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March 11, 2025 - The David Knight Show
51:29
Land Rich, Cash Poor: The Collapse of the American Dream and a Family’s Fight to Survive
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I'm real interested to talk to our guests.
And just to give you a tease for it, this is someone who grew up on a farm.
He's like fourth or fifth generation.
I forget how many it was.
But it was about 100 years ago that his ancestors immigrated to the U.S., set up a farm in Wisconsin.
And it was a dairy farm.
And he left the farm to become a journalist.
His sister stayed there.
And he's written a very compelling book.
He's a very accomplished writer.
But he's written a very compelling book about the situation with farmers.
And we're going to talk to him about the COVID crash and the road to revival, a couple of chapters that are there.
But as he talked about his experiences there, he said, He and my great-grandmother built a future together as the Depression gripped the country.
Out of their 14 children came the eldest, my grandfather.
Albert, who married my grandmother, their generation helped expand our family's dairy farm up out of the valley and into the hills above.
And then his eldest, my own father, took over, feeling like his father before him that he had no choice with what he was supposed to do with his life.
So he and my mom rose each morning to milk the cows, bounced countless hours on the seat of a tractor, shoveled, Carried and heaved until they expanded the farm further still, buying a third farm that was once run by my dad's aunt and uncle, bringing the Reisinger family acreage to a height of 600 acres.
My dad found, despite feeling that he had no choice, that farming was his calling.
Each day, it sank deeper down into his blood and then his bones until it was a part of him.
To me, he seemed to share the instincts of his animals.
And to sense the changing weather bearing down on his crops.
For 45 years, morning and night, every day of the year, he milked 50 cows in our old but sturdy red barn, sometimes rotating in more cows in shifts when he could manage it, to make a little more money and harvested enough crops each year to feed his herd and maybe sell a little on the side.
He and my mom built our family a farm that was worth more than any point in its 100-year history and gave my sister and I choices that my dad never had.
For me to find my own way, whatever it may be, and for my younger sister to decide to take over the farm in what had been a man's world.
And each year, more people shrugged and told us, little family farms like ours, so much work for so small a milk check, just couldn't make it anymore.
And so as he points out, been there for 100 years, his father built it to a pinnacle.
But then the things that have happened recently nearly took it down, and his sister had to completely rethink the operation to try to keep the farm going.
So we're going to talk to him about that, the effects of COVID, the effects of tariff, and then what can be done.
And this is something that applies to all of us, even if we don't want to farm, even if we don't have it.
We need to keep that access to good food open.
And that's something that is really missing, and so I'm anxious to talk to him.
We're going to take a quick break, and we will be right back.
The book is Land Rich and Cash Poor, and we're talking to Brian Reisinger, and this is about his family's story, but it is also something that's happening across the Western world.
We're seeing this happening in the UK. We're seeing it happening in France.
we're seeing a lot of things happening in america but he's going to speak to us about some of the specifics that have happened uh when things really took a downturn and um how his family has managed this but we also want to talk about uh what is coming forward uh brian has an interesting background he He grew up in a family farm in Wisconsin, and then he became a columnist, a consultant.
He's worked for a lot of large mainstream publications like USA Today, Newsweek, and others like that.
So he's really ideally suited to tell this story.
He's lived it.
That's been a part of his family's history for 100 years, and now he is a writer, and so he is able to articulate what has happened with them.
And so welcome, and thank you for joining us, and thank you for this very important book, Brian.
Hey, thank you for having me on.
I appreciate it.
It's really good to be with you.
Tell us a little bit about your family.
As an introduction, I read from your book, you're talking about your father and mother and how they'd expanded the farm to the biggest that it had ever been, bought the farm that belonged to your aunt and uncle and everything, and then things turned difficult.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, you said it exactly right.
You know, we were and are a small farm, but through the generations, we had built it up to be able to make it.
And from my great-grandparents to my grandparents to my parents, it was each generation added a building block.
And my parents got it to that height, as you said.
And, you know, almost in the same moment, things began to decline.
And I was lucky to grow up with the middle-class living that my mom and dad fought for us to have.
And to be from college, partially paying my way on newspaper hourly wages and partially with my parents helping.
But at the same time, we began to see that farms our size just couldn't continue to deliver that kind of living.
And what happened is, in the generation from my dad to us, we saw the...
American economy fundamentally shift.
The farm crisis in the 1980s played a big part of it, but fundamentally shift where the medium and small size farm really was in a downslide and couldn't make it in a way that had been possible in past generations, even though it had always been tough.
You know, this is a story.
My dad had a small business, and it was not a farming business, but it was the kind of business I saw that regulations were going to choke it off, and it wasn't going to be able to continue with that.
And I have seen small businesses.
So, you know, when my wife and I began our business, it was a service business, because that's the kind of stuff that's left to us now.
And even that is being choked off to us everywhere.
So your story is very relevant because it's really the American experience.
You know, for centuries here, every generation has been better.
Now we've reached this, and now it's been a sudden downturn.
And it doesn't matter really whether it's a farm or whether it's a small business or even a service business.
Forget about manufacturing, you know, the Chinese competition and things like that.
But you can't even – you can't do – it's difficult for Americans to really have a dream that they can pursue.
it's difficult for Americans to really have a dream that they can pursue.
