Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: That's the awareness that this podcast is trying to bring right now. Is the awareness of, what's this farm bill really doing? In the late 1930s, the United States created a farm economy that got us to where we are today. And right now, we're all waiting on the United States Senate and House of Representatives to maybe pass a 2024 farm bill.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The last time we passed a farm bill was in 2018, and a lot in our world has changed since then.
[00:00:32] Speaker A: Will they pass one today? We're going to talk about that.
[00:00:35] Speaker C: Welcome to the Duster Mud podcast, episode 80.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: I'm rich, and I'm Shelley.
[00:00:40] Speaker C: I spent 25 years in the United States Air Force and retired from that job. And for the past three years, we have been farmers. We are regenerative farmers in the southwest portion of the Ozarks of Missouri. The rhetoric has been mounting, especially this week as we approach the deadline for passing the 2024 farm bill. We've got five days to the end of the fiscal year as of recording this podcast, and the rhetoric is reaching all kinds of hype.
[00:01:13] Speaker A: Oh, my goodness. Yeah. First of all, no farmers, no food, and we are in a food farm crisis.
[00:01:23] Speaker B: America is facing a farm and food crisis as we're here speaking today in the nation's capital.
There are farmers and ranchers that are.
[00:01:34] Speaker A: Struggling according to the rhetoric. If we do not get a bill passed, we are going to see people starving and in utmost crisis, no matter where we traveled.
[00:01:44] Speaker B: One thing was clear. America's farm economy is in crisis. And with no farms, there's no food. And when you lose farms, you lose food. And you lose food, you have food insecurity, which leads to national insecurity.
[00:02:00] Speaker A: Now, is that really the case, or are we ramping this up in order to get a bill through the House and the Senate?
[00:02:09] Speaker B: The time for Congress to step up and pass a new farm bill is now an extension of the current policy is not acceptable. America is in a farm and food crisis. And if we don't have farms, we don't have food, we don't have food security, we don't have national security. A nation that cannot feed itself will not exist.
[00:02:31] Speaker C: All right, let's start with where. What is the current status? Okay, so current status is the House version of the bill. HR 8467 has passed the agriculture committee. It has made its way to the floor, but it has not yet been voted on.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: Okay, so they have at least put together something.
[00:02:53] Speaker C: Yes.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: The Senate, on the other hand, has not. Their agriculture committee has not submitted anything.
[00:03:00] Speaker C: That's correct. They haven't even put together a full bill.
[00:03:03] Speaker A: So the thought that our congress persons are going to get a bill put together and passed in the next five days, meanwhile, I believe they were working on something to try to keep the government from shutting down. They're quite busy. I do. I will see.
[00:03:25] Speaker C: Yeah, we'll see.
[00:03:26] Speaker A: We'll see.
[00:03:26] Speaker C: That, at least is where it is now, the farm bill itself, I think there is some misconception about what it actually covers. There are actually twelve different subcategories in the farm bill.
The largest subcategory within the bill is the nation's nutrition program.
[00:03:47] Speaker A: And the nutrition program covers snap school lunches. All nutritional support programs across that are federal. Across the country fall underneath that. And it is 76% of the total cost of the bill.
[00:04:06] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:04:06] Speaker A: Okay.
[00:04:07] Speaker C: That's right.
Some of the other subcategories that we're probably familiar with are commodities.
The conservation. There's a trade section.
There are some others that are sort of weird, like rural development, research, extension, forestry, energy, crop insurance is one that we've most likely heard of. And then the 12th category is miscellaneous.
[00:04:35] Speaker A: Of course, that little miscellaneous thing where they can just throw all sorts of things in there.
[00:04:41] Speaker C: So we mentioned the impending deadline. So what happens, okay, if they don't.
[00:04:47] Speaker A: Yeah. What are the, what are the consequences to farmers across the country if they don't get anything passed?
[00:04:54] Speaker C: To me, I think, like, biggest issue is snap. Right. 76% of the funding is a nutrition program, and there are a lot of people that rely on that program in order to eat.
