The Biggest Threat to Your Food!

[00:00:00] Speaker A: In 1935, the United States had 6.8 million farms. In 2023, 1.9 million farms. A 70% reduction in the number of farms. [00:00:20] Speaker B: What if we told you that the biggest threat to the food on your dinner table isn't inflation or the supply chain? What if we said that it's actually we have fewer farmers in this country than we have ever had before? Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast. My name is Shelly. [00:00:40] Speaker A: And my name is rich. [00:00:42] Speaker B: After 25 years of rich being in the Air Force, we left Washington, D.C. moved to Southwest Missouri and started farming. At 48 years old, we became farmers. Now, that is not the traditional retirement from someone who served 25 years in the military, mostly as a fighter pilot. So very untraditional type swing in our career. We were led down that path for a multitude of reasons, but here we are becoming something that we're actually losing in this country. And the statistics are staggering. [00:01:24] Speaker A: Yeah. In 1935, the United States had 6.8 million farms. In 2023, 1.9 million farms. A 70% reduction in the number of. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Farms in 90 years. [00:01:46] Speaker A: Yep. [00:01:47] Speaker B: Okay, but that doesn't necessarily mean that there's less land being farmed. [00:01:54] Speaker A: There is some less. It's not as drastic as that. The, the consolidation is really what has happened. The, the number of really big farms has increased, and a lot of that has to do with the United States government. In the, what was it, the seventies, the United States Department of Agriculture said get bigger, get out. In 1973, President Nixon's secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz, responded by calling upon American farmers to plant fence row to fence row. And he told them to get big or get out. And they traveled around the country telling everybody that this is the future of agriculture. You either get big or you get out. And it, it happened. [00:02:48] Speaker B: Yeah, it did. And another part of the problem is the farmer force is aging. And the app. We did not help out the average. Okay, y'all, we started. We. No, not significantly. Not. The average age is 57 and a half. [00:03:06] Speaker A: When we started that, we were 10 years younger than that. [00:03:09] Speaker B: Yeah, but we. Okay, but we didn't really, you know, you need, we all know we've. You needed to have started like get some 20 year olds in here to start bringing that average, you know, younger. So I don't think that we really helped out the average that way. But the average farmer is 57 and a half years old. So they're coming up on retirement age. And there are not people replacing them. The generation behind them, they're not there to replace them. And so instead of it being passed on to these new folks coming up, it's actually just not being farmed sometimes maybe it's being sold, put into conservation. A lot of land is in conservation, not being farmed at all. But they get, you know, paid by the government to not farm that land. So it's a problem. It's a real problem. [00:04:05] Speaker A: Yeah. I think over the past 20 years, about 50 million acres has gone out of farming. A lot of that is just urban sprawl. But you're right, there's, you know, a. The next generation that doesn't want to farm. It's real easy to take that land and put it into a conservation status where the government will pay you to not farm it and it just goes away. [00:04:33] Speaker B: So we do have these really large farms, but they're all farming four or five of the same crops. [00:04:40] Speaker A: Yeah. All commodity crops. [00:04:42] Speaker B: So they're commodity crops. You've got corn, wheat, soybeans, rice. Rice maybe. And I'm numb for sure, missing something. But commodity crops, they're growing. And that leads to a lack of diversity in our diet that makes less, you know, good whole foods be available. So all of these monocrops are going into the ultra processed food system rather than to, like, right onto your plate as broccoli or any other thing that you like to happen to eat. [00:05:21] Speaker A: If you look at any of the USDA data on farming, if you want to find things that you would normally find in your produce aisle, they call that specialty. [00:05:36] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:05:38] Speaker A: Like the government, the things that most of us think about as farmers growing. Like we all think of a tomato or a. [00:05:47] Speaker B: Well, typically we're going to think of the thing that we're going to put into a salad or on to. Into like maybe steamed vegetables, some. Some squash, some zucchini. Things that you would grow in your garden. [00:05:57] Speaker A: Yeah, that's all called specialty farming. [00:06:01] Speaker B: Oh, great. The rest of it is commodity. Commodity. [00:06:05] Speaker A: But when, when, from the government perspective, when you talk farming, that's commodity crops, otherwise it's specialty crops. [00:06:17] Speaker B: Yep. [00:06:18] Speaker A: Isn't that crazy? [00:06:19] Speaker B: It is crazy. But look, if the farmers are going away and the farmland is being all farmed in the same sort of manner, it's a problem for everyone. Now for us as farmers, we're interested in farmer things. But I think that even as a consumer, when you don't farm, maybe you have a garden, but you don't farm as your profession, this is still a problem for you because you eat food, you know. [00:06:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And the larger the farms