Grubstakers - Episode 219: Communal Farming, feat. Nathanael Haun

Episode Date: March 10, 2021

We're joined by Nathanael Haun, communal farmer and noted poster. We cover Monsanto, factory farming, and the corporate techniques killing family farms across America for decades. You should all read his Substack post "The American Collective: the role of the commune and party in the 21st century of the American Continent", as it is excellent. By the way, did you know that in Japan the LDP appointed a "Minister of Loneliness"? Where to find Nathanael: https://turbonics.substack.com/ @Turbo_Fucker

We find people that basically can't make enough to eat before they go into the fields. I don't believe that. I think that you're looking at other places that are not Central Romana. People actually who focus on and who like getting an orgasm never get one. Pull up your socks and figure out what you're going to do. Any chance we'll ever get to be a complete red state? Oh, yeah. Well, the future's always uncertain. But more uncertain now.

And listen, Blue Ivy is six years old. Beyonce's dead. She tried to outbid me on a painting. Everybody in Atlanta right now at the Louis Vuitton store, if you black, don't go to Louis Vuitton today. In five, four, three, two. That's why you need to take a meeting with Kanye West, Bernard Arnault. Hello, and welcome to Grubstakers,

the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined today by my co-hosts. Yogi Paywall. Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. And so we've been doing research this month on animal agriculture and factory farming and Cargill and Monsanto and glyphosate and Roundup Ready soybeans.

And I started to become worried who is actually involved in the food production in the United States so that we can learn what is real and what isn't, how food production actually works in the United States and what the political implications of that are and what some possible alternatives for the future might be. So our guest today is Nate Hahn. He's at Turbo underscore fucker on Twitter. He is a longtime family farmer who has become involved in communal agriculture. And he joins us today to hopefully talk us through a bit about what is real and what isn't in the food supply. Nate, thank you for being with us.

And so I guess my first question for you is how much like your life is the video game Farming Simulator 2019? Like, if I took three edibles, would I accurately be able to experience what it is like being you for a day? Maybe. I've never played it. Spoken like a true farmer. Wait, my question is, do you use a combine and is it really cool? No, I do not use a combine. I mostly work with forage and livestock, actually. Oh, okay.

But I have rode in a combine when I was real little. It's fun. It's cool. Nice. Yeah, I think it's only German farmers who do their day jobs and then go play farming simulator after. Yeah. Some people just can't get enough of it.

But I understand, Nate, that your family has been involved in family farming. I was just wondering, how far back does your family farm go? And can you tell us a bit about the history of family farming in the United States? I mean, I strongly suspect my family has been farming since the Bronze Age, pretty much continuously. Farming in the United States, it's been interesting to see what's happened.

Where do you want me to start out now for you is uh farming in your family from your your dad and mom's side did you go back both ways or is it on one side no it's all along my uh dad's side of the family gotcha uh um you know from the research we've done we've seen that uh farming uh in terms of the larger corporations has declined in this country in that it's more it's harder to be a profitable farmer today than ever before how has it been to watch uh that degradation in front of your eyes over the last few decades i mean uh have you ever had someone in your life that uh like had a drug addiction or a chronic disease yeah it's it's like that but everyone it's absolutely miserable fuck

yeah that that sounds about right man um before we recorded uh you were talking about how uh the farming industry is run by dinosaurs uh and uh they are batshit basically what has been your experience with that population i mean you can't you can't work with them they're you can't do business with them you can't reason with them can't talk to them because i mean they fundamentally just don't care like because what they expect will happen is uh they're gonna farm whatever land they've got left into the ground their kids who are you know like in their 40s and 50s now uh they just think i'm gonna give you this you're gonna get a big chunk of cash for it after i you know croak and uh then you'll have some money do whatever go go ham go wild right is it because they've just basically given up that because they're like this is it's a dead end so i might as well do what i want to do and then give you money and then roll out because fundamentally the farming industry in itself is just fucked in this country

yeah i mean a lot of it too is just uh this absolutely insane like way that you know a generation of americans is like approached parenting like these are people like that would rather sell their farm to someone their own age than give their children a farm because they don't think children should be given anything they got to earn it it doesn't matter if it doesn't make any fucking sense i yeah so i do think it is interesting how you know the united states started out as a nation of farmers and then only really recently we've seen this total destruction of small farms with the farm crisis of the 70s and 80s. And I wanted to talk about that, but before that, I did just kind of want, if you could maybe describe to us what a typical day on a farm is actually like, because it is just so fascinating to me that it is such recent history that people are so disconnected from the

land you know i think only very recently people had much more understanding of what goes into the food process and now we just have no idea the uh the majority of people in this country i mean uh about 340 days out of the year it's exactly the same as like anybody else's life like it because uh a properly running farm does not require constant input or maintenance like you just make sure that the uh you know like whatever algorithm that you've built your farm around is continuing to move and you know just a few times a year like i cut hay uh two sometimes three times a year uh you sell livestock every once in a while it yeah and it just happens those are hard days those are long days but there's only a couple of them what's the worst

part of those days uh you just like you just want to make sure that like everything that's critical is right like uh because and also you just drop everything uh like uh last year i had a really good first cutting of hay it was oh it was beautiful because we had just this perfect week of no rain and uh the all the forage was at the perfect like stage of seed development it was still it was almost fully developed when this week started but it was still attached fully to the stock it hadn't so you have this perfect uh sorry high protein you know forage good leaf matter good protein content and it's resistant to the mechanical damage of cutting, raking, and baling. Great year.

Nice. And I understand that a lot of small farmers in the United States have been pushed into corn and soy just to feed livestock. I was just wondering what crops you have been involved in. I mean, our farms have never been well i take that back but in in the 40s and 50s you know we uh used to run a more mixed rotation uh so there was uh corn incorporated into that but that was mostly before my time uh like people often have this misconception of like uh you know corn fed beef like they they think it's like always done on the feedlot but those cattle actually live exactly like you're thinking idyllically in a pasture for the first three years of their life they only go to the

feedlot for what they call finishing uh where they are finished on corn and high quality forage. Gotcha. And 8 out of 10 people actually do prefer, 8 out of 10 Americans prefer corn fed beef because it's more tender, more mild in flavor, has better marbling. When you say foraging, I wasn't familiar with that term. What do you mean exactly? Oh, yes.

