19:29
  We should distribute more of the food back down backwards down the food chain to the farmer.
• 19:35
  Are there policies that need to be changed?
• 19:37
  Or are, you know, you're involved in that industry.
• 19:39
  What needs to take to take place here to save our family farms?
• 19:43
  There's a couple things.
• 19:44
  I always tell people just briefly, there's three main components.
• 19:47
  There's more to unpack for the three main components.
• 19:49
  One is American innovation, making sure it's reaching all of our farms of all types and sizes.
• 19:53
  The other is government policy to make sure that our markets are fair.
• 19:56
  And then the other is consumer demand.
• 19:57
  So just to take each one of those real briefly.
• 20:00
  On American uh innovation, we have had technology that has tilted away from small and medium-sized farms, um, the type of equipment that can only work for the largest of operations.
• 20:11
  What we need is technology that is what they call scale neutral, whether it's private sector technology being vested in by companies or whether it's that research that the government does.
• 20:19
  We need scale-neutral technology that's going to allow farms small, medium as well as large to be able to access and be able to afford that technology.
• 20:26
  On the issue of government policy, we need to make sure we have fair markets domestically and internationally, that they're not the kind of markets that squeeze out small business, and that our government policies around subsidy and things like that.
• 20:39
  Right now we have so much of our government programs that go in just a few areas.
• 20:44
  Um the programs don't work the way they're supposed to.
• 20:46
  Um the money goes to a few certain types of crops and doesn't protect others.
• 20:50
  You know, we need to find a way to make sure that our programs are functioning the way they ought to and diversify that some.
• 20:55
  And then the other part is that part with the consumer where that we talked about it before with the farmers' markets, the growth in that, the need for more growth there, the me need for growth for market infrastructure for local and regional specialty foods, all of that entrepreneurship requires that more people buy their food like they care where it comes from.
• 21:14
  Yeah, it's um it I think that people are caring where their food comes from.
• 21:18
  I think that we've become, I would say, and just in the last few years, much more conscious about that.
• 21:24
  A lot of emphasis on glyphosate, a lot of emphasis on, you know, uh the pesticide industry, a lot of emphasis on the opposite end of that scale on regenerative farming and regenerating the soil.
• 21:37
  And um, I think that those regenerative farming issues.
• 21:40
  I've had conversations with Joel Salatin, you know, about about the growth of regenerative farming and teaching people actually what they need to do to do crop rotation and and animal rotation and things like that.
• 21:53
  Are there schooling opportunities for that?
• 21:55
  I mean, other than going to you know, Texas AM, um, are there are there are a small farm um educational programs?
• 22:03
  Because you said that a lot of the young people just don't believe that they want to be farmers because of the lack of put potential economic solvency.
• 22:11
  Are there are there classes that are available either in person or online that young people can get involved with and learn more about farming?
• 22:19
  There are.
• 22:20
  There need to be more, um, but there are.
• 22:22
  Um, so there are a lot of organizations that are focused, whether it's around organic farmer or regenerative farming.
• 22:28
  Um, there are places where your local farm bureaus, um, your local um agriculture extensions, which are an extension of your university systems.
• 22:37
  They have increasingly more and more.
• 22:38
  In my home state in Wisconsin, they have more classes through the University of Wisconsin, um, either for students or for just farmers out there who want to engage with resources.
• 22:48
  They have more than ever on alternative food systems and things like that.
• 22:52
  And we need we need more of it.
• 22:53
  We have something in this country called a land grant university, and the University of Wisconsin is one, and there's there's, you know, they're all over the country.
• 23:01
  And they were, they were endowed and created to not only advance learning, but do advanced learning in terms of how we used our land and our resources.
• 23:09
  And it's very easy for universities as they grow and things change and the economy modernizes to sort of forget their mission.
• 23:16
  And there's a lot of land grant university work that hasn't really focused on how do we create new entrepreneurial opportunity for farmers, how do we make it viable for more people who want to be in that part of our economy?
• 23:26
  It's so crucial to the security of our nation, which is one of the reasons that the land grant universities were created.
• 23:32
  So there is some out there, but we need more.
• 23:35
  Describe what land grant university is.
• 23:38
  I mean, it I have uh something in my head that pops up of a vision of what I think that might mean.
• 23:43
  It might be totally wrong.
• 23:45
  So describe land grant universities for us.
