Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: The us secretary of agriculture recently said that 88% of farmers have off farm jobs.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: 88% of american farmers work off the farm.
[00:00:11] Speaker A: And he has a solution for that. I say his solution is worse than the problem.
[00:00:17] Speaker C: Three years ago, rich retired from the United States Air Force after 25 years of being a fighter pilot and gave that career up to become a farmer, a full time farmer. The question is, if he did not have a retirement income, would we be able to be sustainable on a farm income?
[00:00:41] Speaker A: No, not currently, no. And I don't like being in that 88% that requires an off farm income. But that is where we are right now. And look, y'all, we're in serious growth mode and we're over 50. And according to Joel Salatin, we're too old to even start this business. So we are in a growth mode because we have to grow fast, because we just don't have the time that we need to put into it to grow slowly. So we are supporting the farm with our off farm income. We just, because it's a retirement paycheck, we don't have to leave the farm to get that off farm income.
[00:01:33] Speaker C: Right.
If you are not a farmer, please stick around on this podcast, because it affects you too, as a citizen of this country and a person who eats food. This is a very important podcast as we are going to go over some of the things about the farm bill that is going on right now while the legislators are out there deciding what they're going to do with your money.
[00:01:56] Speaker A: Yeah, true.
So the secretary of agriculture has talked about the fact that 88% of farmers require an off farm income. And it is, to me, a shocking statistic.
[00:02:15] Speaker C: It is. It's really high. And it blows my mind that knowing what is required of a farmer who is growing the food for the country, knowing that they work nearly round the clock, you're always on call. You never know what's gonna happen or go wrong or what you've got to do. They live this life every day. It is a lifestyle. But 1214, 16 hours, days, sleepless nights, waiting on animals to be born or out in the winter, my goodness, some of those guys up in Wisconsin with cows are out there in the dead of winter working tirelessly to grow food for this country. Yet they're required because they can't make enough money. They're required to go get another job. Someone in their family has to go to work because all of the work that they're doing isn't enough.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: That's correct. Yeah. It cannot support the farm.
[00:03:14] Speaker C: That is insane.
[00:03:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:03:16] Speaker C: That is insane. And we have seen it. It is expensive to have a farm. It is very expensive to grow food. And we'll get into some of the money side in a minute. But understanding that the farmers that are out there growing our food for us are working their tails off and they can't get keep the lights on with that amount of work.
[00:03:37] Speaker A: Yeah. So they're in, Mark, or they're debating. Right now, Congress is about this next iteration of the farm bill that saves everybody. Right. I mean, that's the bill. They're talking over a trillion dollars over the next ten years. In this bill, farmers should be getting rich.
[00:03:58] Speaker C: Well, you know, I think one of the misnomers is about the farm bill itself. And as an average citizen, most of us think that the farm bill is for farmers and that the farm bill is helping the people who are out there growing our food.
[00:04:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:04:15] Speaker C: And that's not the case. No, that is not the case at all, because the percentages are far different than what I thought they were.
[00:04:24] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. It says 81% of the money projected over the next ten years, 81% will go to nutrition programs.
Snap, EBT, Wic.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: Well, I believe that there is a place for those programs in this country. That's fine. I don't.
Their placement in the funding where, who's funding it and what bill? It's underneath. That's kind of the weird thing to me.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:04:59] Speaker C: That doesn't make any sense in a farm bill that we're, that's where the nutrition programs are.
[00:05:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:05:04] Speaker C: They should just kind of be out there on their own. That should be their own thing. Let's fund that by itself, not attached to the farms.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: We could call it government nutrition. Nutrition assistance program bill or government nutrition assistance bill.
[00:05:17] Speaker C: Yeah. Not the farm bill.
[00:05:20] Speaker A: Yeah. It is very misleading to say that there's this huge amount of money going to a farm bill.
It leads people to believe that, oh, we're helping the farmers, and in reality, 19% of it is what could potentially go to the farmers. And then even within that, the breakdown, it includes conservation. There's billions of dollars in just overhead.
