TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #508: How The Government Is Killing Small Farms with Dustin Kittle

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

Marty sits down with Dustin Kittle to discuss how the Farm Credit Administration is destroying the family farm. Dustin on Twitter: https://twitter.com/dustinkittle 0:00 - Intro 0:50 - The farm credit system 9:28 - River & Unchained 10:44 - Dustin’s situation and the lenders’ liquidity crisis 20:51 - The people responsible? 26:19 - Gradually, Then Suddenly & Zaprite 27:56 - Motivations and goals 33:15 - Ruthless tactics 39:51 - FCA’s integral role 48:26 - Last stand of the farmers 55:46 - Educating consumers and supporting farmers 1:01:19 - Herding us toward hyper-centralized food 1:08:44 - Next steps 1:12:09 - Wrapping on a monologue Shoutout to our sponsors: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠River⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Unchained⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Zaprite⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Gradually, Then Suddenly⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ TFTC Merch is Available: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Shop Now⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Join the TFTC Movement: Main ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Clips ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YT Channel⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Website⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow Marty Bent: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Twitter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

this rip of tftc was brought to you by river it's the best place to buy bitcoin go to river.com tftc and enjoy this episode you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for bitcoin if you're not paying attention you probably should be i mean i'm interested in the story dustin we are live now because i think

it's just another example of either government mass incompetence or malice uh that is going on in the world you've essentially highlighted uncovered a scheme going on between the farmer credit administration which is managed by the federal government and how they are putting american farmers in very vulnerable positions and extorting them almost and so i think to start off our conversation let's just give a top level 30 000 foot view of what's exactly happening here why are farmers needing to leverage these type of loans and how are they being manipulated and taking advantage of yeah absolutely and appreciate the interest on the story the uh the farm credit system was set up a little bit over 100 years ago and originally it was set up as a benefit to the

farmers and what has happened over the course of that 100 years is essentially a level of crony capitalism really. We had a system that was set up for the farmers that is it is a government sponsored enterprise when you look at the farm credit administration but they try to keep their lenders on an independent level. At least that's the pitch that they give. What we have been able to find out, and we found this out through an investigation that we had launched back in 2021 by the Farm Credit Administration, is that there is no oversight in this system whatsoever right now. And you have farmers who can be foreclosed on without even getting due process. And I'll just very quickly break down and say that the entire farm credit system is governed by a federal law

called the U.S. Farm Credit Act. And through a series of manipulations in the courts and through legislation over the last 40 years, they have taken away a farmer borrower's right to even sue these people in court. So your only recourse, if a local lender, for example, does what they did to us, to where they put our loan into stress, and that's the first step in the farm credit foreclosure process. And to tell you how egregious our particular situation was, we'd never missed a loan payment. We had over $2 million in equity. The year before, the farm that they were trying to take from us, we owned free and clear. We had only financed it because we were doing a construction project, and we put that farm that we owned free and clear up as collateral.

And so what we ended up finding out was when they put our loan in distress and we had never missed a payment, we reached out to what was supposed to be our only recourse, which was the Farm Credit Administration, and they did nothing for 657 days. And so it lasted two years. And during that period of time, what I was forced to do, an option that a lot of farmers would not have had available to them, is I sold my home. I sold my home so that I could pay off my farm credit debt 24 years early to get out of what was essentially an extortion scheme. And I did that because it was becoming very clear to me that the Farm Credit Administration was not going to step in. And, you know, that that is essentially how we uncovered all of this. We have now found out

in just the last week that it is completely an inside job going all the way to the inspector General, who is really the only even designed independent oversight to the Farm Credit Administration as a whole. But, you know, in a system like this, we are losing family farms every day. The government has sounded the alarm on it. What they're not telling everybody is that they are a major reason why we are losing these family farms. So it's incredibly two-faced. Absolutely. We've got a big problem here we're actually causing.

If I recall correctly reading your Twitter posts from last week, Thursday, Friday, there's internal sabotage. And you've honed in on a couple of particular individuals within the FCA who are working against the interest of small American farmers. That's right. And, you know, we don't even know exactly all the motivations, but I'll tell you, if you look at it, and three years ago, I'd probably laugh at what I'm about to say, but I'm certainly not laughing now. But the government itself has put out reports over the last few years saying that we have a major problem with foreign entities coming in and buying farmland. And what we had missed as far as that full picture was the fact that the United States farm credit system, again, that was set up over 100 years ago for the benefit of American farmers to save American farmland, all of a sudden they carved out a particular provision that allowed our own government to lend or sell to foreign entities and individuals. and and to give you an example the extortion on my case and and and the lender that we have found to be the most rogue I guess at this point almost to the point that it almost has to be a trial

balloon as far as the farm credit system as a whole is Alabama farm credit and you've got a 3,000 borrower system there right now and you've got over a thousand borrowers who they have taken money from and what has happened over that period of time though over the last five years is Alabama went from a state that had two percent of its farmland controlled by foreign interest to now it's over eight percent of the farmland in the state of Alabama that's controlled by foreign interest and and you put that within that same window this new inspector general that had come into the farm credit administration and I've named the person her name is Wendy LaGuardia we we have confirmed enough information to know that she is a major problem as far as farmers who

are about to lose everything they've ever worked for reaching out to the farm credit administration and they are essentially ignoring it and again we don't know all the motivations it could be purely the fact that they are selling this land off to the highest bidder foreign interest comes in as the highest bidder a lot of these executives are set up even though they are in government positions or quasi-government positions they're getting bonuses and commissions based on performance and based on money made and so there is a complete contrast there between where the system started a hundred years ago as far as being a cooperative that was for the benefit of the farmers to where now it is essentially a profit scheme that's it's actually worse than than if