Yeah, forage is just anything, any crop that's intended for livestock consumption. Oh, okay. So you're growing it intentionally as part of your rotation, but it's for the livestock? Yeah. Okay. And I was wondering if you could introduce us

to the farm crisis in this country and what exactly has happened because you know i read all these horrible articles about uh suicides in small farming communities um i'm told there were instances in the 70s and 80s where farmers would actually murder bankers who went to foreclose on them that. Yeah. Look, I'm not technically allowed to endorse that, but I'm not not endorsing it. But, you know, like what what set off this crisis to the point where you have, you know, Cargill and Monsanto and Tyson and just a couple others who have so dominated this industry that used to have a lot of small farmers in it. What was it like in this country before and after the farm crisis?

Okay. Basically, what made this farm crisis different than in the 30s, almost the same exact thing happened as in the 80s. And what's also happening now, farm equity and farm debt is reaching comparable levels over the last four years uh but basically what really allowed it to become this kind of permanent you know society altering crisis uh word what was the advent of organic pesticides by companies like monsanto and dupont and so on in the 60s. Because before then, farms could be sold, but they couldn't grow. They could only be so big, like a half or a quarter section, 80 or 160 acres. Because they were limited by how much a farmer could actually mechanically do,

like so many hours per day in these critical harvest and planning periods so it can only be so big uh but and they had pesticides before like inorganic pesticides based off arsenic that were used in like uh cash crops like fruit in california cotton down south but uh these are very uh hard to apply they don't really they don't make sense for you know bolt crops like forage or grain but uh organic pesticides they developed uh in the 60s that technology was ultimately what enabled farmers in the 80s because there had to be that period because nobody was selling out in the 60s and 70s. But 1980, Jimmy Carter, the Kulak in chief, he embargoes grain to the Soviet Union.

Why would you do that? They produce more grain than the United States does. Why would you do that? But he does it. And so that predicates an immediate spending frenzy. And then later over under Reagan, most of the farm equipment manufacturing is shipped overseas. And just the prices on machinery start going up and up and up and up.

The 70s fuel crisis also plays into that, too, because before the organic pesticides were developed, the main way we had to control pests in crops was just mechanical methods of you know soil manipulation like tillage and cultivation uh where so organic pesticides come on it's easier it's quicker to apply you burn less fuel per year when you do it and uh now instead of being able to run 160 acres a year top one farmer can easily manage up to around 2 000 wow uh in an area like here like in flatter areas it's a much larger number true so it was the result then that prices dropped and and that was what drove a lot of farmers out of the market uh not so much prices, but costs. Okay. Yeah. I think the price of any given equipment just doubled or tripled between 1976 and 1984. Yeah, in support of that,

there was an article in The Guardian by Chris McGreal called How America's Food Giants Swallowed the Family Farm, and just kind of an illustrative statistic here. In 1990, small and medium-sized farms accounted for nearly half of all agricultural production in the United States. Now it is less than a quarter. So, you know, this has been a real collapse in small and medium-sized family farms. And the article mentions the the soviet grain embargo but and it also point causing land prices to collapse and foreclosures to escalate it does also mention the rise of concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs and these kind of industrial farming units pigs cows and chickens are crammed by the thousands into rows of barns many units

are semi-automated with feeding run by computer and the animals watched by video with periodic visits by workers who drive between several operations and you know i also watched this documentary eating animals which kind of talked about how these cafos have had an impact in north carolina among other places where where you'll have these big concentrations of pigs, and then they just all shit and piss on the floor, and then it's all washed out into these giant pink lagoons that in turn are washed out into nearby lakes and the land, and a lot of the fish die, and there's a lot of environmental impact of it. I guess I was just wondering, like living in farming America, have you seen this, this type of impact near where you're at?

I mean, what is the situation for the environment of these big factory farms moving into rural America? I don't smell good. Yeah. It is not a pleasant place to be but really like the ultimate like impact outside of like the immediate like in you know the kaffir locality itself uh not not a question of morality but just like how much like how destructive it is not really uh yeah i mean there's a lagoon full of weeds it's not pretty but it's you know it's not really hurting things in the way that like a coal mine's drainage is right

tag on to what you said earlier about the rising costs during like the 70s I think on it was kind of like a two pronged attack against farmers for a while because the fed started hiking interest rates in 1980. It was in the 15% range for a farm loan. Yeah, that sucks. And so they're getting killed on price of machinery

and material inputs to farming. And then on the other side, adjustable rate mortgages were in the double digits. It got bad enough that I was just looking it up again to remind myself that the farmers started driving tractors in protest in Washington D.C.

Oh yeah. Y'all like John Cougar Mellencamp? Yeah. People got real upset. I would just love to see them like go down K street just like freak out lobbyists so okay after about 1984

we see like a new stability emerge we're no longer talking about these 80 to 160 acre you know truly like family farms uh we're seeing these 2 000 to 4 000 acre family farms right right which uh you know it's uh an increasing level of financialization these farmers uh like this this era of farming you know like it's very financialized they begin to introduce uh concepts that are very alien to the farming world and very

familiar to uh the financial world uh like it's just a complete numbers game now can you give an example uh like they begin to introduce concepts like farm management uh they start to come up with just like equations to like formalize exactly how the operation's running in a way that you know in former times was just like done entirely off of like the intuitive just like just force field inside like you know a farmer's head right right like they figure out how to put everything onto paper these guys figured out too that consistency is uh you know it's the just the number one value just a consistent return it doesn't matter if it actually like is uh you know good right in the same way that like yeah you see in

farming like a very similar like the the financialization of it has affected it in a way that's actually very familiar to the way that a lot of artistic industries are affected by financialization and capital more than it's really weird i have i have heard that the farmers of today are like many of them that who run the bigger farms anyway are like steeped in like management science and like they are actually like very well versed financially and like they keep track of commodities market market prices etc oh and yeah with the second farming crisis that started in 2010 uh they've taken that approach to another like echelon uh now these family farms are running 20 000 acres they're running 25 000 30 000 acres uh they're hiring middle management it It's bureaucratized.