There's crop insurance, there's livestock insurance. There are some things going to farmers, but it's in the single digit percentages of this big, huge trillions of dollars worth of farm bill. Single digit percentages have even the potential to go to farmers.
Yeah.
[00:06:13] Speaker C: I think that most people just don't.
[00:06:15] Speaker A: Know that one of the ways that the secretary of agriculture talks about that farmers can be increasing their income is they're trying to make it easier for farmers to contract directly with some of these food programs.
[00:06:33] Speaker B: That's why we've been investing in local food purchasing agreements and local food school purchasing agreements in all 50 states to enable farmers to sell directly to a school or to an institutional purchaser or to a food bank so that they generate a higher percentage of that farm, of that food dollar.
[00:06:51] Speaker A: So take the school lunch program. There's a farmers to school lunches basically is, I forget the exact name of the program, but it's farmers to schools. And they're trying to make it easier for farmers to get these direct contracts with the government.
[00:07:12] Speaker C: Farmers get contracts with the government.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: Right.
[00:07:16] Speaker C: That's interesting. So. Hmm. So if I'm a farmer and I want to grow carrots and I'm going to grow an amount of carrots instead of wholesaling them out there to wherever carrot farmers wholesale their carrots to, now I can just say, hey, school program in my county, would you like to buy my carrots? And they say yes, and then they buy the carrots. But what is the, is there going to be some price regulation, a set, a set price on those carrots by the government? Because that is a school. That is a government. The schools are government run.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Well, yeah, sure you are. You are a government contractor at that point. You are contracting with the government to supply them a good, at a government contracted price.
[00:08:11] Speaker C: So.
Hmm. So then as a farmer, as a carrot farmer, I'm now in effect working for the government, growing the government's food for them.
[00:08:25] Speaker A: Yes, at the government set price.
[00:08:30] Speaker C: So there's not a real big free market concept in that.
[00:08:34] Speaker A: No, not in that. Like I said, that's one way that they're saying to could help farmers. Could help farmers is we'll just make government contracts easier for local farmers.
[00:08:49] Speaker C: And I could see where that would be a positive thing as you would just go directly to, to, so that you cut out a few of the middlemen. Right. You're going from the farm to the consumer.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:03] Speaker C: And you're cutting out that wholesale middleman.
[00:09:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:09:06] Speaker C: From that purchase and that arrangement.
[00:09:09] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:09:09] Speaker C: So that, that would be a positive.
[00:09:11] Speaker A: But the assumption there is that the government contract price would be enough for you to make a living.
You're working for the government.
[00:09:21] Speaker C: Okay.
[00:09:22] Speaker A: Right. The government sets the price, not you.
[00:09:26] Speaker C: Okay. So in, let's talk about some historical references again to setting food prices and how it affected farms and farmers.
You have a concept that you have kind of coined recently. Talk about that a little bit. And let's dive into that.
[00:09:47] Speaker A: So the concept I coined is soft collectivism. And collectivism is where the government collects all of the food. And there are examples of this in history. We've got Mao's China, we've got the Soviet Union, and both of those collectivist models. Models.
The government went in, took the farmland, installed their own farmers that worked for the government, and they collected all of the food to then be distributed to the people. The net result of that is millions, literally millions of people starved to death.
[00:10:34] Speaker C: Because they didn't know what they were doing. They create a food shortage. People.
[00:10:40] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:10:41] Speaker C: They starve.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Yep. So because the. The farmers weren't farming anymore.
[00:10:47] Speaker C: Yeah. The people who actually knew how to do it. Because farming, as it turns out, isn't actually very easy.
[00:10:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:10:52] Speaker C: To do. That would be what you just talked about would be hard collectivism.
[00:10:57] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:10:57] Speaker C: That is a, we are taking the farms. We are growing the food. We will disperse it as we see fit.
[00:11:04] Speaker A: From the government perspective.
[00:11:05] Speaker C: From the government perspective.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: Yep.
[00:11:07] Speaker C: It didn't work out very well. Soft collectivism.
[00:11:10] Speaker A: So soft collectivism.