you were dealing with a private bank because at least with a private bank you could sue them in court with the farm credit system you don't have a right under the law to sue them under the farm credit act and so they you could literally have a local lender tomorrow come out on a loan that you might have taken out seven days ago and if they want to foreclose all they have to do is put you in a distressed situation they they can even go so far as to say that they have made the subjective determination that their collateral may be in jeopardy because you can't pay that loan over the lot over the lifetime of it and provided that the farm credit administration does not step in and during this period of time that this new inspector general has been in i say

new she's been there since 2017 we can't find a single situation to where she has sided with a borrower as far providing relief against uh in their fight against the lender who might be trying to take their farm and i mean that that's remarkable this episode was presented by river river is the best most secure place to buy bitcoin in the united states go to river.com slash tftc set up an account today you'll be able to dca into bitcoin without paying any fees you'll be able to give people bitcoin via river links you'll be able to send and receive bitcoin over the lightning network and you'll be able to set limit orders if you want to buy bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now you can set orders to buy bitcoin when it hits

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concierge onboarding team today, tell them that TFTC sent you and use the promo code TFTC at checkout, unchained.com. For your particular situation, I mean, you mentioned the loan you took out was fully collateralized by the land that you own free and clear. You were on time with your payments, what was the justification for them transitioning your loan into a state of distress? Was it the subjective whims that you described? So in our situation, it's kind of twofold. One, you have what their reasoning was. Their reasoning was that they believed that they made the subjective determination that even though I had never missed a loan payment, even though I owned the property the year before, even though I had over $2 million in equity in

this farm, that their collateral was in jeopardy and that I was in financial distress and would not be able to pay my loans over the 25 year lifetime of that loan. And the reality of it, though, and this is kind of the bigger picture part of it and what we're fighting still today, is that they were aware I represent a group in the state of Alabama, the Alabama Poultry Growers Association. So these poultry farmers that may contract with a Tyson, a Cook Foods, a Pilgrim's Pride, Wayne Farms, those kind of companies. So I grew up on a poultry and cattle farm. I've represented the poultry farmers of Alabama for more than a decade before this, but I actually had an executive from Alabama Farm Credit, my lender, show up at my farm

in January of 2021 and start asking a lot of questions about who we represented in agriculture and wanting to know whether or not we represented the Poultry Farmers Association still. We told him yes. By June of 2021, we had received a letter to where they had asked us to disclose who our agricultural law clients were as part of their due diligence on our loan. And a month later, I had my branch manager call and say, Dustin, something's going on. Your loan account's been frozen. And so for us, and again, we were unique. We're standing in front of a thousand poultry borrowers that were at Alabama Farm Credit because a third of their entire loan portfolio is poultry farmers.

So from July of 2021 until I paid my loans off in full in December, our account was completely frozen. I could not contact my lender. We were turned over to a private lawyer that was based out of Birmingham, Alabama. I reported that lawyer. We got even recorded calls. There are letters to this effect saying we will not be back in the farm credit system unless we sign a release of claims with confidentiality. what we now know is that that was going to extend all the way to us not being able to represent these poultry farmers against them and uh you know kind of bringing it all full circle there

is that the alabama farm credit uh association by the if you look just at the line of credit that they have at that bank they have a um they have a one billion dollar line of credit with the Farm Credit Bank of Texas, which is their parent bank. And if you look at their most recent quarterly report in March of 2024, it will show that they are over 90% to the maximum of that line of credit. What happened in 2021, at least according to internal former Alabama Farm Credit employees that have spoken

with us on the condition that we keep their information anonymous and confidential, is that the bank was having difficulties, the lender was having difficulties. There was a real chance, and our position is that that lender was going to fail. And what ended up happening is that those poultry farmers had these assignment accounts

where a portion of their money that they received from the poultry companies was being held kind of like a deposit. They woke up one morning in September of 2021 while their attorney up here in Tennessee is being extorted and being told that he's gonna lose his farm if he doesn't stand down from all of this.

And what happened was they locked those accounts. We believe that there will end up being about $60 million that was in those accounts when you go across the board, all 1,000. I think that the highest amount I can think of of a client that we represent would be a little bit over $150,000 that was taken. But we're three years later still fighting this with the Farm Credit Administration and the system as a whole because those farmers' money

just disappeared. And what they have come back in recent months and said is that money is going to be given back to those farmers at the very back end of their loan. And they have painted it as we're going to save these farmers interest on the very back end of their loan because for example I've got clients right now that are the poultry farmers that they're really paid ahead about three years on their loan if you took what was taken out of their account and they're saying well when they get to year 17 through 20 or 22 through 25 they're going to have it made because all of a sudden we're just going to be able to tell them that they're paid off and the reality is is that they took advantage of people that were not sophisticated as far as in financing

and they did that with with attorneys that they hired in going against these people and and it really has put the squeeze on those people you know one of my clients that's had over sixty thousand dollars taken from him he's had to take on a second job and is looking at the prospects that he might have to sell his farm over it and we reached out to them i asked them will you return this guy sixty thousand dollars and all they could cobble together was twenty thousand dollars and and i think that that kind of shows they don't even dispute that they took it they just are in a position right now i think to where they don't know what to do because they don't have the funds to pay these people back and so we're getting this legal

super team of farm credit lawyers from all around the country there's 50 something lenders there's four major farm credit banks we have lawyers coming in from other districts districts that i don't even have clients in and they we're going against five law firms right now because they are trying to protect alabama farm credit from failing because if they fail it's joint and several liability across the system and my feeling is in looking at the annual reports from some of these other lenders, if Alabama Farm Credit fails and they have joint and several liability across the system and they go around passing that offering plate, you'll have other lenders that are going to fail. And it's going to create a domino effect. And I think that there is serious

