Speaker 1: And we're back with another edition of the Federalist Radio Hour.
I'm Matt Kittle, Senior Elections correspondent at The Federalist and
your experienced Shirpa on today's quest for Knowledge. As always,
you can email the show at radio at the Federalist
dot com, follow us on x at FDR LST, make
sure to subscribe wherever you download your podcast, and of
course to the premium version of our website as well.
Our guest today is Brian Reisinger, author of the new
book Land Rich, Cash Poor, My Family's Hope and The
Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer and our Disappearing
American Farmer, Brian asserts, is driving an economic and cultural
crisis that is threatening our very food supply with higher prices.
You want to know why you are paying so much
more for your groceries and everything in large part, take
a look at the growing graveyard that was the family
farm in the United States of America. Brian, thank you
so much for being with us and this edition of
the Federalist Radio Hour.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for having me on, Matt. I
appreciate it.
Speaker 1: It's a powerful book, and in many ways it's a
powerful book personally for me, because I was raised from
the time I was just about two years old in
the state of Wisconsin, spent much of my life there.
It is beautiful country. It was for a long time
to the left in this country and still in many
ways is flyover country. That's unfortunate because they're missing out
on a very, very beautiful area of the United States
of America. It's become, of course, so much more important
to the left in politics today as it is to
the right because of its position as a battleground or
swing state. And we'll delve into that coming up a
little bit later on. But let's talk about how you
grew up. Where you grew up, of course is very important,
and how this project all came about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you, Matt. I grew up in, as you said,
southwest Wisconsin. They called the driftless Area, as you know,
and this is an area where the glaciers didn't plow
over all the hillsides, and so we've got these soaring bluffs,
these deep valleys, this rolling farm country, and this is
where I grew up. And I knew growing up even
then as a kid that I was kind of living
in a rare place you know, I would see teachers
ask students how many kids grew up on a farm,
and I'd raise my hand and I'd be one of
a minority, and they'd say it used to be the
whole classroom.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I would see my dad's devotion from sent up to
sundown each day, and I knew that it was a
special thing. What I didn't know is why was it
becoming more rare? And so in some ways, this book
has been with me all through my life, through the generations,
and through me going on to have a career off
the farm and wrestling with that, and watching my dad
and sister work together as my sister works to take
it over. All of that journey, all the way along,
this book was really with me. And as I began
to work first in business journalism then the public policy,
I began to see how our economy and our social
and technological and political structures have been leaving families like
mine behind, and I thought somebody needs to investigate that.
Somebody needs to write the book that tells our story
and talks about why is it disappearing. So that's where
I married our family story with what had gone on
in this country and the goal was to find the
hidden airs of history that have driven this disappearance. Why
is that? Some of it was natural forces that are
normal to occur in a in a remarket econ me.
Some of it was ways that our country has knowingly
and unknowingly stamped out farmers. And I found that decade
after decade, those forces lined up with things that our
family had experienced. And that was the great stroke of
luck as I was looking into this and although it
involves a lot of hardship and difficult things, the things
we need to face, and so I just feel lucky
to be able to tell that story.
Speaker 1: I think it told it very well. And I love
the fact that you merge your own personal experiences, your
family's history of multi generations of farm families, as well
as the stories of others, neighbors, and not just the
stories of farmers in Wisconsin, but those sharing having shared
experiences across this country. You dedicate this book to your dad,
You say, to my dad, as good and true a
farmer as there's ever been. Let me ask you this question,
because it really is at the core of your story.
Is your dad and his generation of farmers a dying breed?
In this country.
Speaker 2: They absolutely are, and I appreciate asking about that. It's
something that gives me a heavy heart even just thinking
about it and talking about it with you. Here, they
absolutely are a dying breed, but they don't have to be.
And my dad is an example of someone who is
holding on still. He's seventy two years old. He's the
sort of guy who will be on the back of
a tractor and near his cattle for the rest of
his life he has anything to say about it, and
so far he's had a lot to say about it.