My assertion is that we are headed there right now in that the soft part is the government isn't taking the farm.
[00:11:24] Speaker C: No, you get to take the land.
[00:11:25] Speaker A: The government is allowing the farmer to continue to own the land, but the government is setting the prices that the farmers can get for the food.
The solution to the farmer's problem is a government contract.
[00:11:38] Speaker C: It has been that way in a lot of the sectors for a lot of years. Commodity farmers, they farm. To my understanding, we are not commodity farmers, but the best of my understanding, they farm at a price. That is how they, from the government, they set the prices. And depending on what the price is that year on that particular crop, grain, whatever it is that farmers growing, they. They kind of know what they're going to make.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: Yeah. Or even per. Not don't farm.
[00:12:11] Speaker C: Or don't farm. And they get paid to not farm. That's. Yeah. But as a commodity farmer, they. For years, they have relied on this type of income for a long time. The subsidy subsidized farmers.
[00:12:26] Speaker A: That's right. And a lot of that is the big farm. The, the big farms that this secretary of agriculture talks about that make up the majority of the profit in farming right now.
[00:12:40] Speaker C: So what were those percentages?
There are, it's kind of like in the beef industry. There's a very small percentage of farms making a very large percentage of the income.
[00:12:51] Speaker B: If you took a look at the top seven or so percent of farms, it would be roughly 150,000 farms out of 1.9 million or so.
They sell more than a half a million dollars in sales every year.
And those farms cumulatively collected somewhere between 85 and 89% of the income, but they represent 7% of the farms.
[00:13:15] Speaker A: That leaves like, 1.8 million farms. To get that other 15% of the.
[00:13:23] Speaker B: Income, that means that roughly 1.7 million or so of farms had to share somewhere between eleven and 15% of the income.
Which explains why nearly 50% of farms didn't make any money at all. And the other 40% or so made money. But the majority of money they made to support their families came from off farm income.
[00:13:48] Speaker A: And so now my point is, that's where your independent small farm, you're independent minded. What you think of as a farmer, not the big drive in the combines, huge farms, but the small farm, like us, that's where we sit, is in that 1.8 million farms that now get 15% of the farm income potential farm income. And my point is, if the solution to that problem, what that leads to is 88% in that group, have to have an off farm job, the solution that is being presented to that needing an off farm job is you too can get a government contract.
[00:14:42] Speaker C: Ah, I see. So a program for everyone.
[00:14:49] Speaker A: Yes. Where the government is the one that's controlling the food and the prices and the amount that's produced. Right. If the school lunch contract says, we don't want your carrots this year, you don't. Right. Like you're still beholden to the government. And that's why I'm saying it's soft collectivism. They're not taking your farm. So there's still this guise, this feeling of independence. Independence and individualism.
Like the heart of farming. There's still that. Well, I still own my land.
Yes, but you don't set the price for your crop. You're working for the government. You are a government contractor at that point. That's the solution.
Surprisingly, the secretary offered a couple of other solutions.
[00:15:38] Speaker C: Blew my mind.
[00:15:39] Speaker A: One of them is you should put in a solar farm here in Nebraska.
[00:15:42] Speaker B: We're awarding of that number, 18 additional awards in Nebraska for wind projects, solar projects.
[00:15:50] Speaker C: So, solar farm. How can I graze cows on a solar farm?
[00:15:53] Speaker A: You can't. You might could graze sheep around it, but you're not grazing cows around it for sure.
[00:15:59] Speaker C: So your farm can go into the energy business.
[00:16:02] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:16:03] Speaker B: The question is, what would they do with that excess energy?
Well, we have a program called Pace and New Era and the Pace program and the new era program are aimed at recs and municipal utilities.
[00:16:18] Speaker A: So his big idea, his concept there was give your farm a second job.
[00:16:24] Speaker C: A way for the land, your farm, to make more money. But it's not on the food that you're raising.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: No. And I don't. For us, like, I don't understand how taking passes pastures out of a grazing rotation is better for us.
[00:16:39] Speaker C: Yeah, that's not bad.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Like, we have to graze.
