Episode 745: The Disappearing American Farmer

Published Aug 30, 2024, 10:00 AM

Newt talks with Brian Reisinger, a columnist, consultant, and author of the book, “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.” Reisinger shares his journey from growing up on a family farm in Wisconsin, working in Washington D.C., and then returning to his roots. He discusses the challenges and opportunities in modern farming, the impact of technology, and the role of government policies and subsidies. Reisinger also highlights the importance of connecting farmers to new market opportunities and building out rural regional economies.

And on the eighth there, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker. So God made a farmer. God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn milk cows, work all day in the fields, milk cows again each supper, then go to town and stay past midnight at the meeting of the school board. So God made a farmer. I need somebody with arms strong enough to wrestle a calf, and yet gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs team, cantankerous machinery, come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding visiting ladies, then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon and mean it. So God made a farmer. Somebody would bail a family together with the soft, strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh and then sigh and then reply with smiling eyes when his son says he wants to spend his life doing what Dad dons. So God made a farmer.

On this episode of News World, my guest today grew up on his family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin, got involved in politics, and lived and worked in Washingt, d C. Then headed back home to be a part of the family business. His new book describes his journey land Rich, Cash Poor, My Family's Hope, and the untold history of the disappearing American farmer. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest, Brian Riisinger. He's a columnist and consultant. Worked with his father from the time he could walk before entering the worlds of business, journalism and public policy. He currently serves as president and chief content officer of Midwestern based Platform Communications, splitting time between a small town in northern Cali and the family farm in southern Wisconsin. Brian, welcome and thank you for joining me on news World.

Thank you so much for having me on and for bringing light to this issue.

I appreciate it given everything you've been doing, what inspired you to write land Rich Cash for?

You know, growing up seeing my dad so devoted sun up to sundown, covered in the dust in the fields, working with the animals, I knew that it was a rare way of life, and it was becoming rarer. You know. There would be teachers who would ask how many kids grew up on a farm, and I'd raise my hand and they'd say a generation to go out about every one of you, and it was just a minority of us. So I knew that that was happening growing up, but even as I came into adulthood, I didn't know why that was. And so many people where I'm from didn't necessarily know what were the big macroeconomic forces and other thanks driving that. As I got into business journalism in public policies, you said, I began to see someone was going on in our economy and some of the ways that it had left people like where I'm from behind, and so I thought, somebody needs to crack this code, investigate this, and marry these things. So I took my upbringing that I was so lucky to be part of that has so much beauty and hardship to it, and I married that with some of what I saw, and I looked for hidden airs of history throughout our country's history. And what I found, miraculously to me, was that my family's story lined up so often with what had been going out there, and we didn't even know it. And so that was a bit of a discovery along the way. But that's why I wrote it, because I wanted to answer that question.

Now, as I understand it, your great grandfather came to the US after World War One. Could you tell us a little bit about his journey and how that then shaped the legacy of your family farm.

He had an incredible journey. He actually he escaped pre World War One Europe and came here in part because he didn't want to fight in the war. Not that he didn't want to fight, he'd served in the military, but he wanted to have a better life. He didn't like what was going on in Europe and the way that everything he could see the tinderbox, and so he came to America and he found a better life in the rolling hills of southern Wisconsin. Now at that time it was subsistence farming, and my great grandma had also come over for a better life, and so they really dug a living out of the dirt, and they in the early nineteen hundreds did what farmers were doing at that time, which was finding a way to take this opportunity and turn it into an entrepreneurial venture. And some crops could make it and some couldn't, and they had very very hard conditions, but they made it through to the point that before the Great Depression, farmers were coming into a position of getting ready to move into the middle class.

In some cases, her great grandma did she know him before she came over?

Amazingly, No, They grew up in Bavaria, just three miles apart, and they met actually at a funeral in Wisconsin, surrounded by the German Catholic crucifixes and other things that were familiar to them as one of the places, you know, church functions such as a funeral or wedding, one of them only places to meet people, especially in those remote days. So they met, and as it turned out, they'd only been three miles apart back in Bavaria.

You talk about subsistence farming, what did they primarily grow.