• 23:48
  Yeah, this goes back all the way to the 1800s when a lot of our uh countries' um early universities were first established, and they were given um funding from the government, among other things to say, hey, you're going to focus a part of your activity around researching and innovating and instructing how we use our land for the betterment of our country because America was this vast country with all these incredible natural resources and a free market economy that wanted to harness that.
• 24:16
  And so that is really what a land grant university is.
• 24:19
  Many of the major universities in this country began as land grant universities, and they may or may not still embody that mission.
• 24:26
  So are they given land to do this with?
• 24:29
  Is that because when I think about land grant, that's what comes to my mind is like granting land, or is that just uh a misnomer there?
• 24:37
  You know, that's a good question.
• 24:38
  I don't know what all they were originally um endowed with.
• 24:41
  I'm not sure, but I do know that they were they were put there in part to be able to focus on how are we going to utilize our natural resource uh to to help the economy and our and our nation flourish.
• 24:52
  And some of what's happening with with land is I think that you know, there's we're gonna talk uh a little bit more about the foreign countries that are coming into our into our country.
• 25:03
  But I think that there's because there's this big focus on rare earth minerals, and that there's more of the land that's being bought up by the government for those minerals and things like that.
• 25:14
  So I would think that if you've been granted land, you need to know what's underneath the soil.
• 25:20
  Is there a way to really find that out to know that when you when I go out and buy this farm, you know, how deep does the ownership go and do I own everything that's underneath the grass?
• 25:31
  Yeah, that's a great question.
• 25:33
  So mineral rights um are often part of land ownership.
• 25:36
  Sometimes you can own the land and the and the mineral rights can be granted somewhere, um, depending upon the situation.
• 25:42
  Um, but actually there's all kinds of parts of our country where um rare rare metals, rare minerals have not yet been tapped.
• 25:52
  Um, you know, there's uh the ability for sustainable mining practice, and we need to make sure that we do that in a way that doesn't completely destroy the land.
• 25:59
  Um, we want to be able to balance that.
• 26:01
  But the reality is that America hasn't focused on that kind of thing uh very well for a very long time.
• 26:09
  And so what ends up happening is a lot of other countries like China are very focused on making sure that they get their hands on not only their own mineral rights, but the mineral rights of other countries.
• 26:18
  And so when we talk about the uh purchase of uh farmland by foreign adversaries and other things, um, and when we talk about issues like global trade, a lot of what's at stake at times is um whether America or other countries are going to have our hands uh not only on our our farmland, but on land that has crucial mineral rights tied to it, um, on land that is near military installations, um, on land that is near uh critical infrastructure.
• 26:48
  And so the the question of do we have a control of our land in this country um could not be more crucial from our food to our our national security on a number of levels.
• 26:59
  Very good.
• 27:00
  Yeah, that's really, really true.
• 27:01
  And it's becoming more to the surface and in mainstream conversations these days than ever before.
• 27:07
  Well, this is a good time to take a short break.
• 27:10
  So, Brian, hold that thought.
• 27:11
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• 35:01
  Today our conversation is with award-winning author and rural policy expert, Brian Risinger, the author of Land Rich Cash Poor, My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farm, The Truth About America's Most Detrimental and Overlooked Socioeconomic Crisis, the loss of the family farm.
• 35:22
  But let me tell you a little bit more about today's guest.
• 35:24
  Brian Reisinger worked with his dad on the family farm from the time he was able to walk before entering the world of business journalism and public policy and later working as a columnist and a consultant.
• 35:37
  Among other awards, his book, Land Rich Poor, Land Rich Cash Poor, has won the best book award for U.S.
• 35:46
  history and a reader's favorite book award in 2024.
• 35:49
  His writing appears in many publications across the U.S.
• 35:53
  talking about the family farm.
• 35:55
  He also serves as a senior writer for Midwestern-based platform communications, splitting his time between Sacramento, California and his family's farm in Washington in Wisconsin.
• 36:07
  Brian, welcome back to the show.
• 36:09
  Thank you so much for being here with us today.
• 36:11
  We were talking about before the break about the foreign companies, foreign countries that are coming in and buying up the family farm.
• 36:19
  What does that do to our economy?
• 36:21
  And what kind of pressure does that put on the family farms?
• 36:25
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 36:26
  This is such a crucial and urgent issue.
