The David Knight Show - Land Rich, Cash Poor: The Heartbreaking Collapse of the American Dream and a Family’s Fight to Survive

Episode Date: March 11, 2025

The gripping saga of Land, Rich, and Cash Poor, where Brian Reisinger unveils a century-long tale of resilience, heartbreak, and the shocking decline of the American farmer. From the rolling fields of Wisconsin to a world dominated by corporate greed and suffocating regulations, this is more than a family story—it’s a chilling wake-up call echoing across the Western world. As small farms vanish at an alarming rate—45,000 a year!—and global forces conspire to choke out the little guy, Reisinger exposes the hidden crises, from tariffs to COVID, that pushed his family to the brink. Yet amid the despair, a flicker of hope emerges: a sister’s bold vision, a father’s quiet courage, and a rallying cry for a revolution to save our food, our heritage, and our future.If you would like to support the show and our family please consider subscribing monthly here: SubscribeStar https://www.subscribestar.com/the-david-knight-show Or you can send a donation throughMail: David Knight POB 994 Kodak, TN 37764Zelle: @[e-mail] App at: $davidknightshowBTC to: bc1qkuec29hkuye4xse9unh7nptvu3y9qmv24vanh7Money should have intrinsic value AND transactional privacy: Go to DavidKnight.gold for great deals on physical gold/silverFor 10% off Gerald Celente's prescient Trends Journal, go to TrendsJournal.com and enter the code KNIGHTFor 10% off supplements and books, go to RNCstore.com and enter the code KNIGHTBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-david-knight-show--2653468/support.

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And we're going to talk to him about the COVID crash and the road to revival, a couple of chapters that are there. But as he talked about his experiences there, he said, My great-grandfather, his name is Reisinger, had left pre-World War I Europe and lost himself in the rolling hillsides of southern Wisconsin, settling in 1912 on our farm in a deep valley filled with rich brown dirt. He and my great-grandmother built a future together as the Depression gripped the country. Out of their 14 children came the eldest, my grandfather Albert, who married my grandmother. Their

generation helped expand our family's dairy farm up out of the valley and into the hills above. And then his eldest, my own father, took over, feeling like his father before him that he had no choice with what he was supposed to do with his life. So he and my mom rose each morning to milk the cows, bounced countless hours on the seat of a tractor, shoveled, carried, and heaved until they expanded the farm further still, buying a third farm that was once run by my dad's aunt and uncle, bringing the Reisinger family acreage to a height of 600 acres. My dad found, despite feeling that he had no choice, that farming was his calling.

Each day it sank deeper down into his blood and then his bones until it was a part of him. To me, he seemed to share the instincts of his animals and to sense the changing weather bearing down on his crops for 45 years. Morning and night, every day of the year, he milked 50 cows in our old but sturdy red barn, sometimes rotating in more cows and shifts when he could manage it to make a little more money and harvested enough crops each year to feed his herd and maybe sell a little on the side. He and my mom built our family a

farm that was worth more than any point in its 100 year history and gave my sister and I choices that my dad never had. For me to find my own way whatever it may be and for my younger sister to decide to take over the farm and what had been a man's world. And each year more people shrugged and told us little family farms like ours, so much work for so small a milk check, just couldn't make it anymore. And so as he points out, been there for a hundred years, his father built it to a pinnacle, but then the things that have happened recently nearly took it down and his sister had to completely rethink the operation to try to keep the farm going.

So we're going to talk to him about that. The effects of COVID, effects of tariff and then what can be done. And this is something that applies to all of us even if we don't want to farm, even if we don't have it, we need to keep that access to good food open. Alright, welcome back. And the book is Land, Rich and Cash Poor. We're talking to Brian Reisinger. And this is about his family's story, but it is also something that's happening across

the Western world. We're seeing this happening in the UK, we're seeing it happening in France, we're seeing a lot of things happening in America, but he's going to speak to us about some of the specifics that have happened when things really took a downturn and how his family has managed this, but we also want to talk about what is coming forward. Brian has an interesting background. He grew up on a family farm in Wisconsin and then he became a columnist, a consultant. He's worked for a lot of large mainstream publications like USA Today, Newsweek and others like that. So he's really ideally suited to tell

this story. He's lived it. That's been a part of his family's history for a hundred years and now he is a writer and so he is able to articulate what has happened with them. And so welcome, and thank you for joining us, and thank you for this very important book, Brian. Hey, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it. It's really good to be with you. Tell us a little bit about your family.

As an introduction, I read from your book, you're talking about your father and mother and how they had expanded the farm to the biggest that had ever been, bought the farm that belonged to your aunt and uncle and everything, and then things turned difficult. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, absolutely. You said it exactly right. You know, we were in our small farm, but through the generations we had built it up to be able to make it. And from my great-grandparents to my grandparents to my parents, it was each generation added a building block. And my parents got it to that height, as you said. And, you know, in this almost in the same moment, things began to decline. And I was lucky to grow up in the middle class living though my mom and

dad fought for us to have and to be a college partially paying my way on newspaper, hourly wages and partially with my parents helping. But at the same time, we began to see that farms our size just couldn't continue to deliver that kind of a living. And what happened is in the generation from my, my dad to us, we saw the American economy fundamentally shift the farm crisis in the 1980s played a big part of it, but fundamentally shift where the medium and small size farm really was in a downslide and couldn't make it in

a way that had been possible in the past generations even though it had always been tough. You know, this is a story. My dad had a small business and it was not a farming business, but it was the kind of business I saw that regulations were going to choke it off and it wasn't going to be able to continue with that. And I have seen small businesses, so you know, when I, when we, my wife and I began our business, it was a service business because that's the kind of stuff that's left to us now. And even that is being choked off to us everywhere. So your story is very relevant because it's really the American experience.