[00:05:10] Speaker A: Right. Well, the fact is that that program is. All of the nutrition programs are protected. They are mandatory pay. We are going to make sure that those funds are covered by law.
[00:05:26] Speaker C: Yeah, it's a permanent law.
[00:05:27] Speaker A: It's permanent law. It's mandatory. So if they do not pass a bill by September 30, that those folks are not at risk.
[00:05:38] Speaker C: That's right. That program continues. They can't add to it. They can't do some other things to it. But the program as it exists right now continues. So there goes 76% of the entire bill is going to just continue.
[00:05:50] Speaker A: Okay. So cool.
[00:05:52] Speaker C: Right?
[00:05:52] Speaker A: Those folks are not. There's not a threat to that.
[00:05:55] Speaker C: So now we'll talk about the 24% of the bill remaining. That is typically what people think of as what is impacting farmers. Okay, so now when you say, what is the impact of farmers? Now we can go there.
[00:06:09] Speaker A: Yeah. I think there's a lot of misconception out there about what this farm bill really is and what it really, really does. And for me, I was, as a farmer now, I was quite excited to hear that they were coming up with a new farm bill, and maybe it would benefit regenerative small farms like ours. But as we dug into the bill and dug into what it really means and who it impacts, the light began to come on for us. And the thing that it was shocking.
[00:06:41] Speaker C: What you're talking about is as the hype ramps up about farmers and failing, and we're farmers.
[00:06:50] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:06:50] Speaker C: So are we supposed to be caught up in this hype?
[00:06:54] Speaker A: Right.
We thought we might be. Supposed to be. That's why we started researching it. Right, right. A little bit. But mostly this targets commodity farmers. And a commodity farmer is someone who is a monocrop type farmer growing some corn, wheatley, rice, cotton and soybeans. Those are the five primary monocrop, commodity things that are farmed in this country. And the majority of the farm bill, I guess, addresses those crops.
[00:07:32] Speaker C: Yeah. So as far as the portions of the bill that do affect farmers, we've got that subsidies for commodities, we've got crop insurance, disaster assistance, and then any kind of conservation things that farmers may be doing with their land.
[00:07:45] Speaker A: So disaster assistance, if there is a fire or a hurricane or a flood or true blue disaster, hail. Hail can wipe out a crop. Right. It keeps that farmer from losing everything that they have and they get payment out.
[00:08:04] Speaker C: And so, on an annual basis. If you're wondering how big of an impact these government subsidies make for the average farmer, 39% of net farm income comes from government payments.
Now, as we saw that, that immediately made us start thinking, because 39% of our farm income does not come from government payments. So if we're starting to talk averages and we're basically 0% of that, that means that somebody else is receiving more. So, as we got to researching it, what we show is 70% of the subsidies go to 10% of farms.
[00:08:52] Speaker A: Say that one more time.
[00:08:54] Speaker C: The top 10% of farms get 70% of the subsidies.
[00:09:01] Speaker A: And these farms are huge. They are really, really big.
[00:09:07] Speaker C: Yeah. Industrial scale operations, very large farms.
[00:09:12] Speaker A: Another thing that we found in the research was that around 10,000 farms. Now, how many farms are there currently in the United States registered farms?
[00:09:23] Speaker C: Last I checked, 1.7 million and declining.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: Okay, 1.7 million and declining. 10,000. That's an nth of a percent. That's a very small percentage of the total farms have received subsidies for 39 consecutive years totaling $11 billion. Yeah, that's a very few farms.
[00:09:47] Speaker C: It is.
[00:09:48] Speaker A: In case anybody that's a little bitty bitty, teeny, tiny slice. But for 40 years, nearly, they've been subsidized.
[00:09:56] Speaker C: Correct.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: To grow and grow and grow.
[00:10:01] Speaker C: Right.
[00:10:02] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:10:03] Speaker C: To $11 billion worth. Yeah.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Wow.
[00:10:09] Speaker C: Yeah. So small farms like ours.
[00:10:13] Speaker A: Like yours. Not like ours.
[00:10:16] Speaker C: The 80% of farms that we've talked about in previous podcasts, the small farmers are not really the ones that are being held up by the farm bill.
