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Sept. 18, 2024 - Doug Collins Podcast
42:17
Georgia Famers Strike
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You want to listen to a podcast?
By who?
Georgia GOP Congressman Doug Collins.
How is it?
The greatest thing I have ever heard in my whole life.
I could not believe my ears.
This house, wherever the rules are disregarded, chaos and mob rule.
It has been said today, where is bravery?
I'll tell you where bravery is found and courage is found.
It's found in this minority who has lived through the last year of nothing but rules being broken, people being put down, questions not being answered, and this majority say, be damned with anything else.
We're going to impeach and do whatever we want to do.
Why?
Because we won an election.
I guarantee you, one day you'll be back in the minority and it ain't gonna be that fun.
Hey everybody, welcome to Doug Collins Podcast.
I got a special time.
We do a lot of politics on this podcast, as you well know.
We also have a lot of fun with Friday's Finest and football and everything going on.
But this one is a special one because I am a big history buff.
I love to read history.
I love to think about it because I have found over my life that how many times I have went back and read the history of this country and I see it replayed over and over again.
And I see issues that could come up that people say, well, I've never seen this before.
Well, you've never read a book, have you?
And I think this is what comes up.
So today, this is an interesting time.
When you've got a lot of economic conditions, inflation, you've got our, you know, we talk a lot about national security.
One of the biggest national security issues that's not ever spoken of is our basically food supply.
It's our agriculture, it's our farmers, it's the folks who feed us.
This is a lifestyle that, frankly, has been lived for the start of this country to now.
It's always been one in which we have to fight for, but it is in danger.
And that family farm is still precious to me and precious to my family.
My grandparents were dairy farmers over in Greene County.
They go back years in this.
So as we look at this, and my wife and I, as many of you know, had poultry houses for a long time as well.
So, as we get into this, I was with a, down at Perry, Georgia, which is where the, now it is the agricultural, national agriculture, I don't know what they call it nowadays, but it's a big agricultural place down there.
We got the state fairs down there, but it's been a great addition to Georgia.
And I was down there speaking to a group at Fish Fry and ran across an old friend, Lee Lancaster.
And Lee handed me a book.
And it was a book, and here it is, and we're gonna get to this right after the break, but it's the Georgia Farmers Strike.
And this has to do not only with the Georgia Farmers Strike, but also the National Tractor Cay.
This is some cool stuff.
It's almost been a race history, but I was alive to actually remember this.
And I remember seeing the TV reports from Atlanta on the evening news about the tractors at the Capitol and all over.
And the more I've gotten to read this, the more fascinated I'd be.
And I said, we've got to get Lee on here to talk about this.
So folks, right after the break, Lee Lancaster's coming on.
We're going to talk ag, we're going to talk farmers, we're going to talk tractors.
Can't get any better than this on the Doug Collins podcast.
We'll be right back.
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Folks, we're back.
And Lee, one, welcome to the podcast.
Glad to have you here.
Glad to see you and hope all is well with you.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you for inviting me on.
It's going to be fun today.
Now, you're still with the Ag Department here in Georgia, right?
I was in the building that you're talking about.
I've worked for the Georgia Department of Agriculture, the Georgia Grown building.
And we have the baby barn at the Georgia National Fair.
I was where we talked the other day.
I was within five foot of where I handed you that book.
And that's my job.
We deliver a calf every day to bring folks back to understanding where animal protein and food comes from.
And so to understand where milk comes from.
We have baby pigs.
We have all of the commodity commissions that support us.
And we just try to get it where people understand Where food comes from and the importance of agriculture and not to get into the weeds of some of the craziness that we hear.
It's just basically farmers growing crops in the process and all that kind of stuff.
So that's my main deal during the fall.
Well, and that is so cool.
I know we got the Fair coming up here pretty soon, and there'll be tons of folks down around your part of the world in that farm.
If you're in Georgia or if you're anywhere in the close, you want to drive, Perry, just look it up.