In those days? It was very much mixed agriculture. I tell many people it was like Charlotte's web. Every animal you could imagine waddling about every crop you could imagine, so fruits, vegetables in addition to corn and hay and row crops, apples, everything. And then they not only had dairy cows, which is what came to define the Wisconsin economy, but they also had ducks and turkeys and chickens and pigs and raised beef in all of this, and so what they were trying to do is they were in a bid to see what could put the most money in their pocket and the most food on their table. This was sort of the American experiment at that time in the Midwest particular, but it happened in different places at different times of trying to figure out, Okay, what is this states, what is this local community's niche? And at that time it had not yet totally emerged to be dairy al that was trending toward dairy. So they grew and sold everything they could to try to make a barker to try to feed their kids.

And did they only end up as dairy farmers.

They did. They found that milk was sort of the currency of the land. What was happening is Wisconsin did not have as much wide open acreage as Nebraska and Iowa where you could just put rose and rose of corn as far as I could see. So we had to find a way to have our acreage be more potent. And this is where American ingenuity and research and development and all of these pieces began to work together, where people said, hey, you can grow hay and corn. That's nutritious enough to feed to dairy cowsm With the right kinds of technology and the right hard work, you can really have a dairy herd that can yield a lot of milk. And so that's why Wisconsin emerged as America's dairyland, and my great grandfather really sort of riding that dynamo as it came.

You make a key point, though, that in the twenties farmers almost broke through, and then the whole with the Great Depression, the whole agricultural income system really collapsed. Talk about the impact that on your family and on your neighbors.

Correct. And it's a crucial question because something that I learned and that I think a lot of readers across the country might not know up until maybe us talking about it here is that when the Great Depression hit in nineteen twenty nine, Black Thursday, in farm country, they'd been in years of depression before that, almost a decade before that. And what happened is price is crashed right after World War One and initiated kind of a nineteen twenties egg depression that predated the Great Depression. And so you're absolutely right, they were in a position where they were about to climb in that middle class, and suddenly they were living in depression conditions in the nineteen twenties as well as the nineteen thirties, and so the farms that got through that. What happened is that's the moment in the nineteen twenties. That's the moment when we stopped having more farms in this country and we began having fewer. And that has been a trend that has gone unabated, and in many ways our country has made worse ever since.

Now.

Obviously, once America was settled, there was limited land, and there was going to be natural industry consolidation wherever there's competition, so there were always going to be fewer farms. But that's the moment. When it happened. It was in the middle of economic catastrophe, and it persisted for decades afterward.

Did it get better with World War Two or what led to the rise of the modern relatively prosperous American farm.

You're exactly right. World War II, just as it drove recovery from the Great Depression at large, also drove recovery in farm country, and so there were many, many farms that were wiped out. There were tens of thousands of farms wiped out in the twenties and thirties. Those that made it through had done it by scrimping and siving, maybe finding an opportunity to buy a neighbor out of foreclosure and find some cheap land. That's actually what my great grandfather did. He held on, he held on. There were medical bills that went unpaid, there were farm injuries, there were tragedies. His son lost his leg, and they did all of this through the twenties and thirties, made it through onto the other side, and my great grandfather had saved enough money to purchase a farm up the hill that had gone into foreclosure, and that's where my grandpa came into the picture, and my grandpa then bought that farm for my great grandpa, and so my great grandparents were still paying off the mortgage on the original farm, and then my grandpa and eventually my grandpa and grandma, although he was a bachelor for a number of years, took over debt and paid that off as well. And so if you could get through and find a way to acquire more land, you were able to at the end of that climb in the middle class, and they just slipped by and did that. As my great grandfather's generation was ending and the torch was passing to my grandpa.

You'd be in to have a relatively prosperous agricultural community. But then the pressures to get bigger or go out of business really begin to build. Talk about that whole notion that is almost impossible to run a small farm and be competitive in the modern world.