get, the more likely they are to be a commodity crop and the less likely they are to be really interested in nutrition and things that you get from your small local farmer where, you know, for us, we're more interested in growing a high quality, high nutrient value product and we're less interested in how many widgets per square centimeter we can make, you know. [00:07:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And we are. We've become a dependent nation not only because we're kind of farming the same things. We're importing more. [00:07:41] Speaker A: We are a net food importer now of 2024 by the tune of billions of dollars. The scales have tilted. Yeah. I want to just talk like what you were just describing, like to think through that. The. As the number of small farms goes away and the number of large farms increases, the number of specialty crops is decreasing and the number of commodity crops is increasing because that's just what happens. And so like really the supply of those specialty crops is decreasing so that the idea of access even to the specialty crops, like all of the things that you would grow in a garden, access to that is getting less and less. So with that, the reliance on a supply chain to bring those from somewhere else, that reliance is increasing more and more, driving this imbalance that we've got as far as importing. [00:09:04] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, just a few months ago, whenever the dock workers were going to go on strike and did for a couple of days, everyone was a little bit freaked out because especially in Florida and on the east coast, that's where a lot of the imports come in from South America, growing a large majority of. Of the fruits and vegetables that we consume. [00:09:26] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:28] Speaker B: The spinach that we eat probably isn't grown here. [00:09:30] Speaker A: Yeah. I don't know. [00:09:31] Speaker B: You know. Well, look on the packaging. You know, I certainly the chiquita bananas and a lot of people were really focused in on that because they do come from South America. And the supply chain was about to be just broke. And the. I can imagine what the prices of banana would have become. [00:09:55] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:56] Speaker B: If everything had to come through the west Coast. [00:09:58] Speaker A: Yeah. The other thing that happens as the small farms go away is the local economy takes a hit. [00:10:10] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:10] Speaker A: Because like, we didn't really understand it nearly as. As well as we do now. But you know, if somebody buys a pound of ground beef from us, we're taking that dollar and putting it back into the local economy. Right. Like their dollar goes to us, our dollar goes to Kevin and Sarah to buy from Living Traditions Homestead to buy a steer to add to our crop of feeders, or it goes to Beaver Creek Feed Mill or Hirsch Feed Store or like that, that dollar. From a business perspective, that dollar keeps circulating around our local economy where if you buy a pound of ground beef that originated in the industrial system, meaning you're getting it from one of the big chain stores, that dollar. [00:11:12] Speaker B: Oh yeah, it's gone. [00:11:14] Speaker A: Gone. [00:11:16] Speaker B: Probably highly likely out of the country. I mean, it's gone. [00:11:20] Speaker A: Yeah. Wow. [00:11:23] Speaker B: It's good point. [00:11:23] Speaker A: We've talked about that. I mean, JBS is one of the largest beef producers. I think it is the largest beef meat producer and, or Packer, whatever. And they're not even owned in the United States. [00:11:39] Speaker B: They're Brazilian company. [00:11:42] Speaker A: So your, your dollar, instead of staying local and being circulated around to continue to benefit the local economy, just goes, it's gone. One of the reasons we are in the place that we are is that the price of farmland is continuing to rise. It's going up and up and up. And the access for a normal person to buy farmland is decreasing annually. Various reasons for that. One, these large corporations have large amounts of money and as they're buying up. [00:12:26] Speaker B: It drives the price. [00:12:27] Speaker A: It drives the prices up. [00:12:29] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:12:29] Speaker A: Venture capitalists and billionaires are buying up farmland. [00:12:34] Speaker B: Yeah. It's easy for them to outbid a. [00:12:36] Speaker A: Small farmer for various reasons. They're buying up farmland. They want a carbon credit, they want to put it into a conservancy, or they just think that farming is a good investment. I mean, no matter what it is, the net result is the prices of farmland just continue to go up and up and up. I think based on our research, the most expensive farmland I believe is Rhode Island. [00:13:09] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:09] Speaker A: It was over $20,000 an acre. [00:13:12] Speaker B: An acre for farmland. [00:13:15] Speaker A: That's. [00:13:16] Speaker B: I don't know when you get that back. Some expensive farmland. [00:13:24] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:25] Speaker B: Wow. Wow. Well, another problem to me is. [00:13:36] Speaker A: What. [00:13:36] Speaker B: We'Ve done in our culture and how we've treated farmers writ large and what we have said about the profession of farming. And we have not, we've kind of devalued it, but it is not a, you know, you're supposed to go to college and go get a white collar job sitting in a cubicle at the end of the