I get a job driving a tractor for $20 an hour, I guess. Can I just say, Farming Simulator 2019 is way cooler. Now, which one's more of an accurate depiction of farming? Farming Simulator 2019 or Farmville? Farmville. You know, I like the comparison you made to the arts where the math of making it has, you know, corporatized the argument of quality versus quantity. Or I mean, yeah, quality versus quantity where, you know, instead of art or farm goods that are of a certain grade, it's more about just producing as much as possible and then figuring out what to

use, what you make in the long run, which is, I mean, in, from an art perspective, you now have, you know, an infinite amount more of networks and people willing to give you money to make stuff, but it's mostly trash because nobody wants to pay for it. And the way you view it is not one that is exciting. You know, watching a YouTube video on your phone that's free is never going to compare to a movie made 70 years ago with a decent budget it just is just not comparable and it seems like with the farming community that making sure stuff keeps being pumped out i mean it's like they're making nikes at this point like it's it's just sweatshop mentality as absolutely uh because like farming has entirely in common with an artistic

industry that like you know like in music you can like music theory is a very useful and powerful thing to know but it only helps you if you can play music if you can create a thing and this the same applies to the relationship between ag science and farming that's fucking brilliant no it is an interesting analogy that i hadn't thought about before just now but that less moonves expression content is king that has so destroyed the entertainment industry because all they think about is content you know doesn't matter if it's good or not just slop and then this has exactly the same been applied to our food supply and food ecosystem. Except the big difference is that if people are producing slop content, the world still continues to turn.

Whereas if the farms suck, then we just die. There's a lot I want to ask you about, i do just like because i follow your twitter i very much enjoy it um i've been getting into ancient history as well i just saw you had a tweet i think a couple days ago about how you know we get so obsessed now about how much more natural ancient farming methods were but you pointed out that people would have just destroyed the soil it just so happens they would all kill each other's in too often for that to happen. It's not like our ancestors had, you know, organic farming all down pat. There were just a lot less of them. But another historical thing that I find very interesting is that in World War II,

throughout Europe, you actually saw a massive redistribution of wealth towards the farmers after war broke out because everybody in the cities of course depends on these farmers and they forget they exist but then suddenly a war breaks out you need food and if you happen to have some priceless artwork you might actually go out to the farms and trade it because you will gladly get rid of it for some food so i just just, I was wondering if you could, yeah, I was wondering if you could kind of talk about community farming and, because I understand, please correct me if I'm wrong, you have an icon of Vladimir Lenin on Twitter.

I understand you are a communist, and I was just wondering if you could kind of talk about the political implications of farming and what you think going forward in the United States, the importance of communist or leftist movements being involved in farming is. I mean, you know, the revolutionary proletariat's got to eat. Indeed. indeed yeah it's like uh especially from the marxist leninist perspective it's like there's an inherent like resistance within like most of that movement uh because like especially in this country like the family farmer is the same as a pet you know pt pujwa uh just a shithead that's

just gumming up the gears and that's that is exactly 99 of the people that i live with and work with like economically all they want to do is just slow everything down they want to hold hold hold and you know they're just they're scared and fretful people not not helpful yeah maintain the status quo and and no no vision to to innovating what they're trying to do. It seems like, you know, the fear of fucking up the system really holds a lot of the older generation from, you know, trying, not even growing, but just trying um and i'm sure that uh if things continue uh kids being born now may think that about our generation but at the same time it's one of those things where it's understandable that uh fear is so debilitating that it makes you hold on to what little you have

and in the case of farming I think that you know the experience that you've shared where over the last few decades you've seen it you know just literally a little and will itself down to the husk it currently is I mean that same experience must have happened to the people before us and so for them it's like I I've seen this thriving and now that it is what it is i'm gonna do whatever i can to maintain it because this ship is sinking right like yeah that's the way i see it is like uh i don't really fundamentally care like oh i'm on a state-owned collective farm who gives a shit i don't care i'd right i like this is what i do

and uh uh you know like how how many people work at fucking mcdonald's it's it's a way bigger number than people that still live on family farms it's like it's not even close uh all we can do by trying to like fearfully preserve like what we think family farming is about, all of that's going to do is just make life harder for this mass of people that are suffering. And it's and there's so many more of them that, you know, if they do that, if they get their way, if there's a day of the rope, every billionaire is just strewn about the street, they're not going to be happy with us. They're not going to be thankful. Yeah. You know, it's like I literally just want to be on the right side of history. Well, I don't know.

It is so fascinating to me because we're seeing everything we just described with all these pressures on smaller farmers. But if you're predicting, as I would imagine a lot of people are, that the political situation in the United States is going to get more unstable and, you know, possibly even approach collapse or something like that. Well, you seem to be in the right industry for survival in a post-federal government United States, or a United States with a high degree of political instability. So it is just interesting to me, as a political project, how important farming is. Oh, yeah. If shit got incredibly balkanized like that, I would just

clam up and do subsistence agriculture with my buddies. Nice. When you think about food security in third world countries, usually if there's sustained food price inflation

of like 10% or more for a few months, it usually means the government is overthrown and so that uh probably won't happen here but you know it's it's been it's never been more likely because like their food food prices have gone up considerably for for the u.s anyway in the last year yeah uh these fucking people man uh they think that you know the whole country is you know biden stole this election and whatnot and so forth uh they're not going to do anything because they're too busy running their small businesses right yeah they love it dude all right question so um with this uh in this sort of more um commune framework for food production like would it be kind of like a worker's co-op

sort of like the it's all worker owners is it it that type of thing? Like if you, if you had it, uh, if you were to like sort of write out the constitution for your new business. Yeah. Yeah. That, that would be like my immediate thing to do now on the ground with material that actually exists and not like talking about something that could happen, talking about what, you know, is what i can work with so yeah you just you do a kolkhoz uh you know a collective farm okay you know like people often

have like this mental idea in their head that like a soviet collective farm you know everyone lives in this huge apartment block and you know they wake up at the same time with a big whistle and they all march with their hoes out to the field. No, it can look like anything. It can look just like American Farms. Exactly what

you're thinking, except they also coordinate sometimes as opposed to being competitors. I imagine after you you gave us like the soviet realist thing you're like i mean i thought you're gonna be like and yeah i mean we do that but it doesn't need to be that way yeah i was thinking that sounds pretty cool oh it is we we do walk out in unison with hoes. No, Nate runs more of an animal house farm. That's his style.