And so I like what you had to say in terms about the road forward with this.
But talk a little bit about what caused that immediately.
And you talk about COVID, you talk about tariffs and other things like that, the really kind of the immediate causes of what was happening in that crisis for your family.
Tell us a little bit about that.
Yeah.
A family farm is a small business.
And small businesses of all kinds have faced different variations of what farms face.
Farms, I think, faced a lot of unique challenges that had a confluence that really tell the story well.
But to your point, there was a lot of parallel experiences.
What happened is we moved into the 90s.
I was growing up in the 80s and 90s.
As we moved into the 90s, we had the family farm suddenly confronting a world that was so much...
Bigger.
Defined by bigger business, bigger government, bigger markets, all of these different things.
And that was the latest chapter and kind of a progression.
So we really began to lose our farms actually in the 1920s, believe it or not, 100 years ago.
And we've been losing farms at the rate of 45,000 a year on average ever since.
And there are...
Economic crisis reasons, you know, crises that we didn't understand how it affected the farm on the ground.
There are political reasons, mistakes by our political leaders, and there are technological reasons.
All those issues have been piling up for a dang near a century.
And then when we got into the 90s, all those compounding forces combined with this emergence of the family farmer really being a little guy in a way that...
Blew out of the water all the past challenges.
And so we had what's going on with global trade.
We had a lot of agriculture markets that have become broken.
We have bigger and bigger industries surrounding farming requiring that everyone else get bigger.
And all of those things kind of hit as we had all these horses from years past.
And so next thing you know, a farm that...
You know, in the 1980s, a dairy farm, the midpoint for a dairy farm was about 80 cows.
And our farm milked 50 cows for a lot of our history.
So we were on the small end of medium, you know?
Alpha midpoint, David is...
1,200 cows, 80 up to 1,200.
And it's not just dairy, it's all types of farming.
So that's the acceleration that we saw in the 90s and 2000s.
Wow.
And it's that kind of consolidation.
I mean, we've seen that.
You take a look around, even in the retail trade, you see the fact that in the 90s, Romney and other people started putting together things like Staples and stuff like that, driving out hardware stores with Home Depot and Lowe's.
And so what we see is all these different retail Well, When we were in business, we were in a video business, and we had to compete against Blockbuster, who operated for the entire time that we were in business.
They operated at a loss.
Well, we can't operate at a loss, you know, and we can't get money from Wall Street.
And so that's the situation that we're in.
But you've also got with the farms, it seems to me like recently there's been a tremendous turn in Europe especially where they're coming after the farmers where they used to protect them.
Everybody used to realize, hey, we need to be able to feed our own people here.
And so we're going to protect the farms even if we've got to subsidize them.
Now they're at the point where, and it's not just the farmers, but especially the farmers, where they're going to come after them because they are land rich and cash poor.
The tax policies of inheritance things, which really fall on all small businesses, especially the farmers, they have to be forced to sell their farms in order to pay for the taxes.
When the parents die, they can't continue it from generation to generation.
And they're directly challenging them with tax policies.
They're directly challenging them with environmental policies, as we saw in the Netherlands.
There seems to be a concerted effort to get rid of the farms.
What do you think is really going on here?
It seems to me like they want to...
Consolidate and own everything, and they want to feed us the soil and green out of the labs.
That's what it seems like.
Well, that's where it's going to end if we don't do something about it.
And here's the reality.
I think that political leaders on all sides of the political spectrum have not understood what's going on on the ground on our family farms.
And some of the things you're talking about now, the tax policies and the environmental policies, Farmers, you know, farmers want to do smart things with their money and farmers want to do things that would be good for our soil, for our water, for our natural resources.
So there's ways for all these people to be able to work with farmers.
I think something that's happened with some of the folks that are pushing a lot of those anti-farm policies is they've convinced themselves that the only farms out there are the great big farms.
And we can talk about the big farms and we wrestle with that in the book.
And I try to talk honestly about some of the pros and some of the cons about that.
But a lot of people out there that are tagging farming have convinced themselves that it is big farms out there and that's it.
Well, what the reality is, even though we've lost 70% of our farms in this country, and even though the farms that are left are struggling, the thing that people don't realize is 88% of them are small family farms.
People say, how can that be?
I don't hear about those farms.
Well, what's going on is those folks are working two to three jobs.
And that's farms like ours, where people are working the land and they're also working, you know, Working factory shifts or pouring concrete or working construction site or got another small business on the side, whatever the case may be.
They're working two or three jobs and the farm is supplemental income.
So what we're doing when we attack farming is the biggest farms have the money and the resources just like any other larger business to absorb those attacks.
The smaller farms are the ones that are going to get hit and going to get wiped out.
So a lot of the people who are...
Well, you know, as you point out in your book, I'll just read the sentence here for you, but both parties, both political parties, used food as a weapon abroad.
Just as economic catastrophes of our own making were unfolding at home.
And that's true.
I mean, we use them as, you know, we put tariffs on.
And so what happens, one of our major exports, of course, is agricultural product.
So the farmers got hit with Trump's tariffs.
And then we had Biden do sanctions and so forth.
And we had the COVID stuff happening in the middle of that.
Was that the point at which things got super difficult for your family?