interstate. That's what we're supposed to do, not go farm. [00:14:13] Speaker A: That's the best way to trap somebody in the system. The I need to take out a loan so that I have a mortgage. Right. Like you. That system is a trap. And if you're passing down a family farm from one generation to the next, generation to the next, you don't have to be caught in that trap, you don't have to be a part of the system. And I think that somewhere along the way, I don't know exactly where, maybe it was the get bigger, get out era, but it became, it changed. It did. It just changed. [00:15:03] Speaker B: It did. [00:15:03] Speaker A: And I know in the 2008ish timeframe, it really became, you have to go to college like you have to. Everybody has to go to college. And with that push came. You're trapped in the system with student. [00:15:21] Speaker B: Loan debt to the tune of trillions a year that we currently have in student loans. [00:15:26] Speaker A: Right. So this, the, the, the trap to me is set to keep, to, to force a person to become indebted so that you have to play in the game. The system. The, you must go to work at a 9 to 5 job. Like, you know, and it's just part of this system. And farming, really, it is outside of that system. If you're talking the small local family farm, you're operating outside of that system. You're, you're not doing what you're told to do. You're doing what you want to do. [00:16:07] Speaker B: And well, the corporations and the government, the corporations especially, and the institutions, you know, you're not institutionalized, you're outside of the institutional system. And that, that's a, that's a little, that's a threat to that system. They need you. [00:16:25] Speaker A: They need so much so that now farmers, even the ones that are still existing, are becoming indebted. [00:16:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:16:35] Speaker A: It's becoming like we've, we've devalued that small local farmer to the point where in order to stay in business, they have to have a job in the system or they have to take out. [00:16:48] Speaker B: Debt or they have a job in the system and they're encouraged to take on the debt through the USDA so that they can. There's, I mean, there's a, there's a, there's a very large, large play on this. Huge, huge. But once you get into farming, the policies and the regulations that go along with all of it are pretty substantial. [00:17:19] Speaker A: Yeah. I, I mean it started like we said back in the 70s of Get Bigger, get out. [00:17:23] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:17:24] Speaker A: And from there the government pushed that. And the by, you know, you look at the subsidies, and the subsidies are taking care of the commodity crops. The large farms that are, that are farming those commodity crops are the ones that get the subsidies. So the government is, has like made it a priority to ensure that those large farms stay in business. [00:17:51] Speaker B: Sure. [00:17:52] Speaker A: And not the small farm. [00:17:54] Speaker B: Right. But the certifications, Certification, if You want to, hey, I want to become an organic farmer. It's very expensive and a bunch of little, you know, hoops you have to jump through with the government in order to get certified to be organic or if you want to put in a processing plant or something to be part of the farming system or if you want to start farming particular location. And then all of a sudden the EPA comes in and says, no, you can't because of the, you know, whatever, whatever frog can't you now, you can't farm the land that you thought you were going to grow some specialty crop on. So the policies and infrastructure with the thing coming out with the processors now, the potential EPA rule that it's going to cost them millions even on the small processing for water treatment. For water treatment. And so the barrier to entry for new farmers when it comes to policies and certifications and infrastructure, it's, it's a hot. They're high ticket items. Yeah, you just go, you know, that would be great to be, to do that and to be independent and work for myself and farm and grow food. But man, oh man, the amount of funding that it would require and approvals that it takes to get from, from the government agencies is significant. [00:19:19] Speaker A: Yeah. So this, this is a problem for everybody. Like the idea of less farmers. [00:19:28] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:28] Speaker A: I mean that means that there is less food security. Right. You are more reliant on a supply chain that as we saw in 2020, is extremely fragile. It doesn't take much of an interruption for the supply chain to shut down. And being a net importer of food now in the United States, like you, we are now reliant on that extremely fragile supply chain. It's, it's not a, it's, it's not a, an easy thing to fix either, you know, like a diesel shortage or a trucker strike or a terrorist organization making ships sail around Africa instead of coming through a strait. I mean like there are so many, so many things, a war going on in Europe's breadbasket, like the supply chain, the fragility of a global supply chain is real. And when you get to the point that you're now reliant on that, this idea of food security is less certain. [00:20:54] Speaker B: So food security, let's break it in just a little bit. I mean, Europe is a, you know, they've got their issues. What if we said that if we went small and we could prop up or we could, we could rejuvenate. Rejuvenate, I guess, rural communities. Think about Will Harris, what he's doing down there. In Bluffton, Georgia, with