It is, And there are historical based arguments and facts. There's also political debate that grows out of this air. And I guess what I'll say is, you know, friends on the right end the left have things to be up to set about this period of history in terms of what happened. But the reality is that the American farmer emerged into a world where he was the little guy alongside of big government and big business. And on the big government front, there was the intervention from the depression that some would argue was needed and some would argue was not necessarily geared the right way. But whatever the case, it continued on that intervention that post government programs continued on, and at the same time as we emerged in the nineteen fifties, we had an economy again to be dominated by big in a much bigger way, bigger businesses, bigger companies in more and more industry sectors. Again, some of that is natural through the course of economic competition. Some of it perhaps is less so. But what happened is the farmer was put into a position of constantly chasing scale, either because of the economic reasons of all the large companies across our country, or because of the way that the government programs work, which over time they are prone to favoritism and abuse. And so again, there are things that people on the left and the right can be frustrated about here. But the American farmer was the little guy in a suddenly much bigger world, and it created that economic scale pressure, among other problems.

What was the role of advancing science and technology and all this. The amount of science that now goes into agriculture is just unbelievable. It has no relationship to two hundred years ago. This is in many ways, agriculture may be the most effective user of science and technology. Talk about both what's happening with science and technology and what's its impact on the quality of life for farmers.

It's astounding the role that technology plays in agriculture, absolutely right. And it has been a double edged sword that is so large and so sharp it's almost unfathomable. And I'll talk the good first, because it's undeniable. We went from horses to tractors. I mean, we went to motorized implements, and we went to electricity, and those are just the basic building blocks to your point. There are incredibly sophisticated systems that help farmers with the planting and the harvesting of their fields, making sure that they get the precise amount of moisture for soybeans, all of these incredible things, and that's amazing, and it is a modern miracle that has made it possible for us to feed more people more affordably, with fewer people breaking their backs to do it. And that is a good thing ultimately. And that's another part of some of the disappearance of farms that was going to be natural. There were going to be some farms moving on as we got to a place where not everyone had to grow their own food anymore, right, And so that was an incredible thing. It's still incredible. It's still advancing us every day. The reason I call it a double edged sort is because it also needlessly ended up favoring some farms over others, and that has been one of the major areas where we contributed to disappearance of farms in a way that we didn't need to, and that we can talk in a bit about how that impacts food price. But what happened in the fifties, sixties and seventies, there was a need to help farm wages catch up with manufacturing wages. Everyone is leaving the rural areas to go work in the factories, and that was natural, normal economics. When we got to the seventies, the way that they had been doing that was through technology that made it possible for farms to take on more acres and more animals with less labor. That was natural. Over time, those wages caught up to one another, where farming factory wages weren't quite so out of whack, and so there was a need for more innovation and advancement to continue to improve productivity and continue to feed this country. But we didn't need that technology to create additional pressure for bigger and bigger farms. It could have been more what's called scale neutral technology, where a big farm a medium size from a small farm can all justify their own version of that technology and be able to continue to innovate. So when we got to the seventies and eighties, there was no more reason for technology to tilt only toward the large or primarily I should say toward the largest farms. There would have been an ability for entrepreneurial ventures of all sizes in the agger culture community to benefit from agriculture and continue to innovate and continue to have a strong small business sector I'll call it in the form of small and medium sized farms persisting. We didn't do that, and so technology was a massive human miracle as pertains to agriculture, but it also needlessly tilted the scales against some farms that could have very well been efficient enough pound for pound to continue competing.

When you look at all these different things going on simultaneously, the emergence of new kinds of scientific agriculture, and now of course with the ability of GPS and robotics and I mean, all of which costs more and more money. So in a way, farming becomes a remarkably capital intensive kind of business. What's the role of government policies and government subsidies. Do they help or hurt small family run farms.

The reality is that they do on some level provide a certain type of safety net needed for uncontrollable factors such as weather. And there are also farms that the reality is they syst because they've been able to tap some of those government programs. That's true. It's also true though, that the subsidy regime that we have in this country is one that people from the right and the left and everyone in between, including the farmers who benefit from it because they need to, don't like. There's something that everybody doesn't like about it. And I think there is an ability to have that baseline safety net, but to have the subsidies adjusted so as to not necessarily be driving so hard toward one sector or another. And also we have to remember that whether people like government or not, the more plentiful the government programs, the larger those programs, the more likely it is that those farms that can afford the lawyers and accountants and the lobbyists to navigate that system are going to benefit from it. So there's a need for reform there. I think related and contained in your question something really crucial, which is the role of research and development, and there needs to be proper accountability that folks on the right would want to see. And there also needs to be something to be done by the way which we're lagging in this country, and a lot of that can be private money, but some of that is the role of government in finding discovery, and there's a way I think to make those programs accountable enough that people can trust that those tax dollars are going toward good innovative ideas that can lead to private sector innovation in the way that the Internet or other things emerged from government spending to some degree, but it needs to be accountable and properly targeted in.