So should we be concerned from a farm perspective?
[00:10:35] Speaker A: No, it doesn't really affect us, honestly at all.
But I think that it affects the mind of the american people because I'm looking through comments on some of these house floor YouTube postings, and, you know, people are really cheering on the american farmer, and they're.
[00:10:54] Speaker C: Which is awesome.
[00:10:55] Speaker A: It is, you know, save american farmers, help them save american farms. But when 80% aren't getting any slice of the help, it's very misleading to the american public as to who's actually being helped. That's the awareness that this podcast is trying to bring right now, is the awareness of what's this farm bill really doing?
[00:11:21] Speaker C: Yeah. And what that leads to is the small, independent farmers that are not receiving government subsidies. We're not receiving help from the government. It makes it difficult to compete with large.
[00:11:38] Speaker A: Right.
[00:11:39] Speaker C: Huge industrial size farms that are receiving government subsidies. So we're both farming, but we're not receiving the subsidy from the government that the big guy is. So not only do we not have economies of scale and all of those types of things, they're also getting government help that we're not getting. So the idea of competing as a small farm with large farms is like, we don't. Right off the table.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Yeah, we don't.
[00:12:12] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:12:13] Speaker A: But perhaps that puts us into a more resilient position.
So let's talk about resilience and reliance. And whenever farmers, big or small, are reliant on government programs, what sort of vulnerability does that put on that farmer and on that land and on that crop?
[00:12:35] Speaker C: Oh, we're seeing it right now. We're sensing the vulnerability of those large farms that are lobbying in Washington, DC, that then the congressmen are frenzying about.
It's not us lobbying because we're not reliant on those subsidies. The fragility of relying on a government program to support your farm is real. Like if the program isn't passed and you're reliant on it.
[00:13:16] Speaker A: Right.
[00:13:19] Speaker C: That is a really, really, there is definite risk there.
[00:13:22] Speaker A: Yeah. A really vulnerable situation.
[00:13:25] Speaker C: What you brought up at the beginning was in the 1930s, is when we started building this farm economy where the large farms can get larger and the individual crops can get larger, and it's all being subsidized by the government. And when you build an entire economy based upon that government subsidy, you become reliant on that government subsidy. And so the foundation of the whole farm economy is only as firm as the government subsidies that it's reliant upon.
[00:14:08] Speaker A: But those farmers that are growing the, let's just say one of the five crops, they're locked in on what they're going to do, what they're going to produce, produce more, produce better, get your all about the yield. And that makes sense to me. But they're also in a cycle of a system that has locked them into this monoculture situation that in order, they can't diversify, hardly if they want to.
[00:14:41] Speaker C: There's been a few farmers, take Gabe Brown or will Harris, that have broken out of that industrial, government supported farming system and went towards a diversified, regenerative, sustainable approach to farming. And both of them discuss how, like, almost impossible, that is very, very difficult to break out of that system, especially when your family, your livelihood depends on successful farming.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Right? Well, the majority of the farmers are not debt free. And whenever they take out government loans, though, although they are low percentage government loans, they have taken out loans or they have very large credit with the bank that they are able to roll over with the years.
If they can't service those loans with their subsidies, they lose it.
[00:15:44] Speaker B: Many producers are barely breaking even. And if there are, they're lucky. Others are sinking deeper into debt with USDA, the United States Department of Agriculture, forecasting farm sector debt to hit a record $54 billion by year's end, the highest inflation adjusted level in more than 60 years.
[00:16:06] Speaker C: Credit is one of the things that's in the farm bill also. Ah, like, so credit programs. Yeah.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: Right.
[00:16:16] Speaker C: You're loaning money from the government, and then you're relying on government subsidies to repay the loan to the government.
[00:16:22] Speaker B: And it's not a handout. These are public private partnerships.
[00:16:26] Speaker A: It's a vicious, vicious cycle. And the food system in this country, for whatever it's worth, the food system in this country is dependent upon these farmers growing the food. And if they, if they're shackled by the debt and they don't get the payments, they can't grow the food.
