Why America's Family Farms Are Disappearing ft. Brian Reisinger | The 1600

0:00Hello, hello from Newsweek headquarters at the top of the World Trade Center in New York City. This is the 1600, and I, of course, with Carlo Fursana.

0:08Brian Reisinger:This country was stone cold dead. So if the midterms that are coming up go as badly for President Trump and the Republicans as at least some polls are suggesting and have been suggesting, and the GOP is certainly fearing, part of the reason could very well come down to a voting bloc that overwhelmingly went for Trump back in 2024. I'm talking, of course, about farmers, the American farming industry. Trump won all but 11 of 444 farming-dependent countries—counties, excuse me. That's defined by the Department of Agriculture. But he's seen that support deteriorate and some instances actually collapse due to, at first, his tariff policy and also the rising costs that have just been made even worse by this war with Iran that we are in the process of losing, it looks like.

0:53So my guest today is a man named Brian Reisinger. Brian is a fourth-generation Wisconsin dairy farmer turned writer. He's author of the great book Land Rich, Cash Poor, and he's a rural policy columnist for the USA Today Network. Brian's coming to us from Sacramento, California. Brian, good to see you, man. Hey, good to be with you, Carlo. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk to you. We were just talking off air. Farming is not my area of expertise. I am a city boy through and through, so I'm excited to talk to a real farmer in the flesh. But before we get into the politics of farming right now, tell me a little bit just about your family farm.

1:32You've lived off the land your whole life, is my understanding. What was that like growing up? And what's it like now? Yeah, absolutely. It was a beautiful place to grow up. I love my roots. And the beauty and the hardship go hand in hand for American farmers, and I grew up with that. I was working with my dad from time I could walk. And I always say, how old do you have to be to get your dad a wrench? That's about the age I would work on. I'm probably about four years old. and we'd get up in the morning you see the sunrise uh after the work had already started i'd see my dad whistle to send the cow dog out to the pasture to bring the cows in with just a whistle you know we'd help birth calves all these things that you learn on a farm and it was a beautiful way of life it was also a way of life that even as a kid i knew was slipping away you know guys were driving the driver when i was working my dad and they'd say you know this farm's going under this farm sold, you know, what do you make of this?

2:22What do you make of that? So I always knew that what my dad did was special and it was, it was slipping away. So for me, the story is of pursuing a writing career after growing up on the farm, worked with my dad for most of my life as a kid and pursued a writing craft, farming journals, and then public policy. Then came back around and I help on the business side of our farm and they throw me in a tractor and in the farmyard, I help out when I'm, uh, when I'm not on the road, but really it's my sister working, take over the farm for my dad these days. And in addition to trying to help them, I have my writing work and consulting work and work to tell our story.

2:53And what I found as I was working on the book and working to tell our story is that we're not unique. We have stories of economic upheaval. We have stories of tragic farmland accidents. We have stories of all, you know, weather that blesses and threatens across the spectrum. And as I've gone around the country talking with farm families, I realized what's maybe unique about us that we got the chance to pick up our head and tell the story. But there are farm families everywhere, generation for generation, living through the kind of economic hardship we're seeing today and that we've seen for decades.

3:24It's all added up to the loss of 45 ,000 farms a year for the past century. Right. That's, I mean, that's an incredible statistic. I mean, I just, I certainly didn't know that. And it sort of gets me to my next question. So the book, as I said, it's titled Land Rich, Cash Poor. I want to ask you about that concept and also the concept as sort of like this paradox that faces so many of these small family farms. How can you sit on millions of dollars of valuable land and still go broke month to month? Are the economics of farming that bad, and have they always been that bad? It's always been a dilemma.

4:00There's always been a push-pull. So the concept for people don't know, although I think it makes sense on a gut level to people in the same way it grabbed you. To be land-rich, cash-poor means exactly what you said. It means you have this land that is worth so much. It's an incredible investment. It's incredible to be able to have it. If you want to go sell it, you can make money doing that. If you want to hold onto it and make a living farming on it, it is getting harder and harder to do that every year. It's been getting harder and harder for decades. The real reason for that is that there are three big categories of issues that have hit our farmers that we haven't really reckoned with in this country.