He gave us a middle class upbringing as it was
slipping away. He's found a way to have our farm
be debt free and one that is something where my
sister can be in a position to take it over.
And he has fought and fought every single day, and
he is in many ways, my dad is the disappearing
American farmer, and he's one of them that hasn't yet disappeared.
And I'm grateful every day that he hasn't. But there
are so many farms like ours and farmers like him
who have disappeared, and so it's something that is so difficult.
It's been at the rate of forty five thousand farms
per year on average for the past century, and so
it's going to continue. But I do think there are
things we can do about it, and I think I'm
proud to say that one part of what we can
do is harness the kind of resilience that I've seen
in men like my dad. But there's a lot more
that we need to do. But there are still a
good many farmers out there who are holding on and
who have given us an opportunity to try to not
have that breed completely die out.
Speaker 1: When did your family start? It's the farm, the family farm?
How long? How far does this go back? We know
a lot of farmers out there who are on the
century Farm list. We know that you know at the
turn of not the last century, but the twentieth century
that farms were indeed and they still are in many ways.
But we're talking about employment wise, the lifeblood of America that,
as you know painfully point out in your book, has
changed dramatically. But what did your farm family look like
years ago? The farmstead, and talk a little bit about
the change and where your farm and the American farm
is today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely so. My our farm began over a century ago,
in nineteen twelve when my great grandpa Alice Rising or
my great grandma Teresa Rising or Teresa Roth, i should
say at the time, but they met in southern Wisconsin.
They had grown up just a few miles apart from
one another in Bavaria, and they had both left Bavaria
free World War One. My grandfather, my great grandfather, had
served in the military. He did not want to fight
on the German side should World War One breakout. He
wanted to find a better opportunity, and so he left
before war broke out, and so did she. They'd never met,
even though they'd grown up three miles apart. They met
in Wisconsin at a church function, as so many people
in those days did, and they were married and bought
the farm, all in the same month of January of
nineteen twelve. It was the coldest and hardest winter on record.
That was the year of the Blue Northern where we
had it go Swings in temperatures were incredibly drastic. There
were winter tornadoes. It was a really difficult time.
Speaker 1: It was climate change, Brian.
Speaker 2: It was, yes, it was a very severe, very severe
shift in weather, and this is something that farmers have
been living with for a very long time. So he
got the farm and it was in this remote valley
and he began farming, and it was in those days.
It was subsistence farming, and they were doing I call people.
It was, you know, kind of the Charlotte's Web days
in the sense that it was every animal you could imagine,
every type of crop you could imagine, and they were
trying to find which crops and products would put food
on their table and make them enough of a buck
to continue to make it. Now, eventually dairy emerged from that,
and so as my grandpa took over from my great grandpa,
it was really dairy farms at that point. And my
great grandpa grew up in the agriculture depression in nineteen twenties.
A lot of people don't realize that's one of the
hidden histories we tell, is that the Great Depression when
that hit farm country had been in depression for a
decade before that. So my grandpa grew up as a
young boy in the agricultural depression and as a young
man in the Great Depression. The first two decades of
his life essentially were economic depression, and he climbed in
the middle class despite that. On dairy farming, the likes
of which drove a lot of Wisconsin's economy. And then
my dad took over in the nineteen seventies. My dad
and mom took over in the nineteen seventies, and they
survived the farm crisis the nineteen eighties, and that brought
us on up to today where globalization and other changes
contributed toward farms being left behind. As I was growing up,
the recessions of the two thousands on up through COVID,
and so it's quite a long range of different economic
upheaval and economic, social, technological, and political trends that have
affected that kind of a farm over the past century.
Speaker 1: It's been an absolute roller coaster that you write this.
Even when the land finds some new and valuable use,
some parts of past economic life are extinguished. Families going
bankrupt or left with no choice but to sell the
land that had been their stake in the American economy
for generations. You know, you mentioned it, your grandfather and
your great grandfather trying to start out becoming, you know,
growing their farm through all of the adversity, the difficulty,
the Great Depression, difficult economic times, changing markets. Yet they survived.
