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On this episode of the Strip-Till Farmer podcast, brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment, we go 1-on-1 with award-winning author and rural policy analyst Brian Reisinger.
Reisinger’s book, Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer, was recently named Book of the Year by the nonpartisan Farm Foundation. Described as a working-class story of heart and hardship, the book breaks down the biggest challenges facing farmers today and reveals how Reisinger’s family farm overcame tough times in their four-generation fight for survival.
During this candid conversation, Reisinger discusses how strip-tillers and no-tillers are uniquely positioned to overcome today’s biggest challenges, explains the potential financial advantages of conservation ag, shares stories of how cutting-edge technology can be a double-edged sword, addresses the mental hurdles that come with making sweeping changes on the farm and much more.
The Strip-Till Farmer podcast is brought to you by Yetter Farm Equipment.
Since 1930, Yetter Farm Equipment has been providing farmers with profitable solutions. From residue management and fertilizer placement to seedbed preparation, our equipment is designed to maximize your inputs, save you time, and deliver a strong return on investment. Explore our full line of planter attachments, precision fertilizer placement options, strip-till units, and stalk rollers at yetterco.com. Let Yetter help you prepare your equipment lineup for success today.
Full Transcript
Noah Newman:
Hey, welcome to the Strip Till Farmer Podcast. I'm your host, managing editor, Noah Newman. Big thanks to our sponsor, Yetter Farm Equipment for making this podcast series possible. And we are back with a bang after a brief hiatus as we go one-on-one with award-winning author and rural policy analyst Brian Risinger. His book, Land Rich Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer was recently named Book of the Year by the Farm Foundation, described as a working class story of heart and hardship. The book breaks down the biggest challenges facing farmers today and reveals how Reisinger's family farm overcame tough times in their four generation fight for survival. So during this candid conversation, Brian will explain some of the potential financial advantages of conservation ag and practices like strip-till and no-till. He'll share stories of how cutting edge technology can be a double-edged sword sometimes, address the mental hurdles that come with making sweeping changes on the farm and much more.
We got a lot to talk about, so let's jump right in. First off, let's start with this. Tell us a little bit about your origin story. And you grew up on a farm, right?
Brian Reisinger:
Yeah, I did. I guess my story starts like most farm kids working with my dad in the farmyard. I don't know how old you have to be to go get your dad a wrench, play gopher, but that's when I started, like most farm kids, I was probably about four years old. And I remember growing up hearing trucks pulling into the driveway and a guy would roll the window down and talk to my dad, "This farm sold, this farm went under." I always knew that where I was growing up was a special kind of place and that farmers like my dad worked hard, did an important job growing food, fuel, fiber for the country, and that it was a hard life too. It was beautiful and it was hard both. And as I got older, I wanted to pursue a writing career off the farm and I did that.
I did that in journalism, public policy, and then later in my own writing and as an author. And it's been the honor of my life to be able to come back around and tell not just my family story, but examine the issues of what's affecting our farmers, why are they facing economic challenges, what can we do about it, and why do we need to for the good of the whole country?
Noah Newman:
Yeah, and that brings us to your award-winning book, Land Rich Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. This has received multiple awards, including the book of the year by the Farm Foundation. So I'm sure you would need much longer than the time we have now to explain everything that's in this book, but tell us a little bit about it and why you think this book is really resonating with people.
Brian Reisinger:
Yeah. What it boils down to is we examined a hundred years of family farm history and uncovered all the moments that show why we've been losing farms for decades. And then we weave that with my family story. So the book goes from before the Great Depression on all the way up through to today saying, "Here's the points in history that there were turning points that began to wipe out family farms. Here's why we're facing these challenges, here's why we're facing these problems." And then we weave that each step of the way with a story for my family story. So we talk about my grandparents surviving the Great Depression. We talk about my parents surviving the farm crisis. We tell honest, raw stories that I think a lot of farm families and other people in agriculture would relate to. And we tie that to here's what was going on in the economy, here's what was going on with our government, here's what was going on with technology, whatever the issue may be, that has impacted family farms.