4:29One is the way that economic crises uniquely hit our farmers, whether it's the depression, the farm crisis, the 80s, COVID, today's economic hot button issues. They always hit farmers in a unique way we tend to miss in this country. The second is governmental policy on both sides of the aisle over the decades that have made it worse. And then the third is technology. We have American innovation moving farms forward, but so much of it is geared around technology that forces farms to get bigger and bigger. It's leaving behind our midsize of small farms. So for all these reasons, we're making it harder and harder for farmers to make a living each year.

4:59Now they could turn around and sell it, but if you sell it, you're losing not only your mom and dad's job, you're losing your home, your community, your heritage, everything. So most farm families want to hold onto it. And that means grinding out a living that gets harder and harder every year and has been doing that for the better part of a century. I'm glad you mentioned technology because this was one of the, I struggled when I was prepping for this, but actually asking because it feels like it's kind of a dumb question, but I'll ask it anyway, since you sort of teed me up. So every once in a while, I'll see like videos on social media or TikTok or whatever, and it'll be a video of some sort of robotic tractor, essentially, that's like picking strawberries or carrots or whatever.

5:36And it's doing it incredibly, I don't know if I'd say better, but it's certainly doing it more efficient and faster than a human could do. Shouldn't that sort of technological progress be a boon for small farms or why isn't it always? It's such a good question. It should be. And the reason it isn't is because we're not very deliberate in this country about how we develop our technology, what type of technology. What I mean by that is you're right that there are actually a lot of AI high-fueled vehicles, small modular vehicles, where if you have a small or mid-sized farm, you could have one or two of them.

6:12If you have a large farm, you could have many of them. There are certain types of technology that's called scalable, where if you have a lot of something or a large version of it, or a smaller number of something, or a smaller version of something on a smaller farm, makes it affordable for the small mid-sized farmers, as well as large farm, makes it practical for their farm. The reality is that most of our technology that we've developed for the past really half of a century has not done that. It's been all about how do you add more and more field rows to your equipment and you're going out in the field with the tractor and you're pulling an implement, or how do you add more and more animals within a facility if it's a big milking parlor or what have you.

6:49And so most of our technology has been about, hey, how do we get those farmers to achieve scale? How do we get those farmers to get bigger? So that's one part of the broader get big or get out forces that we've had in this country for a very long time. If we gear more of our technology toward doing what we're talking about here, where it can be a large or small version of it, and it's affordable and it's practical for a small or mid-sized farm as well as a large farm, that's the key to making sure that innovation reaches farms of all kinds in the same way. Farms need to be competitive. They need to be resourceful.

7:23They need to be efficient. There's just all kinds of small farms that are just as many of those things as larger farms, but the technology doesn't fit their checkbook or their needs. Interesting. OK, so that that's a perfect segue into what I wanted to pivot to, which is politics. I mean, this is a political show and farmers are obviously, you know, whether they want to or not, are often in the middle of our national political saga for better or worse. So back in December, President Trump signed the most recent farm bailout, right? So$12 billion package for American agricultural producers facing financial losses.

7:57Almost or at least up to$11 billion of that, my understanding here, is directed towards row crop growers through the Farmer Bridge Assistance Program in order to offset impacts from the trade disruptions from President Trump's trade war, the tariffs, right? This is before Iran. This is before we went to war with Iran, before the Strait of Hormuz closed. That's a whole other issue I want to ask you about. So an environmental working group analysis found that the largest farms, which they define as over 1 ,000 acres, which presumably are much larger than the farm that you grew up on, these are ones that are capturing hugely disproportionate share of federal bailout money.

8:34So roughly 40 percent of those December bridge payments went to the biggest farms in the country. Last year, 15 ,000 farms went out of business, most of them small to the point you just made. Corn is one example here. Farms growing more than 1 ,000 acres of corn make up just 6 percent of farms growing corn. But according to that EWG projection, they will collect 50 percent of all corn payments. So this is a long way of asking you. I feel like a lot of people don't really understand this, right? There's farmers and then there's big ag. There's big agriculture, big food. Trump's bailing out Big Ag and he's sort of leaving the family farms twisting in the wind.

9:12Is that a fair assessment? You know, the way I would put it is that government programs are always imperfect at filling the hole that is left in a market. And farms of all sizes, small, medium and large, have been experiencing this for decades. And it is true whether it is because of a change in the market that just means farmers are making less, that for whatever reason, someone decided a government program should help address that. Or it is true when you have a package that is supposed to provide assistance in the wake of a specific disruption. Most farmers I know just want to be able to make money growing something that they can sell out there in the market.

