USDA Says They're Helping Farmers. They're NOT!

[00:00:00] Speaker A: The US Government just ran a multi billion dollar shell game and farmers, especially regenerative farmers, are supposed to clap. [00:00:08] Speaker B: Recently The USDA made two major announcements. [00:00:12] Speaker A: One was a $12 billion bailout for row crop commodity farmers. And two was a $700 million announcement of a new pilot program for regenerative farming. [00:00:25] Speaker B: Farmers are not being freed. Farmers are being managed. And today we want to talk about, if we follow the money, what do we really get? [00:00:37] Speaker A: Welcome to the Dust yout Mud podcast. [00:00:38] Speaker B: I'm Rich and I'm Shelley. We like to talk about food freedom and farming. And today is a subject we're going to follow. The money. And it is about freedom for farmers that grow your food. [00:00:50] Speaker A: These recent announcements, who gets the real money? Commodity row croppers. 11 billion of that $12 billion that was announced this week is earmarked for commodity row croppers. We're talking corn, soy, wheat, like your standard row crops to include seed oils. [00:01:12] Speaker B: Basically your large acreage producers, your industrial system that fence row to fence row. These guys are needing help. [00:01:22] Speaker A: Why do they need help? According to the usda, it is high input costs, trade losses or interruptions, inflation, market disruptions are the words that they're saying. [00:01:35] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:01:36] Speaker A: The question though is who caused the disruptions? [00:01:38] Speaker B: Well, we can look at policies, we look at tariffs, we look at global exposure and the overall structure itself in our big ag system. [00:01:50] Speaker A: We've talked about the structure so many times on the podcast. The, the, you mentioned it. 1970s push from the USDA to go fence row to fence row, which has turned into road to road because they took down the fences. [00:02:05] Speaker B: Well, why do you need a fence? You don't have anything in there to hold in there. [00:02:08] Speaker A: That's right. We need commodity crops from road to road, acres after acres, and this program is bailing out those farmers. [00:02:16] Speaker B: So what's going to be the result of this program? Who's, who's going to benefit? [00:02:22] Speaker A: Let's think about it realistically and literally. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Okay? [00:02:26] Speaker A: The majority of debt over. It's like 69% of farm debt is held by 10% of the farmers that are the big row crop farmers. So the debt is going to get serviced. So who gets paid? [00:02:42] Speaker B: The banks. Right. The input companies keeping farmers buying their products. This will benefit them. So that because they want to make sure that those farmers are going to come back next year and if they're burdened with debts that they can't pay and haven't paid up on this last year, the bank's not going to loan them any money next year. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Right. [00:03:04] Speaker B: So they're going to. They're going to ensure that their customer is coming back. [00:03:07] Speaker A: Right. The input company is the chemical fertilizer companies, the pesticides, herbicides, insecticides, fungicides. And the seed companies has a lot of sides. It's a lot of sides. Which means killing. [00:03:20] Speaker B: Right. By the way, global markets get subsidized. And what I mean by that is the. The. For instance, North Dakota soybean farmers sell the majority of their soybeans to China. They export it. And so if our government says, here you go, North Dakota soybean farmers, guess where that money is actually going? That means that the subsidies are actually transferring to China, not to you, not to your plate. We need to just be eyes wide open here. [00:03:57] Speaker A: Right. And so what happens to the farmer? They stay on the debt treadmill. Yeah. So they're running hard. They're running really hard to the point where suicides are happening in farmers and have. Why? Because they're on a debt to treadmill. They're running and running and running. And where are they going? The same place you go when you run on a treadmill. [00:04:20] Speaker B: Nowhere. [00:04:22] Speaker A: Right. [00:04:22] Speaker B: This isn't relief. And we all think that it is, as taxpayers. Good. Take care of our farmers. We need to give them some relief. It's not relief. It's maintenance. That's what it is. It's barely maintaining. [00:04:37] Speaker A: Yeah. And it's management. We're going to manage the farmers. [00:04:40] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:42] Speaker A: I hate. [00:04:43] Speaker B: I know. Anyway, we're so aggravated by it. [00:04:45] Speaker A: The regenerative announcement. [00:04:46] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. [00:04:47] Speaker A: Like this was. Yeah, go ahead. [00:04:49] Speaker B: This was yesterday. [00:04:50] Speaker A: This was just yesterday. [00:04:51] Speaker B: And we got multiple texts from our friends and family, like, oh, my goodness, this is amazing news. You guys need to look into this. [00:04:58] Speaker A: This is great. I'm sure you've already seen