And the hope was to be able to tell an honest story that would get people engaged in what's happening to our farmers and also help show why this is happening and what we can do about it along the way.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. And what would you say are some of the biggest differences between the pressures and challenges maybe your family faced when you were growing up on the farm and what farmers are dealing with today?
Brian Reisinger:
Yeah, I think that there are a lot of similarities. One of the things that is unique and new and different is the rapid, rapid shifts that are going on in technology. And whether it is artificial intelligence and the way that can inform the way our machinery operates and our systems operate, our facilities, et cetera, or anything else, technology is moving so much faster really than it has any time in history. But that's also true of you compare the 2020s here to the '70s, '80s, '90s, even the 2000s, technology's moving so much faster. So I think that's the biggest thing. And I think that's why for your guys, readers and listeners, the reality is that farmers and people working in agriculture who are focused on how technology can help solve problems are a really big part of the solution. So that's the biggest difference. But I also want to note that technology ties into some of those things that are common through lines.
The reasons we've been losing farms for decades now is threefold. One is economic crises that we didn't understand how they're affecting the family farm, the Great Depression farm crisis, whatever it was, governmental policies from both sides of the aisle at different times that just have not helped the family farm. And then technology has been a double-edged sword. Technology has moved us forward and helped us innovate in so many ways. It also has tended to not be what's called scale neutral. Scale neutral would mean that it's technology that can help farms of all sizes, large, medium, and small. A lot of our technology has tilted in one direction away from the small and mid-size farm. And it's been another thing alongside the economic crises and the government policy that have driven our farms to have to just continue to get bigger, get out. So technology is that thing that's moving faster in a way that is different from when I was young growing up on the farm, but it's also a big through line for why we're losing farms.
And if we get our technology right, we can save a lot of farms and we can accomplish a lot of conservation goals. If we get our technology wrong, we're going to just speed up that process of losing our farms that are such an important source of our food and economic activity in this country.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, the technology, that's a big one. It seems like a lot of stories we've been focusing on lately have dealt with AI and autonomy. And there's this farmer, I did a story on Quint Pottinger in Kentucky who his family farm, he talks about all the challenges his family has dealt with over the years. And he actually made the decision he was going to sell all of his big equipment and trade it in for smaller equipment and he was going to plant his crops autonomously with a Cebanto retrofit autonomy kit and he pulled it off this first year. And so that's a pretty impressive story there about how making big changes with your equipment. And that's a story of how technology can really help keep a farm like that going.
Brian Reisinger:
Oh, that's absolutely right. I'm so glad you guys are covering stories like that because the reality is that technology is this fork in the road. It can go either way. And that story of that Kentucky farmer is a perfect example of the way that scale neutral technology can help. I'll give you another one. There is a guy named Bart Pinter, and I can send you his info if you want to get into the specifics on him, but he's developed a autonomous vehicle, small modular vehicle, like a little thing that can drive around your field that does soil testing. And along the way, it's collecting data about the soil in a way that is far more sophisticated than we're even doing today, which what we're already doing is pretty sophisticated. And it's the sort of thing where he wants to make it affordable enough that this is not some massive piece of equipment that can only be purchased and used in a practical way by the largest operators.
This is a small autonomous modular vehicle that can be used by a large farm, a midsize farm or a small farm to improve their sense of their soil and what they need for fertilizer and what they need for nutrients on a really sophisticated level that can also ultimately save money in terms of inputs that you got to put on your crops. And he's deliberately designing it in a way that can work for farms of all sizes. So imagine that you've got a farm that needs to innovate and any size farm can use this thing and find a way to save themselves money. That's something that can help us solve problems. So that example and the example in Kentucky are examples of how technology can help. We've got so many examples of how we just haven't stopped to think about the ways that technology can hurt.