9:50And they're not looking for a handout. But the reality is that when there are things like a trade disruption and the federal government says, hey, and whether anyone, this isn't meant as a partisan thing, whether people agree or disagree with the strategy, basically the stated strategy was, hey, we're going to use tariffs and tougher negotiations to make for tougher trade deals. A lot of farmers applaud that because they say that they've been getting ripped off. And there's evidence for that going back to the nineties that Republicans and Democrats have talked about. So if the government says, we're going to make a disruption here in the market, and we know that we want to get tougher, but that also means that we could have a trade dispute that means some disruptions make sense.

10:24And a lot of farmers will say, sure, if you're going to do something to impact my trade income, it makes sense for the government to do something to come back and try to make farmers whole. The problem is, whether it is Democrats, Republicans, anybody, a government program trying to make whole a farmer that was disrupted by something in the market is always going to be imperfect. Now, then you get into what happens with government programs of all kinds, which is that the folks who have not only the lobbyists to shape policy, but who also have the army of accountants and lawyers it takes to really utilize programs to their fullest extent are generally the largest operators in any industry.

11:02And so you'll naturally see these subsidies end up going toward the biggest operators, whether it's farming or any other industry, and small business struggles to be able to get the assistance that, you know, you could argue they ought to have received if there was a disruption the government deliberately caused because of another goal. Insurance isn't one size fits all. That's why customers have enjoyed Progressive's Name Your Price tool for years now. With the Name Your Price tool, you tell them what you want to pay, and they'll show you options that fit your budget. So whether you're picking out your first policy or just looking for something that works better for you and your family, they make it easy to see your options.

11:40Visit Progressive.com. Find a rate that works for you with the Name Your Price tool. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Is there actually a constituency in Washington for small farms like yours? Does it feel like there is? It's a good question. You know, the Farm Bureau represents farms of all sizes. There was the National Farmers Union represents farms that tend a little bit smaller or might have more liberal persuasion. There's all kinds of different farm groups. Here's what I think. I think they all work hard at their respective areas to try to represent their membership.

12:17The thing that I think is a lot of agricultural groups, not just those, there's all kinds of them. Sometimes there's egg groups for one specific crop. I mean, there are hundreds of egg groups out there, but it's very splintered and it's hard to get all the egg groups, whether it's individual crops or whether it's some of the broader ones, it's harder to get all those egg groups speaking with one voice in a direction. I think we're in a place in this country where we need to put family farms first and we need a bipartisan family farm moonshot to correct the way our government programs work. I think we're in a place where maybe we could get all these groups to start speaking with one voice.

12:50If we could do that, I think more farmers would be represented. But it's such a splintered situation and the influence game in Washington is such a challenging set of waters to swim in that I think a lot of farm voices get drowned out. Absolutely. I mean, how could you, you know, even if it's a collection of small farms, right, you're going up against lobbyists from, you know, Cargill or some of these, you know, Monsanto or some of these just massive agriculture producers that are obviously going to have the, you know, the ears of the government regardless of which party is in power. But back to your point about the moonshot, let's dig into that a little bit.

13:26If you were president, President Bryan, what would that moonshot look like? Yeah, here's what it would look like. We would have to assemble people from both sides of the aisle who are serious about ag policy. There are a couple of them in Congress. There aren't a lot of them. We'd have to assemble those people. And we need to go through every program that's been created since the Great Depression onward. this is why this doesn't happen. Generally, what we've done in the last several decades is we've piled one government program on top of another. And there are programs that have worthy goals and a good way to reach them.

13:59There are programs that were maybe ill-conceived. Whatever they are, they've been piled up. So we don't know for years, decades now, more than a hundred years in some cases, whether the programs are still working. We don't know which ones are contradictory, of which there are many of them that are. We don't know which ones have become the most prone to favoritism and abuse, the kind of favoritism and abuse that we talked about here. And so we have all these programs and it is fair for the American taxpayer to say, hey, where the hell is my tax money going? And for the American farmer to say, hey, where in the hell is that support that was supposed to be coming?