Yeah, we drink a lot of beer. Nate's always hanging out and smoking cigars with the pigs who are standing on two feet. That's animal farm, Sean. That's an animal farm house. And Nate

writes about his experiences. We'll link to his blog spot and his sub stack. I did just want to ask about this article you wrote that I found pretty interesting about the American collective. I'll just quote a paragraph that you wrote here. Quote, at least until 2030, the majority of the energy

and resources of any serious communist party in North America must be to diffuse the continent with material, tangible communist societies, unlike the hippies and the anti-Baptists, linked and united in an aggressive and expansionist manner. And you'd previously contrasted the hippies and the anti-Baptists set up these communities, but they had no interest in expanding. They just wanted to do their own thing and cut out from society. The contrast is the Communist Party model would be interested in expanding these community farms.

You continue, quote, the online left is nothing but cope, which no lies detected. The quote unquote counterculture has so far proven to be a large degree unserious and unsuited to the task of forcing change. And the Communist and socialist parties that exist today here are tiny cliquish generations removed from the hope or desire to power and consequently have long shed themselves

of any notion that they should be hoping or desiring power. The task of the serious communist party is to build itself into existence in a fully formed manner. The communist party is the party of people that live in communes. I feel attacked.

But that's a pretty powerful mission statement. And I do think as a lot of people do see these kind of electoral political projects on the left run up against the rocks and not really accomplish anything, there may be more appeal to that. Was there anything else to that? I mean, I guess, do you see this idea of communal farming kind of catching on more in the left than it has been in recent years? I truly do. Because farming is just an easy industry to get into and create a totally complete like a place, you know, not just like a workplace or like a neighborhood.

But like it's it's completely like totally contained. Right. And so like, you know, I'm saying this and maybe someone that's grown up comparably to me in Iowa will say, wait, I'm in that situation too. I can do that. That would be my hope. And then you start forming a network. And once you reach a tipping point of people that are doing this thing instead of the other thing, then we can just start to be preferential we say

i'm going to deal with you know these people and not not not you right right and yeah it is interesting to me just having been uh in a one-bedroom apartment in new york city in lockdown for a year and i was just considering this morning yeah, I would just go live on a community farm if I could have friends again. Yeah, dude. If I could just hang out with people. Sure, I'll join your communist communal farm, you know. We had a lot of fun last year.

Just the complete opposite of everyone else's lockdown experience. Yeah, dude. Steven? We had bits. We had riffs. We had it all. Mario Kart? Mario Kart.

You said Mario Kart? Oh, okay. Well, my farm would be different. Oh, I just became a reactionary. Damn it. Shit. Do you see it being a problem for you guys? If like, okay, if you're,

if you're, if you don't have control over the inputs that you're receiving, like the, the, the things you need to do, you're farming the machines and whatnot. Could that become a problem later for your project? I'd go ahead and say that,

you know, that kind of thing isn't really coming up on the radar. Because there's a shit ton of agricultural machinery that's not in use. Everyone that has land and a bullshit job making $20 an hour, they just have a shit ton of

inscrutable machine crap that they bought. Right. Okay. So a lot of individual farm owners just have a bunch of capacity that they just aren't using? Yeah.

Everyone I talk to, it's like they would do more but they don't have labor they can't get help and it's like well there's a way that you can multiply labor

massively you just don't like it does that go for like fertilizer and stuff too oh man that shit's so cheap i want to again like these uh like these this petit bourgeois mentality is so insane because you'll hear so many excuses uh for like why like these other farmers don't want to buy fertilizer they'll make excuses and it's like you know there's like it's it literally just makes you have more

right works every time and it never doesn't work you just don't want to do it okay they just don't want to work you're saying they're lazy yeah that's like the definition of short-sighted where it's just you spend a little bit of money to make a bunch in like what three months and then like no no hey i know what if you increase your cost by 0.1 percent no definitely not that's bizarre okay well if you have if you guys feel like so there's like some independence as far as maintaining the inputs

you guys need like for the conceivable future yeah it's it's a there's nothing crazy gonna happen so you said a big turning point for you was like 20, it was the farming crisis of 2010.

Um, and that's kind of when you realized that the preexisting model wasn't really sustainable. Um, could you maybe like go into detail as to like what the crisis was and how that affected you personally? Yeah. Uh,

like, uh, I mean, I was a child for most of the twos, and I spent most of that with my dad just every day. It was wonderful. Absolutely. I'd ride with him in the tractor. I'd ride with him in the truck. We'd go and eat lunch every day at the diner with a bunch of people that were just like my dad. Everyone. I didn't think there was a world that didn't farm. I didn't know what anything else was. And 2008 was when it started

for us, specifically because we're heavily invested into horses. And George Bush did a little horse slaughter ban for the liberals. And so the value of a horse that sucks went from being $1500 to $0

so we just started losing a lot of money really fast and so he had to go find work for the first time in 15 years I watched his health rapidly deteriorate. We just had to go without more and more and more, you know, just proletarianization, exactly what you'd expect. And I don't know, I guess like most of the people that grew

up like me, they just, you know, the easiest answer was just to do reaction. But I'm built different. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. And again, I'm an outsider looking in, but it seems to me debt has been used to control small and medium-sized farmers to a similar way that debt has been used to control a lot of the U.S. population. They load up on all this heavy debt. And then, you know, maybe some of the reluctance to spend any money is this illusion that you can pay down your debt if you just like cut all spending to the bone.