But it is a hard, hard business.
Speaker 2: It really is. I get asked a lot why would
people do it? Yeah, I understand the question because it
is a difficult life and it's a lot of work.
It's sun up to sundown, and that's on the good days.
When you're in the field during planting and harvesting time
be much more than twelve hour days. And there are
farm accidents. We had tragedies throughout our family's history that
I talk about. Through the generations, all kinds of difficult things,
but it gets down into your blood and your bones.
And when you wake up before the sun and you
work with your dad each morning and you see him
with one whistle, have the cow dog run out to
the pasture, bring the cows in. When you travel with
your dad across the fields and watch him feel with
his hands and look at the sky trying to figure
out when's time to harvest, you know, that's something that
really stays with you. And you build a close bond
with the land, You build a close bond with the animals,
and you build a close bond with the way life.
And then when you compound that generation after generation, it's
not only your dad's job or your sister's job, or
your job for a time, but it's your home, it's
your community, it's your entire history, it's your heritage, and
so that instills a great love and affection and deep devotion.
It also instills a lot of guilt and a lot
of difficulty, and it contributes storta mental health challenges too,
because it's such an incredible weight that presses down in
each generation. It's a burden that people are happy to carry,
but it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a heaviness
to it.
Speaker 4: Warmer, sunnier days are calling fuel up for them. With factors,
no prep, no mess, meals meet your wellness goals in
time for summer thanks to the menu of chef crafted
meals with options like calorie Smart, protein Plus, and Keto factors.
Fresh never frozen meals are Dietitian approved and ready to
eat in just two minutes, so no matter how busy
you are, you'll always have time to enjoy nutritious, great
tasting meals. Make today to day you kick start a
new healthy routine. What are you waiting for? With thirty
five different meals and more than sixty add ons to
choose from every week, you'll always have new flavors to explore.
You can crush your wellness goals this month with dietitian
approved meals and ingredients that you can trust. Make your
day delicious from breakfast to dessert. Stay fueled with easy
nutritious options. Treat yourself to restaurant quality meals that feature
premium ingredients like filet mignon, shrimp, and black and salmon.
Keep kitchen time to a minimum. Factor meals are ready
in just two minutes, no shopping, no prepping, no cooking
or cleaning up. Enjoy effortless support for your lifestyle by
choosing from six menu preferences to help you manage calories,
maximize protein intake, or simply eat well balanced. Head to
Factor Meals dot com slash Feederalist fifty and use code
Federalist fifty to get fifty percent off your first box
plus twenty percent off your next month. That's code Federalists fifty.
At Factor Meals dot com, slash Feederalists fifty to get
fifty percent off your first box plus twenty percent off
your next month while your subscription is active.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you see, I understand a lot of what you said.
I don't understand it like you do. I grew up
in and for full disclosure, Brian and I have known
each other for a long time. We're in very similar
circles as we left the rural communities in many cases,
and like a lot of our friends, and went out
outside the farm and the rural community to work in
other fields, so to speak. And I guess that's that's
what I'm going. I mean, I remember as a high
school kid in Platteville, Wisconsin, working on Old Melvin de
Bureau's farm. Nobody worked as harder. I've had no boss
who worked as harder, but man, the cheese sandwiches were good,
bail and hay, and doing stuff around the farm. It
taught me an invaluable sense of the value of work,
I mean, working with your hands and working with your heart.
And I get that from your book. It's really clear,
and it's been clear since I've known you, your experience
on your family farm that said that guilt is there.
You have gone into this, You go into this in
the book, the experience of leaving the farm but still
being on the farm, never being able to truly leave
the farm. But so many people have and that is
why we're in this position. Is there a next generation
to have a family farm experience in this country.