[00:16:41] Speaker C: Well, another way you can do it is put your land into conservation.
[00:16:44] Speaker A: That's the other option is we will pay you to not farm. Not graze by putting your land in conservation, or not farm by putting your land into solar panels, or we'll give you a government contract.
[00:16:59] Speaker C: And these are his solutions.
[00:17:00] Speaker A: These are the solutions.
[00:17:02] Speaker C: You can work for the government and you can not farm.
[00:17:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:06] Speaker C: In order to make more money.
[00:17:08] Speaker A: Right.
[00:17:08] Speaker C: Not fix the food system, not fix the farming problem.
The food problem.
[00:17:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Part of that problem is our import export imbalance. We are net importers of food now. Billions of dollars. Wow. Are imported. We got a comment on our organics podcast from Tom, who is an organic farmer. He talked about the fact that he organically farms high quality product and it is exported overseas. He has buyers come in and look at his product to make sure that it's a high quality and it's exported then. And we're importing, as we talked about in that podcast, we're importing organics.
[00:17:58] Speaker C: Organics that are not. They are, they're.
Very few of them are actually inspected. Stuff is coming in from overseas that has not, does not have USDA inspected.
[00:18:13] Speaker A: That's right. And there's, there's not even a nod to the nutritional content of that food.
Tom was telling us that the food that gets checked for nutritional content is livestock food, not human food. No, human food doesn't matter what the nutritional content is. You can grow it hydroponically and have very little nutritional value to the food. Call it organic, send it to be human food.
[00:18:48] Speaker C: Right. But that would never fly on a live.
[00:18:51] Speaker A: In order to be livestock food, the nutrition has to be spot on. It has to be just right.
[00:18:57] Speaker C: Right.
Wow.
[00:19:00] Speaker A: So this import export balance just exacerbates the problem. If you decided not to play in the government system, if you said, I'm just going to take my stuff to market, the result of that import export.
[00:19:16] Speaker C: Imbalance, you're getting undercut. I mean, the farmer is getting undercut by the cheaper imports.
[00:19:22] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:19:22] Speaker C: You can't compete with that.
[00:19:24] Speaker A: No, because those cheap imports are what they set the price.
[00:19:27] Speaker C: There's your price point.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: And they're calling it organic.
[00:19:30] Speaker C: But our best food is being sent overseas because our system demands cheap.
[00:19:41] Speaker A: That's right.
[00:19:43] Speaker C: Yep.
[00:19:44] Speaker A: And then bringing it all the way back around the system. Demanding cheap means that 88% of farmers have to have an off farm job.
[00:19:55] Speaker C: Is that what we want for our country?
[00:19:58] Speaker A: It's not what we want. I can tell you that that is not what we want. And we're doing what we can do at the local level. We are taking our product to the store that we opened and selling it directly to the consumer.
[00:20:13] Speaker C: And that is a way for farmers to mitigate the cost problem and to raise more funds for their business, for their farm. Because farmers are for profit. Yes, it is a job. Just like Amazon and Walmart and the grocery store. It is a business model to grow food and to make money to live on it.
[00:20:41] Speaker A: Correct.
[00:20:42] Speaker C: It's what you're doing for your livelihood.
[00:20:45] Speaker A: That's correct.
[00:20:45] Speaker C: In order to make money, and I think because maybe because it's food, people think that you should just be a nonprofit and just volunteer your efforts to the snap program. I don't know. Like, I'm not, and I'm not being facetious, I'm. It's this. This thing, like, what? Farmers are trying to gouge people out of money whenever they set their prices at a reasonable price for the farmer. Now the farmer becomes the kind of the bad guy because it actually is more expensive than what the current system has prices set at.
[00:21:25] Speaker A: Yeah, we've talked about it multiple times that it is. Our grocery prices are artificially low. They are artificially deflated, fed by the imports, the cheap fed by the government subsidy programs. Fed by the cheap imports. I mean, the government subsidy programs, those commodity foods are what fill the center aisles of the grocery store. That's. Your ultra processed foods are coming from those subsidized crops.