• 36:27
  In fact, I just wrote a column about this for the USA Today Network.
• 36:30
  Here's what's going on.
• 36:32
  We have farmland across the country that is vulnerable to be purchased by foreign adversaries, and it is yet another force that is putting pressure on family farms that are trying to hold on.
• 36:45
  Now, here's the good news.
• 36:46
  The good news is that the best defense against foreign adversaries being able to buy our farmland is actually to help preserve our family farms because if you think about it, if more of our farmland gets in the hand of very few uh landholders, say they're large corporations that only owe their shareholders the best financial return possible.
• 37:04
  It's pretty easy to flip large amounts of land to China or Iran.
• 37:08
  But if we have individual small family farmers that have an economic path for it able to hold on, imagine saying I'm with the Chinese Communist Party and I'm here to buy your farm.
• 37:16
  You walk up into a farmer's porch, that's not gonna happen.
• 37:19
  So what's going on is this.
• 37:21
  Um, countries like China have about 300,000 acres, which is a small amount of the land right now.
• 37:26
  But the thing that was alarming about it is how quickly it's been able to increase.
• 37:30
  It increased 15% in just two years from 20 to 22, 2020 to 2022, for example.
• 37:37
  And the reason for this is really because there are not restrictions on this, and there is not transparency.
• 37:43
  And so in many cases, entities are able to get their hands on this land, and it's not really clear what's going on until it's too late.
• 37:50
  The other thing about it is it is not only them getting their hands on the land that makes up our food supply, which is you know an issue for our food, our health, our national security in its own right, but also often this land is near military installations and critical infrastructure, creating an even more direct threat to our security.
• 38:07
  Doesn't the Secretary of Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture need to have their hands on that?
• 38:14
  Or is it just a private transaction between a country and a and a landowner?
• 38:21
  It's a great question.
• 38:22
  So there are um ways that the government tracks the amount of land held by foreign uh countries in general, um, including foreign adversaries.
• 38:32
  And um, there are some requirements around disclosure, most of them are confidential, and they're really for the government's purposes of tracking this.
• 38:38
  There aren't a lot of safeguards that help people at the point of sale know if they're selling to someone that has um uh a foreign investor, for example, and because more and more of our farmland has been slipping from the hands of individual farm families to large companies, it's again very easy for a large company that isn't concerned with these kinds of things uh to go ahead and sell.
• 38:58
  Now, there is a nuance to this debate that I think is important to note.
• 39:02
  Um the number of foreign adversaries buying land versus the number of just foreign entities in general.
• 39:10
  So there are some industries in agriculture in America that will say, well, having friendly investment from friendly countries that say can help us pioneer a new industry they've done in their country, etc.
• 39:20
  That's something we want to be open to.
• 39:22
  Other farmers would say they would never dream of having a foreign investor in their land.
• 39:25
  But there's a difference in any case between foreign entities in general, foreign countries that might be part of friendly countries, allies, and then those adversaries.
• 39:34
  In Wisconsin and my home state, they recently passed legislation that said that if you are listed as a foreign adversary, according to the federal government, this is your China's, your Iran's, your North Korea's, you just can't buy farmland in Wisconsin at all.
• 39:47
  There are many states that haven't realized that that is an issue, and so this is kind of on the cutting edge of uh the debate.
• 39:54
  Well, two questions come to mind about that.
• 39:56
  One is um don't most
• 40:00
  To the foreign uh foreign buyers that come to a to buy your, let's say they're coming to you and they knock on your door and want to buy your farm.
• 40:07
  How do you even know they're from China or from Iran?
• 40:10
  Don't they usually have a uh a broker intermediary that you wouldn't necessarily know that, or is it important or is it uh required for full disclosure?
• 40:21
  Yeah, oftentimes things will be set up by brokers and things, and you might ultimately find out who the who the end buyer is, but you may not know that they have a foreign investor that's a has a controlling interest, for example.
• 40:31
  Now, the good news is that right now most farm sales are, you know, to you know, from one farm to another neighboring farm that's getting bigger to survive, you know, things like that.
• 40:43
  So it's not like we've got, you know, foreign agents walking up uh every farm driveway in this country.
• 40:50
  But the reality is that because there aren't a lot of restrictions or safeguards or requirements for transparency, that this is something that is coming.
• 40:58
  And that's why people were so concerned about the increase, that double digit increase that I mentioned from 2020 to 2022.