concern that the whole farm credit system could collapse over this. Wow. Initially, I mean, it's remarkable. Here's another thing that we just found out in the last week is that if you go back about 10 years ago, farm credit snuck into the treasury department. This was not passed by Congress. This was never revealed publicly and this information was provided to us from the private banking industry which you know they've had a beef with farm credit for years because there is no oversight there and it makes it difficult for the private banking world to compete with them or anybody else but what they found out was they went to the treasury department and got a 10 billion dollar standby line of credit and nobody can get them to explain

why it was that they needed that because they continue to say hey we are in great financial position. But I think the reality is they are trying to hold on for dear life at this point and make sure that this whole thing doesn't crumble down. And I say that because what is going to end up being the case is it was brought down by corruption. You know, you look at some of these executive salaries and listen, I'm a capitalist and and, you know, in the in the most sincere way but when you again when you have a system that is at a minimum quasi-governmental that was set up for the farmers and you have the farm credit bank of texas and their ceo makes over a million dollar base salary with over a million dollar in bonuses that something has went amiss

in this system and there's just no question that there there's some financial difficulties across the board when i initially came into this conversation i was thinking that we would uncover some corruption in the sense that you have some people in positions of power in government that are looking to sell american-owned farmland to foreigners but now as you describe it seems like this is a pure liquidity crisis going on within the fca and the member banks and the reaction to their liquidity crisis is try to thrust the blame on the individual farmers who are taking out loans to um maybe on the back end of this crisis say it wasn't our fault the farmers couldn't actually pay their bills when you're making it abundantly clear that

most people can and so especially with moving the the frozen funds and saying hey we're gonna add that to the back end of the loan structure so that you're good at the later years that signals like no they need the money now so they need to confiscate it so that they can cover their liabilities elsewhere oh yeah absolutely and and this is perhaps the most egregious part of it is the fact that again you're talking about a farmer owned system so so all the money really that's at these lenders belongs to the farmers and and would in theory go back to them as a dividend which they do have a patronage program but uh the frightening part of this is like with Alabama Farm Credit, like I mentioned before, they have five law firms

that are working for them right now. Well, who do you think those law firms are paid for? They're paid for by these farmer borrowers. And so the shocking fact here is that these executives have used farmer borrower funds. They have just about collapsed this system and they are hiring, I'm talking about the top law firms, not just even in the United States. I mean, we're going against a law firm right now that's got offices all across the world. And we're going against the biggest law firm in the state of Alabama. And again, these lawyers are brought in to try to protect the executives from the farmer borrowers. And again, the tragedy to it is that the lawyers are being hired with the farmer borrowers money. And at Alabama Farm Credit, like I said, they've brought

in the biggest law firm in the state of Alabama. And that law firm is Bradley A. Rent. They have offices across the United States. But they are the biggest law firm in Alabama. When you have a farmer borrower that that bank wants or that lender wants to put in a distress status, the first step to foreclosure, they actually turn that over to the law firm. And I'll give you just an example of how far they are stretching this distress status. I had a gentleman that called me recently and he said, Alabama Farm Credit's put my loan in distress and they are offering, they want to take a deed in lieu of foreclosure. And I said, well, who are you dealing with? And they said, well, I'm dealing with the Bradley A. Rand Law Firm. And said beyond that, if I turn

over this deed in lieu of foreclosure. They also want me to sign a legal release of claims and confidentiality to never tell anybody about it. And I said, well, did you get behind on your payments? And he said, no. He said, I've been reading your story. He said, I felt like I was all alone. He said, I've never missed a loan payment. I said, well, what happened? He said, well, my dad died and my dad was listed on the loan with us. He said, my dad and me and my mother. And I said, well, send your loan documents. I pull up his loan documents, and in the default provision, it actually states if any person that's on that loan passes away, the bank has the right to declare you to be in default whether you've ever missed a payment or not.

And so there are like 13 different factors that Alabama Farm Credit and their loan documents can find you in default for, And one of them being the the section that they used on me to where they just decide, well, we don't think you can make your payments. I mean, they literally do not have to buy the contract, have any kind of proof of that. And, you know, that's that's scary. Number one, if it was even a private bank. But the fact that, again, this goes all the way up to the top, there's a federal agency that's supposed to be providing oversight to this. the federal agency has a lobbying arm that is lobbying the ag committees to be sure that they don't step in and take a look at everything and and again you've got lawyers all the way to the top and you've got this inspector general in the position and where one of the ways that we got a

tip on her being part of the problem is she is the former legal advisor and assistant to the chairman of the entire system. She moved directly from advising the chairman of the system on policies to going into what is supposed to be an independent position as an attorney looking to see whether or not the system in their policies has violated any laws. And so it's a complete conflict of interest. It would be no different in that situation than if my guy that's been my lawyer for years, all of a sudden a woman that's representing me as an attorney is appointed to a judge position or elected to a judge position. And they get in that spot and my case comes up before them. Well, who do you think they're going to give the benefit of the doubt to? They're going

to give the benefit of the doubt to me. They've got a prior relationship with me. But that's why legal ethics does not allow that to even occur. And that's where we were confident enough to know these people these people understand that they know exactly what they're doing and you know they need to be called out on it and we've got two other people that just since that post went viral on X this past week all of a sudden I have other individuals that reach out with some other puzzle pieces now we know kind of the two right-hand people that were working with Wendy LaGuardia, in McLean, Virginia, to make all of these borrower complaints go away.