We'll get you some more information on that here on the podcast.
If you want to come see it, it's a great place.
Really different here in the southeast as we go in.
But one of the things that was brought up, and you and I began talking, you showed me this book, and it brought back memories.
From the moment you handed it to me, I was, because I love to read, and so I've been looking over and reading, and the pictures, I went through the pictures, and they brought back memories of my childhood.
I was about 11, 12 years old when this actually happened.
And I remember Carter's president.
I remember the farmers.
I remember there's one sign in particular, and I don't think it's in your book.
I've not finished the book completely yet, but I got along with it.
And I remember this going to Florida.
We'd go down to the beach occasionally, and there was a big sign on I-75 that says, from the farmers of Georgia to the farmers of America, we're sorry.
You know, we apologize.
And it's for Jimmy Carter.
And that is burned in my mind to this day when I think about this.
But most people don't know what happened here.
And they don't understand because as you said today, you know, you're talking about telling kids and all where milk comes from.
They think it comes from the grocery store.
You know, they don't know it comes from a cow.
My grandparents were dairy farmers over in Greshamville, Georgia, over in Greene County.
And, you know, they milked 180 head a day, twice a day with no, you know, it was before all automation, you know.
So, this is a big time deal, but farmers, What I want to do, Lee, is let's lay this out from your background.
Give them the elementary version of what was going on with the farmers in the 60s and the 70s.
I don't want to dump into parody.
They're not going to understand that.
And this is my podcast and we reach all over the country.
So I want them to understand because one of the things I'll say in dealing in Washington and dealing with my friends, you know, Austin Scott, a lot of others who deal in ag up and Tommy Irvin, you know, I knew Tommy from a long time ago and Gary Black is Dear friend of both you and I, former Ag Commissioner, and of course, Tyler Harper, who's the new one.
Ag is still hurting.
There's still areas, this has become an issue all along, especially when you deal with our fruits, vegetables.
Georgia, by the way, is becoming amazing in that.
And we need to protect that.
And we've been working on it.
So give us a little primer.
In the 60s, has it led up to what we now know is the farmer's strike or the tractor cades here across the South and across the country for that matter?
Well, I think everybody that came back from World War II, they left plowing with a mule, and then when they came home from World War II, they were plowing with a B. John Deere.
And so you were doing two rows at a time, and then you start with a 40-20, and you're doing four rows at a time.
And then when you get into the 70s, you're doing six rows at a time.
And so, as you can imagine, the larger the tractors get, the less people it's going to take to farm.
You remember a lot of farms that were doing the sharecropping, that was 40 acres?
Yep.
And that was it.
That was all you could do.
You imagine 40 acres with one person right now, that's nothing.
That's 10,000 acres is basically the equivalent of what it would take to produce cotton or Corn or whatever on 40 acres.
And so these people were getting edged out.
And a lot of the, I mean, you know, what, 2% of the entire population of the United States is a farmer.
I don't know what the population, I don't know what the percentage was in the 70s.
It was probably around here, it was probably 75 or 80%.
And even in Dodge and Telford County, the number of people that are farming has fallen.
And it started to fall back in the 70s because people were figuring out that they could go to these larger farms in the Midwest and get grain.
And they were growing grain on a huge scale and they could make a crop and make profit off of it compared to what we were doing 100 acres at a time.
And so the stock exchange or whatever, the prices were just below, they were 40% below what the cost of production was here in Georgia.
And so the folks were finding out that, you know, when we had Jimmy Carter elected, everybody's like, this is a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia.
Well, they thought that he was going to save them.
And then when the USDA Farm Bill came out, All of the prices were going to be about 40% below the cost of production.
And so everybody started protesting against those things, wanting price supports and things like that.
And that's pretty much where they were.
And they didn't get any help because this was 1977. Jimmy Carter, worst case scenario, was going to be president until January of 1981. So all he had to do was run out the clock on these folks.