The machinery that's only going bigger and bigger and bigger about adding more field rows or the facilities that are only going bigger and bigger and bigger and more sophisticated around how to have more animals, those are good for certain types of farms, but the medium and small sized farms that can't afford that or it's not practical on their size of operation, they're left behind by that innovation. So we've got a choice, not just farmers, but researchers at universities and with the government, R&D folks and executives at agribusiness companies, we all have a choice. Are we going to have technology that can work for a wide variety of farms and spread innovation as far as we can or are we going to just limit it to the few and see more and more farms slip away?
Noah Newman:
Yeah, I'll have to look into that tool that guy's creating. That's very interesting. And then going back to this Cebanto autonomy company, I was talking with their CEO, Craig Ruffin, and he had a good quote. He said, "There's two ways to farm. You can make money or save money and making money is becoming increasingly more difficult as you talked about." Are you finding that more farmers you're talking to are focusing on ways to cut back and save money?
Brian Reisinger:
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, what he's talking about there is the economic advice that all of our farmers are in right now. They've got increasing input costs, just exponential, whatever it is. And at the same time, the income they can make on a lot of their crops is maybe the same, stagnant at best, jump around a little bit, falling. I mean, how many folks are growing crops that the price hasn't fundamentally changed and gone up in decades really, in terms of actually keeping pace with what's going on with their expenses? So there have to be new ways for farmers to cut down on costs, reduce those costs so that the money they can make on the crops they're growing can get them a little further and get them through the next year. Now, we also need more entrepreneur opportunity. We need ways for crop prices and new types of crops and innovation to offer new opportunity on the income side, but that's not where we are right now.
So in the short term, being able to cut those expenses is what helps those family farmers that every year their expenses are going up by double digits and the money they get back is roughly speaking staying about the same.
Noah Newman:
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Brian Reisinger:
Yeah, it absolutely can. I think that the folks who have had the opportunity to position themselves in advance are in a really good spot right now because there are ways that more and more types of technology, we just talked about a couple of examples, more and more types of technology are helping to reduce costs and can also contribute toward conservation goals. To go back to that example that I gave about Bart, if you've got a method of soil testing that is affordable for you, that cuts costs for you, but also helps you know what your soil needs in a more sophisticated way, you can save yourself money and you can also accomplish conservation goals with that. And when you combine that with the farms that have already been doing cover crops, already doing many of these practices, they've got it worked into their system, they're able to reduce their costs along the way and they're able to accomplish conservation goals along the way.
The thing that we have to remember is that there are a lot of farms that want to be able to do those things, but for whatever reason, it hasn't been the right time, they haven't had the money to do it, they were in some other big transition for their farm, whatever it was. We've got a lot of farms that are caught and they've got to figure out a way to transition toward new practices and new things and they've got to figure out a way to do it without increasing their costs so much that they aren't able to make it through the next year. So some farms are really well positioned, others want to be better positioned and just for whatever reason, there's been some barrier to them being able to do it.
Noah Newman:
Yeah, that's something we come across a lot, that mental barrier of making a big change. It's tough if you're in a multi-generation farm and you've been doing it one way for a hundred years, conventional tillage. It's tough to make that change. So is that something you cover a lot too, just the mental hurdles of making big changes in farming?
Brian Reisinger:
Yeah, absolutely. I think every farm family experiences this. I know I've talked with farm families all across the country. Now I give talks from everywhere from Wisconsin to California and anywhere in between that I can. And when I talk to farm families, it's all of them trying to figure out a way forward. And for some of them, they're trying to figure out new forms of income, new value add agriculture, new side forms of income to supplement their traditional crops. In some cases, they're trying to figure out a way to be able to get through to the other side of some of the costs and making some changes that can benefit their bottom line and can benefit conservation efforts and others. And all of these farmers are trying, they're all at different points in spectrum. They're all working on it. And my own family has experienced what it's like to make a change on our family farm too.