it, but you've got to check into this, because we are regenerative farmers. Right. So the government announcing a $700 million pilot program, which means. It'. [00:05:12] Speaker B: Right. [00:05:13] Speaker A: It's a pilot program. This means we're going to start here and grow it into something else. Right. A pilot program for regenerative farmers. Friends and family are like, check this out, guys. You're finally getting the support that you continuously talk about. [00:05:29] Speaker B: Yeah, Right. [00:05:30] Speaker A: We watched the entire live announcement led by Brooke Rollins, who is the secretary of the Department of Agriculture. Secretary Kennedy was there. Dr. Oz was there. Like it was. And some farmers. [00:05:47] Speaker B: Yep, farmers. And some of the farmers that are leading this pilot program and getting it off of the ground. We were enthusiastically observing and watching this press release, and we kind of cocked our heads Though there was something said and we're like, wait, what? [00:06:07] Speaker A: Huh? [00:06:08] Speaker B: Back that up just a second. I want to hear what she said again. [00:06:12] Speaker A: So we're not new to this part of things, right? So like, we're informed enough that it made us question what was being said. And then those questions led to some research and then quick research. Check us on it. Let us know in the comments if you disagree or think that we're missing it. But here's what happened. [00:06:32] Speaker B: And to validate also, he was in the Air Force and running programs in the Pentagon before we were doing this. And when you hear government agencies speaking, you just listen with a different ear. Whenever you've been in charge of multiple billions of dollar budgets and you just have an ear for. Therefore it gives you. I'm just trying to validate your ability to listen and say something's not quite straight here. Right. [00:07:00] Speaker A: So here's what happened. Earlier this year, the Trump administration, through Doge, clawed back, is the words that were used, $3 billion in climate related programs that were being run through the USDA and the NRCS. Natural Resources Conservation Service, in particular, they clawed back $3 billion. It was earmarked, you know, climate associated. And as the administration changed, we're going to get rid of all of this climate stuff. In reality, those programs were climate related in that they were conservation related and were leading towards more regenerative practices. That was the reason that they were there. So there was $3 billion funded initially through the Iraq, the Inflation Reduction act under the Biden administration that was clawed back. Okay. The administration rejoiced. We're getting rid of all of this, you know, BS climate crap. Climate crap. Right. So everybody was happy. We clawed back $3 billion. Then the announcement yesterday of $700 million. And you got to. There are a lot of YouTube videos out there that show eight minutes. And that was the portion of the announcement where Secretary Rawlins was speaking. You got to go find the 26 minute, 24, 26 minute clip because that shows the questions that happened at the end of this. [00:08:40] Speaker B: The reporters were asking, and Secretary Rollins pointed to her experts, which one of them was the farmer who is in charge of building this pilot program? And the reporters asked her and she answered them quite directly, as she should. [00:08:59] Speaker A: Well, the, yeah, the NRCS person was the one that was actually giving out the real information. So the real information minus the questions from the reporters were what programs are these being run through? The exact same programs that have always existed through the nrcs. [00:09:21] Speaker B: Okay, so no new program. [00:09:23] Speaker A: No new program. Well, what do you have to do to get in the programs? The exact same things you had to do before. [00:09:31] Speaker B: Okay, well what changed then? [00:09:34] Speaker A: What changed was you are now filling out a one page form instead of a ten page form. The last administration reduced the twenty page form to a ten page form. This, the announcement is you now fill out a one page form and you can put your entire farm on the same form. [00:09:57] Speaker B: So a whole farm program rather than I'm going to focus on water retention or I'm going to focus on my timbers or so each thing used to be different. [00:10:08] Speaker A: That's correct. [00:10:09] Speaker B: And now it's all. It's going to be a whole farm regenerative program. [00:10:15] Speaker A: Well, you call it regenerative, it's the same program. Okay, so the big announcement was using the buzzwords that will make the Make America Healthy Again base very happy. And you bring the Make America Healthy Again guru, Secretary Kennedy in to be part of this announcement. And Dr. Oz and you talk about in the announcement, make America healthy. The, the highly processed foods, ultra processed foods, making America sick. And these regenerative practices bringing in real food and practices that are going to help the soil. And like the. All of the words are there. [00:10:59] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:10:59] Speaker A: So the ruse, the guise is we'll say all of the things that are going to make our supporters happy. The reality is the only thing that changed is the forms that you're filling out. [00:11:16] Speaker B: So pretty much they've bundled it up like the practices. [00:11:20] Speaker A: Yes. [00:11:21] Speaker B: They're streamlining the paperwork. [00:11:23] Speaker A: Yes. [00:11:24] Speaker B: Because farmers don't know how to fill out papers, I guess, and labeling it. [00:11:29] Speaker A: Now regenerative instead of climate. Like they took the climate things out of the, out of the verbiage and replaced it with regenerative. The programs are the same, so. [00:11:43] Speaker B: But there's a one page application. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. They said it. But they're treating farmers with their one page application, which does. It could save time. But they're treating the farmers like they're stupid. I'm not stupid. Right, you're probably not stupid if you're a farmer, I can tell you it is not easy. Farmers are not dumb. No, no. [00:12:11] Speaker A: The practice of farming is not easy. [00:12:13] Speaker B: No, it is not. [00:12:14] Speaker A: If you had trouble with the 10 page or even 20 page, but the reduced down from the last administration 10 page application, you bring it into the NRCS office, which you have to take it to anyway, and they will help you fill it out like they help you with the application. [00:12:36] Speaker B: Right, but the problem is not the application. [00:12:39] Speaker A: No. It's the fact that the farmers are still in debt. The whole entire industry is still consolidated. [00:12:47] Speaker B: Land access. [00:12:50] Speaker A: Land is still ridiculously expensive. It's still being hoovered up by multi billionaires that are using it as investment property. [00:12:59] Speaker B: Well, crop insurance traps. I mean the whole crop insurance and subsidy thing that farmers begin to, especially row crop farmers begin to rely on and they become dependent on that. Right? And moreover the export dependency because they're growing things that may or may not be necessary here. They depend on the export market to get their crops sold. [00:13:29] Speaker A: So one thing is sort of new, okay. And that is what they called the sustains matching portion. [00:13:39] Speaker B: Okay. [00:13:40] Speaker A: That is we're going to bring in corporate, have a public private partnership. [00:13:51] Speaker B: That little phrase you just said, right there is just becoming more and more ubiquitous in various government bureaucratic programs. [00:14:02] Speaker A: Well, the crop insurance that you just talked about, another public private partnership, okay? The sustains is a public private partnership. So the corporations come in. The corporations are needing the image boost of regenerative of we're helping the environment. They get their points as far as the World Health Organization and the EU and UN goes, right? Like they're getting environmental points. How can they do that? They can put money into these new regenerative programs and the government then will match those dollars. So a corporation can put in a dollar and the government puts in a dollar and it goes to these programs and you know, helps the regenerative farmer. [00:14:56] Speaker B: So corporations are going to help define regenerative ag and the farmer's going to help the corporation. And we've talked about this before with Bayer taking over Monsanto and trying to become quote regenerative. The farmers are going to help the corporations meet their quote criteria for like carbon. [00:15:20] Speaker A: That's right. [00:15:22] Speaker B: Oh, okay. [00:15:23] Speaker A: And their metrics, right? Like all of these companies have metrics that they have to meet for their social governance score. And this they now they're going to be able to do that not by changing their own practices, but by just dropping dollars into the bucket of these same programs. [00:15:41] Speaker B: And guess who's subsidizing the whole thing? [00:15:43] Speaker A: The U.S. taxpayer. [00:15:44] Speaker B: The U.S. taxpayer, okay. And corporations then get to claim that they now have a regenerative supply chain. [00:15:57] Speaker A: So expect the words region trademarked to start showing up for sure on products. [00:16:03] Speaker B: Well, just the same exact way that the corporations usurped, took whatever you want to call it. The word organic. Organic farming used to be so niche. I mean it was, you know, the, the really earth conscious health nuts were grew organic food. It grew, it caught on and now you can get cheap, quote, organic food all over the place. And so when they took. We're not even allowed to use the word. It's so owned by the government that you have to pay a lot of money and have them out on your farm and have all of this stuff done. And so the entire organic world take what happened there and now we're going to do it too. Regenerative. [00:16:48] Speaker A: Right. So I see the change coming. You're going to have to become certified if you want to use the word, because now the corporations are going to own the word. In conjunction with the government, they're going to own that word. So now you're going to have to become certified, pay all of the fees and fines and