And that's basically what happened.
And they said, well, we don't have a voice in Washington.
And so they started Tractor Caves.
And they started the first track decade that was over to Pueblo, Colorado, where the USDA director was.
And that's where everything started out over there.
And then there were some farmers over in Alma and Unadilla that started the track decades in Georgia.
And they drove the tractors to the county courthouse in Perry and Alma and Statesboro.
And then they went to Atlanta.
And my daddy was in this tractor, Kate, in Atlanta.
And I think every state patrolman in the state of Georgia had to work that thing because these tractors were going 14 miles an hour.
And that tractor came from my neck of the woods up to McDonough, where they all stopped.
They stopped in McDonough, they stopped at the Atlanta Motor Speedway, and they stopped at the Atlanta Farmers Market.
There was about 5,000 tractors.
On December the 9th of 1977 and when the tractors first got to McDonough right over there on Bo Simpson Parkway they went to Bo and Billy Simpson's farm right off of the interstate right there The tractors were still getting on the interstate down in Macon, I think.
Well, it wasn't that far.
The tractorcade was 26 miles long, so when the tractors got to Forsyth, they were still emerging right there at the Macon Coliseum.
Huge amount of tractors, 5,000 or so tractors, and every one of them rounded the capital in Atlanta on December the 10th, about 11 o'clock that morning.
And that was the beginning of our tractor caves and the protests and things like that.
And of course, everybody's like, what do you remember about it?
I don't, because I wasn't born yet.
I was about four months away.
Yeah, well, I was, and I think that's what has attracted me.
I cannot wait to give this to my daddy.
My daddy somehow got out of this one.
He got hauled all over the state.
My daddy was a state trooper, and I said, Daddy, do you have to do this?
He said, no, I got out of that one.
But everybody else did.
Another thing that you talk about in the book, Lee, that's pretty interesting, is it was a, you know, they always talk about a rainy night in Georgia.
Well, this was a cold day in Georgia.
That they had to deal with the tires.
Explain something, especially if people, I read this and I thought it was interesting, and some people who've never been around tractors or farms, the water in the tires and had to put in the antifreeze.
Explain that to folks if they read this book.
All right, when you take a tractor, you put water in the tires, in the front and the back tires, and that's the ballast.
You can figure it up.
Water weighs eight pounds and air doesn't weigh anything.
So if you've got a gallon of air, it don't weigh anything.
A gallon of water weighs 8.3 pounds.
So you put a bunch of water in the tires, then you've got ballast, and that's what helps you keep it on the ground so that you can plow better.
So the farmers tried their best to get the water out of their tires, but if you look on your car, the valve stem is up here and the ground is down here, so all the water you can get out of that tractor is still about that far, and that water would freeze.
And so they had to put calcium bicarbonate, I think, in it.
And you had to pour it in there.
And a lot of them would put antifreeze in there.
And a lot of them thought, well, we got this little bit left.
Well, that little bit right there froze.
And it was like riding the American Scream Machine trying to get it going.
And it's an out of balance deal because you probably got 40 pounds of ice on that tractor and it just didn't work.
And my daddy and them, they didn't know how to put Cardboard on the radiator to make the tractor hot.
And it was about to freeze to death.
And some of them said, go get some cardboard.
And he put some cardboard on it.
And he told me, he said, I took my coat off on the way back down there.
I was doing good, you know.
Well, that's when the North Georgia farmer came in, you know, because we knew what the cold weather morning was like up in the mountains up here.
Y'all helped us out with that.
Y'all told us what to do, sir.
Yeah, because we had learned that one before.
And I think that's interesting.
Let's talk about some of the folks here.
And like I said, I'm still in the process of reading.
A lot of these names are familiar to me.
You had Dawson Mathis, who was a former state congressman down there, U.S. congressman down there.
Of course, you had Tommy Irvin.