My dad's still farming, my sister's working to take it over and they're always working to figure out how can we make the operation as good as we can. And here's what the way I look at the dilemma that farm families face as I talk with folks across the country and I think about our own experiences, every change you make costs you money in some way. Maybe it's direct money, maybe it's time that is money, whatever it is. And the problem that our farms have is through all these issues, these economic crises, these governmental policies and these technological issues that have been wiping out farms for decades, all those issues make it so that there isn't a lot of room for error. You're going to make a change. It's like, okay, am I going to make this change? Is it going to lead to more income or lower costs?
Am I going to be able to get through to the other side? And what's it going to do to my traditional income? Is it going to impact my traditional income streams or not? And there's no room for error for a lot of our farms because of the situation our country has left them in. So there's a lot of farmers that want to make a change, but it's more money to do it and they got to make sure that they get on the other side that it's going to be ultimately lower costs or better income and that they aren't going to jeopardize their current income either. So it's a very tricky balance and there are farmers doing it. There's reasons for help, but we just got to remember that it is a challenge with ongoing dilemmas for farm families every day.
Noah Newman:
Yeah. And another angle too is when you think about landlords, so there's Mike Starkey, who's one of our no-till innovators, he hosts a workshop at his farm in Indianapolis strictly for landlords where they just kind of educate them about some of the benefits of soil health and cover crops and no-till. Are you finding in your travels, are landlords recognizing that long-term value of soil health investments or is that another big challenge for a lot of people?
Brian Reisinger:
It is a work in progress is the best way I can describe it because there are some notable examples of folks who notice that and care about that. And then there are folks who really just want to be able to cash the check. And I'm not blaming people who. It's economics, you know what I mean? But it takes a little bit longer term thinking and being willing to work with your farmer, your operator around what they're doing and how they want to evolve it and why that's going to be better for everyone long-term. So it's like any other industry, any other business. There are folks who are only looking at the short-term gain and just the bottom line. And then there are folks who are saying, "Hey, I can focus on my bottom line, but I can also think about some of these other goals and I can benefit my bottom line long-term by being creative here." So it's a mix.
It really is a work in progress in terms of trying to get enough folks to adjust their thinking and give our farmers room to figure out what's going to make their business most viable in the future.
Noah Newman:
So getting back to your books, did anything surprise you when you were putting this together or any revelations that you could think of off the top of your head where you're like, "Man, I was not expecting that?"
Brian Reisinger:
Yeah. What really shocked me is the way that my family's stories lined up with all the economic issues that farmers have faced. Every era of history that I looked at where I researched why were farms pushed closer to the brink in this era of history or that era of history, every time there was a story from my family that somehow exhibited that. And I figured there'd be some of that, but I was shocked that it was every single era. And I guess as I look back, it makes sense because our farm family, so many farm families, you're living the hardships of whatever that era is. But I was just amazed how it lined up. I'll give you one example real quick if it's all right.
Noah Newman:
Yeah.
Brian Reisinger:
So in the farm crisis, the 1980s, that was a economic and political crisis that was caused by a lot of bad decisions that ended up wiping out tens of thousands of farmers. And my family has a story that lined up with that. So there's a lot of things that happen in farm crisis, but one of the basic things that happened is that the government had been for a long time encouraging farmers to take out debt. They had government programs that were encouraging farmers to take out debt so they'd get bigger, so that they could grow more food and they can meet our international demands. And then inflation was getting out of control, and so the government decided to raise interest rates to slow down inflation just like they did the last couple years. Now, you could be for or against any of those things. You can argue for or against the loan programs that were encouraging farmers to take out debt.
You can argue for or against lowering interest rates or increasing interest rates, whatever's being done with monetary policy. But when you do those two things at once, you use government programs to push farmers to take on more debt, and then you use government programs to increase interest rates. Suddenly you're making overnight those farmers have debt that is completely unaffordable for them. And it's just that nobody thought about what the impact was of the farmer of doing those two things in a row. So that's why one of the reasons we lost so many farms in the farm crisis is because farmers who were encouraged to take out debt suddenly had debt that was made unaffordable by the same government that encouraged them to do it. Now, my parents at that time were trying to live through farm crisis and they were married in 1976 and there was a drought.