white oak pastures and literally bringing back a small town from nothing it had gone to like it's dead. And he is slowly, systematically bringing back that rural, small area in southwest Georgia, at southeast Georgia. Wherever Bluffton is, I know it's south Georgia, that at any rate, he's down there, he's bringing that back. And how, by keeping the dollars there for one. You know, by hiring people and creating community. And one of the things that we like to do, as you mentioned, keep it local. So we buy an animal from someone local, we raise that animal, we go to a local processor, we have that animal processed, and then we take it to a local store and have it sold to a local person in the community. That piece of beef or chicken or lamb or whatever it is has stayed within a two county range. That's as local as it comes. And it's, it's good for the environment, it's good for the people, it's good for the land. You know, bringing it back to local, localized, decentralized food production. I it, if a person could get small holding of land, I don't know, five acres, you can start growing chicken. [00:22:51] Speaker A: And pigs. [00:22:52] Speaker B: And pigs. So we can, we could bring that back and start encouraging our young people and letting them know, hey, you don't have to go to college. Go to college if you want to, if that's what your career that you want to do requires. But hey, we encourage people to get into food production, to get into regenerative agriculture, to start learning about animal husbandry or growing broccoli and bringing those skills back into our young people. [00:23:25] Speaker A: Yeah, it's really important. [00:23:27] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, we've got a almost 13 year old who knows more about animals than most people. [00:23:33] Speaker A: Most people, yeah, for sure. So what can we all do about this issue about the ever declining number of farms and farmers that we're dealing with? The first thing is something that you've heard us say a lot of times already and that is buy local. Vote with your dollar. Tell everyone with your dollar. I support local. [00:24:04] Speaker B: Find a farmer, Talk to that farmer, get to know that farmer, educate yourself on what they're doing, how they're doing it, get, become friends with them. We have some customers, when she texts, she says, hey, food family. Yeah, you know, and we love that because we have become a family with them. And your local farmer, in the event that the supply chain kind of breaks down, your local farmer is probably going to be more apt to take care of you when you're part of their food family. [00:24:36] Speaker A: Yeah. And educating yourself really is important. Learn. Learn things. Learn about food, learn about health and how health and food relates to each other. And I think the more you learn about that, the easier it will become to make choices like buying local. [00:24:57] Speaker B: Yeah, well, you know, and we can all be advocates for policy changes. We can get a hold of our representatives or even our local people, especially for farmers markets. If you don't have a farmer's market, start a farmer's market. Make a place available for people to go and sell their garden food that they had extra of and increase your local food production that way. [00:25:29] Speaker A: Yeah. And for as far as, like, the nation goes, we were listening to Representative Thomas Massey talk about it. He represents 750,000 people in Kentucky, and he said that his phone rings an average of six times a day. I was floored. I figured it was hundreds of times at the least. And he said six. So if you want to actually get something across the face of your congressman, pick up the phone and call them. He was saying that basically form letters get ignored, phone calls get answered. [00:26:05] Speaker B: Right. Another thing we can do is just engage with our community. If you don't know what a CSA is, it is community supported agriculture. Fun story. Whenever we lived in Prattville, Alabama, we had just come back from Korea, and I found a local. I didn't know it was a CSA at the time, but I wanted fresh vegetables and to support local farms. And so I signed up to get a box of vegetables every week. And I would go and pick them up at this random location, this drop site, and get my box of vegetables every week. And it would always be wonderful because I would be like, okay, what do we get this week? And sometimes it would be cabbage and lettuce and tomatoes and squash in the summer. And then in the winter, I was like, what do I do with a. With a beet or a parsnip or a parsnip. And it would be root vegetables, onions, and things like that that we would get. And especially with the root vegetables, I had to learn, like, what am I doing? So I educated myself on how to cook. Man. Roasted parsnips are phenomenal, by the way. They were really good. And so learning the different ways and the different places that you can access local food, CSAs take farm tours. A lot of us offer them. Anybody who asks us, hey, I love your chicken. Can I come out and see your farm? 100%, yes, you can come out and see our farm. So farm tours and then a lot of times, educational events, farms. I know, little farm store, they hold events. Often they're in our local area for farmers to come and consumers to come and learn about what they're doing. We all eat food and we all have a part to play in supporting the farmers in this nation. Find yourself a local farmer and get to know them. If you have enjoyed this podcast, make sure to check out this next one where we talk more about food, freedom and farming.