14:30Both those things are true at once because of this kind of monstrosity that we have that needs to be examined, honestly, program by program. And that would be my step on day one. If there was a president, Brian, I guess that would be a step one, day one thing. It certainly sounds fair to me. So just back to the tariffs. I appreciate, Brian, that you're not a partisan guy. I'm actually not either, believe it or not. Although the fact of the matter is it is the Republican Party who currently controls all levers of government in this country. It is the Republican Party under Donald Trump that has done two major pieces of policy that have hurt small farms, one being tariffs, right?

15:09His tariffs drove China away as the top soybean buyer. Farmers are describing this year as the makings of the next farm crisis when the next planting season starts. Corn, cotton, sorghum revenue projected well below production costs even with that federal aid we talked about. And that's not even, again, getting into the war. The Farm Bill passed the House in April with the most Republican support in Farm Bill history, but it doesn't address the underlying cost pressures, which are coming from things like tariffs, also immigration policy, and the issues of the trade-of-war moves being closed, which carries, I think, what, a quarter of the world's fertilizer, which is obviously a very important input cost.

15:49Do you blame the tariffs or are you sympathetic to the trade war logic, even if it hurts farms like yours personally? It's a really good question, and I'll answer it from the farm perspective, but I want to address the political part of it. Please. Farmers live, farmers like my dad, my sister, and families like ours live in a reality that has been spoken to at different times by different parts of both parties. The reality is that since the 90s, when free trade opened up, free trade opens up new markets, and that's good, and many farmers want that. But a lot of those markets were negotiated with countries that ended up not abiding by those trade deals or there was a lack of fairness.

16:28Right. So, you know, working class blue collar Democrats were talking about that early on. Labor Democrats, some working class populist type Republicans were talking about more recently. Different parts of both parties have recognized the problem for a long time. and that so there's a lot of support in farm country to get tough and say hey let's hold china's feet to the file let's get tough and sometimes they understand that means tariffs but at the same time if those trade disputes spin out of control and cause problems in terms of shutting down the markets like you're trying to get china to be tougher and they're getting they're getting they're getting there and then they turn away and they snub american farmers which they did last fall suddenly those markets close off so we need those wide open unfair markets to become more fair and that's an argument for getting tougher and some tariffs and we need those markets to not completely shut down because the trade dispute goes so far out of control.

17:15So the reality is that farmers don't live in an either-or world. They live in a world where we need open trade with other countries and we need that trade to be tough and fair. And so that's the world that the farmers live in. Now, for me, at a point in my career, this is many years in the past at this point, but I worked in government for a few years and I worked in Republican politics for a few years. I got fed up with partisan politics, left, began working on my writing, consulting on issues and kind of got back into my farm roots. I'll just say this about the Republican Party. The Republican Party for a very long time believed in free trade wide open, and that was good for opening markets, but it went too far.

17:49And one of the things that President Trump did is recognize something that labor Democrats have been saying for a while, which is we need to have this trade situation be fair so that people aren't getting ripped off. A deal is no good if you're getting ripped off. Now, it can go too far. So farmers are on this pendulum that's swinging too far toward free trade that's wide open, swinging too far toward protectionism. Farmers need open, fair markets. So we need a policy that can navigate that strategy. And so when I hear the Republicans and Democrats battling over whose fault is it, both parties have failed to recognize the balance that farmers need for a very long time.

18:24And then when we do strike trade deals, to your point earlier, the family farm is so often forgotten in those trade deals. I had a farmer that I was talking with for a piece I was writing tell me, you know, the farmer's always a throwaway. In any negotiation, you've got like five things you care about and you got one thing you're willing to throw out so you can give something to the other side. The family farmer is so often the throwaway for decades, whichever party is negotiating these trade deals. They say, well, we're going to negotiate around rare minerals or manufacturing and farming in general.

18:52And by the time you get down to one of those economic sectors and the many things within that economic sector, boy, that mid or small sized family farmers pretty hard to keep at the table. Unless it's campaign season, right? In which both parties absolutely love to use farmers as, you know, stand-ins on stage. They like to put on their Carhartt boots and pretend like they're, you know, plowing the fields themselves. And then they get into the office and it's like, you know, go screw yourself. But one thing, one thing else that presumably farmers need, and you tell me, I don't know anything, but they need predictability, And they need stability because if you're planting soybeans now for harvest whenever in the spring, you need to know that you have a buyer of those soybeans, right?