Speaker 2: It's a great question I think there is. There are
young people who want to go into farming all the time,
every day. There are also despite the fact we've lost
seventy percent of our farms forty five thousand on average
per year for a century, there are still nearly two
million farms left, and there are people who want to
go into it. The challenges are they going to have
the entrepreneur opportunity needed to be able to justify the costs.
And for those who grew up with land in their family,
usually the next generation buys that land, buys that farm
from the prior generation through a land contract, so they
have years of debt to the prior generation, but they
have an opportunity to own land. It's hard for those
families to be able to make ends meet with rising
costs and with the shaky opportunities that are out there
for farmers to make a living. The challenge becomes even
greater for young people who don't have an opportunity for land,
where they have to lease land or find a way
into land that they can buy. It's hard to come
by and it's expensive, and so it's incredibly hard, But
I do think there are ways we can do it.
I think there are things that we can change about
our policies. We can change about the way we think
about our economy, we can change about the way that
we behave as consumers and as farmers. There are things
that can be done if we can find a way
to make those nearly the two farms growing entrepreneurial ventures again.
Because right now, what they are and you know this, Matt,
from your time in these states and your time talking
to so many people across the country. What happens is
these farms that are there, the nearly two million farms,
first of all, ninety six percent of our family operations,
which is incredible. Those of them that are the smaller
farms that are having a harder time making it, are
the kinds of farms where there's someone running it, but
they're also pulling shifts of the factory, working construction jobs,
pouring concrete. Right they've got two to three jobs, one
of which is a farm. What if we were to
change the way we orient ourselves in this country so
that those farms could be growing small businesses again that
could support the family that is working the land. I
think we can do that, and it would be an
incredibly powerful thing, not only for the farmers whose livelihoods
we could save, but also for the people whose food
supply we could secure.
Speaker 1: That's all good points. How do you effectively go about
doing that? You're a free market guy. I'm a free
market guy. We're a free market free people kind of guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That said, we have seen a lot of consolidation of farmland,
a lot of corporate farming going on in this country
because it is just for too many farm families, costs prohibitive,
they can't do it, or they've been driven out of business.
So how do you do that in a system that
often rewards larger scale of operation. There's a number of ways.
Speaker 2: And what I'll say about farming as I'm out there
talking about this book, and as I've been talking to
people in rural communities and in urban communities, that people
who care about their food, people who are from the right,
the left, everywhere between. There are people out there who
care abou where their food comes from it and almost
all of them have something they don't like about our
current system, even if they have different beliefs and viewpoints.
And by the way, the farmers who are in that
system don't necessarily like the system, whether they're big, small,
or medium, and so there's a lot of things that
need to change. There's a lot of things that people
have frustration with. Here's I think the reality there is
a way that we can sew a path in this
country where we can find sustained private sector innovation that
can give our farms more entrepreneur opportunity. And I say
sustained private sector because it's something that has to make
economic sense for the farmer to do, and it has
to make sense for the consumer to buy. Now. I
do think that government has a certain role. There are
some programs that guard against uncontrollable factors, like whether that's
a bit of a safety net. I think that there's
some place for that. But the issue that we have
right now is that we have government policy, we have
economic practice, and we have technology that has favored some
over others, and people from both the right and the
left dislike a lot about the farm programs that can
be prone to abuse and favoritism and things like that.
What I talk about in the book is trying to
find places because we do have federal, state, local government,
and people from different ends of political spectrum. It took
people all across this spectrum to break the farm system
in this country, and it'll take everybody to put it
back together. So I try to find places where where
can we find areas of agreement, and there are a few.