So they almost didn't get a single crop. They got one hay crop. They weren't going to get any other hay crops that year. They couldn't get corn to hardly poke its head out of the ground because of how dry and hot and brittle the soil was from the drought. Well, what did they do? They banded together with local farmers. My dad made, for example, a deal with a local farmer down the road who's an elderly man, couldn't do his field work, and his ground was in a little bit better shape than our dad's because it wasn't quite as dry. It was lower country that had a little more moisture to it. And so my dad had made a deal. My dad would do the field work and they would go halves where my dad would get half the crop for doing the work and the elderly man would get half the crop for it being his property.
Well, the old man gave my dad more than half. And no matter how many times my dad went down there, it makes me emotional just thinking about it. No matter how many times my dad went down there trying to offer him money to square it up, he wouldn't take the money. He said, "You just got married. Take it and go." And it was that kind of hardworking families banding together, treat each other right, that kept my family, my mom and dad from having to take out debt in their first couple years. If they'd had to take out debt in the late '70s or early '80s just to make it, they would've been wiped out in the farm crisis when having too much debt doomed tens of thousands of farmers. And so that story of hard work and grit and families working together and the bigger economic forces that were at play in that era just wove together so naturally.
And I found that at every point of history, there was some way that my family had found a way to survive that lined up with the bigger problems farms were facing. Wow,
Noah Newman:
That's an incredible story. Thank you so much for sharing that. And I'm sure there's several stories like this in this book and it's definitely one that I'm looking forward to reading and I'm sure a lot of people in our audience will pick it up as well. Anything else you'd like to add about the book or any other projects you're working on you'd like to highlight right now?
Brian Reisinger:
Oh yeah, no, I appreciate it. I'll talk about the book for a second and then I want to share closing thougts. So as far as the book, people can find it on Amazon, anywhere else we have books online. It's also available in bookstores nationwide. And I just hope that people spread the word on these issues and try to help us face what's going on with our farmers. The closing though I have is throughout the whole eras of history that I examined, we've been losing farms at a rate of 45,000 a year for the past century, 45,000 a year for a hundred years. That means we've lost 70% of our farms. If we keep losing farms at that same rate, 45,000 a year going forward, we're going to lose the rest of our family farms in the next generation. I'm 41 years old. By the time my two-year-old little girl is my age, we'll have lost the rest of the family farms like the one her grandpa operates.
So we have to act now. But here's the thing, those farms we have left, we got nearly two million farms left, 96% of them are family farms. So we got nearly two million farm families holding on, figuring out ways to innovate, figuring out ways to make it, even though we've made it so hard to do in this country. So imagine what can be accomplished if we focus our technology and our efforts around how do we help farms of all sizes affordably innovate? If we do that, we can rescue family farms that are perfectly competitive, perfectly efficient, perfectly hardworking. We're not talking about bad farms these days. There aren't any farms that made it up to this point that are bad farms. So if we can figure out a way to spread affordable technological innovation to farms of all types and sizes going forward, we can save our family farms, we can save our food supply, we can keep our country strong.
And so I just like to make sure people know that there is reason for hope, but the statistics show that we have to act.
Noah Newman:
And then I'll wrap things up for this edition of the Strip Till Farmer Podcast. Big thank you to Brian for taking the time to talk about his book and share some of his perspective on key issues and challenges facing a lot of you out there today. For past episodes of the podcast, head to striptillfarmer.com. And hey, I hope to see you at the upcoming National Strip Tillage Conference August 6th and 7th in Springfield, Illinois. There's still time to reserve your spot at the striptillconference.com to sign up. And you can use a special promo code I put together for you, NOAA, to save 50 bucks off your registration promo code NOAA. All right, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.