paperwork and forms and all of the things. That's the next step. [00:17:13] Speaker B: So we'll just call it regenerative capturing. Right. And this is now going to be a public private partnership or the privatization of an entire philosophy. [00:17:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:17:25] Speaker B: The whole thing. So we, we have minutes probably left to use the, the, the term, the terminology, all of the things of. We're a regenerative farm because I can tell you we're not going to be involved in any of this. We are going to grow real food for real people on a real farm, by a real family. Maybe they'll take real. I don't know. They may. But at any rate. [00:17:51] Speaker A: So the entirety of the system that we're talking about here, in our opinion, is a farmer slave system. It is. The whole thing is ensuring that the farmers are doing what the government wants them to do. It is slavery. It is slavery to debt. It is slavery to corporations. It is slavery to the government. The whole thing is designed to keep you right there on that treadmill that we just described. [00:18:22] Speaker B: So the bank owns the land. [00:18:23] Speaker A: Yes. [00:18:23] Speaker B: The chemical companies dictate the inputs because they're going to tell you what to do with their seeds that they have patented. [00:18:29] Speaker A: Correct. [00:18:29] Speaker B: Crop insurance dictates the planting, global markets dictate the price, and the government dictates survival through bailouts. So tell me, in any of that, with all of those entities dictating upon a human being what they're doing to grow food has anything to do with freedom? Not one thing. [00:18:54] Speaker A: Not one thing. The image of the farmer free, standing in his field, it's bogus. Not. No, not at all. What's happening. So this regenerative program is not going to add to that freedom either. It does nothing about land access, it does nothing about debts that the farmers are in or reforming that debt. It doesn't Reform the insurance programs that the farmers are required to keep. It doesn't bring any local market reform. Allowing farmers to access their own local market, do anything to decentralize the processors. Right. The big four that we keep talking about, especially with beef, that the centralization of all of the processing of this does nothing and it does nothing to free farmers from the monocrop model. During the announcement, they said, this will act as a Bridge. The $3 billion of the last program was designed to act as a bridge. [00:20:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. It's not in it. And you know, here's the thing. America needs an industrial scale. We do. We have 330/something million people in this country. A lot of them are in the cities. We have millions of people living, millions of people living in concrete jungles. We don't grow food there. And so therefore it's like a, it's a concrete jungle, but a food desert, you know, and so we need industrial scale food growth. [00:20:37] Speaker A: Yeah. We would need 25 million farmers to get back to the farmer to consumer ratio that we had back in the 1900s before the industrial revolution. [00:20:49] Speaker B: So the labor doesn't exist. We don't have that many farmers. We don't have that many people who want to be farmers, by my estimate. So. And finding people to do that hard work is, is an ever growing challenge for, for our country. But the industrial scale must exist. So what do we do? [00:21:09] Speaker A: Well, the industrial scale does not have to mean industrial slavery. [00:21:13] Speaker B: Okay. No, you're right. So there could be a model where the farmer, I don't know, owns their land and could get out from underneath and transition out from underneath this industrial slavery farming apparatus. [00:21:35] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. But the USDA in this week's announcements just told us where the focus is. $12 billion to commodity row crop farmers. [00:21:49] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:49] Speaker A: $700 million to a regenerative pilot program that is the same programs that were there before. There's the, there's the focus. [00:22:02] Speaker B: There's the tip. [00:22:03] Speaker A: There's the focus. Commodity row crop farmers. [00:22:07] Speaker B: Yeah. So all in all, don't let the speeches fool you. It's the same. This is not a political conversation. This is just a conversation about your food, how it's grown, who's growing it, and who's really actually in charge of the entire thing. I mean, it's just truth. And don't be fooled by what they're, by what they're saying. Actually follow the money and what they're actually doing. [00:22:32] Speaker A: Right. A free food system requires free farmers. Free meaning not controlled. Right, right. Like the farmers have to be free. Free farmers can't exist in a system that's built on debt, bailouts and global dependency. No, you're not going to get the free American farmer as long as that is what's driving the system. [00:22:58] Speaker B: And with the Maha, and they're kind of tapping into the Maha gang, and I'm all about healthy human beings, but if we want healthy people, we need free farmers, and this right here is not that at all.