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well. The time is now, freaks. The fiat system is fragile. Invest in the infrastructure that de-risks the future. Invest in yourself. Bitcoin payments with ZapRite. Go to zaprite.com slash TFTC to get $40 off their annual subscription. Zaprite.com slash TFTC, $40 off. What do you think their end goal is? Just to confiscate all this farmland, to solve this liquidity issue that they have so so i i think that you've got multiple competing interests and and i think that there is someone standing back and it's you know when you look at all of this as far as uh you know i did one of the things that that i figured out is that these banks are not what we all thought they were um as far as uh you know if everybody walked into

their bank obviously it didn't what happened in alabama farm credit is essentially a bank run they took that money what was supposed to have had happened to that money when they eliminated those accounts was the money had to go back to them the reality was they could create an artificial bank run and they didn't have the money to go back to them but i think it's it's got to be multi-tiered at the lender level the only thing really that they need to drive this is the fact that they're not treating it as a cooperative they put these executives in place and they put tiered salary structures and tiered bonus structures in place to where it benefits them to push the farmers out of the land and they know that they're going to be covered again all the way

up to the top in McLean Virginia because no one's looking at it and so you know at Alabama Farm Credit and again this is this is one of many systems but it's going on at more at more lenders than this but at Alabama Farm Credit in two of the last three years the executives have taken over a 15 percent raise and you know they're receiving six-figure bonuses and it it got to the point of where when they submit the annual report they are supposed to be listing the CEO and senior officer salaries well they hid those salaries from the farmer borrowers for the last six months and wouldn't release them and a big part of it is the fact that the dividends that went back to the farmers

took a dramatic decrease at Alabama farm credit some of those people that were really counting on the dividend check that they get every spring got cut in half and then all of a sudden what they were about to find out was that their executives all were making as much as they were before if not if not more and so it's a situation again to where their goal might just be personal profit but somewhere there is somebody looking at this I think almost certainly at a higher level. There is a report that was put out by the government and they put it out every year. It's the same report that it talks about that Alabama has now lost over 8 percent of its farmland to foreign interest.

But there is a blurb in there that talks about how when they looked at where these farm locations were being chosen, they were finding out that they were around a lot of strategic military positions. and if again like when the my feeling is on it when the government tells you that it's probably too late at that point i mean when they're letting you in on that little secret and you just think about we're never going to get those farms back i mean there there is unless there is some kind of legislation that repeals some of these sales of the foreign entities and you know i don't see that happening but um those are never going to be turned those are never going to be farms again and the fact that you have foreign interests coming in

that are at times buying this and they have no intention of turning it into a farm. They're willing to pay a premium for this land and again, then you get back to the personal profit standpoint at the local lenders. It's more money in their pocket to get it to the higher bidder and there is no loyalty, there's no allegiance, there's no oversight to what the mission of the entire system is,

which is to actually save American farmland. It has been completely turned down its head since 1916 when everything was put into place. And really, probably when you look at it, the error was in 1933 when they created the Farm Credit Administration. We were rocking along, I think, okay from 16 to 33 when it was kind of a true cooperative.

But as many cooperatives, particularly in the agricultural space have turned into over the last 100 years it's been manipulated it's been captured by some entities at the very top and and again I think there are multiple goals one being money one being land capture and one I just almost have to believe there is a bigger narrative there and this kind of goes into the the food issue is that you look at all of these trends that we see there is almost certainly unless something you know unless this case honestly now if this case is I mean it means a lot to a lot of people there's a lot of people out there across the country right now with a distressed loan that's just praying somebody's

going to come in and fix this but if if this was allowed to continue and and to tell you how much they want to allow it to continue they tried to hire me as a and they hate the fact that I mentioned this and and I I'm actually going to release the documents over the next few days because I I just can't help myself at this point and and if if they take me out I want to be sure that everybody knows the story but uh between uh I guess it was in January late January they offered me 1.2 million dollars to become a paid legal consultant for farm credit well what that would it would this guy represent over 200 borrowers in the system and what that would do was it would automatically disqualify me from ever representing a

farm credit borrower again they wanted to give me 1.2 million dollars put me on a five-year contract and I turned them down I reported to a federal judge reporting the state bar they've not done anything about it but that should show you the desperation that they have right now to try to keep this from all unraveling it's truly infuriating and disgusting in a situation where you're cutting off your nose to spite your face and when you think about the american farmer and how tough of a business it has been historically how tough it is specifically right now and the benefit that these business owners bring to the american economy literally feeding and sustaining us

as american citizens as we go to live our lives work raise our families and you'd think at least i would that you would have a lot of respect for this particular industry but it seems like the federal government in combination with these these agricultural banks are really again cutting off their nose to spite their face to take advantage of business owners who simply want to do what they do best, which is grow food and livestock, get it to market so that the American people are fed and healthy and are taking advantage of them on both ends with very stringent debt products

and then using the language and taking advantage of relatively low financial education to take complete advantage of what is arguably a top three most important industry in the United States. Oh, absolutely. And I mean, you're talking about a farm credit system, a government that controls 40, 46 percent of the farm debt. I mean, that's huge. That's collectively across the board and all their 55 lenders. But, you know, somebody who put this plan in place understood psychology very well, because, you know, I can tell you as somebody that has, you know, I grew up with nothing. I'm the son of a muskrat trapper and my mom worked at a gas station when I was born. And so neither of my parents went to college. And when I was three years old, they bought a farm

and I watched them go through the same kind of things. And my dad was smarter than I am. He was just smarter on different types of things, and these lawyers have come in, and one of the things I think that they've preyed on, and quite frankly, it's took me, even though I never missed a loan payment, we had money in the bank, we're sitting there, and we're literally just being extorted to the point that they're telling me basically in telephone calls, you're either going to go away or we're going to, I mean, here's the lengths they went to. They didn't only try to try to foreclose on me. They told me they would foreclose on my mother, who had a farm in Alabama that didn't have a loan with them. But it they had filed a lien on her farm with a sham mortgage note. I mean, that's how ruthless a sham mortgage note. Yeah. So they had her come by the the local branch under the auspices that she owned. Part of that. She lives in Alabama. I live in Tennessee.

under the auspices that she was signing a document to affirm that everything was okay with my loan because she was a co-owner on some of the cattle that on our farm and she said that they just slid a piece of paper at the front up under the window she signed it she asked for a copy of it and they told her that well we'll mail it to you we didn't I didn't even she didn't even tell me about it And as far as like after it, I didn't know, you know, that she didn't get a copy of it. I didn't think anything else about it. And when they locked my account, they sent me an email and basically said, how about this? And it was a two year $750,000 mortgage on a farm. My mother walked in the family farm I grew up on. She walked in that bank that day owning free and clear. They gave her no money back. They gave her no appraisal. They've never even explained where that $750,000, the only explanation they could ever come up with would be that they are saying that they reassigned part of my debt over to her. But my name's not anywhere on it either. But that just kind of shows you the level of how ruthless that they are on this.