• 41:06
  And it has been demonstrated and documented that the land that has been purchased by foreign adversaries is near military installations.
• 41:14
  Again, I mean, the the you know, countries like the Chinese are both patient in terms of getting their hands on our land over time, and they're strategic in terms of making sure that the stuff that they do get their hands on has more than one piece of value to it.
• 41:27
  So it's not only the acreage and what it means for our food supply, it's that, oh, look, that field is right next to this military installation.
• 41:33
  These things are not coincidences, as I know you and your listeners well know.
• 41:38
  I did uh I wrote a substack on this a while back.
• 41:41
  And I when I did the the research on foreign landownership, I was surprised at the number one foreign landowner in this country is Canada by by a large margin, like 12 million acres or something like that.
• 41:57
  And on the list close to the top is like Belgium and other um uh European countries.
• 42:02
  Why would those countries come here and buy such large swaths of land in comparison?
• 42:07
  Because China and Bill Gates, the people always talk about how much land they're building, they're buying, they have several hundred thousand acres, but they're uh 12 million acres belongs to Canada, and something like six million belongs to, I believe it's Belgium.
• 42:23
  What are they buying land for and why the disparance uh dispersed?
• 42:27
  It's a good question.
• 42:28
  And it depends a lot, country to country, individual to individual.
• 42:31
  Generally speaking, what we're talking about is foreign investment in agriculture in the same way that you might have foreign investment in another industry.
• 42:37
  You know, you might have a um foreign investment in in manufacturing here in America.
• 42:41
  And so there can be good elements to attracting investment.
• 42:44
  Um there are types of farming that were pioneered by people who came here from other countries, you know.
• 42:49
  I mean, my my ancestors are from Bavaria, um, the Bavarians and the Swiss are among the people who came and pioneered dairy and cheese making.
• 42:56
  And so, you know, so there's natural reasons um on a smaller scale for other countries to want to invest in America.
• 43:03
  And again, for some farm, some farm sectors to be interested in that, whereas others would never do that in this day and age.
• 43:09
  Um, but I do think that, you know, people validly ask the question at this point, you know, why why do other countries have such large shares of our farmland?
• 43:20
  And I think it's important to draw the distinction between a Canada and a foreign adversary.
• 43:24
  Now that it's gotten more tense and they aren't always acting in our interest.
• 43:28
  We have to be clear-eyed about that.
• 43:30
  Um, but a China that is is plotting for our demise versus a Canada that isn't always dealing with us fairly, but I think wants to be an ally is um a different thing.
• 43:40
  Now, I do have to say though, Canada um was one of the big reasons that we lost so many farms in the last decade because one of the things they were doing, they have a very um controlled dairy industry.
• 43:50
  And they their government manages their supply.
• 43:53
  It's it's very hard to get into dairy farming in Canada or expand your herd.
• 43:58
  And so um they were doing that, and our American farmers are competing with them, and they were doing things like there were um different types of milk fats that they don't sell on the open market.
• 44:08
  They don't have a need for.
• 44:09
  So they were dumping those, meaning they were selling them believe market value and depressing the price.
• 44:14
  It's an example of how even you know, traditionally friendly countries can either cheat or do unfair trade practices that hurt our American farmers.
• 44:23
  And so that's one of the reasons you have we do have such a big debate going on with Canada right now.
• 44:27
  I think that your average American be safer traveling to Canada than they would to China or Iran, but I think that that doesn't mean that these countries are always dealing with us in a fair way.
• 44:40
  The loss of the family farm, what are the consequences of that on our health as a nation?
• 44:46
  Yeah.
• 44:47
  Well, you know, we're we're not only losing the farms that feed us, we're losing a part of ourselves.
• 44:51
  And part of that is is the health of our food.
• 44:54
  You know, as we lose more and more family farms and those those farms and the other businesses that are that are left that are helping to produce our food, it requires that more of our food travels farther.
• 45:04
  It requires that more of our food is uniform, and you know, all the things about our national supply chain that have gone maybe too far.
• 45:10
  And so it does contribute toward hyper-processed foods, it does contribute toward food that people don't necessarily know where it's coming from or what's in it.
• 45:17
  And so that has a major impact on our health.
• 45:19
  The other thing is, you know, people don't realize necessarily that the price of our food going is going up because our farms are disappearing, and that's tied to our health too.