And they're kind of trapped in this whole thing. I guess I was wondering if there were any specific things that your family farm had to do to survive this assault from the 2010s? Yeah, it wasn't especially crazy crazy for us. It was for a lot of people. But, I mean, yeah,

we're still here. I mean, literally, my parents happened to have their assets in a good place when 2008 hit and 2010. But, no, my parents happened to have their assets in a good place when 2008 hit in 2010. But no, a lot of people absolutely are completely just destroyed by debt. Yeah, because again, like this documentary, Eating Animals, they interview a chicken farmer who's kind of been put into this whole, what they call is the tournament system where these major corporations like Tyson, rather than just paying people for, you know, a set price for a chicken or a set price for a soybean or whatever, they'll set all the chicken farmers in an area on a tournament where

Tyson will give you X inputs. And then whoever, you know, grows the fattest chickens or the most surviving chickens gets a bonus. And then whoever is below that, grows the fattest chickens or the most surviving chickens gets a bonus. And then whoever is below that actually gets their wages docked. So every chicken farmer in an area is competing against each other. Tyson makes it illegal for them to share any information. It's a way of pitting them all against each other. And then also they take on this debt because their startup cost to uh produce chickens at the scale that tyson requires is like hey you got to go half a million in debt to do this and

then if you're losing the tournament you're you're about to lose your shit because they're going to pay you nothing um so i guess i was wondering if um your family is still involved in in livestock or if there's if the situation for like non-livestock crops is is different from that or how accurate this documentary i saw is no uh with chicken specifically because they're at this point now the chicken production is incredibly industrialized and mechanized and you know removed from its origins as a element of farming practice. So yeah, it's the most advanced, but every, every crop, every animal it's, it's trending that direction. Absolutely. Uh, like, uh, just, it used to be like, I remember when I was real little, like there's a major

feature of the landscape was various kinds of auctions and markets uh that's where that's where produce was sold uh you take beef you know your beef cattle to a livestock auction and the buyers are competing to get your animals uh there used to be a lot of tobacco grown in this area and a lot of small farms used to depend on, you know, like five or ten acres of tobacco because you can cut it down, put it in your barn and just listen, you know, to the radio, watch the TV, see if tobacco starts to go up, take it to the auction barn and, you know, get some actual liquid cash, which was never a particularly common thing on family farms. So it seems like the diversification of crops was a lot better, we would just say 20, 30 years ago, and slowly over time, based off of government restrictions, but also the corporatization of certain cash crops, it's become that if you're a farmer you can only rely on one or one to three i guess sources of revenue when it comes to farming huh yeah and like especially like these guys that are managing you know like more than 5 000 acres right uh like farming from their point

of view is literally just driving a tractor as fast as fucking possible as many hours out of the day as possible blasting across the landscape that's what help they don't want to think about like oh what should I do with this field what mix of crops

what's the seasonality look like they don't like they don't care about any of that element because they know they usually know one thing they know corn and they uh all they know is they want the fields to be more level than they were last year and straighter and square and flatter so they can go faster it almost reminds me of like i used to work at a local supermarket and then it got bought by a chain and it went from a place that like i don't know it kind of had quirks in how it was designed and then once the chain bought it it just became a fucking box and you could like i mean i could physically feel the corporate reasoning behind every fucking detail.

And it, you know, it's one of those things where like, I mean, it seems kind of far fetched, but like you can tell when you're in a place where people are like, this kind of looks good here versus like a computer told us this needs to be right fucking here.

Like it's, it's, it's jarring. Oh, absolutely. Uh, especially cause like on machines, you know, this needs to be right fucking here like it's it's jarring oh absolutely uh especially because like on machines you know that like i grew up using from you know the 30s to the 50s era like everything you do is done entirely as an artist works you know it's the things you feel

with your hands right uh whereas nowadays uh you look inside like a modern uh tractor with a planter hookup you know a seed drill like a big fucking 36 row seed drill he's got eight screens in there yeah and it's like that shit doesn't fucking matter you can just think you know yeah it's it's i mean when you've designed things for convenience and maximum efficiency you lose the ability to you know not wing it but just human kind of we can figure this the fuck out yeah so do they also have like the farmer has like a bloomberg terminal yeah yeah they can he can look up yeah he can look up um commodity prices yeah i'm and i'm sure a lot of the biggest guys literally do just have bloomberg terminals

in the house yeah why not there are a lot of the screens in the in the tractor just connected to like cameras or something in the back of that or just is it more of like stats and things yeah like uh you might have in like a tractor pulling a large planter you know it's tracking uh the density uh the spacing things like that uh the the depth too uh because it's one of those things yeah they, they're maximizing. Because you can literally prove it does affect how much yield you'll get if the corn is planted millimeters deeper or shallower. But you shouldn't ever have to care. Right, right, right, right.

You guys should check out the Bloomberg Terminal mod for Stardew Valley. It's pretty good. Yeah, how does Stardew Valley stack up? I don't know about these games, man. I'm not good on the computer. That does just show you, like, we have an actual farmer here, and all we can ask him about is, so, like, the video games that we play to pretend that we do what you do, are those like tell us really video games that were made

by people like us yes i did actually have a sim farm when i was a kid well, yeah, I don't know. I was never good at it. It was hard. Unlike real farming? Pretty much. Next week, we're actually going to have a city planner on and have all SimCity 2000 questions. Oh, that would be cool. What are your thoughts on SimCity 3000 Unlimited? They're like, I just really never played any of those.

I did like, I was going through your Twitter a bit, Nate, and I did like what you said about farming being an art. I know you've kind of talked about that a bit here and how, you know, great farmers are more like great artists than these kind of spreadsheet monsters that the video games and the modern agricultural system would have us believe. And there does seem to me to be like real satisfaction to creating food the way there is to creating any piece of art. If you'd want to talk about that for a minute.

This is just, yeah, when you actually have a really good thing, like you can see it and you know it's like you just have animals that are very happy and you have uh like uh the areas that of your the parts of your farm that aren't under cultivation they look healthier too there's you get more wild animals you get like uh you get wild animals that don't go to disturbed environments. You get, like, if you have a woodlot, you'll get, like, more and more characteristics of old-growth forests that are very rare outside of a state forest. And, you know, it just starts to really be,

oh, let's be something. And also here in this region, too, like, you've really got to be careful because we have a lot of hills and we have just the ground like this the bedrock is swiss cheese it's you know this is cave country so if you're not taking really good care of your soil it will literally just leave right and never come back and you know it's not it doesn't feel good to watch soil just leave, watch channels form.