One of them does have to do with, for instance,
trade and anti trust policy. So for trade, we don't
have to pick between the unfettered free trade of the
nineties that didn't protect us at all against the countries
that had lower costs because they had lower standards than
we do. We have the ability to open new markets
in a way that can prevent countries like China from cheating,
and they can prevent countries that have advantages around cost
from completely exploiting those things in an unfair way. We
can have a fair global marketplace in this country. We
are America. We have more leverage than any other country
in the world. There's also a place for making sure
that small businesses are able to compete in this economy,
and that big government and that big business doesn't only
dominate our economy, that there is a way for entrepreneurs,
small business people, farmers and otherwise to make it. So
those are some things in Wisconsin. We also have an
example of the rural regional economy around cheese where the
Master Cheesemaker program has made it so that there are
small cheese factories that make the type of cheese that's
consumed all over the country and is viewed as the
best in the country. So there's a ways to organize
around niche market opportunities. There's also role the research and
development and innovation play. So how do we make sure
that the technology that we have is something that's what's
called scale neutral. So this is where when technology is
developed matt it is able to be used not only
by large farms, but also medium farms and small farms.
They all have their version of this technology that they
can afford and that they can implement. That's something that
we can do to make sure that as technology marches forward,
which has been an incredible accomplishment for mankind what it's
been able to do for our food supply, that as
that technology march is for it doesn't leave some farms behind.
So there's a lot of things that we can do
that people, I think from different political persuasions can look
and say, hey, that would make this market function the
way that that market act to function instead of being
on a whack.
Speaker 1: You've said a lot of important things. You've said a
lot of interesting things. Once you started talking about cheese,
my mind and media went to kurds, squeaky kurds, and
anybody who's ever had fresh Wisconsin cheese curds, particularly straight
from the small factories that the cheese factories that make them.
You know exactly what I'm talking about. Brian, Yes, absolutely.
Brian Reisinger, author of the new book Land Rich, Cash Poor,
My Family's Hope and The Untold History of the Disappearing
American Farmer, joining us on this edition of The Federalist
Radio Hour. What do you think about some of the
policies we have heard in selection cycle? And I want
to go to one in particular because it is interesting,
I think, not only to the American consumer. It's important
to hear policies from presidential candidates. And to be honest,
we haven't heard much in the way of policy from
the Harris Walls ticket for the Democrats. We're told that's
the work in progress. One thing we did here from
Vice President Kamala Harris, the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party,
is that she fancies or favors price controls, and then
she and her campaign have walked that back, but she
definitely did talk about that what would such price controls
do to an already difficult time on the American family farm.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a good question. And the issue that we
have is that farms have been dealing with higher prices
in terms of their costs that go into production, seed, fertilizer, energy,
and more for decades. That's always been going on and
the reality is that there are many steps between the
farm gate and the dinner table. So you know, higher
cost for farms has been something that's going on forever.
And as food prices go up, there's no additional money
in farmers' pockets, and so we have an issue that
is so much deeper, so much deeper than any one
such policy proposal, be it from the left or the right,
would necessarily address what we need to do in this
country in order to be able to address the cost
of food is we have to slow and alter the
course of the disappearance of our family farms. We have
to create an economy where there is an incentive in
the market for more food distributors to be operating on
local and regional levels in addition to what we have nationally,
so that we can shorten the supply chain and create
more channels for food to get from the farm gate
to the dinner table. And we don't have that right now.
And on top of that, we don't have an ability
for American innovation to take over. Actually the globally, the
innovation in our agriculture sector has been slowing, and America
has been one of the biggest sources of the drag
on that. And so if we want to actually address
food prices and avoid more food price increases in the future,
we need to have a world where more farms can
make it, where there's more ways for food to get
from farms to consumers, and where there's more innovation improving
the capabilities of those farms. Those are the kinds of
things that are actually going to change the course of
what's going on. They also happen to be by the
way they happen to be the things that tie back
to some of those policy solutions you and I were
just talking about that folks of different persuasions can get behind,
and I think that it's important to try to solve
fundamental issues with these kinds of proposals.
Speaker 1: With all of that said, Brian, what about the regulatory
environment now for farmers, particularly in an era where we
see concern over the environment. In my estimation, the climate
change cult that has already done so much damage, and
I think significant damage lies ahead if they continue to
hold power and consolidate power. But there is a lot
of regulation that has driven the family farmer out of business.