Because you began your book talking about...
Your dad, who as you, and the quote that I read, grew up on the farm and it just kind of worked into his entire life to the extent that he was one with it.
And how depressed he was at the fact that he had to sell off his dairy cows in order to keep the farm going.
Was that what happened?
Was it that crux there at that point in time?
You know, it was really the 90s and 2000s that pointed us in the direction of becoming smaller and smaller relative to the rest of the economy.
And what happened during COVID, to your point, is when COVID hit, and depending upon the situation and the perspective, the spread of the virus and or the government's response to the virus, that did was it put farms through a You know, last additional shock.
And for our farm what happened is we were continuing on and I don't know how long my dad would have continued on.
Work in the farm, even though the economic scale wasn't there for a dairy farm anymore.
He might have gone up forever if he hadn't gotten so sick with COVID. And I know there are a lot of people who had different experiences with COVID, lighter cases and different things like that.
And there's a lot of discussion, debate, and difficulty around how cautious should we be?
But in any case, my dad got a case that he was older, he was 69, and he got one of those cases that sends you to the hospital and they're talking about, they're having ventilator conversations and things like that, right?
So he got up from that.
And he survived it.
And he just looked at it and he said, man, if something had happened to me and I hadn't come back, we would have had a farm that wasn't in any shape to move forward for the next generation.
He'd gotten it through his generation.
He'd ran his race, right?
And we had no debt.
We owned the farm free and clear.
And it was, what does the next generation want to do with it?
And if something had happened to him, what would we have done?
And so he knew that he couldn't continue.
Like milking physically.
And then we needed to evolve the business model in the way that my sister and he could work on into the future.
So COVID for us really was kind of a final shock to the system.
It was a shock to so many people because we had a situation where farmers couldn't sell their goods.
Yeah.
Oh, it's crazy.
It was absolutely crazy.
Yeah.
Destroying the food on the farms while the shelves were empty.
And we're seeing a lot of that stuff in this idiotic approach to bird flu as well, where they test one bird with a PCR test.
And then if they get one positive, they kill millions of them.
But, you know, there's also maybe some other things that are going on, as I've reported.
You've got situations where these big, gigantic egg corporations have already been brought up on charges and had to pay...
Tens of millions of dollars to General Food and all the rest of these companies that were fixing the price.
And so there's a question there, you know, is like, what is going on here with this?
Or we look at the foreign situation with the Chinese buying up pork, for example, in North Carolina where I used to live.
They went in and bought these different farms.
RFK Jr. had a great video explaining exactly how they were taking over all the different pork farms and things like that.
We have these massive corporations.
We even have foreign countries that are interested in getting a stranglehold on our food.
And then at the same time, you've got a lot of people who just want to have a monopoly on everything.
That really seems to be what is happening.
Yeah, you're absolutely right.
And you're hitting on a really important part of what's happening to our food supply.
We're seeing it right now during bird flu, which is the disruption of our food supply.
And the reason that...
So, you know, you can talk about bird flu and like, okay, in this case, should we have euthanized as many birds as we did?
Or, you know, you can talk about the individual responses on the ground, but here's the thing.
Whatever the response is, the impact on that, on our food supply, is outsized.
And the reason for that is because our food industry is so concentrated that our supply chain is vulnerable.
So if we hadn't been wiping out 45,000 farms a year for the past century, and we had more businesses of more kinds and more sizes, to your point on small business, involved in the purchase and the processing and the transport and the wholesale and the retail of our food, if we had more links in that chain, there'd be more ways for the food to get from the farm gate to the dinner table, including direct sales from farms to consumers for those folks who want to do it that way.
But because we've been wiping out farms and because we've been hammering the ag and the food industries as much as we have, the reality is that our supply chain is very vulnerable.
So you got in COVID, you got this almost dystopian situation where farmers can't sell their goods if they can.
It's for a lower price in the basement.
Consumers can't find the food they need if they can.
It's higher prices through the roof.
Same thing's happening with eggs right now.
Bird flu does not have to have the impact that it's having, but it is so disruptive because if you have one distribution center that goes down because of something like that...
That really affects the supply of eggs in a really big way, in a way that it wouldn't if we had many small operators in many parts of the country.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
You talk in your book about the commodity trap.
Talk a little bit about that.
Yeah.
You know, that's something that the community I grew up near and so many fall into.
And what happens is when you start out, and you know this as a business guy, when you start out...
With a new industry or a new business idea, you might be selling something that's a little different.
And it could be a sophisticated product or it could be just something that you do a little differently.
A dish that a local restaurant prepares in a way that sets them apart.
It's high in innovation and it's lower in its availability.
Over time, industry gets more mature and a lot of this stuff is natural, but we fall into it in an unnatural way.
It gets more developed and evolved.
And, you know, at some point, you know, growing, people in Iowa will get mad at me for this as a Wisconsinite.
The corn, the field corn in Iowa and field corn in Wisconsin, very similar, right?
They'll say no.
A commodity is a product that is basically very similar regardless of who's producing it.
And there's certain things and goods that make sense to produce that way.
But what happens is if an entire industry, farming, and an entire community It's based on one industry.
Slide into that.
Where now your whole economy is just based on producing corn the same way that every other community and every other state that produces corn does it.