I thought something was interesting in the book, and I don't know if you figured it out because you've been around for a little while, of course, with Gary and then now with Kyler, but also Tommy before.
Tommy Everett is from up in my part of the world.
Tommy is probably branch kin to some of my wife's folks up at Alto and balling up in that part of the world and up in Habersham County.
I noticed in the book, though, he wasn't allowed, he didn't get asked to speak, although he showed up on a tractor in your book down at McDonough, but he didn't speak.
Why did you get any reasoning behind that?
If you don't do Straight up, you know, give us what we want.
You're not going to speak.
That's pretty much the way it was.
I don't really know what he would have been able to do.
I know that in your conversations with Gary Black, I think people believe that we have sometimes the ability to loan money or things like that.
With the Georgia Department of Agriculture, we don't do things like that.
And I really don't know what he what he could have done to to facilitate these things.
But obviously he was not able to.
But in but later on, he met with Tommy Curz and Billy Simpson and the folks up there at the Atlanta office.
Yeah.
But I just don't believe that he would have been able to do much of anything besides saving 100 percent of the farmers, you know, to to satisfy them.
Because once you get it in your mind that this is this is what he can do, even though that's not what he can do at all.
I think that was probably what what part of it.
But.
He was the commissioner of agriculture until January of 2011. It didn't hurt him one bit.
No, it didn't.
And it's interesting, you make a great comment about politics today, and you've heard me say it, I think probably before, is this divorcing politics and reality.
And we expect things We're good to go.
Midwest, which has now become a big tension point in farm bill issues because you have the row crop issue, you have the vegetable and fruit issue, you have others that are mixing into a lot of problem policy.
But back then, Georgia was cotton, tobacco, we were transitioning over.
And would you say, Lee, and again, maybe it's my perception, We were still in the 60s, 70s.
Soybeans hadn't come in good.
We hadn't really transitioned a lot to soybeans.
I still remember going down 75 in the 70s, and it was white all the way down there during cotton picking season.
But by the 80s, 90s, you go down through there, it wasn't up until about 10 years ago you saw cotton on the side of 75. Was that part of the thing that hit it so it made it, or was it mainly the president being from Georgia?
What do you see in that?
Well, cotton really didn't hit Georgia until we eradicated the boll weevil in 1993 and I was in high school.
And that started in 1917. I talked to one of the farmers the other day and he had soybeans and he didn't have a whole lot of soybeans.
He told me he lost a quarter million dollars overnight On his soybean crop during that period of time.
And so the diversity that we have in the state of Georgia now really helps us because you've got a lot of folks that are in the poultry business, and I don't see any problem with that in the near future at all.
I think we're going to eat more chicken like the folks say all the time.
There were just people that were unwilling to change, I think, with a lot of this stuff.
Peanuts saved my family.
I can tell you that much because of just the crop price of all of that kind of stuff.
But the people that were doing corn, they planted the corn in April.
It didn't rain until August, you know, and that was a part of it.
So it wasn't really a whole lot to do with anything that the government could have done because the government can't make it rain.
Right.
But one of the things that I remember about...
Do you remember when Scarecrow came out with John Mellencamp?
Yeah.
Go back and watch that video.
And the beginning when them three boys are talking in front of that planner, they're talking about the same things in 1985 that happened in 1977. This is eight years later.
And when Scarecrow came out, that was the biggest thing that we had that got anybody's attention because John Mellencamp was hot back in them days with his albums and everything like that.
And they're talking about Well, prices are this and the government's going to want to give me a loan.
Well, I've got to pay that loan back at some point.
And that's what one of the young boys said.
And that's the reason why we ended up where we were.
In 1977, the government decided to give us a loan.
Some of these loans were Four or five percent, whereas the normal interest rates, if you wanted to buy a brand new Buick, it was 17 or 18 percent, but still four percent.
And I don't have anything to pay.
I'm going to kick it down the road, kick the can down the road, as they say.
And so in 1982, 83, 84, 85, that's when everybody started losing their farms.