How are family farmers throughout America dealing with the state
of regulation today.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's no question that regulation adds cost, and it's
always a question of trying to balance the goal of
that regulation with the downside of that regulation. And the
reality is that and this happens across many industries in
our economy. I saw this as a business journalist and
in other walks as well. Regulations that are intended to
regulate certain types of entities or maybe some of the
biggest players in an industry, they impact the smaller players
to an even greater degree. And so there is the
additional cost of regulation that causes a real problem. And
here's the challenge and kind of the tragedy of it.
Farmers are the original conservationists. Farmers care about their land,
and there are so many areas of our land, our soil,
our water where there could be agreement, and in some
cases there is, but there could be more agreement between
farmers and people who are concerned about our environment. For example,
soil quality. Farmers have an interest in having soil quality
be as high as possible because it can lead to
greater yields and so cover crops and having other types
of vegetation on their land is in their interest in
many of them are implementing that, and that soil quality
is also something that people care about our environment are
concerned about from the standpoint of the quality of our environment.
Abundance of water is another example. Nobody wants those aquifers
beneath our country's soil to be running out. Farmers need
plentiful water. People who care about water for recreation purposes
or for other reasons pollution, et cetera care about that too.
So the reality is that there are so many places,
and we talk about this in the book. There's so
many places where people who are on different sides of
a debate could actually work together if we could set
aside the devisive elements of those things and workload solutions.
Speaker 3: From the Egyptian Pharaohs all the way to Richard Nixon.
What Kamala's plans are are dangerous? Watched Out on Wall
Street podcast with Chris Markowski. Every day Chris helps unpack
the connection between politics and the economy and how it
affects your wallet. It is never a good idea to
implement price control. It has a proven track record of
making matters even worse and in some cases end civilizations.
Whether it's happening in DC or down on Wall Street,
it's affecting you financially.
Speaker 1: Be informed.
Speaker 3: Check out the Watch Dot on Wall Street podcast with
Chris Markowski on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: You're wearing a cap that has the John Deere logo
on it. Yeah, and I you know, that's a familiar
hat in rural America and it's been that way for
a long time. John Deere has been a staple in
America for a long time, and it has been because
it's been over the years, a very innovative company. It
started with innovation, It started with technology, building something that
was absolutely necessary as the Americans of your settled the
you know, the rough places around the country and turned
it into farmland. It's a double edged plow, so to speak.
To use the parlance, technology has greatly benefited the American
family farmer, it has also hurt them immensely. What's that
that fine line today?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an issue that grew in its most dramatic
form in the nineteen eighties farm crisis, and it still
happens today. So what happened in this country is as
our private research institutions, our companies, our government, as all
of these different entities were doing research and finding ways
to find new technology that could march farm productivity forward,
what happened is we lost sight of something called scale
neutral technology, where farms of all sizes large, medium and
small could find a cost effective version of it to implement.
And we've never really recovered that. So that happened during
the nineteen eighty farm crisis. It's one of the unknown
things that we talk about that happened beneath the surface
of our history in the book, and it still persists today.
There is an incredible amount of technology moving farming forward.
It has made it possible to produce more food more affordably,
with fewer people breaking their backs to do it. It
has also made it so that farms that are smaller
and medium sized each year see a little bit less
technology that they can utilize to innovate, and we really
need to have technological discovery and innovation be something that
is i'll say economically diverse as a phrase that I'll
use where it can be going in so many directions
and involved so many different type of people, because that's
what unlocks americanrepreneurship, and so small farms have benefit from
less less techology. I give one example, when my parents
were going through the farm crisis, something else that had
happened around that time was that there was a disease
I shouldn't say disease. There was a sickness called masthitis
that hit our herd and it affected a large part
of our herd. And what we needed was a pipeline
to take the milk directly from the cow to the tank.
The bulk tank and the milk colts were cool to
improve sanitation. So they put that in and that was
an expense, but it was an expense that a small
farm could afford to finance from a dairy supply company
for a short period of time, and they got through it.