19:38Yep, absolutely. And we need that certainty. And one of the ways to create it I'm always talking about is diversify our trade partners. So just like you diversify your investment portfolio or what have you, so much of our trade is tied up with China, which is our biggest buyer of ag products and our biggest adversary. There are other countries we deal with, but the reality is that China is the biggest one by far. And at any given time, America has about 20 trade deals, right? There are hundreds of countries. So last year, farmers saw a wide mix of things that were helpful and unhelpful. There were new trade agreements being struck with the UK, Japan, Malaysia, more of these deals with mid-sized countries that if we get enough of those, we can start to diversify and not be held hostage by China quite so much.

20:21And then with China, there was an effort to make things get tougher. and farmers were saying, I don't speak for all farmers. I'm just saying many farmers are saying, hey, this is good. Let's get tougher. There might be some short-term pain for a long-term gain here, but then China walked from the table and snubbed, for example, US soybean farmers who saw their prices plummet around the time that they were needing to sell their soybeans. So there is a big mix. We saw more countries coming on board. We saw tougher negotiations with China, and then we saw China walk away. So farmers are sitting here seeing all kinds of ups and downs.

20:49What we need is more of that diversification of who we're trading with so that no one country can take our trade situation and plunge it into the basement. Right. I mean, I think that you make a point that a lot of people, even people like me on the center, center left, understand, which is a classic thing that Trump does, right? Which is he precisely diagnoses a real problem, such as trade imbalances and us getting ripped off by China. But then the actual policy is implemented in a way that makes like no sense. And often, you know, in often situations, it just makes things worse. I would argue that, you know, the Liberation Day tariffs, where just we just threw these sort of like universal, randomized tariffs on every country, and then we negotiated from there was a bad way of doing that.

21:31But I want to ask you something else about sort of on the same topic. So the same bill that we were just talking about, which boosted commodity subsidies also came bundled with the largest snap cut in history. So as snap being food stamps, right? As somebody who both grows food and presumably knows people who rely on food assistance, does that seem fair to you? Or let me put it another way. Do you see foreign policy and hunger policy, social welfare policy as connected or are these sort of like two separate fights that kind of get cynically traded against each other in Congress? Every day as a small business owner feels like solving a puzzle.

22:10One moment you're cruising along and the next there's a shipping snag that has you scrambling. But here's a surprise you will like. With Progressive, small business owners save 13 % on their commercial auto insurance when they pay in full. So go ahead, surprise yourself. Get a quote in as little as eight minutes at ProgressiveCommercial.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and Affiliates. Discounts not available in all states or situations. it's such a good way for you to ask that they are legitimately connected and that connection is exploited by the folks in congress so i don't want to sound like a dodge i think it's kind of both there's no no i think that's right but i think that congress exploits it the original reason that farm legislation and food legislation the farm bill stuff that crop subsidies and everything and then snap on if it's such were put together was to get the two parties at the table and i I could see that being in a temporary sense, right?

23:05Like, hey, we got to get a negotiation done this year. Let's bring something to both sides of the aisle care about and work on it together. That makes sense, right? Sure. The problem is that this has become this massive, staggering zombie situation where this is a huge piece of legislation where everybody has a whole bunch of stuff they love and a whole bunch of stuff that they hate. And sometimes it's better to tank the deal than it is to take it. And it's become a political football. In other words, the situation has sort of been decayed by the congressional grid. Like, I think we're actually a place where we need to break these things apart and we need to actually have a more honest discussion, which is to say, hey, Republicans who represent and care about or say they care about rural areas and Democrats who represent and care about or say they care about urban areas.

23:46Guess what? If you don't have the other, you don't have, you know, one. Like, we don't have to link them together in the same bill to make the argument to say, hey, folks in urban areas who are concerned about food access issues, we can't keep wiping out our farms at the rate of 45 ,000 a year for the past century if we want to be able to have farms to grow your food. Hey, rural areas who care about what's going on with our farms, we need to have a way for those farms to be able to grow the food that people need in urban areas. And we also need to be able to have assistance programs that for those people who can't buy food, they are able to get nourishment and there can be ways for that food to be purchased from you.