And I think 75 percent of the farmers That had loans from FMHA and SBA production, crop production folks.
75% of them were in default in the state of Georgia.
We were trying to borrow our way out of debt back in those days.
Yeah, and there's no way to borrow your way out of debt, especially when there's no hope in it.
One, let's play this on out a little bit for folks in the book.
They did the strikes here, then it went up to D.C. The Farm Bill, by the way, this is something that is fascinating to me that nobody understands.
The Farm Bill, It's no longer the farm bill.
The farm bill, it hadn't been since really the 60s, 70s when they started this process.
It's a multi-year bill, so it's not up every year.
It's not up every two years.
It's a multi-year bill, depending on when they can pass it.
And about 80% of it has nothing to do with the family farm.
At all.
This was done by, you know, what happened to be a compromise, if you would, between inner city and urban legislators and rural legislators to get food stamps, Medicare, all this other stuff passed that are in the food subsidy programs that are on there.
And then we have to deal, the farmers have to deal with, you know, what's left.
And they're the ones that, you know, frankly, it's named after.
Everybody thinks it's a farm bill, if it was.
It's not.
Tell us what, after all this goes on, as we now know through, you know, Farm Aid and everything, as you mentioned with John Mellencamp, not a lot changed.
And they basically, I was interested in your comment earlier that the Carter administration basically kicked the can down the road.
Yeah, it was not something that he was interested in.
I'll tell you how far it went.
In 1977, he was inaugurated in January.
And in March of 1977, he asked the USDA secretary to cut the peanut program 25%.
The USDA wanted to be completely out of, well, the government wanted to be completely out of the agriculture business.
And there were only two subsidized crops.
One was peanuts and the other one was rice.
Rice is in Arkansas, so we know about peanuts.
We don't know a whole lot about rice.
He wanted to cut the peanut production, I mean, subsidies by 25%.
And he's a peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia.
He got to know at least 10,000 peanut farmers.
So you think he's going to be tone deaf about everything else if he's tone deaf about the peanuts.
So that was the canary in the coal mine right there.
That was when it really started to hit people that Oh boy, we're in for a bumpy ride.
But there was not a whole lot left to be able to give to the farmers anyway, because you had the oil embargoes and all of these things.
The economy was awful back in those days.
You had inflation in the double digits.
You had interest rates in double digits.
And the approval ratings of the president were in the...
Well, his approval ratings were in the 30s.
Right.
So that was not just the only thing.
So the economy was awful.
We were in a terrible recession and we're a lot like that nowadays.
I just don't believe anybody really wants to say it.
Right, right.
Well, one of the things that came out of this and for, you know, for farmers and looking at the agricultural Industry and business here in Georgia in particular, which is still by far the largest industry in Georgia is still agriculture.
As much as we've grown in other areas, manufacturing, all the stuff around Atlanta, it's still ag.
Ag is still our biggest commodity and biggest industry.
But do you see coming out of this, and just a curious question here, Coming out of what happened in the 70s, the 80s, and into some of the other issues with the commodity pricing, there began to be a diversification in Georgia.
And now at Alma and other places, you now have blueberries.
We have the fruits that we see all around down there, which has become one of the largest.
I mean, most people don't realize, and I think it goes year to year, Lee.
Correct me if I'm wrong here.
It depends on the year, but Georgia is the number one producer of blueberries in the country, correct?
Yes.
If we don't get a freeze in March, It depends on the freeze.
If we don't get a freeze, it kills everything.
It puts us off.
We have the most blueberries of any state in the country.
Absolutely.
Well, and I think if you talk about freezing from my part of the world, it goes with peaches.
And now peaches, you know, again, okay, here's the crazy part.
We're nowhere close to being the leader in peaches.
But yeah, we're the peach state because of where we came from.
But, you know, folks like Jerome Crosby, a lot of those old guys, you know, now in blueberries that you just got massive fields of blueberries that depending on the year, as you said, but also we do a lot of more diversification.