Well then, the only thing that you can do to...
Be able to make more money and survive as things get harder and as, you know, the economy has its ups and downs as you produce more of it for cheap.
And it's good to be more efficient, to produce more of something for cheaper.
That's a good thing.
But when that's the only card you can play and you don't also have innovation doing something new different or having a new thing that people are willing to pay money for, you don't have economic growth and opportunity.
You're just sliding into this kind of downward spiral where the only thing you can do is produce more of it for cheaper and that's it.
And what happens is that squeezes out industry.
That squeezes out small businesses.
And consolidation is a normal thing.
Shifting toward commodities is a normal thing.
But when you go so far...
That there are so few operators who can make it.
And by the way, when you've got misunderstood economic crises and faulty government policy and technology tilted against the little guy, all three of those things making it worse, now we've got kind of this unnatural, unholy shift where it's not normal competition.
It's not normal consolidation.
It's a completely twisted market that is tilting the tables against American entrepreneurship.
Oh, I agree.
Yeah.
And so the question is, you know, what do we do about that?
When I look at the...
When I look at engineering, because I also worked for a while in the semiconductor industry, and what we saw was the commodification of, like, memory chips, for example.
And it wasn't too long.
At first, the memory chips were, oh, this is, you know, we've gone to integrated circuits instead of board-level stuff, and so this is a real innovation.
But then it became, you know, commodification happened, and so then it became who could produce it more efficiently.
And so these Asian countries are doing a very good job of doing that and doing it cheaply.
And so it essentially drove the U.S. companies out of that.
But they were able to succeed.
By going to CPU design and things like that.
We see that now with NVIDIA. You know, they're very successful because they have focused on some innovative, specialized thing.
But how does that translate?
You know, I can see how that works with technology, but how does that translate with food?
Because food is fundamental, like you point out, you know, corn is corn, you know, when you go different places.
How are you going to escape that commodification thing?
If I come to you looking with a crazy, innovative apple, you may not want to eat it, right?
Well, they have produced some of those, and you're right, I don't want to eat them.
The genetically modified ones, yeah.
Bill Gates is doing some of that in a lab, and I wouldn't even tell.
It's got to grow naturally out of the ground.
But no, the way that it works is actually the intersection of agriculture and technology.
So this ties back to your exact point.
So when I talked about economic crises, government policy, and technology tilting against us, here's what happened.
We stopped having what is called scale-neutral technology in this country, meaning a large farm or medium farm or small farm could all have different sizes and types of that technology that's scalable for them.
It's affordable for the small farms and practical for them to integrate.
We stopped doing that halfway through the 20th century, and here's why.
Farm wages were Much lower than factory wages.
And we had a big challenge with a lot of people moving from rural areas to urban areas to chase industrial jobs and making sense.
But we needed to have farms be able to grow and keep up a little bit.
So some of that technology helped.
Farms be able to take on more acres and more animals with fewer people breaking their backs to do it.
And it allowed farm wages to grow.
It allowed us to not have to depend on labor quite as much.
And it also meant that fewer people had to grow their own food.
So at some point, technology that helped farms just kind of be able to produce more and get a little bigger was a good thing.
But in the mid-20th century, we got to the point where we kind of balanced that out.
That wasn't needed anymore.
So now, the technology that's made to just make farms bigger, more and more field rows, more and more animals packed into a building, all that's doing is making it so that big farms can get bigger, and it's not something that a small farm can do because it doesn't make sense for them or they can't afford it.
You've got to take out too much debt to build a big building or whatever it is for the small farmer.
And so we lost that scale neutral technology that we could have large, medium and small farms doing different things in our economy.
And you had perfectly good medium and small farms that were competitive other than they couldn't afford that next technological innovation.
So they fell behind, even though they were efficient, hardworking, resourceful, scrappy.
In some ways, as you know, sometimes small businesses are more innovative because they got a little freedom to figure something else out or take a different risk that a bigger one isn't going to.
So innovation can come from all places.
But not if the technology is tilted against certain players in the market.
And now you've got a situation with, you know, John Deere is pretty famous about this coming in and saying you're not going to be able to fix your tractor.
You know, farmers are always the jack of all trades and being able to do that.
And so I guess if you're a large, you know, farm concern, you don't really care about that.
You know, I don't want to fix my tractor anyway, so fine, I'm with it.
But if you're a small farmer, that becomes a real barrier to being able to own and operate that.
And so, you know, sometimes that...
Technology can be twisted and used to make it more difficult.
Instead of being an assistant, it makes it more difficult for them as well.
Yeah, you know, that's right.
And look, my dad probably drives John Deere green tractors, you know, and that's been a brand in our family for a long time.
And the reality is that I think it's actually in the interest of all of the companies that exist in our food industry, in our agribusiness industry, in our manufacturing industry, all the different industries that intersect with agriculture.
I think it's in their interest to be long-term, to be able to build, continue to build machinery that can be used by farms of all sizes.
Because here's why.
If we don't do that, if we keep losing farms at the rate of $45,000 a year per year, For the next century, like we did in the past century, we're going to lose most of our remaining family farms in the next 40 years, just mathematically speaking.
And so those great big farms that people are taking shots at, whether they should be doing that or not, those are going to be the only ones left.