I would say too circling back on something from earlier that we talked about as far as kind of the end goal is there is going to come a day where they're going to trot out some politician somewhere some government official and they're going to say hey we hate to tell everybody but we we've lost the family farm in America and and we're going to have to do some things different we're going to have to look at some alternative sources and and what they will not share with people is the fact that they're the one that killed the family farm. And I don't think it's that dissimilar to some of the other things that's going on with the government. It's maybe just in this particular case. And I don't think it's any credit to me necessarily. I think

that at the end of the day, they flew a little bit too close to the sun and what they were trying to do. And to the point that they had some internal employees that really felt strongly that what was going on was wrong and um so uh the the uh the ending to this story will be that there are a lot of whistleblowers outside of myself yeah well on that note what how what do you think is an appropriate resolution to all of this i mean it seems like there's rampant corruption incentives are not aligned uh between the co-op and the owners of the banks handling the loans uh it seems like the government does not seem motivated in fact it seems like it's motivated to act against the interest of the individual farmers what is a solution to this problem that you that

you think can arise you know i've had several people that have the only negative comments i ever get on social media or out in public is people that misconstrue what my end goal is there are people that say, you know, well, my farm credit lenders are doing a fine job. They may be, and they say, well, Dustin Kittle wants to end farm credit, and I don't want to end farm credit. You know, if it was up to me, if I was being selfish on it, yeah, I'd say take farm credit out back and do what it's done to all these family farms, but the reality is when you hold 46% of the nation's farm debt if farm credit goes away tomorrow will collapse the entire agricultural system because you know you take a client like what I've got with these poultry farms

there there almost is no way anymore to make a viable living doing anything independently in poultry poultry's been captured by the Tysons by the cooked foods and if you want to do business with them, you're going to have to come to the lender, you're going to have to have a contract in hand, and you're going to have to buy a farm with these mega poultry houses, and you're going to be looking at a million dollar loan. The reality is, and this is kind of getting back to what do we do about it, because the answer number one is education. We have got to educate these farmer borrowers as far as on the front end of some of these

loans. The poultry farmers are being treated like a commodity. The poultry farmers I've got right now that are at the biggest risk are the ones that are in really good long term loans. They might be in a 3% loan over the next 25 years and essentially what these executives, it's kind of trapped them at this point with interest rates going up. And they want to play basically what I'd call a game of boggle to where they hit that thing and all the pieces go everywhere and it shakes it up and new loans have to go into place.

If they can force these poultry farmers out of business, just like some of my clients that say, hey, if I don't get my money back soon from these people, I can't keep going on. I'm going to have to sell it. And when they sell it, then all of a sudden somebody else comes back in and they're on a 10% interest loan. And the way that, again, this is another part of how farm credit has flown too close to the sun, is that the entire system was set up to provide a safe and reliable source of credit to the farmers. What we have uncovered, and I just posted this last week, is you've got

Tyson, which is one of not just the biggest companies as far as food production, but it's one of the biggest companies in the world generally and we have found where they have went to Tyson they've went to these other poultry integrators and instead of doing like a farm loan what they're giving them is for example a billion dollar line of credit to those poultry integrators so our farm credit system has started providing pooled loans to these big companies and and again then it becomes a shared effort they're both working against that particular farmer and if the poultry company can push a farmer out, then all of a sudden a new guy comes in, new loan, that poultry company might say, well, in addition to that new guy coming in, we're going to need

him to make about $200,000 in upgrades to these poultry houses to make everything work more efficiently. And kind of around and around that merry go round you go. And the end point is you're either going to sell your farm you're going to lose your farm or you know you're going to get you're going to get 10 years down the road and and quite frankly your mental health's probably not going to be where it was when you started into farming and you won't find many poultry farmers that's been doing it very long that have a very good feeling about any of it it is there is a reason why in the farming space we've had such an issue with suicide and a lot of it is the stress from this debt and and you know they kind of put you in a position and this is touching

on something I said earlier that it's taken me three years to feel comfortable in talking about it because nobody the first thing people think when you hear well I'm having difficulties with my bank is well what did that guy do wrong you know nobody it's it's hard to believe that somebody in the year 2024 could be subject to losing their property and have never missed a payment on it and uh you know i i i'm not going to say that something like that doesn't go on in the private world. But it certainly is being done at a much accelerated level when you get to what foreign credit's doing. And it's directly because they have the support and the backing of the government. And when I talk about the fact that that institution has been captured, it has been

captured by a lot of these trade organizations. And, you know, one of the things that I hate putting out there and wish that it was somebody else just because there's mixed reviews. And I don't want anybody that's, you know, I don't want to turn allies away from my case, but I'm also trying to be as honest with it as I can be. But if you look at 2019, President Trump actually appointed an outsider to the farm credit board, three person farm credit board. That person was Donald, was Rodney Brown, who is a former Kansas and California banker, very accomplished compliance expert spotless resume he was vetted no issues all that he liked was going through senate confirmation to go on the three-member farm credit board and all of a sudden we might

have finally had somebody that was going to come in and make changes the farm bureau which is the most powerful lobby in in agriculture joined forces with the farm credit council the lobbying arm of Farm Credit and they actually wrote the Senate Ag Committee and told them that they didn't want Rodney Brown. He was an outsider and the private banking industry wanted to destroy Farm Credit. And so through their campaign dollars for two years, Rodney Brown sat there and never got a confirmation hearing. And when on January 3rd, 2021, which is three days before the event everybody talks about,

the Senate Ag Committee actually returned a letter to Donald Trump saying, we never had an opportunity to get Rodney Brown to the confirmation hearing, and so we're returning his nomination. That passed the nomination over to Biden, but what was allowed to happen is, and this This is still the case today, which is why we filed suit at writ of mandamus against the president. There is only one member of that three member board right now serving in a legitimate valid term.