And I've actually seen it happen because one of the places I farm was our family's 80-acre farm we've had for about 100 years. It's split up now into basically two lots, the one I farm and one that an ant owns. And they rent it out to a completely conventional agriculturalist. And I've seen, like, I go onto the GIS data map, and I look at it from 2018, about two years after they took stewardship of the land. And I see on my side where we continued farming the same way that I always have, and you can see ancient plow ways. It hasn't been tilled in probably 60 years.

The soil hasn't moved. The hedgerows are still intact. You can still see these ancient plow marks. On her side, the conventional side, in about two years, you can see these huge flows of mud right the soil's lighter it's been completely demolished and if i was to you know if there was ever a hypothetical situation where i buy that land and come back into it it's going to take me 20 years to get it back up to the field that i'm farming, to get them to compare to each other in productivity and yield.

And just so the listeners know, you farm in rural Indiana, is that correct? Yeah, the extremely southern part. I'm actually, from that farm, you can see the Ohio River. Nice. Nice. It's beautiful. What's the weather like out there right now, Nate? I'm freezing. yeah the winters are usually extremely mild nowadays they weren't 70 years ago but you know

sure nothing we can do about it god i did want to ask how the farm crisis ties into the the larger crisis in rural america i do have a quote from that guardian article i quoted earlier they talked about with the farm crisis of the 70s and 80s as the medium-sized family farms retreated the businesses they helped support disappeared local seed and equipment suppliers shut up shop because corporations went straight to wholesalers or manufacturers demand for local vets collapsed All those businesses packed up and left. Communities shrank. Shops, restaurants, and doctors' surgeries closed.

People found they had to drive for an hour or more for medical treatment. Towns and counties began to share ambulances. And so, you know, we've seen this whole crisis in rural America caused by a variety of different factors, such as private equity and the farm collapse. I did just want to ask you if you had any observations as to how things have changed in your part of rural America throughout your lifetime. Oh, I mean, everything that you just described happened from 2010, except, you know, cubed. Like, there was one practicing livestock vet in the region

who was about a 45-minute drive from everyone, basically. And four years ago, he exploded. He blew up. Wow. And no one replaced him. Because everyone that goes to vet school nowadays you know they just want to make a shit ton of money keeping like stupid corgis alive or whatever and uh so actually one of the one of the guys that's uh you know working on this project with me he's actually in vet school now to you know be that guy on our collective

nice you know i was reading your uh substack nate and uh you know from what i understand most communists have a big balls but you seem to have a big dick as well and i'm just curious where does your big dick energy come from nate you seem to uh have stuck on your own in terms of saying uh fuck the norm i'm gonna do what i want to do this family tradition i don't know nice uh yeah like uh my papa uh is banned from galveston or was banned from galveston texas uh they threw him out uh in a in a literal mob with you know torches and pitchforks he never told anyone why but

he could just never go back there that's crazy the original twitter shit poster my brother lives in Galveston so I'll let him know that alright I was wondering I guess My brother lives in Galveston, so I'll let him know that. All right. I was wondering, I guess, your opinions on U.S. food supply in terms of health and in terms of all these pesticides and shit.

I know, like I said at the top of this episode, we started researching Monsanto and Cargill, and you kind of get freaked out about this stuff. And, you know, I had a guy who says he's a small farmer in Iowa actually hit me up on Twitter and be like, hey, man, we're kind of between a rock and a hard place. Could you not publicly talk shit about the U.S. food supply like that? You know, like we need people to buy our organic, you know, soy and our organic corn. So I guess I was just wondering, you know, first of all, if you have opinions on how glyphosate and all these other pesticides have changed farming, if you personally have any hesitations about them or if you avoid them.

And second, what your opinions are on the organic labeling process. Some people dislike it. Some people are just kind of trusting it. If you can explain to us about what goes into organic labeling and whether or not you think it's actually like a more healthy way to eat for people who are interested in that in the United States. Yeah, I would say that if you voluntarily choose to buy organic produce, you're throwing money away.

The biggest problems that I have with the chemical agriculture are just this gross overuse and its contribution to this absolutely negligent attitude towards soil. But they're not they're not evil uh you know they're just tools we have that we can use i would like to see them applied more judiciously as opposed to just being the entire basis of the you know the input output mechanism uh but like especially from the consumer's standpoint like they've done multiple studies. You cannot taste the difference between organic produce and conventional produce. You just can't.

As far as the health goes, even if you forget to wash your cucumber, you're not going to be... Even as shitty as they do it now, you're just not exposing yourself to a concerning amount. The farmers definitely are being exposed to a grotesque amount of these chemicals, but you're not. You're fine.

Right. Because when I mentioned Roundup Ready soybeans at the top this is the big the big monsanto innovation i think in 96 they came up with these soybeans that are immune to glyphosate is also known as roundup so they can uh spray this um uh pesticide it is a pesticide right or is it pesticide is everything okay um yeah so they can spray this pesticide, right? Pesticide is everything. Okay. Yeah, so they can spray this pesticide all over these soybeans, and they're immune to it, and I believe the Roundup Ready soybeans are something like 80% of the global supply now.