Now, that is fewer customers for suppliers.
That is fewer customers for buyers.
know, all of the larger agriculture and agribusiness and food companies, they at some point need to have a robust farming sector.
And we can't have farming, I guess, you know, for lack of a better phrase, get to the point of being too big to fail.
It really doesn't benefit these other industries to not have a robust farm sector that's got some economic diversity to it with large, medium and small farms alike operating and playing different roles and being there, especially during supply chain crises and other things like that, you know?
We look at it and we all understand that this kind of consolidation of everything is not in our best interest.
It is the interest and the obsession with the people who are doing the consolidation and they've got so much money.
So what do we do to push back against that?
Because you address that in your book as well.
I want to give people a positive vision of things that can be done that we are not necessarily helpless about that.
What are some of the things that you talk about in terms of helping smaller farmers to survive?
Yeah, well these are things that I found as we looked in the book.
at the hidden areas of history driving the disappearance and weaving that with my family's story of survival from the depression today i found just places where it seems like we made a choice in our country that we didn't have to so can we make a better choice next time these are things that right left uh in big small industry outside farming inside farming all trying to find things that we could all find a way to agree on and there's a number of things The first is we need to have a research and development revolution in this country.
We don't have enough research and development that is done to figure out what's that next great innovation for farming and for agriculture.
And when we do, to the point of our prior discussion there, it is technology that really is tilted against the medium and small size farms.
So we need a research and revolution where we've got more innovation happening and more innovation reaching more farms.
That involves private sector and that involves public sector.
The next thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that we have fair markets, internationally and domestically.
And that means that getting it right on trade, meaning we get tougher to wipe out some unfair trade standards and things that have made global trade, while free trade is good, it needs to be fair trade.
So we've got to address that.
And then our domestic markets, to your exact point, we have to have an economy set up that allows small business, the individual American entrepreneur, to be able to thrive in addition to Mm-hmm.
To create more opportunities for our farmers.
And that means the farmers being willing to move from some traditional crops and products into new crops and products.
Figure out what is it that they can shift off of.
Because they've got these broken markets that they depend on.
And there's a certain amount of income there.
So you've got to continue to do what you know.
Because you know you can make some money there.
It's not enough.
It keeps diminishing.
And you don't have a market for other things.
Well, farmers need to be ready and willing to make some changes as we have a growing market for those people who care more than ever where their food comes from.
And then those people need to act on that.
Caring about where their food comes from.
We need more people who are willing to buy locally and regionally from farmers, willing to buy in specialty food markets, willing to go to farmers markets and local butcher shops and permanent outdoor markets and patronize CSAs and things like that in addition to the normal places to buy their food.
Can't expect everyone to just throw out the way they buy their food.
But we can all take half steps.
So if everybody's doing that, it can really help.
So if we do those things, we have a research and development revolution, make sure our markets are fair, and we make sure that we have farmers and consumers moving in this direction together to where people care and where their food comes from, we can begin to see some changes.
And I hope we do it, but the challenging part about it...
Is that it requires all of us to do a little something at once.
We're all jumping in the water at the same time, and it can be tricky to get people to do that.
Yeah, you know, when I look at these situations, you know, the farmers in France or the farmers in the Netherlands or something like that, and they're pushing back against, you know, in the Netherlands, they're banning fertilizer, you know.
What are you doing this for, you know?
And they're protesting, and I'm looking at it, and it's like, okay, so the farmers are doing this, but the people who eat the food.
Or just kind of sitting on the sidelines like, oh, well, whatever, you know.
You know, my food doesn't come from a farm, it comes from a box, you know, or whatever.
You know, there's this total disconnection that they are going to be fed by this or not fed by this, depending on how this comes out.
To me, it seems like, you know, there's this, there's also the situation, I talked about how, I think it was Joanne's Fabrics.
It was a huge thing, because women used to make their own dresses, right?
And women used to also be interested in cooking, you know, or men as well.
And so we're losing this interest in doing things ourselves.
And a big part of that is, hey, I just want to buy something that is pre-processed food, stick it in the microwave and eat it, you know?
Fast food, even if it's fast food that we get out of the grocery store.
Now, maybe people...
are going to start looking at this and start to realize that that's going to negatively affect their health.
There seems to be a big disconnect about that.
If they were concerned more about what they eat, they might be more concerned about learning how to cook and things like that.
But it seems like we've got this huge hurdle to get over because we've become so pacified and so dependent and so really just...
You know, we don't want to make our clothes.
We don't want to cook our food.
We don't want to know how to grow our food, even, or where it comes from.
And it seems to me like that's a big part of it.
I did a video a few years ago.
It was for a...
A farm association, we talked about locavores.
Instead of a carnivore that's going to eat meat, somebody's eating locally.
And there's great stuff that's out there in the farm-to-table stuff or farm-to-market type of things.
But people have to want that.
And right now, that's really kind of the only innovation that I'm seeing as a consumer is that some farms are out there trying to sell high-quality food to people.
But it also comes at a price, and that's a bit of a problem as well, because then it becomes kind of this designer food, and only a few people can afford that.
So is there anything that you're aware of that people are taking a slightly different path to try to do things in terms of direct from the farm to the consumer?