In your time in ag in Georgia, How much have you seen that help?
That we've diversified ag, it's helped, you know, keep some of these farms, but also the awareness level is still so low among most people about what agriculture does in Georgia and other states for that matter.
Yeah, the people that don't change are the farmers.
People who you talk to right now, you talk I know that you know Albert Wilds is in that book.
He's a blueberry farmer, one of our largest blueberry farmers.
He got in it on the ground level.
Albert was growing hogs and growing corn and all these other kinds of things, soybeans and things.
The farmers never change.
If you've got a person who's a...
If the Lord calls him to preach, he's going to preach.
If the Lord calls him to be a farmer, he's going to raise anything he can get his hands on, but up to a point where it's not a hobby.
If I lose a half a million dollars, I'm going to find something else to grow, but I'm still going to be a farmer because God gave me these gifts and he ordained me to be a farmer.
So that's the thing that has never changed.
One of the things that you'll look at is the apple people.
The apple farmers, their granddaddies were dairymen or they grew cotton.
And the boll weevil came and hit us and we had to find something else to grow.
And we started growing peanuts and apples and Vidalia onions and all these other kinds of crops.
We had five and a half million acres of cotton when the boll weevil came.
And then we went down to almost nothing.
But those farmers didn't have anything else they could do.
So they had to scratch out a living and they learned some other crop to grow.
And there was a man named George Washington Carver over at Tuskegee and a man named Tom Houston over in Columbus that got together.
And that's where Tom's Peanuts comes from.
And that's where peanut butter comes from and all those other kinds of things.
And so God gave us something to grow because, you know, that's what we do.
Special heart there for that.
Well, you know, and look at it, too, and we think about it today.
A few years ago, I think, wasn't it Matthew, Hurricane Matthew?
Exactly.
Okay, it came through South Georgia.
I couldn't remember that.
But here was an interesting part that, you know, to talk about diversification, not only from what we're talking about right here, but we also, Georgia is one of the largest for pecan and trees.
And it is interesting that one of the biggest crop fights we have for the pecan trees was the issue of They don't fit under insurance.
They don't fit under crop damages because of the way that we were talking about this and people outside the state didn't realize, well, just, you know, for those who don't understand this, we lost a lot in that hurricane knocked over trees.
We locked over crops.
I mean, people lost thousands of acres in this kind of thing because these trees were full and Nothing fit them, and I remember talking to some folks up in D.C. and some other place during that time, and trying to explain to them, they said, well, they've got insurance.
I said, but you can't just replant a tree, and it all of a sudden, it's not like cotton.
You replant it next year, we'll grow up peanuts.
You put them in the ground next year, they'll come back up.
It's gonna take 11 to 12, 13, 14 years before that tree will produce what it was producing when it got knocked down.
But it is interesting that we have that kind of diversity now in Georgia with pecans, with the, you know, pecan, depending on, as Gary Black loves to say, it depends on how much you're paying for them.
You know, there you go.
But you got, you know, the other crops, row crops with fruits.
I see that as a benefit of a lot of those who sat on those tractors and said, we're going to fight for a way of living.
All of these farmers that did that, like I said, they're still around.
A lot of them are, and they're still in the business, even though they did lose a lot back in those days.
All of the farmers that I talked to, they're still farming, even after 45 years.
So, like I said, it's in their blood.
And the thing that I talked to some folks the other day during the tropical storm, Debbie, There were a lot of people that lost a lot of crops over in East Georgia.
We had 18, 20 inches of rain.
And I told them, I said, you may have never seen this before and you may never have had to deal with this before, but you go talk to some of the older farmers.
It's happened before.
And all you got, it may not be a good thing.
It may not be the answer that you want, but these things have happened before.
And you just got to go through and talk to some of the farmers that have And the farmers that went through this, they tightened up and they became better farmers because they knew there wasn't a whole lot of margin anymore.