• 45:29
  And what I mean by that is as we lose 45,000 farms a year, it weakens our supply chain.
• 45:33
  It means that there's fewer places for the food to come from and fewer ways for it to get from the farm gate to the dinner table.
• 45:39
  That means that one great big distribution center going down can have an outsized impact on our food supply.
• 45:44
  The supply goes down and the price goes up.
• 45:47
  And when that happens, it makes it even harder for people to afford food.
• 45:50
  They're more likely to go and buy even more highly processed foods, you know, you know, and so that economic pressure creates pressure on our health as well.
• 46:00
  Because we are losing 45,000 farms a year.
• 46:04
  How many do we have left?
• 46:06
  And when is this crisis irreversible?
• 46:10
  It's a great question.
• 46:11
  We have about two million farms left, and we're really getting to the point where it's it's about to be irreversible.
• 46:17
  Um, so when I mention that um, you know, within my little girl's lifetime, she's one year old.
• 46:22
  By the time she's 41, we're on track to lose the rest of our family farms.
• 46:26
  Here's the issue.
• 46:27
  Um, I when I say that this will happen within the next generation, that's actually a very loud alarm bell because the solutions to this will take years and in many cases decades.
• 46:38
  You know, it takes takes years for any one single farm to be able to convert toward more promising markets.
• 46:44
  It takes decades for those markets to grow enough and the market infrastructure to grow around that and the direction of our country in terms of how we get our food to change.
• 46:51
  So, you know, these are decades-long solutions.
• 46:54
  And so we do need to act now.
• 46:57
  What do you think are some of the first steps that need to be taken on a on a state level more than a federal level to preserve our family farms?
• 47:05
  Aaron Powell One of the biggest things that states can do is they can make sure that number one, um, whether it's tax or regulatory burdens, that we don't have ways that the government is just making farming harder and more expensive.
• 47:16
  It could be around water rights, it could be around any number of things.
• 47:19
  Are we doing things that hamstring our farms?
• 47:21
  Because a lot of times the people that are going for like say, let's say a regulation that's aimed at the biggest farms out there, it's the small farms that don't have the money, the compliance, the lawyers, the the uh the accountants, the lobbyists to shape these policies and to be able to get through them, let alone the money that it costs to deal with the expense.
• 47:40
  And so we have to be aware of that.
• 47:42
  And then the other thing is if if states can be working on programs that can help us find ways to connect the older aging generation of farmers with young people who want to farm.
• 47:50
  In some cases, those older generation are going to have people in their family, sons or daughters in their family want to take it over.
• 47:56
  We need it to be economical for them to be able to sell it to the next generation in a way that can fund their retirement be but be affordable for the next generation.
• 48:04
  And then in scenarios where there isn't someone within the family, there are all kinds of young families that would love to get land access to be able to start a farming operation, and we need to be able to connect them with older, the older generation of aging farmers if they don't have a successor in their family.
• 48:20
  Is there some sort of a for lack of a better term, some sort of an a small farmer organization that they can get together and try to uh come up with solutions and have some uh some some saying power against these big lobbyists and these big companies that have endless money and endless toinees and all these different things and lobbying power.
• 48:43
  Uh is there a a lobbying power for the small farmer when they go to Washington, D.C.
• 48:48
  Yeah, you know, there are a variety of organizations.
• 48:50
  Um there's the um the uh farm bureau, there's the farmers union, there's all kinds of different organizations that represent farmers.
• 48:57
  And here's what we run into.
• 48:58
  What we run into is I I talked with a farmer recently whose story I told about where they got wiped out by a change in trade that impacted um asparagus farmers.
• 49:08
  And they were talking about how the farmer is the throwaway in a deal, whether it's a big uh trade deal being negotiated or whether it's a uh big uh government policy.
• 49:17
  What I what he meant by that is, you know, you've got the farmer is just one link in the chain of the broader agriculture and food economy.
• 49:25
  And then that agriculture and food economy to the point of your earlier questions are uh alongside of manufacturing, alongside of uh mineral, uh rare minerals, you know, always so when all these things are being put up against one another, it's very easy, even if they are actually lobbying for the family farmer to be swept aside.
• 49:42
  And so what I'm always saying to people is we need to help make sure that our policymakers on both sides of that understand the stakes for our family farms and that they want our consumers, our voters want family farms supplying our food in this country.