[00:21:59] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: The other way that we're trying to help is we're starting to partner with local farmers, because oftentimes farmers want to farm. They do not want to be in marketing and sales. And so they're only left to take a livestock producer like us. If you don't want to be in marketing and sales, you're left with, well, I'll sell a whole cow.
[00:22:21] Speaker C: Right. And you can make, like, no money on doing that at all, because people who buy a whole calorie wanting a very good bulk price. And I get that. But what. What we've done in creating air to ground meats is our farm has the opportunity to sell by the cut to increase the value of that animal.
[00:22:44] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:45] Speaker C: Many times over. And then what you were just saying, the partnering with other farmers in this local area and saying, hey, we've got a direct to consumer outlet.
[00:22:55] Speaker A: Right.
[00:22:56] Speaker C: And we would love to partner with you and get you more money back in your pocket. And we all distribute through this one avenue. And we're really, we're pretty excited about that.
[00:23:10] Speaker A: Yeah, we are.
[00:23:10] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:23:11] Speaker A: And I get it. It's a small, it's a, you know, it's a tiny little eyedropper drop, but it's something. Right. Like, there is another way, and we're exercising that other way. And it is being successful.
[00:23:29] Speaker C: It is. It's being very well received. People are very happy about it. And we aren't the only ones. Yeah, we're small, but there are a lot of smalls out there. And there are quite a few of this, this model around the country. There are, they're popping up. Get on the Internet and look up regenerative farm near me and see if you can find somebody who is selling their products and maybe a local area around there. They're taking in, partnering with other farmers and getting the product to those people. Look on the Internet. You will find them.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Yeah. Eat wild is a great place to find it, right?
[00:24:13] Speaker C: Yeah. And this movement is moving. This movement is going, and we invite all of you to join this movement and buy local. Find yourself a local farmer, find yourself a local meat store, even if you have to have it shipped, even if you have your favorite. Hey, they're my favorite farmers. I'll be your favorite farmer. If you want me to ship you your food, we can do that. Find someone that you trust and go directly to those farmers and give them the opportunity to get the most value out of their product, whatever it happens to be.
[00:24:54] Speaker A: And maybe we can at least reduce that number of farmers that require off farm jobs without having to go into a soft collectivism.
[00:25:06] Speaker C: Right.
I will mention before we end, another one of the things that the secretary brought up was about the number of processing plants around the country over the years. Some years back, they really centralized processing of livestock into some, very centralized it into very few, and they're trying to decentralize it now.
[00:25:34] Speaker A: Yeah, they did that through regulations. Right. They regulated people out of business. And the most recent thing, although he has talked about, they are providing grants and loans and things to set up new processing plants, they've also just come out with brand new regulations on processing plants.
[00:25:53] Speaker C: Oh, good grief. See there? I thought there might be a little glimmer of hope. Well, I mean, I think you're right.
[00:26:01] Speaker A: If you listen to his words, you find hope in all of these things.
[00:26:04] Speaker C: Right.
[00:26:05] Speaker A: But the reality is, while, yes, they're setting up some new processing plants with government money, meaning that you're working for the government.
Right. For everybody else, here's a whole slew of new regulations.
[00:26:20] Speaker C: Sure.
[00:26:20] Speaker A: So we believe that this shift towards a soft collectivism does not lead anywhere good. Anytime that the government has the solution to the problem, I would at least propose that the solution is oftentimes worse than the problem itself. So in trying to fix, 88% of farmers have to have off farm jobs. Where we're going is that the farmers are going to be working for the government. And in my opinion, that is not where we want to be. History says that is not where you want to be.
[00:27:03] Speaker C: Leave us a comment and let us know what you think about this, how you feel. Do you agree with us? Do you disagree with us? Do you think that it is a good place for us to go and that maybe paying farmers government contracts is a good idea? Just let us know what your thoughts are in the comments. We really appreciate you guys hanging out with us again today. And until next time, bye, y'all.
[00:27:28] Speaker A: Bye.