The other two members have been serving in expired terms. One of them has been serving in an expired term for six years. He's the man that should have been replaced in 2019 with Trump's appointee of Rodney Brown. And here's the irony to it all. The man that should have been replaced, Jeff Hall, is a former executive for the Farm Bureau. And he also is a former ag legislative staffer for Mitch McConnell, who serves on the Senate Ag Committee. So it is quite a web of conflicts.

And what we have found is that at least on the national level, Farm Bureau is, I would say, more motivated by their interest as an insurance company than they are by the interest the american farmer right now yeah it seems pretty clear and again it's infuriating the corruption is very blatant and in your face and i don't think if there would be any other industry i mean i could be wrong on this but a big part of it is the fact that it's farming um and and you know again i go back to my parents which extremely smart people but if a lawyer told them something they they wouldn't have any or a banker told them something they really wouldn't have any reason to think these people are manipulating us and and they're telling us you know the guy that called me that

said that he was in distress because his dad passed away so i guess that's just the way it is and uh you know i was kind of like well hell no that's not the way that it is it's not the way that it should be it's not legal and uh they were shocked by it but i think that goes to uh how they've preyed on these people, because you're dealing with people that don't have, listen, they, when I look back through my loan documents, and I'm notorious for it, you know, I have always felt like, you know, hey, if they tried to, and they've always been successful. I mean, I've defeated in litigation Ford, I've defeated Verizon, I've defeated the state of Alabama in litigation, even as a small private attorney. And if you would have told me three

years ago that there was somebody that I couldn't be I would have said there's no way that you give me three years but here we are and I will end up beating them at the end of the day and it but it's they have made my life and a lot of other people live in hell and I think about over the last three years I reported this fraud to them in August of 2021 August 24th of 2021 two days later they started their federal investigation. And the findings come back from that investigation. Like I said, I had ended up having to sell my family's home. Where I'm at right now doing this interview

is that venue we were building out, by the way. I had to move into the venue, so we couldn't open the venue. I sold over a hundred head of cattle and I sold over a hundred acres of farmland that we had to pay those loans off. But I did it because, you know, I very much valued the fact that this was something as far as free speech that needed to get out there. And, you know, I'm kind of I do the agricultural thing. My dad passed away 10 years ago.

He was killed in the shooting. And I took over this whole farm as kind of a legacy project for my dad. and uh you know i i just i i guess since that i probably view things differently than most people and and you know i don't think i've stayed ahead of them for three years necessarily even because of uh being a better lawyer as much as it's uh you know i was stubborn enough to to basically destroy my own life um in in in having to do all of this to to to do everything i could to be sure that they didn't get away with it and you know it's been it's been frustrating because you take the example like I gave earlier in January to where they offer me the bribe and I turned that information

over to the federal judge and asked for it to be made public so those stockholders the farmers could see it and I don't just mean at Alabama Farm Credit I mean across the country and they they got a federal judge to put it under seal and so all of that information is under seal in a federal court and there's no there's no way that's right but what do you do when you're dealing with a federal judge it's the same kind of issue what do you do when you're dealing with the government and and eventually you know here we are three years later and i'm still waiting i've said this for three years tomorrow could be that day that i get the call from the person that could put stopped while this and i have not got it yet but i feel like we're getting closer every day in the

last week um in linking together a lot of these pieces to know that it is internal sabotage it is deliberate it's part of a bigger plan i feel like that we have got enough pressure on them now that they've got to step up and and have some accountability um you know you've got a board chairman that's in there that i'm at least told by people is uh on the right side of the wall Typically, he is a lawyer. He's new to the board. And my hope is that he sees that this is an issue that was not done of his creation. He stepped into it, but he has an opportunity to fix it and quite frankly, to leave a legacy for himself of being a friend of the farmers. I mean, we're at a at a crossroads in time right now. We're on a track right now to where in 10 years the family farm is going to be a distant memory. And it's all going to be turned over to corporate agriculture, which is not going to be good for anybody.

And, you know, this is this might be the last stand for the farmers. And so, you know, I have devoted the last three years of my life, quite frankly, to to beating these people. But in June of 2023, they finally finished that investigation at the Farm Credit Administration, found that they violated the law, federal laws, against me seven different ways. Then they wrote at the end, thank you for sharing your concerns, but we know you've already paid your loan off, so there's nothing we can do for you. You're no longer a borrower in the United States Farm Credit System. And I said, well, will you at least make this public? And they said, no, we're not going to make it public. It's confidential.

And so I let people know what happened starting last September because my mother had kind of been put through a hell through this. And in fact, due to the stress of it, like they know all this, but due to the stress of it, she had a heart attack over it, over the fear that, you know, she's a retired public employee, public school bus driver and afraid she might lose her home over this. And that's really the reason that I ended up doing what I did in selling my own home. I couldn't risk them taking hers in retaliation against me. But, you know, it's been a frustrating road, particularly getting that having those findings come out. But when we filed the Biden complaint, I basically said that, you know, do whatever you want to to me, because I'm at a point where I don't have anything left to lose. and I made the findings public.