That context, do you have any sense that the government understands the importance of distinguishing between sustaining small and family run farms and the policies that help the large corporate farms.

Unfortunately, there is no indication that they do. I think that we're hopefully reaching a point like we are with many problems in this country, where people are frustrated enough that maybe elected officials will begin to see it. There are a few who understand it. I appreciate your question because you're making a crucial point there, but we absolutely need to change the understanding of our policy makers. The reality is that this is a way for farmers of all sizes, large, small, and medium to be able to compete if they can find that innovation. Now, there are opportunities when we look at where we're at with technology artificial intelligence. For example, there's a world where, and I talk to a lot of economists that study this, there's a world war that technology can simply lead to a large farm having one employee watching a bank of screens kind of like a NASA command center, driving tractors all over. That probably will come to pass. There's also a world where small self driven vehicles can help with fertilizing fields, whether it's spreading way or whatever the case may be, with small affordable vehicles where a small farmer could afford that investment, and at the end of the day, all the farms are looking for the same thing. Can I invest in this technology and will it have a payback for me what my dad would call penciling out. Will it pencil out soon enough that it'll pay for itself over our enough number of years that the return all get will justify the technology. That's something that's very possible for large farms right now. It's not as possible for small, medium sized farms. But AI that's an example of one thing that good. These small driverless vehicles and fields is an example, and there's many.

How does all this then affect kind of small town America? Because originally the small towns grew up surrounded by lots of little farms, and as the little farms disappear, you begin to lose the marketplace that they sustain. So how has that effected, for example, in Wisconsin smaller towns.

Absolutely, it's been a hollowing out of rural America. And I come from a small town. Our farm is between Plain and Spring Green. My dad still runs at my sisters. We're going to take it over, and I help out on the business side. They throw me in a tractor now. And then it used to be there were farms that would sustain an entire family, and that those farms really surrounded the communities and really built those communities, and they were feeding those communities, and they were supplying a market and it was self reinforcing. These areas have been depopulated in a way that is shocking, that goes beyond the normal shift from the farm to the bright lights of the city and the shift toward urban jobs. And now we have a situation where the hollowing out of rural America has become so difficult that it's devastated many of these areas. And in many ways, the decline of farms is sort of a precursor to the rest belt decline. In many cases these areas overlap as well, and so it's really been very, very problematic. And I'm hoping though, that we're at a point in our country where we can to recognize it. For two reasons. One is COVID, although a terrible thing in many many ways, did have the one small silver lining of having people moving to different areas seeing how mobile our economy could be. So there are more people moving to rural areas. Actually, rural population recovered for the first time in a couple decades or recently here. That's one reason we have more money, more ideas, and more people coming into rural areas. The other reason is that our food prices and our food supply have been shown to be so problematic, and it's not simply a matter of the inflation debate. It is a matter also of the loss of farms and the limiting of the distribution channels that we have for food in this country that have led to higher prices and a vulnerable supply chain as we saw during COVID, but also as we see from birdfloo and other kind of spotfires that pop up. And so I'm hoping that because in a post COVID world and because of what's happening with food, people look at this and say, we need to do something about these disparing farms. We need to do something about these rural communities, because it's not only affecting those communities.

So we sort of touched on something which became kind of a political issue a week or two ago, and that is, to what extent are higher prices for food a function, for example, of higher prices for energy, which then goes also into things like fertilizer. And to what extent is it price gauging? How do you interpret the market as it affects the American consumer?