• 49:55
  And that that can really change things.
• 49:58
  You know, I've listened to several.
• 50:00
  Um interviews and press releases, conversations with Brooke Rollins, you know, that she seems to be, she seems to be really on the side of the small farmer.
• 50:12
  Is there more discussion coming out of Washington and out of the Secretary of Agriculture about preserving the family farm and the small farmers now?
• 50:20
  Because I know in the past there really have uh I've talked to other farmers and people like yourself that have written books about farming and they said there was like a wall, you couldn't get to them.
• 50:29
  Is she more responsive to the crisis that we have right now?
• 50:33
  It's a good question.
• 50:34
  There is a lot of conversation.
• 50:36
  I've talked with a lot of farmers and a lot of farm groups that feel like they've been able to have the dialogue.
• 50:40
  And I think that what we're running into is the challenges are just so vast.
• 50:44
  You know, these are decades-long challenges that have been embedded into our government.
• 50:48
  And so I think that, you know, there are there are farmers who are hopeful.
• 50:52
  Um, there are also farmers who are frustrated, whatever party is in power.
• 50:55
  And so I'm you know, my hope is that the dialogues can continue and that we can continue to find a way to shift policy more and more toward putting family farms first in this country.
• 51:04
  You think it's heading in that direction?
• 51:06
  I mean, she seems to be.
• 51:07
  I've I've heard both sides of the story, and I spend a lot of time in DC with with Maha Action and different things that I'm involved with down there.
• 51:16
  And I've heard I've heard both sides of the story.
• 51:18
  I've heard that she talks a good story about the fan about the family farmer, but that she, you know, she really uh leans towards big ag and big agriculture and the and big egg and everything that's going along with that.
• 51:30
  Um, do you think there's reason to hope really that something is going to change?
• 51:35
  It's a good question.
• 51:36
  I know that there are a lot of farmers who feel like they've gotten an open year, and I think that's a start.
• 51:40
  And I think that the reality is that it took us decades and both parties and everybody in between to wreck this problem, and it's going to take a very long time to fix it.
• 51:50
  And so I'm hoping that Secretary Rollins and the administration could be as concerted as possible, and that our government, you know, whoever our electoral officials are and whatever parties in power is able to to have that concerted focus on an ongoing basis.
• 52:03
  I mean, we do have a in this country ultimately, we have a two-party system where different one party or the other is going to control different parts of the government.
• 52:09
  And so what I when I think about this, and when I talk to farmers about this, it's really about transforming our policymakers on both sides of the aisle irregardless, because at the end of the day, we have to have everybody focused on putting family farms first.
• 52:23
  It really isn't a political issue, or it shouldn't be a left-right issue.
• 52:28
  It should be, because everybody doesn't matter if they're Republican or Democrat, they still have to eat.
• 52:35
  It shouldn't be a policy issue on that's divided along political lines.
• 52:40
  That's right.
• 52:41
  Um, your book, the your book, um Land Rich Cash Poor won the best book award for U.S.
• 52:47
  history and the reader's favorite book award in 2024.
• 52:51
  As in the closing minutes that we have our time together here, Brian, tell us a little bit more about your book.
• 52:57
  Absolutely.
• 52:57
  Well, thank you for that.
• 52:58
  Um, the book actually came out with a new paperback edition just a few months ago.
• 53:02
  Um, people can find it on Amazon and anywhere else that book buy books online.
• 53:06
  You can also find it in bookstores nationwide.
• 53:08
  And really what we try to do is we try to tell a raw and honest story of what's happened to the American Farmer.
• 53:12
  We wove the hidden errors of history driving that disappearance.
• 53:15
  What are the issues driving?
• 53:16
  What are the impacts?
• 53:17
  We wove that with my family story from the Great Depression to today.
• 53:20
  And so we talk about my great grandparents digging a living out of the dirt when they got to this country.
• 53:24
  We talk about my grandparents surviving the Great Depression.
• 53:27
  Um, my parents, one of the stories that we tell is they were married in 1976, the year of a drought.
• 53:33
  And as they faced that drought, they were sailing into the farm crisis of the 1980s.
• 53:37
  And so we tell stories as honestly as we could about economic upheaval, weather that blesses and threatens farmland, you know, tragic accidents, all the things that happened to a farm family over four generations trying to survive.