And I guess some people, including myself, got a little freaked out because people have, of course, sued Monsanto and got billions of dollars. People got serious cancers because they were heavily involved in using glyphosate, you know, as a weed killer. They got it all over themselves while they were applying glyphosate. So it is just something where I guess people are nervous that that's being used at all. But I would say my understanding is your position is generally if you are not the one directly applying it it's not really that uh worrisome for human health and even then too part of the reason that the app you know the applicators themselves i've actually absolutely i've seen what you're saying like uh every like all the beef farmers they just lived longer than

the corn farmers uh they died of you know they would die of heart disease because they ate too many steaks right right whereas the corn farmers were dying of like weird kidney cancers and you know they they all the corn farmers at the diner they always had like just liver spots everywhere you know the beef farmers had clear whatever they had normal skin for their ages. I think the main reason that happened is because in the 60s when they came

out, they marketed these chemicals basically fraudulently to people that have no chemical safety background. They're farmers. Chemicals are a new thing to them. They were marketed as just this miracle shit you just throw it out there and it works uh some of the earliest sprayers you know they did they had open cabs uh open control stations so that you're just

driving through a cloud of this shit right right you know it's it's just fucked yeah i mean you you mentioned it a moment ago where you you would like to see a more judicial use of this stuff but it definitely seems as if it was marketed towards the farmers as like a magical solution to any any problem where the reality was like well it's not let's not just let's not give you kidney problems that's how much you use it you know i mean and you guys i'm sure you know exactly well like if you have a product do you want to sell more or less yeah i want to sell more dude we want to sell less that's our that's our mo on this show we want to sell in not out yeah but so my understanding then is you you overall you trust the u.s food supply are there any

particular products or foods you avoid knowing what you know about what goes into it i mean not really okay yeah even like it's not great you know like it's mostly because like like what what's really truly like dangerous about like roundup ready soybeans is that they are 90 of the you know soybean supply one genetic lineage and uh his like that's you know historically when you do when you have like so much reliance on so few genetics, you're just setting yourself up to get fucked. That was the Irish potato famine, was one cultivar of potato cloned endlessly over the island. Virus gets in it, gone. Right.

Yeah, but you can't expect the Irish to know how to do two types of potatoes. Sorry, Nate. Potato is Sean's trigger word. He's got to pray to the Celtic gods for about 40 minutes now. Well, and all they had to do, too, is

if you just grow a potato to seed and you throw those seeds out into the field, they will come up as 60 entirely new, new to science, new to man potatoes. Every time you plant potato seeds, they're different. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah. Well, see, Sean, all you had to do is throw the husks into the fucking ground and y'all would have been fine wait so isn't it like they grow potatoes by just like cutting off i'm i'm a moron but they they like cut off a piece of potato instead of growing it from seeds and that's why it was so

homogeneous yeah because i mean that's how commercial potato production works is uh the you know the the breeders they grow seed potatoes they find ones that work they're that are good right bad and then they market clones of those you know what do you think about like mcdonald's now controlling like most of the potato uh science crop like from what i understand i don't know if that's most anymore what it is but like at what point do you feel like corporate interests in a food have taken over the farming corporate world because like i remember learning about that and just being like man if i made like i don't know spicy eggplant and i got so popular that everyone

on the planet's eating it i then could control all the eggplant the fucking world almost like it's just crazy concept yeah wild fucking irish mcdonald's yeah and you know especially like in marxist leninist circles like you know the the natural like the default tendency is to always promote centralization and streamlining inefficiency uh but this is a case where like redundancy is actually just a virtue. You want, like you want farmers to be saving seeds. You want people to be thinking about relatively small amounts of land because it's incredibly complex. Sure.

I like in these fields I work, I know where every rock is. I know every tree in them. I know every little, I know, I know exactly how bumpy each part is. Like it's there's just a lot of shit to know

and so you can only scale that up so far before you have to start subtracting from your ability to observe I want to ask about the John Deere repair shit going on right now if that affects you at all but I guess I was gonna ask how you started your

collective farm. I just kept posting on Twitter that people could come to my farm. I actually kept demanding that people do it, screaming at them, telling them they were stupid to not come here. Take them to a party. posting all right it's awesome i love it but uh yeah the john deere repair thing no i've worked with much older generations of

equipment with that for the most part so i'm just watching it it's just ah fuck you is the is that whole thing affecting more of the large scale uh production farmers that makes sense hold on hold on what's the john deere repair thing because i'm out of the loop on this uh the john deere repair thing is like uh you buy a tractor or something from john deere and if you're working on equipment that like nate does if like a carburetor blowless or something you can fix it and it's not that big a deal but with john deere and if you're working on equipment that like nate does if like a carburetor blowless or something you can fix it and it's not that big a deal but john deere similar to apple and other corporations if one thing breaks and you try and fix it john deere's like whoa whoa what the fuck bro you got to give me money for that shit and it's not for from what i understand repairs they just want you to buy more equipment because like nate has explained

here the large-scale farmers can't necessarily afford another equipment but john deere knows that if they don't they're fucked so they just put them a gun to their head and been like well i know you're i mean i'm just posting up i'm just i'm just saying a hypothetical here but like oh your tractor has a flat well you need to buy a new tractor is basically what they're doing wow i mean i have to say though that as far as business goes uh having the john deere repair guy be a dick and you know a dick in your ass uh it's a good problem to have that means your business is doing fine you've got new equipment you're probably having very a dick in your ass, it's a good problem to have. That means your business is doing fine.

You've got new equipment. You're probably having very little downtime. It's just business makes you think about business not correctly. Do you guys have trouble with Monsanto ever yourselves?

No. I mean, Monsanto ever? Yourselves? No, I mean... Yeah, Monsanto gets singled out. For some reason, it captured the public imagination as the evil chem company, but all these companies do kind of the same thing. And unless you're like... Again, it's really a problem for these large guys at this point. They don't work with the small guys that are still out there.

They don't care. I do remember that there was some court case about farmers were saving the genetically modified Monsanto seeds, the ones that they don't use, and then cultivating

it just for their own purposes. Monsanto won a case that said like that was copyright infringement. Yeah. I mean, I think that, yeah, genetic copyrights are going to be a widespread issue in agriculture, medicine, and many kinds of industry like in the future. You know, base and shit, they're going to have a... Oh, that's going to be totally fucked over.

I'm not going to visit. That's going to be like a military dictatorship on Mars. I mean, most of the farming there is going to be Soylent Green. Don't get into any of those Musk self-driving

Mars rovers because they'll actually crash right into a semi-truck. OK, so but the seed thing is that's mainly just like the bigger the mega farms dealing with them that might

have problems. Yeah, the people growing these like you know it's like a trading card game or whatever where they come out with like the new generation and then all of a sudden the old ones are completely worthless now right uh so like you could just grow older varieties of corn uh and just grow them it's just not fashionable it's just like the old model you know and you want you want the current the 2021 generation man yeah man fuck everything this is like like what a fucking stupid world we live in where it's like well you ain't got the 2021 corn you

you rock of the 2015 model what the fuck is wrong with the goddamn planet, man? This sucks. That's pretty fucked, though, in another dimension of the problem that they have. Yeah, I'm into 80s retro corn. Yeah, the difference between a 30-year-old hybrid and a modern one is going to be like

0.05% more yield and well-drained loam. Sure. That's pretty messed up, though, that the seeds, like the biodiversity basically of the food chain is being significantly reduced because people have to have the latest whatever lineage of the seed. Yeah. I mean, that could like,

that affects more than just like farmers who are angry that they couldn't get their hands on it. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's probably, that's the real source of like immediate instability and insecurity in the food supply more than almost anything else.