There used to be margin.
There wasn't a whole lot of margin of error once this came about.
What happened to the leaders?
Tommy Kersey, all these others out there we talked about, you mentioned them earlier.
What has become of them and their families?
Tommy Kersey, he went, he was working over in, he stayed over around Unadilla and he and his brother Wendell, they built Southeast Livestock Arena that you see in Unadilla on I-75.
And Wendell, he's still with us.
Tommy died in 2017. His brother Layton, I think, died in 21. I talked to Layton's daughter a pretty good bit.
I see them, they still live around Perry.
Okay.
But Tommy Fulford, he died.
He was one of the first people that I knew of that died of COVID. And then Tommy Carter died in 1997. I think he had heart failure.
He was a young man.
But he went to school with a lot of the folks that I knew over.
He was in Alpha Gamma Row up there at the University of Georgia and knew a lot of the guys that were In, you know, at Georgia at the time in the mid, well, the early 70s.
Right, right.
Yeah, you and Ellis Black's mentioned in there, I had to pleasure serving with Ellis.
It is a national, I just think it's just a national treasure just to listen to Ellis talk and keep everything up.
Absolutely.
I mentioned something earlier to my producer when we were talking about this.
Explain, the state senator now, Russ Goodman, who's down in his family, been farming for, you know, generations down there, but he mentioned something the other day when we were talking about this, The pricing, and especially when we go back to some of this commodity pricing, has not changed a great deal in a number of years.
And talk to us a little bit, because people go to the store and they see their clothes price, they see this.
Explain how that, you know, like cotton prices or other prices have not really kept up with, quote, what we see as inflation or anything else in these industries.
Well, the things that you look at like gasoline and diesel and those things, they've come and gone.
Well, they go up and they don't seem to come down as much as they go up.
Input prices have taken a beating because of where the fertilizers, you can add a zero to what the fertilizers were just about You know, seven, eight years ago.
And then you think about the diesel prices, you know, the red-dyed off-road diesel, how much they cost.
H2A labor is $18 an hour right now.
You know, it was 11 or 12 just a couple of years ago.
All these things add up.
But the thing about it is you're cutting 68, 70 cents a pound.
It was, what, over $2 a pound back in the early teens.
And everybody just...
They didn't know what they were going to do.
But it failed about the time they started planting it again in 2013. And so that's the only time that I've ever seen really the commodities be a really good, at a good level.
And I don't know if they're going to get over a dollar a pound anytime soon with cotton.
And you think about cotton, was that Price during World War I. Is there anything that you can buy that costs the same as it did during the George W. Bush administration?
I mean, there's nothing like that.
Cars, anything like that.
Agriculture is the basis of the economy.
That's always been the thing that I think You know, nobody's going to change my mind because I can't live without eating a piece of bread or something during the day.
So until that changes, that's still going to be the basis for the economy in my mind.
But the loaves of bread, they've gone up, but the price of wheat is still the same.
And I talk to people that make shirts.
There's some folks that make shirts, and they never leave the southeast.
And cotton's 68 cents a pound, and the shirts are one thing.
And we figured out that if that shirt weighed eight ounces, that cotton would be worth $70 a pound.
You know, so it's 100 times more than what it is when the farmer Pays for it out of the field, you know, and it's got to be refined and made into some other things.
You got to gin it and spin it and weave it in the cloth and all those other kinds of things.
So we're taking advantage of, obviously, and that's the thing that was happening in the 70s.
People were talking about this is how much this is and And you look at the prices, the prices of everything has changed except for the commodities because the commodity folks that are on the stock exchange, they don't farm and they want to get as little out of it as they possibly can so they can turn it around and make as much as they can, but they're not being greedy.
Okay.
They're trying to make it profitable.
They got to make a profit too.
And they got to take it from Georgia to Oklahoma or to Nebraska or somewhere like that, or even send some of the cotton and things over to China.