The kind of technology that can make it so that
small farms can be innovative on new levels is fewer
and fewer. That was one of the last great innovations
that occurred before. What really happened was the technology was
such that it was making it possible so that you
could get bigger and bigger. And that doesn't have to
be a bad thing. But for those farms that don't
necessarily want to continue to quadruple their herd size, having
a type of technology that can give them different pathways
to make their own decisions in this economy is a
good thing and it's something we don't have enough of.
Speaker 1: Every time I think about the farm crisis of the
late seventies early to mid eighties extended really into the
late nineteen eighties. We live that in Wisconsin. Obviously, we
live that in the old Rust Belt because we saw
not only the farm jobs go away, we saw the
factory jobs that supplied the farms. You know, the John
Deeres of the world, the international harvesters, those plants. I
remember growing up in the shadow of Dubuque, Iowa had
a major John Deere factory. They did some agriculture, but
they did a lot of construction equipment, and you know,
they were laying off people by the hundreds on a
daily basis. Remember, these are the times where your economies
were one horse town or a two horse town when
it came to you know, the major employers and the
farmers needed of course those incomes, and they needed success
in those supportive manufacturing areas. But I always think about,
you know, that time period, and I see two faces.
I see Sam Shepherd and Jessica Lang. I grew up
in the eighties. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
I mean the movie talking about how many family farms
at that time just went bankrupt, how many auctions there
were every weekend in a given area. You live through that,
your family survived that. But was that the most destructive
time in America for the family farm.
Speaker 2: It's a great question. It was one of the most destructive.
The amazing thing is that it wasn't necessarily the most destructive.
It was the one that was specially for us. And
I say that with my tongue in my cheek. It
was the economic catastrophe that was specific to rural communities
that did not need to happen. And there are many
things that occurred, But one of the things that occurred
is that the government had for a long time been
encouraging farms to get bigger and bigger, to take on
more debt, to continue to expand, and then in order
to control inflation, they began to raise interest rates, and
that was needed to help address inflation. But it came
so quickly and in such a turnabout after having encouraged
farms to take out debt, and it suddenly made that
debt unaffordable, and so it was a catastrophe that was
created that didn't need to happen. That occurred specifically in
rural communities. Now that's one of the major chapters. There
are so many others. We actually had an incredibly large
amount of farm loss in the nineteen fifties, a time
of great prosperity that included for those farms that were
doing well in that time. But it was also the
era where our country moved into an economy defined by
big and the farm was the little guy. So that
was another era. The egg depression and the depression were
also times that were hard, and they actually that's when
the crisis of the Discprepan America farmer was first established.
In that economic people that took these growing entrepreneurial ventures
and made them go from increasing a number to decreasing
a number. So there are a number of eras that
were incredibly harsh. The farm crisis was one of them.
And I think the farm crisis sticks in our minds
so badly because it was specifically for rural America, and
it was at a time when other parts of the
economy were doing just fine, or at least not facing
the same challenges.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does for me. I mean I was a kid.
I remember being a twelve thirteen year old kid and
my dad over at the plant out of work, of course,
because the plant had shut down a lot of strikes
that went on. Of course, in eighty four, eighty five,
and eighty six. It was a tough time in rural America,
particularly in the Midwest, where it might not have been
so difficult elsewhere. In fact, other portions of the economy
were booming, and we kind of looked around and said,
what gives here? And it took a long time for
those communities to, you know, move on from that, to
start to grow again. You have a number in your
book that is extremely startling. It is this, as of
twenty twenty two, forty three point four million acres of
American farmland was owned by foreign investors, a total that
remains small relatively speaking. This is a very big country,
but is growing rapidly. And we think about how much
China has gotten involved in land ownership and countries that
we don't have a well, let's put it the right way.
We have a very adversarial relationship with How much is
that influencing the American farm, the family farm today.