The issues driving our food prices are so much fundamentally deeper than our public debate has gotten to. It is true that increasing costs of energy and fertilizer and seed and other things have contributed to higher costs for harmers, but that's been going on forever. When I grew up in the nineties, I remember emerging from college in the early two thousands and meeting a banker in Nashville who talked about the good years after the Great Recession. And I looked at and I said, when were the good years? And that's because in where I'm from, the prices have always been going up, and the income opportunities, the entrepreneur opportunities have always been faltering, at least as far as in my lifetime, as we had a good middle class living that I saw slipping away. So that's always been going What is.

There about living on a farm which despite all of these problems and all these challenges, people just do it. It is truly a way of life. What is there about that way of life?

It gets down into your blood and your bones. And when you wake up in the morning you see the sunrise over the land, when you walk down to the barn and you hear your dad whistle, and with one whistle the cow dog runs out and brings the cows in from pasture. When you grew up driving with your dad to check the hay by hand, and you see them, look at the sky and feel the moisture of the hay and kind of decide whether it's time to cut it or whether the rain's going to come. These are magical things, and you learn work ethic, you learn about the circle of life, You learn so many things that just become elemental to who you are and so many of the values that matter to our country. I think that's why this is a troubling issue too, And so that's why. And despite the hardship and the difficulty of it, it's just a beautiful way of life. And it's truly it's not only your home or only your job, but it's your community, it's your heritage, it's everything.

I always get the sense when I talk to friends of Glistas who are still committed to the land, that there's a satisfaction they get out of getting up every day. A number of them are still dairy farmers, and just the interaction with the dairy cows, the interaction, the quality of the air, the beauty of the land, that there's something that just makes them feel good.

It's just fulfilling. It truly is a calling. It's like that old broadcast, So God made a farmer, you know. It is such a fulfilling thing. It's who you are. And when I grew up and learned that I wasn't going to farm just because my gifts were elsewhere, that was a very difficult struggle for me. I was the first eldest son in four generations to not do it, and for a long time I felt like I'd let my dad down, even though he was supportive. And the reason for that is I saw him, and I saw his devotion. I saw he got out of it. It was a calling, it was what he was meant to do, and ironically, even though he didn't have a choice, it was what he was supposed to do as well. But it gets down into your blood and your bones.

As I say, what advice, given all the complexities we're discussing here, what advice would you give to young people who are kind of interested in pursuing a career in farming but not quite sure if it's the right path for them.

There are some hard asset type things that you have to figure out. Where are you going to get land? Is there land that you can purchase from your dad like my dad did his dad? Will you need to lease land? Those things will severely impact your business model one way or the other. For certain. But the biggest thing that I say to young people getting into farming in the way that my sister is coming up taking over from my dad, is you have to engage and talk to people, other people on agriculture, people in other parts of the economy. The thing about farming, one of the things is there's a beauty in the remoteness. There's an individualism to it. You learn to figure things out yourself, as part of the reason that people are so independent minded in rural areas. But you also can become too remote and not know what's going on, not know what's happening, and so you may not learn that there's a new technology that you can adopt. You may not learn that there's a new crop that you could grow that can diversify your mix. And maybe it's only ten or twenty acres, but it's a new area that in ten years it's going to be a major market. You have to engage. You have to make sure that the beauty and the remoteness of the life doesn't withdraw you from what's going on in agriculture, what's going on in our society, because you have to have a voice in it to be able to have a shot.

So the unbalanced though, do you think that there's a very satisfying potential future for a young couple that wants to go do it.

It's an incredibly hard life, especially if you're trying to start out in it, but it is incredibly valuable and worthwhile. Part of the issue, I think is answering the question of can we save our farms for the future or can we reduce the amount of disappearance. I think we can. We have lost forty five thousand farms on average annually for the past century. That's more than seventy percent of our farms. We still have nearly two million left. And the incredible thing about that is ninety six percent of them are family operations, and the majority of them are medium and smaller farms. And these are farms that are not providing full time income. That's how they're still there. So people are pulling shifts at the factory, pouring concrete, working construction jobs, and running a farm. What if we could do things to make those two million farms entrepreneurial businesses again, growing ventures again. We have nearly two million families that are resilient enough to keep farming despite how hard this is, so what could we accomplish if we could make that entrepreneurial opportunity better like it was when my great grandfather came here from Wartar in Europe, although with a bit more stability and less turmoil to come, I would hope, because there should be a brighter opportunity for farms if we can open up that kind of opportunity again.