And so then all of a sudden that opened up a lot of eyes to where, you know, now we're talking to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and we're talking to other government agencies and we've got farm credit people that have read the findings and they are absolutely shocked at what's went on. And I think we may have lost your screen. Your screensaver may have kicked in. But, I mean, while we're figuring out the screen,

I mean, it's just, again, extremely disgusting the lengths of dehumanization that the government and these banks are going to erode. I'm not sure why, but my camera did completely go off. I'm not sure what the deal is. We can still hear you. And if need be, we can put in a nice, beautiful placement picture. Yeah, yeah, that's fine. I guess we can go with that. I mean, but it's it is shocking. It is something that like you would see in a movie.

I mean, really, when you think about all the layers of this, it's you know, I posted on X yesterday. I've had people say, you know, is corruption at an all time high? And I don't know the answer that I'm not so sure. It's not just that all of a sudden we're able to discover this kind of corruption more easily due to technology and things like that. And also just the fact that, you know, just like on this story, when that when it went viral and it got, you know, over a million views last week in 24 hours, all of a sudden I started hearing from farm credit employees saying, you're exactly right. Something's got to be done on this. And we've been trying to stop this person for years. yeah and you mentioned education earlier education of the farmer but i think and hopefully this

episode and what you've been doing on x is a great example that is educating the american consumer that the people producing their food are being attacked like this and treated like absolute dirt which is again disgusting i think that is the only word i can think of yeah it's the the you know the i guess the one thing i would say is maybe we've got an opportunity here to take lemons and make lemonade out of it in that we are we are at the right time I feel like post COVID to where there is enough attention that's being looked at it's something like this by the average American there is an understanding that this isn't something that's just involving you know plows and cows this is something that's involving the food supply and they see that

They see that through the inflation. They see that through food shortages. And the hope would be that we can create a relationship between the farmer and the consumer, a direct relationship that would eliminate some of these issues as far as going through and having to be a partner with the government on certain things. And that really is where we need to get to in agriculture, as to where we've got a more independent mindset on it it's it's it's really at the end of the day it's the only way to make agriculture work we've got to do you know we got to be doing what what nobody else is doing we've got to take a look and realize that the model this model of going into debt through these farm credit systems it might sound good on the front end what they're putting

out there but we have got to go back to the independent farming self-sustaining uh model and you know i think that again i think that there is a movement out there for the first time in my lifetime i feel like to where that conversation is happening uh at a national level and and that truly is what we need we need the farmers are one percent of this country and but what we we need to do is to embrace and create that relationship with the consumer so that essentially they go to bat for the farmer and and realize that we've all got a stake in this and and that there could be disastrous consequences if something like the farm credit system goes unchecked completely agree i I mean, I know you mentioned you were on a Twitter spaces with, uh, Texas slim from the

beef initiative, had him on the show multiple times. We've got, I'm actually wearing the hat of one of our local farmers here in Austin, sure. Tail Creek farms, um, big, big fan of what they're doing with local pastures, uh, here in Austin to get local farms access to end consumers and vice versa and consumers access the local farms um able to avoid whole foods heb go direct to the source and support those farmers financially knc cattle their efforts to spin up independent slaughterhouses and packing distribution centers it's happening but i completely agree like the american consumer needs

to really put their money where their mouth is and begin supporting these local farmers directly because it seems abundantly clear. And I thought it was abundantly crystal clear to me many years ago, having talked to Texas Slim and Cole and other farmers who were trying to solve this problem. But this story that you're describing and what you're involved in right now is adding a layer of corruption and dehumanization that I didn't even think was possible

when you think about the federal government acting against the interests of the farmers that they're pretending to try to save. It's infuriating. I would say it's the worst farm debt crisis since the 1980s for sure that we're in right now. And again, a lot of this is prompted by the corporate agriculture demands

as far as you know again with the poultry farmers but we've already seen the pork industry has pretty much been captured as well really cattle is kind of and we raise I've raised cattle all my life we raise cattle now that that's kind of the last bastion of independence that's left and you see a lot of the efforts that's going forward now you know with the RFID tagging and the things like that to where you get pulled all of a sudden into this government system you're losing that independence they get their hands on you and then all of a sudden they've got at least some measure of control and and at the end of the day you know you think about you know they don't just control 46 percent of the nation's farm debt that's 46 percent of the nation's farm land essentially

and uh they've got that behind them that's not going to be something they're going to give up real easily and uh you know you look at our debt and things like that and it you know it it kind of uh you hope that we don't end up in in a microcosm of like what alabama farm credit's going through to where they're getting squeezed and then they squeeze the ones under them but that seems to be the case at the farm credit level to where if they can create a squeeze nationwide again it allows them to obtain more land one to control where that land goes and it provides some immediate financial relief to a government that's run wild on spending yeah that's funny this is all coming on the heels of the biden administration waiving the debt of students who took out loans i know

I know. I haven't run the math on that as far as, you know, if you even if you just did something to where there was he would have had much more support on it if he would have said, OK, we'll have some kind of program. There might be a companion program for the farmers on the debt. And listen, there's a lot of farmers that they've made their beds and, you know, they're going to have to live through it. And I'm not out to save every farmer on this. There's farmers that have made bad business decisions. There's farmers that don't need to be farming, quite frankly. We probably need to fend that herd, so to speak. But nobody should lose their property without due process.