Because that's a real issue, and of course, government regulation is a big part of stopping that in many cases as well.
You hit the nail on the head.
And I think that there is reason for hope, but there's a lot of work to do.
And what I mean by that is we had this kind of paradigm that's set up where, you know, the cheap food was the stuff that you could buy off the national supply chain and all the normal conventional ways that we buy it in this package and all that.
And then the other healthier food and the food for those who cared where it came from was just more expensive, right?
Here's the reality.
While there are still truth to that, the other thing that's going on is We've got this supply chain vulnerability that's driving up the price of conventional food.
And that's happening at the same time that you've got more and more farmers realizing that we need to take the local food movement out of the corners and out of the more affluent areas and spread it.
So you got more people interested in that at a time when our conventional sources of food are more expensive than ever.
Eggs is a really good recent example for the same reason we talked about bird food and the same reason that much of our food got more expensive after COVID. We get these supply chain disruptions where this great big supply chain that can provide any kind of food you can imagine any time of year, any part of the country.
That's a miracle, but it is Ebola.
And it hits these shockwaves where suddenly there's spikes in prices of food.
So if that's happened, at the same time that farmers and consumers are thinking more and more about where their food comes from and farmers are innovating more and consumers are getting more creative in terms of how they buy their food, we may have a world where...
Balance this out a little bit.
And people get some of their food that is, you know, from another part of the country because that's the only place that it's grown.
Just like bananas need to be imported, you know.
And there's a role for that.
And then people also get a lot more of their food from local and regional sources.
And farmers can sell into those local and regional sources where they're selling, you know, fresher local food.
They can also sell into specialty food markets.
A good example is Wisconsin cheese.
So Wisconsin got surpassed by California in milk production in the 90s.
The same time that I was talking about the farmer becoming the little guy, that's what happened is the great big farms in California that were bigger than Wisconsin could produce more milk for cheaper.
But Wisconsin said, wait a minute, we still have a lot of dairy farmers left, even though they're suffering.
And we have a lot of small cheesemakers.
So let's specialize.
And Wisconsin is the only state that has a master cheesemaker program.
And that's why you'll see Hook's Cheese from...
You know, right near where I grew up in Wisconsin, you'll see that in California and Texas and all over the place because that's a specialty cheesemaker.
They sell something special and unique.
It's their variety.
So we need more farms selling locally and regionally and more farms selling into markets that have these specialty foods where people who care, you know, about that food just a little more can buy something that really fits their taste.
Well, that's great.
When you look at the title of your book, Land Rich and Cash Poor, that is the leverage that they're using, in many cases, to drive the farmers out.
And so...
You know, what is it that, you know, how do we avoid that as the cash keeps going further and further down, the temptation for all these people just to sell out and shut it down?
We've seen that with a lot of the people who've been severely damaged by the USDA's program, a mass culling of chickens.
It's like, okay, I'm done.
I'm just going to sell the land and get out with this.
You know, what can be done about that?
Of course, tax policy and some other things like that.
Yeah, absolutely.
Absolutely.
You're absolutely right.
Land-rich cash, for that dilemma, for people who haven't read it or studied it, it's a simple concept, which is it's harder and harder to make money, make a living on that land when you own it, but it's worth a lot if you were to sell it.
And so the dilemma that farmers face is each year it gets harder and harder where dad and mom are, you know, fearing that they're going to face today where they have to say to the kids, we can't make ends meet anymore.
The alternative is they can sell it.
And when you do that on a family farm, you lose everything else because a farm isn't just your mom or dad's job.
It's your home.
It's your community.
It's your heritage.
So that's the dilemma.
Farmers are locked in a whole amount of this land that means more to them than anything.
And they make less and less money each year.
And so the problem that it creates, to your exact point, is it makes people think farmers are wealthy.
You could have land that's worth about a million dollars.
But the living that can be made on that land is getting squeezed out and is really very modest and probably at this point isn't full-time income for the family anymore.
They're probably working two or three jobs.
So having that land on paper and having the tractors on paper, yeah, you could go sell that, but that's one little mini bonanza for one generation of the family.
And, you know, in the next generation, the family will level out and have, you know, what are they going to have?
Well, they lost the land.
They lost their heritage.
They lost their way of living.
You know, farmers really are not in a position of being wealthy.
They're in a position of being working class with a target on their back.
And so then, what do we do about that?
One issue is the inheritance tax.
You're absolutely right.
You got land that has been taxed as property and has been taxed whenever there's money made off of it from an income standpoint or a sales standpoint.
And then they tax it again.
At the family's most vulnerable moment, you know, the older generation has passed away.
The next generation that would have normally probably bought the farm from the prior generation is now inheriting it.
But if they have to pay a massive tax on that, on top of how hard it is to make a living, and the fact that that's happening at a time when their family is going through a really difficult time, there are so many families that have no choice but to sell the farm.
And it gets sold for development or it gets sold to a millionaire or whatever the situation is.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
And we've seen that here locally as well with a local dairy.
I had that same situation, a death.
And now there's a couple of dairies that were there.
Now there's just one.
We still go there to get milk, but the other dairy and other farm has just been chopped up to a lot of retail.
By the way, let me show people the...