Sure. Yeah, I'm more into the vintage retro crops. I like my personal sprouts to be, you know, a little bit more bitter the vintage retro crops i like my brussels sprouts to be you know a little bit more bitter than these new crops you know i'm not a fan of the new corn i like mine to be a range of colors and occasionally taste kind of weird oh there's some incredible heirloom crops out there fascinating attributes like you can read about these like they found varieties of corn or that'll do just anything anywhere like they found one in mexico i don't know if you guys have read of this but it actually can fix nitrogen out of the atmosphere really yeah yeah

and it works completely differently to the way that like uh uh clovers and you you know, oleagines do. It has like this weird goop on its roots that's like a fungal like symbiont. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it's wild. I learned recently that corn isn't naturally occurring, that it was invented by the native peoples of

America over centuries, which is wild. It's genius. I love it. yeah yeah i liked what those gmo soybeans were doing before they sold out and signed with monsanto much more much more independent flavor back then oh i mean it does go to show you what an incredible just again like lack of art that's being applied to farming is like uh when they were developing the techniques of genetic modification they were thinking about you know increasing nutrient values increasing yields growing crops in marginal areas increasing

diversity and so far the main thing they've really accomplished is just making corn that doesn't die when you spray it with poison. It like, it really, I mean, I love the art comparison cause it really reminds me of like auto tune and the electronic boom in the eighties for music where like theoretically it allows you to make music without having music knowledge or even talent. But in reality,

all it does is it makes pop music all sound the same or with core and taste all this. Like it's like instead of innovating and really goes back to what we're talking about with the older generation, instead of making things better for tomorrow, it's just maintaining the status quo of today. Yeah. I just had two last questions for you, Nate. All right. last questions for you, Nate. Alright. Well, first of all, I was looking at your Twitter, and I was just wondering, with no further setup, could you tell us what are Nazi cattle?

Yeah, the Nazis had a program to breed, to recreate the extinct wild cattle of Europe, the Aurochs. And so, these two brothers, the Heck brothers, were tasked with it and

they created a breed of cattle that are just really good at murder and don't like to be around people at all. And they would use them in parades and shit to show off the might of Aryan

coolness. It's extremely fucking stupid. Wait, would they like gore kids on the side of the parade? Probably. So at some point was Hitler receiving like a briefing of like the updates on the like

murder, did not see murder cow program? I don't know if this would have ever gotten to such a high desk but i hope it did i hope he had to think about this and convince himself that it wasn't the dumbest idea anyone's ever but were you saying that these went extinct and i guess some neo-Nazis are trying to bring them back? Is that true? Yeah. Dipshits keep perpetuating these cattle

generations after their need to bolster the Nazi regime. It's not relevant anymore. Because yeah, the Aurochs were driven out of Europe because they were replaced by good domestic cattle that are better

i just i don't know i love the idea of neo-nazis trying to recruit by uh recreating murder cows yeah seems like seems like the nazi problem in some at least in in agriculture is kind of self-regulating if the cows are constantly killing their owners i don't understand why these socialist cooperatives are growing so much faster than ours with our cows kill somebody every week over here it weeds out the weak people you just subtly encourage them to go, no, keep at it. You almost have the Aurochs. Got this.

Start donating. Maybe they do serve a purpose after all. Well, Nate, I want to thank you for joining us. Thank you very much for explaining all these concepts to us and educating us. And my very much for explaining all these concepts to us and educating us. And my final question for you is, where can people find you? Where can they contact you? And what can people do if they want to inquire about or support your communal farming or communal farming more generally?

I'm on Twitter at Turbo underscore fucker yeah you said you linked my articles that's pretty much about as much as going on honestly I've never really come across any like collective farming organizations that

meet my you know get my seal of approval they're not up to it not ready for action what do they do that suck they just not represent themselves or they're more uh they more cultist than communist yeah yeah i think one of the most successful uh you know communes of the 60s is a farm called Eastwind in Missouri. Supposedly, they make a very popular organic nut butter. And I don't know. I'm sure it's nice. I'm sure it's a nice place.

I'm sure they're happy together. Cool. Well, do keep us updated because I do think it's a very fascinating idea. It's these different communal farms, but there would be, I guess, a central communist party around all of them. Yes. And that's kind of the goal and what we're building towards. And do you have any predictions or imaginations

for what an idealized future might look like in the United States, or do you not think we're headed towards an idealized future? I have an idea I'd like to see. I can imagine just a billion Americans living just along the Mississippi River and the Ohio River in these basins, and just being in a place that's full of people and full of life. Steamboats and airships that'd be cool why not

nice I'm with you yeah I can see it people just in the river just slapping catfish no steampunk is that a metaphor for sex what oh is that a metaphor for sex what oh is that a euphemism for sex

or no I mean just literally just stunning a fish dead beating it yeah no I think I think steampunk with catfish is a pretty good recruiting pitch I think we're gonna get a lot

of people in on this. All right. Let's go. Well, thank you again, our guest Nate, for joining us. You can check him out, as you mentioned, on Twitter, Turbo underscore fucker. And we'll be checking back with him and wishing him lots of luck with this communal farming project. Thank you for listening to Grubstakers. We'll see you soon. I'm

Sean B. McCarthy. I'm Yogi Paywall. I'm Steve Jeffers. I'm Andy Palmer. Have a good night. Goodbye, everybody. Remember to practice safe catfish flapping. Yeah, and don't tell me about Farming Simulator 2020, okay?

2019 was when they perfected the formula. Goodbye.