And we shouldn't be losing farmland. I mean, again, you look back and throughout history, as far as a land grab like this, It almost always has led to just complete disaster at the end and it always comes from the top with the government and we're not that far. The only thing that's keeping this from just being something where people are out in the streets screaming about it is the fact that the government and frankly the media, when you look at the mainstream media, is gaslighting us all into thinking that it's a situation just where maybe farms can't keep up. and and the reality is we have created this system to where we have to play by their rules to the point to where a farmer really in in this day and age outside of just the very few their sharecropper again we have we have turned it completely around and they only hold that land to the extent that they are being allowed to they are completely at the mercy of a government system right now

that anytime they wanted to could take any farm in this country and uh that's frightening i mean because uh they uh they have shown that they are not only planning to do that they've shown they are willing to do that and again you look at this these statistics and the government is the first one to trot them out to us in how many family farms we've lost but nobody's asking the question as to why are we losing them yeah i'm not sure if you're aware of this dustin but i'm uh one to uh dab on theories around people conspiring to do things and if you look at the uh projection of of people um whether it's davos class or bill gates here right united states they're really attacking the food system um yeah and trying to trying to make it seem like it's a natural problem

but it seems abundantly clear that this is a manufactured problem particularly by people in government in big business and they're looking to pun intended cattle herd everybody into this hyper centralized food system where things can be granularly controlled and the end consumer really has no options at the end of the day and the individual who would like to run a small family farm doesn't have the option to because they've been completely boxed out of the market and soon enough we'll all be eating soy slop um yeah no meat you look over at europe right now and you're really getting a preview of of i think of what is to come in it and uh you know it doesn't take long to put all these pieces together and to realize nothing is that circumstantial nothing

is that coincidental. When everything is moving in the same direction on this, with the motivations being so clear at the very top that it's about control and it's about a completely different motive as far as you look at all of the money that's going in right now to the alternative meats and things like that. And there's just no question that they are positioning the United States to, again, at some point, come out and say, hey, we've got to do things differently. And here's how we've got to do it differently. And in the process, though, they've got to break down this system entirely so that there's no fight left in it. And they're not far away from doing that. So if you're listening to this, stand up and fight. They're attacking your food.

Absolutely. Which you need. You need healthy food. And a national security issue. When you find out that we're selling farmland that's around these military bases, and you look at Alabama, Alabama was a strategic location here. You've got Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, and you've got multiple military bases that are nearby there that's within that Alabama farm credit territory.

you look at some of these farms that have been bought they are strategic and uh you know they we probably will find out the answer to all of this at some point but i i think that it's we can make some logical interpretations right now just in in looking at how far we've went so far yeah well thank you absolutely for for all your work over the last three years i know as you've described it's been immensely stressful for you and your mother and i think it's extremely honorable you trying to extend your your father's legacy and make sure that the legacy he began does not get bombarded by the federal government and this agricultural credit system and beyond that fighting for the small individual farmer out there to to make sure that they can actually

live a life of dignity because that's that's the most again disgusting thing of all this stripping the dignity of individual farmers and then publicly posturing like it's the the small farmers that are unable to run reliable businesses it's their fault right the government's fault and it's yeah it's satanic almost it's like what yeah there's not a lot of empathy here i mean as far It's like, you know, there's not a whole lot of concern. The last thing I'll just tell you, and I appreciate you letting me come and share this story and appreciate the interest in it. But our next move on this is that we have taken the complaint that we filed against the president to appoint these positions. And we are going to, their answer is do you actually this week.

So the United States president is going to have to answer a private citizen in a lawsuit unless they ask for some kind of continuance on it. And our lawsuit's backed up by 50 years of case law precedent. The first thing I always think of, somebody's going to sue the president, you know, they must have lost it. But we've had every legal analyst that's looked at it, like they get through with it and their jaw drops. And they say, you've built this all around the case that was against Nixon in the 70s. And it's true we have to where if a president just fails to make an appointment, which is what has happened over the last week, what has happened since Biden was put into office, he's made only one appointment of the three, then you can sue them. But we're going to try to broaden the scope of this, and we are actually going to adjust some of the legal standing in the case to make it on behalf of the farmers of the United States as a whole, because they all do have a stake in it. And then we're going to try to take eight cases from across the country and use that as an education to work those cases up, post that so that there's transparency.

And through that, you'll have a lot of farmers that will learn what their rights are. And through that, you'll have a farm credit administration that knows somebody's watching this. And so that's our end goal. And it is to create change on it, to try to get the farmers to stand up and also all the people across the country to stand up on behalf of the farmers. well it sounds like you've got uh this is only the beginning of the journey so hopefully this is the first of many conversations that we can be having as this journey unravels and the fight to protect the american farmer and educate the public about what is going on continues um dustin thank you again for doing what you're doing and thank you for taking some time i know this has been a crazy week for you i feel very fortunate that you uh joined us for an hour today so thank you for your time as well greatly appreciate it thank you marty all right where before we leave

before we wrap up oh he left already he's gone he's gone we'll link to his twitter and any links uh that he's been sharing about this particular case but i guess we'll end on a little monologue here freaks uh shocker government is acting corruptly uh corruptly is that a word they're acting they're very corrupt they're attacking the american farmer they're trying to blame the american farmer sorry for the for the mess on the side of my desk here if you're watching this live uh i thought it was out of frame but it's we've been covering these topics for many years it shouldn't be a shocker to anybody but having that conversation with us and it is still you think it's gone to its extreme and then you find some little detail like this out like you have

government and an agricultural credit system here in the united states actively working against the interest of small farmers i mean dustin's story his father and mother did not have much they scrounged together as much as they could to buy a farm to create a legacy to hand it on to their son and the government is actually actively trying to destroy that it's absolutely disgusting and it cannot stand we need to stand up against this go support your local ranchers your local farmers share this story with people make some noise the government hates you and they're they're trying to destroy your food system and the first step in destroying your food system is removing the individuals around the country who actually care the most about it who are the farmers and

ranchers who do the hard work to toil for very low margins it's typically a passion project they just like be living on the land and providing for their communities they get their fulfillment from their part in that community not necessarily the monetary rewards of fulfilling that part and those are the people who actually care about you it's not the government and the government is trying to destroy those people who care about you and are trying to bring you healthy, nutritious food. So hope you enjoy that. Like I said, hopefully that's the first

of many conversations we have with Dustin as he continues on his journey to fight the government and the Farm Credit Administration. So hope you enjoyed it. Peace and love, freaks. Okay. Thank you.