The book cover here, Land Rich, Cash, Poor My Family's Hope, and The Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer by Brian Reisinger.
You know, when we look at this in your own personal example, tell us a little bit about what your sister did after you have this dairy farm that's been built up over a century, many generations, and then times get tough.
You have to sell off the dairy cattle there.
But your sister has continued it.
What has she done?
Innovative ideas that are the kind of thing that give you hope for the next generation, which is really what's going to be able to move this situation forward through the crisis.
So my sister came to my dad and as we were thinking about selling the cows because the economic scale just wasn't working anymore and a little bit hit us and all of these issues, my sister began talking to my dad about, you know, having what we call a diversified farm.
And so we raise, now, we raise heifers that become We milk cows on other dairy farms, so we supply those farms.
We raise beef that is sold to consumers, and we also cash crop.
And we are constantly experimenting with new types of livestock and new types of crops to try to figure out what's that next food product or what's that next agricultural product that can make sense for us to do.
And what we're finding is that it's working from the standpoint of we're hitting the income targets my sister projected, and it's just an ongoing challenge because expenses are always going up for farms.
So we've found a path forward for the time being, and we're hopeful about the future, but like every generation, it is always...
And it's unclear the future.
So we're living this out as we go.
And, you know, I'll just say one thing about my sister.
The really incredible thing about her is just her courage and her spirit.
A lot of people root for her, being a woman in a man's world, taking the farm over.
And the reality is that she descends from four generations of farm women who have done the work of men for 100 years.
There's a lot of independence.
I don't know if you can use the word feminism, but there's kind of a farmland feminism, if you will.
There's a lot of independence and strength from women who have grown up in farm country.
They might have been celebrated if they'd picked their head up from the work to tell their story.
My sister's the fourth generation of that.
And so I'm incredibly proud of her.
And it's amazing to see where this goes.
And we all work on it together.
You know, my dad still owns it.
My sister's working to take it over.
And for me, you know, I pursued a writing career off the farm.
And I'm grateful to be able to tell her story.
And I help out a little bit on the business side.
And like any farm kid, when I'm home, they throw me in a tractor on my quote-unquote day off.
I'm glad to be part of it in that way, and we're trying to figure it out as a family.
But we couldn't do it if it wasn't my sister leading the way on the ideas for what we need to do next.
Well, it's such an important thing.
It's a hard life, and it's not for everybody, but I was talking about...
One family on a farm in Virginia, and they were talking about how positive it was for the kids.
You learn a work ethic.
You have to do things.
You have to do hard work.
It's a necessity there.
You have to be able to be a jack-of-all-trades in order to make this work because, again, you're cash poor with this.
And so you have to learn how to do things.
You have to get up and work hard.
And that's a wonderful thing, but it's also something.
That if we look at it as society as a whole, Jefferson was very much focused on the importance of an agrarian society just from the standpoint of political independence and not being so dependent on everything as you are in an urban environment.
I look at this and I kind of wonder, I've seen now, I've talked to some farmers who have set up, done like a mentoring program.
You know, they want to teach other people how to farm.
They can make a living doing things like that on the side, you know, even having people We'll pay to come to the farm to learn how to do things.
And so there's a lot of people out there who I think are interested in learning how to grow some things and they don't know anything about growing them.
Or how to take care of animals or chickens now because of eggs.
So there's an opportunity there.
And I think once people start to taste the better quality food, I mean, they really get a taste for it, right?
Part of it is that they've grown up eating packaged food.
food and and maybe uh if you get a situation where as and it might be out of necessity uh that people start getting uh farm fresh food they get a uh a craving for it and a taste for it and they want to be able to either support the people in the area or learn how to do it themselves so to me that seems to be the hope uh because people have to want this you know they have to have to want a a local you know farm to market or farm to table type of experience i think yeah well here's the
You know, not only does it taste better, you feel better.
I grew up in an area where we had some types of fresh local food available to us, but there also wasn't a lot of food awareness for a lot of the country for a long time.
We didn't necessarily have as many local stores as we once did to buy from, so a lot of people end up driving 30 miles down the highway to the big chain to get whatever's packaged.
I had a mixed experience with, on the one hand, drinking milk straight from the bulk tank.
On the other hand, having frozen pizza for dinner.
And things have really progressed where people of all walks of life in all areas, including in urban and rural areas, care more about where their food comes from.
And my wife and I have made that shift as much as we can.
You can't get everything without going to some of the conventional places.
And a lot of places are willing to carry more fresh local food if they know people will buy it.
But you can do a lot.
And boy, you feel better.
Yeah.
You sleep better.
You have more energy.
It makes a difference to grow something that came up out of the ground natural.
It does at the end of the day.
Yeah, I know this last year, we started doing our own chickens even before this bird flu thing happened, and then my wife learned.
I started growing vegetables for the first time.
We've done that.
And it was just so much better than anything we could get at the grocery store.
And so we really enjoyed it.
And it's really kind of built our taste for doing this type of thing.
And so that's really where my hope is, that people have to change.
We grew up in the 60s.
Everything was going more and more towards packaging and convenience.
So you get your TV dinner packaged in aluminum.
You put it in the oven.
Then later on, they put it in something that's non-metal so you can microwave it and everything.