[00:16:48] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:16:49] Speaker A: Now I don't agree with the food that's being grown, that whole thing. But at the same time, it, it is, it's a, it's a vicious, very, very ugly cycle.
[00:17:02] Speaker C: And we've talked about a bunch of times on previous podcasts. The artificially low prices of food. And this is where that comes from.
The us consumer expects a very low price for food, and the only way you can get there is by the government subsidizing the production of that food. Because it's not cheap, right. Just to produce, the food is not cheap. So when the government subsidizes it, then the cost to the consumer can be low.
[00:17:35] Speaker A: So where should the concern really be with this? With the farm bill? With the farm economy?
What should we really be worried about right now?
[00:17:49] Speaker C: To me, the farm bill is an authorization. It takes an appropriation to even assign money to that authorization.
The majority of the programs within the farm bill are going to continue just like they are. Some new stuff is not going to be able to happen. Some new programs won't actually happen.
Some of the subsidies that have increased over the years may revert back to a lower amount, but for the most part, everything within the farm bill is just going to continue.
[00:18:34] Speaker A: Got it.
[00:18:38] Speaker C: The fuss, the hype, the hubbub to me is it's not warranted, it's misplaced. It's helping the top 10% of these huge farms anyway. And it just isn't, it's not all that big of a deal. My prediction is they're going to extend what's already there. This is an election year.
[00:19:01] Speaker A: They're not going to make any nutrition.
[00:19:02] Speaker C: Program is tied into this whole thing.
Nobody's going to make any changes. There's going to be a lot of hype. And the representatives and senators that come from states and districts where farming is very important will look very good in front of their constituents because they made a lot of hype. And at the end of the day, they'll pass an extension. They're not going to let it lapse and they're not going to do something new.
[00:19:29] Speaker A: That's my, and the real question is, is the farm bill the answer anyways? My assertion is the farm bill is not the answer. The farm bill is more of a problem for the food economy, the farming economy of this country. And if we could revert back to prior to the 1930s and take away some of the practices and policies that govern the farm economy in this country, that we could create more resilience, more diversity and more strength within our local communities.
[00:20:05] Speaker C: It would revert back to local. Absolutely. And we totally believe in the benefits and really the power of local communities and local farmers taking care of their local community. That to us, is the overall answer to what's going on or what should happen with the farm economy?
The US consumer is going to have to get used to it for that to happen. The actual price of food for that change to occur, there would be a shock to the system if food stopped being subsidized. The production of food stopped being subsidized.
Billions of dollars.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: That's true.
[00:21:05] Speaker C: On an annual basis. Billions of dollars are spent to subsidize the production of food, which artificially lowers the price of food.
[00:21:14] Speaker A: And you say artificially because there is still a real cost and it is still paid for by someone, but it.
[00:21:21] Speaker C: Is paid for by the government instead of by the person buying the food, where those like us who are just producing food without the government subsidies. That's why there's this big imbalance, because we have to pass on the cost of producing the food to the consumer instead of having it artificially lowered by a government subsidy. So where does that leave us in what we think of, or what we think is a. We need to rework the entire farm system that the farm economy, the agriculture economy, the farming economy, however you want to say it needs to go, like, stop, right? Like let's stop that and let's go back to something that is sane.
[00:22:23] Speaker A: Maybe our biggest takeaway from this is to focus on local find your local farmer, support that local farmer, support your local food economy. And as we gradually get out of and stop purchasing the food from the commodity growers, we don't have to. We can vote with our dollar every single day and support agriculture, support growers that are not participating in these programs and switch our own local food supply to one that's more resilient for ourselves.
[00:23:04] Speaker C: Yeah. So for us, instead of being concerned with the farm bill and whether or not it passes, we believe the concern is actually the larger farm economy and getting back to something that supports local.
[00:23:21] Speaker A: Thank you guys for joining us again today on the Dust or Mud podcast. If you are getting value from these podcasts, we would certainly appreciate it if you would hit that subscribe button and leave us a comment with where you're at, with what you think about the farm bill and how it's affecting you and maybe your farm. Until next time. Bye, y'all.
[00:23:39] Speaker C: Bye, y'all.