Speaker 2: That's a great question. It's a crucial point. As you know,
I don't want to distort the fact that it is
still a small share, but the issue is that it
is an incredibly rapidly growing share, and the amount that
it increased in just two years is something that is
really very shocking. It actually was bad enough, believe it
or not, it was bad enough that it's one of
the rare areas where Congress, the two parties came together
and passed some protections against Chinese, North Korean, Iranian and
Russian ownership of farmland. But it is still an issue
where we are in grave danger of the quick pace
with which our farmland can slip into unsav our hands
and specifically foreign adversaries as you know it with China
and what happens is as we have fewer and fewer farms,
more and more of our farmland is in fewer and
in some cases less careful hands. It's just math. If
you have land owned like it has been traditionally this
country by millions of small landowners, but it's really hard
to get in and convince all those people to get
off their land and sell it to you. If you
have our farmland in fewer hands, it's just simple math. Again.
There it is fewer people to convince, and in some
cases there are companies in holdings that will sell land
as well. And so we are in this position where
not only is the disappearing American farmer contributing toward higher
food prices, not because the farmer can't produce cheaply, but
because there aren't enough farms and because there aren't enough
waste for food to get to at dinner table. Not
only is our food supply at risk during disaster, but
the very land on which we grow our food is
at risk. That's a level of food security that I
don't think we want to have at risk in this country.
Speaker 1: Well, let's look ahet. As the we close out our
conversation today, we talked about the roller coaster ride that
is agriculture, farming in particular in America. Where do you see,
and you've hinted at this throughout our conversation, where do
you see the American family farm five years from now,
ten years, a generation from now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a great question. What I see is
an ability for us to have two million family farms
that can become entrepreneurial ventures again. And the reason I
say that, the reason I have faith in it is
there's a couple of reasons. One of them is farmland resilience.
It's not only my family and my admiration for my dad,
it is something that you can see in nearly two
million farm families across the country and what they have
gone through, and if they can survive what we've done
to them in this country, imagine what they can do
if we create new entrepreneur opportunity. The second reason is
that people care more than ever about where their food
comes from. There's a growing local food movement. There are
in many cases not only new places and ways to
buy food in locals, but there are grocery stores and
restaurants that are working to have farm to table options.
In the wake of COVID, people care more about where
their food comes from and understanding just as they care
about their children's education and other things that after the
isolation of COVID they had a chance to encounter in
a new way people care about where their food comes from.
And so I think that the resilience of the American farmer,
combined with the desire of the American consumer to have
a better way, is something that is in a very
interesting intersection right now. And so if we're able to
change policy, and if we're able to harness consumer desire
and demand for local food, and we're able to harness
that resilience of the American farmer, I think we can
change the course of this. And although consolidation is a
natural market force that will continue in some ways, we
don't have to have economic, social, technological and governmental forces
making it worse forever in this country as we have
for the past century. And I think we can change that.
Speaker 1: It's the story of the family farm, the American family farmer,
rural America, very important story to tell at this intersection
of American life. Brian Reisinger is the offer of this
very interesting book, and I think there will be a
lot of our listeners who will be taken back by
the history therein remembering some very fond moments on the farm,
the a family, farm, friends, farm, what have you as
you grew up in these places in Wisconsin, these places
that seem more and more as we talked about, to
be disappearing. Where can you find the book? Brian?
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, Thanks Matt. You can find the book online
on Amazon, land Rich Cash Poor on Amazon or anywhere
else online that you buy books, and also you can
find in your local bookstores all across the country. So
if you prefer online, go to Amazon or anywhere else.
If you prefer to pick it up from your local bookstore,
reach out to your local bookstore. The should evidence stock
and if they don't ask them, then they can help
you get it.
Speaker 1: Thanks to my guest today, Brian Reisinger, author of the
new book land Rich Cash Poor, My Family's Hope and
the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. You've been
listening to another edition of The Federalist Radio. I'm Matt
Kittle's senior correspondent at The Federalist. We'll be back soon
with more. Until then, stay lovers of freedom and anxious
for the
Speaker 2: Fray I heard the fame, voice the reason, and then
it faded away.