And it tastes awful and it's bad for you.
And people are now becoming aware of that.
So we may have an inflection point where people start to care more about taste and about health and things like that.
And that might work out for everybody's benefit.
Hopefully it will.
Well, it is a very interesting book and really do appreciate you giving that hope and those ideas to people.
And it's a fascinating story, too.
It's wonderful to have somebody talk about what it was like growing up on the farm and to take a critical look at the bigger picture that is happening to it.
And as I said before, it is something that we can all relate to in a lot of different areas because this consolidation...
It's happening very rapidly and it's happening across all sectors, but in the farm in particular, we're going to be concerned about that because that's what we need to have to eat.
And these people really do want to just serve it to us from the lab.
I mean, they want to take it to the nth degree in the opposite direction.
And I'm starting to see a lot of pushback against that.
And so maybe that'll work out well for the local farmers.
Well, that's my hope.
And we did our best to, as you said, take a look at these issues, honestly, wrestle with them where there was debate.
And we did our best to tell our story, you know, from the Depression to today and that survival story, the things we've been through.
We did our best to tell it, honestly, the good and the bad.
And my hope is that we can tell a raw and honest story that gets people thinking about these issues.
And gets us all working to solve them together.
And so I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the book.
I agree.
And I want to say one more thing before we stop.
And that is, I thought it was very telling that the very last chapter in your book, or it's like kind of an appendix, you talk about suicide and trying to get help.
That's how dire things are.
And I've reported on what is going on in India.
You know, when Monsanto would go in and use glyphosate and GMO seeds and everything, and these farmers who are extremely poor, they then, after they use it one season, now they can't grow anything else there.
And they've got to buy their seed from Monsanto.
And they couldn't afford, and they were losing everything, and massive numbers of suicides that were happening there.
But with all these other market forces that are there, that's just how bad it is.
And, you know, of course, with this rapid change that is happening now, that is something that everybody needs to think about.
Talk a little bit about that and about the pressure that you saw on your father and in your family.
Yeah, well thank you so much for asking about that.
You know, the opening pages of the book and the closing pages of the book deal with a story from our family where, you know, the day after we sold our cows, we were As I said, shifting towards some hope for some new types of farming we want to do, but also selling the dairy herd that you milked morning and night is akin to a death in the family.
And for the farmer, trying to figure out how to move forward and whether we're going to make it or not, there's that pressure.
And then there's the pressure of the generations that came before.
You know, great-grandpa escaped pre-World War I Europe.
You know, to take a better living out of the dirt.
Grandpa survived the Depression.
Mom and Dad made it through the farm crisis.
Why can't I make it?
That's kind of the generational pressure that builds.
And my dad was staring down the barrel of realizing that he had been the first in 100 years that wasn't going to be milking cows on our land.
We were grateful to have our land and have a plan for the future, but he still woke up asking himself, you know, what am I here for?
And I... I had an experience with my dad that we talk about in the book where I was standing there on the porch of a cabin that's out back at Farmhouse where we both grew up, and I was wondering whether he was thinking that.
And I found out in the course of talking to him for the book that he was.
And so here we were standing right next to each other, but we were a world apart because how alone he felt.
And I'm grateful that he continued on.
And the way that he did it was he thought about his grandkids, you know.
He started thinking about the next generation.
He said, you know, I got grandkids here and I got to teach them things.
And he realized that the farmer goes on whatever happens to the farm because there's two words here.
There's family farm.
There's the family part.
And he focused on that.
And it's the same thing that carries every...
Farm generation forward, just think about the next generation.
And so I'm grateful that through that and through all of us talking about it in a way that a lot of farm families don't find themselves able to do, we're able to bring them out of it.
And I asked my dad really candidly if we wanted to talk about that book.
We decided we were going to bear everything in the book, but I asked him, do we want to admit that?
And he said, yeah, we do, because I want other people who feel that way to know that it isn't that way, you know, that they aren't alone.
That's good.
And that is a key thing.
It is turning the father's heart.
To the children, right?
That is the restoration.
That is the salvation of a culture.
If you think about the next generation, you prepare for them.
Otherwise, you know, we all get to a point where we say, what's the point of this?
Well, the point of it is for the next generation.
The love of the family, creating the family, propagating that, that is the heart of a civilization.
That's why the family farm, as you point out, is so important.
It really is.
Well, thank you so much.
And again, the book, Brian's book, Brian Reisinger.
Land-rich, cash, poor, my family's hope, and the untold history of the disappearing American farmer.
And I would also say the disappearing family that is happening.
That is something that really does build a family.
And I think that is one of the most important aspects of the family farm.
Thank you so much for joining us, Brian.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
I really appreciate it.
Anybody who wants to find Land Rich Cash Park can do it on Amazon or anywhere else online.
Also, independent bookstores all across the country.
And I just appreciate anybody who keeps the conversation going on these issues.
And I appreciate you shedding light on them.
Thank you so much.
That'd be great.
Yes.
Amazon.
Yes.
And any independent bookstore.
Thank you so much.
That's right, boys and girls.
There's a post-election sale on silver and gold.
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It's time to buy some medals with fiat dollars before they come to their sense is.
Go to davidknight.gold to get in touch with the wise wolf himself, Tony Arterburn.
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