• 53:49
  And the thing I tell people is, you know, every farm family that I've talked to has stories like that.
• 53:54
  And maybe the difference between our family family and others is that we got the moment to pick our nose up from the grandstone and try to tell an story on behalf of everybody.
• 54:03
  How can people get involved in saving the family farm?
• 54:07
  One of the biggest ways is that take steps in terms of the way that they buy their food.
• 54:11
  So looking for ways to buy your food in a way where you can trace it back to a family farm.
• 54:16
  That can mean a farmer's market, it can mean stopping at a local butcher shop, it can mean asking your grocer to carry local goods because many will if they know people will buy it.
• 54:23
  Nobody in this country right now with how our system is set up, is most people are not equipped to get all of their food from a local farm, but you can get a lot of it.
• 54:31
  And so everyone, if everyone took a half step toward a family farmer in some form or fashion, it would completely revolutionize the way we produce food in this country and create new entrepreneurial opportunity for our farmers.
• 54:40
  The same is true when you're talking to your elected officials.
• 54:43
  Think when you're buying your food, what am I doing to create entrepreneur opportunity for the family farm?
• 54:48
  And when you talk to your policymakers, don't ask them, do you support the farmer?
• 54:52
  Because they'll all raise hand.
• 54:54
  They've all taken votes that support the farmer, right?
• 54:56
  But ask them, what are you doing to create entrepreneur opportunity for our farms?
• 55:00
  And if they don't know, they don't have a good answer, tell them how you'd like to be able to buy your food and see if they can find a way to create policy solutions that get out of the way of that.
• 55:09
  Those that's excellent.
• 55:10
  Those are great suggestions.
• 55:12
  Um is there a bit a way that we can follow your work?
• 55:15
  I know you write for a lot of outlets.
• 55:17
  Um, is there a way that we can follow you and support what you're doing, Brian?
• 55:21
  Yeah, absolutely.
• 55:22
  So you can find me on my website at www.brian dash risinger.com.
• 55:26
  That's B-R-I-A-N-Risinger, R-E-I-S-I-N-G-E-R dot com.
• 55:32
  You can find the latest columns posted there.
• 55:34
  You can sign up for my newsletter, my ex account, my Facebook account are all linked there.
• 55:38
  And so anybody who wants to get in touch, I'm there and engaging with people across the country.
• 55:43
  Sounds excellent.
• 55:44
  Well, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge on this topic, which is becoming more interesting to people and more people are getting more and more involved.
• 55:54
  And I think even people that are living in high-rise condos and apartments in like Chicago and in New York and downtown Cleveland and Columbus, and they go, I don't even have a balcony to grow a plant.
• 56:06
  There's they're becoming very aware of farmers' markets and what they can do and where they can get their food.
• 56:12
  It's becoming a really important topic, long overdue to be front and center on people's lives.
• 56:18
  We've gotten spoiled by the convenience of the junk food, and we want to have whole food, real food, and be able to cook it ourselves.
• 56:25
  It's just really, really good.
• 56:27
  So thank you so much for writing the book.
• 56:29
  Thank you for uh, you know, and telling us your whole story about the family's hope and the untold history of the disappearing American farmer in your book, Land Rich Poor.
• 56:40
  So I want to thank everybody who's joined us here today.
• 56:42
  This has been a marvelous conversation.
• 56:44
  And these are the types of conversations that we have every day, bringing you interesting and informative educational topics.
• 56:51
  And I think that we everybody sh would would really be uh uh ahead by buying some of these books and supporting some of the authors and getting the information and digging down because we just have a limited amount of time here to talk about the topic.
• 57:05
  And I can tell you, I read all of these books that I do five days a week.
• 57:09
  I don't may not read every single word, but I read through them.
• 57:12
  So I am being blessed with incredible knowledge from these incredible authors, and I hope that you'll take advantage of it and do the same thing too.
• 57:20
  So we hope that everybody will have a really great day.
• 57:23
  We'll see you tomorrow here at 3 p.m.
• 57:25
  Eastern or the next time on the 10 Penny Files.
• 57:28
  And in the meantime, please follow me on X and Instagram at Busy Dr.
• 57:33
  T.
• 57:34
  Have a great rest of your day, everyone.
• 57:35
  We'll see you here tomorrow or the next time on the 10 Penny Files.
• 57:39
  Goodbye.
• 57:39
  And God bless.