How much of that's a function of figuring out how to market so that the farmer gets a higher percentage of the value of what's being sold.

It's a huge part of it. One of the big kind of five solutions that I talk about in the book where I went through this hidden history and I looked for places where we had false choices. Where can we reject the false choice and try to find a new way. One of them is trying to find a way to work andize farmers around new market opportunities and building out rural regional economies that can connect the farm gate more closely to the dinner table, the farmer and the consumer more closely together, so that people are buying food not only from the grocery stores, which they should continue to do. Enough of the national and global supply chains but also locally directly depending on the type of food. There's a real opportunity to do that right now, and farmers, through social media, through greater awareness and concern for the public about where their food comes from, have a bigger opportunity than ever to do that. I kind of joke that we need to get the farmers and the hippies together a little bit more because we need farmers' markets to be more than a novelty, you know. We need farmers' markets, grocery stores that carry local goods, specially food stores, permanent outdoor markets, distributors that are there to serve these regional economies. We need all of that to sprout up in this economy to be able to create that kind of entrepreneurial opportunity.

I frankly take hope from what you've written that seems to me that while there are big challenges, there are also wonderful opportunities, and that it's a fight worth taking to make sure that our policies maximize the opportunity for small and family run farms. And that's not something I think what you've written is coool.

Well, thank you, I appreciate that, and I certainly hope people can take hope from it. I felt that we needed to stare into the difficulty of these problems and face the hard truths about them, and I also hoped that we could find pass forward. That's also true of my family story. You know, I weave these hidden airs of history with my family story, and with my family story. I talked with my dad and everybody, and you know, we talked about pharmaceuicides, we talked about mental health, we talked about addiction, different things our family has dealt with over the generations. And we felt that we needed to be honest about the problems so that people could be with us for the journey and more hopeful when they saw us come through. So we wanted to create an honest picture about our personal story and an honest picture of the economic, technological, social, and political situation that our country is in. So my hope is that people arge with hope. But perhaps it's hard fought.

But now, as I understand, I feel on my priying for a second, you both have a base in Wisconsin and you are also in California.

Yes, it's a great question. I struggle with the rural urban divide myself, and so what I did was. I grew up not having the talent for cattle and crops, and my dad did, and I knew I would have to find my own path. I found that with writing first and journalism and then in public policy. And I came back to Wisconsin and I was working in public affairs consulting, and I began to get reinvolved with our family business because I saw what was disappearing, and my dad invited me in. So I help out on the business side and they throw me in a tractor on my days off. And also in addition to that, my wife is from northern California, of all the places for a Wisconsin farm boy to go, and so I'm very fortunate in that we moved out there to northern California. We live in a small town of Moraca. We rent an apartment here. People ask, how can you afford to place? Say, well, we can't afford a place in California, let alone two places. But what I do is we rent a place here in northern cal California, and I come back to Wisconsin. I to live on the farm when I'm at home, and that's something I hadn't done since I left for college. And so in some ways, my life is going back and forth between this rural world and the more urban world that I'm trying to work connect, and in some ways I get to be more in touch with my roots than ever because when I'm home, I live on the family farm, and I drink these stories in and I work alongside my family in a way that wouldn't have been possible otherwise.

It's a great story and I think a real contribution. So I want to thank you for joining me your new book, land Rich Cash Poor, My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disaperian American Farmer. It's a great read. It's available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere in Brian. Thank you for sharing with us.

Thank you so much for having me on and for shedding light on this issue.

Thank you to my guest, Brian Risinger. You can get a link to buy his book, land Rich Cash Poor on our show page at Newtsworld dot. Newtorld is produced by Gangwich three sixty and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Guarnesy Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Artwork for the show was created by Steve Penley. Special thanks to the team at Gingwigh three sixty. If you've been enjoying newts World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Right now, listeners of news World can sign up for my three freeweekly columns at gingwichthree sixty dot com slash newsletter. I'm Newt Gingrich. This is neut World

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