And so the commodity prices are still relatively close to what they've always been for some reason.
Isn't it, you know, except for that spike up in the early teens, so really what you just said there is the cotton price, and we'll just use cotton as an example here, the cotton price today is basically what the cotton price was in the 70s.
Yes.
So, I mean, it's unbelievable.
People, again, need to hear this.
Lee, this is why I wanted you on today.
This is why I wanted to talk about this because people need to understand that, you know, their food doesn't come from this grocery store.
It comes from a farmer.
It comes from somebody who's grown it, got it to market.
And if it doesn't start there, it's not going to ever get there.
And I think that's what you're doing down there with the Georgia Grown, also with the, with the Ag, you know, part down at Perry.
If you had, and you do this every day, you know, you're birthing the calves, you're doing everything else.
If you could speak to a larger audience and say something that your family talks about with ag, looking back on the folks that I've known, what would you tell a generation?
Because I speak this from a military perspective as well.
Less than one, we had the longest war in our history and less than one and a half percent of the population had direct involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Less than one and a half percent.
So everything that's talked about, for those of us who actually were in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a minute portion of this country that had it.
Farming is very similar in that everybody benefits from it, but very few are involved in it like they were at one time.
What would you tell all those folks in other places who have no concept of farming to make them understand that there's value in all of us?
They need to do the research and just look where these things come from.
And the best way to do it is you get a jug of milk and you look for the ingredient label.
Okay?
And you're like, oh, look here.
It contains milk.
It's not made in a lab.
And when I talked to the Rotary Club over in Dublin the other day, I went by four roads that were named after dairies.
When you go down I-16, you cross Walk Dairy Road.
Well, Walk Dairy isn't there anymore.
Okay.
And so, and we didn't have competing dairies.
They had enough to deal with as they were.
And so that's the thing that I talk to people about is the farmer's market.
There aren't many farmers at the farmer's market.
I'm on the farmer's market board in this county, but I can tell you that the farmers are growing things and they're putting it on trucks and they're sending it out by the truckload, 70, 80,000 Well, 40,000 pounds at a time.
And so in order to support your local farmers, you know, You need to eat things that we grow here in the state of Georgia, and the best way to do that is Vidalia onions and blueberries, pecans, pecans, peanuts, those kinds of things.
Satsumas.
Look up satsumas.
We're growing more satsumas every day.
That's the best thing in the world.
You can peel it without using a knife, that kind of stuff.
Don't worry about natural.
Don't worry about organic.
Worry about Georgia grown.
There you go.
Get Georgia growing out there.
We got it all over the country.
And this is what, look, I'm so glad we had this talk.
We're going to have some more on.
I think I'm going to spend a little bit more time on with a lot of our friends as well.
By the way, also a good mutual friend of ours, Terry England, I told him I was going to do this, said to say hi as well.
So we'll get in.
Folks, this has been a great time.
Lee, thank you for this book.
Folks, where can they get this book?
Can they get it on Amazon?
Where can they get this book?
You can get an autographed copy on LeeLancasterBooks.com.
There you go.
You can get the autographs.
You can get one from Amazon.
We just started the website.
Y'all give me a little space.
I'll get to you as soon as I can.
I'm still learning this newfangled internet stuff.
I love it.
I love it.
Well, folks, Lee, thanks for being a part.
Folks, if you want an interesting read, you want old, you know, Ag South, and you want to understand politics, I started off the podcast by saying if you don't understand history, you can't understand tomorrow.
Well, this is a great place to put it.
For folks, and maybe if you've never been on a farm, well, take a read on this book.
It's fun.
There's some fun stuff in it about fights and who got in what and somebody got left in a tractor.
I mean, it's just some pretty cool stuff in it.
But if you're from a farm, especially in Georgia, this is our history.
This is who we are.
And the folks that come out of it want you to take part.
Lee, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast.
And folks, we'll see you again for Friday's Finest this week.
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