You know, we've, for centuries here, it's been, every generation has been better. Now we've reached this and now it's been a sudden downturn. And it doesn't matter really whether it's a farm or whether it's a small business or even a service business. Forget about manufacturing, you know, the Chinese competition, things like that. But you can't even, you can't do, it's difficult for Americans to really have a dream that they can pursue. And so I like what you had to say in terms about the road forward with this. But talk a little bit about what caused that immediately. And you talk

about COVID, you talk about tariffs and other things like that. They're really kind of the immediate causes of what was happening and that crisis for your family. Tell us a little bit about that. You hit on it exactly right. A family farm is a small business. And small businesses of all kinds have faced different variations of what farms face.

Farms I think faced a lot of unique challenges that had a confluence that really tell the story well. But to your point, there was a lot of parallel experiences. What happened is we moved into the nineties, I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, as we moved into the nineties, we had the family farm suddenly confronting a world that was so much bigger, defined by bigger business, bigger government, bigger markets,

all of these different things. And that was the latest chapter, kind of a progression. So from the, we really began to lose our farms actually in the 1920s, believe it or not, a hundred years ago. And we've been losing farms at the rate of 45,000 a year on average ever since. And there are economic crisis reasons, you know, crises that we didn't understand how it affected the farm on the ground. There are political reasons, mistakes by our political leaders and there are technological reasons. All of those issues have been piling up for a dang near a century. And then when we got into the 90s, all those compounding forces combined with this emergence of the family

farmer really being a little guy in a way that blew out of the water all the past challenges. And so we had what's going on with global trade. We had a lot of agriculture markets that have become broken. We have bigger and bigger industries surrounding farming requiring that everyone else get bigger. And all of those things kind of hit as we had all these horses from years past. And so next thing you know, a farm that, you know, in the 1980s, a dairy farm, the midpoint for a dairy farm was about 80 cows and our, our farm milked 50 cows for a lot of our history. So we were on the small end of medium, you know, alpha midpoint David is 1200 cows, 80

up to 1200. And it's not just dairy, it's all types of farming. So that's the acceleration that we saw in the nineties and two thousands. Wow. And it's that kind of farming. So that's the acceleration that we saw in the 90s and 2000s. Wow. And it's that kind of consolidation. I mean, we've seen that. You take a look around even in the retail trade, you see the fact that in the 90s, you know, Romney and other people started putting together things like staples and stuff like that, driving out hardware stores with Home Depot and Lowe's. And so what we see is all these different retail segments even now being replaced by these giant corporations that are financed

from Wall Street and they essentially have an unlimited amount of money. They're almost like the federal government in the sense that as long as they've got a good story to tell somebody they can get unlimited financing and it's really difficult to compete against something like that. When we were in business, we were in a video business, and we had to compete against Blockbuster, who operated for the entire time that we were in business, they operated at a loss. Well, we can't operate at a loss, you know, and we can't get money from Wall Street. And so that's the situation that we're in. But you've also got, with the farms, it seems to me, like like recently there's been a tremendous turn in Europe especially

where they're coming after the farmers where they used to protect them. Everybody used to realize, hey, we need to be able to feed our own people here. So we're going to protect the farms even if we've got to subsidize them. Now they're at the point where, and it's not just the farmers, but especially the farmers where they're going to come after them because they are land rich and and cash-poor. The tax policies of inheritance things, which really fall on all small businesses, but especially the farmers, they have to be forced to sell their farms in order to pay for the taxes. When the parents die, they can't continue it from generation to generation.

And they're directly challenging them with tax policies, they're directly challenging them with environmental policies as we saw in the Netherlands. There seems to be a concerted effort to get rid of the farms. I don't know, what do you think is really going on here? It seems to me like they want to consolidate and own everything and they want to, you know, feed us the soil and green out of the labs. That's what it seems like. Well, that's where it's going to end if we don't do something about it. And here's the reality. I think that political leaders on all sides of the political spectrum have not understood what's going on on the ground on our family farms. And some of the things you're talking about now, the tax policies and environmental policies, farmers want to do

smart things with their money and farmers want to do things that are going to be good for our soil, for our water, for our natural resources. So there's ways for all these people to be able to work with farmers. I think something that's happened with some of the folks that are pushing a lot of those anti-farm policies is they've convinced themselves that the only farms out there are the great big farms. And we can talk about the big farms and we wrestle that with that in the book. And I try to talk honestly about some of the pros

and some of the cons about that. But a lot of the people out there that are attacking farming have convinced themselves that it is big farms out there and that's it. Well, what the reality is, even though we've lost 70% of our farms in this country, and even though the farms that are left are struggling, the thing that people don't realize is 88% of them are small family farms. And so people say, how

can that be? I don't hear about those farms. Well, what's going on is those folks are working two to three jobs. And that's farms like ours, where people are working the land and they're also working, you know, you know, working factory shifts or pouring concrete or working construction site or, you know, got another small business on the side, whatever the case may be, they're working two or three jobs in the farm is supplemental income. So what we're doing when we attack farming is the biggest farms have the money and the resources just like any other larger business to absorb those attacks. The smaller farms are the ones that are going to get hit and going to get wiped out. So a lot of the people who are doing this, if they realize

that they're shooting at the small farms, they might rethink it because those are the types of farms that for decades to your point, people really wanted to make sure that we treasured and cherished and they can be part of the solution for many of our food and environmental problems as well. Well you know as you point out in your book, I'll just read this the Senate's here for you, but both parties, both political parties used food as a weapon abroad, just as economic catastrophes of our own making were unfolding at home. And that's true.

I mean, we use them as, as, you know, put tariffs on it. So what happens, uh, one of our major exports, of course, is agricultural product. So the farmers got hit with Trump's tariffs and then we had, uh, uh, Biden do sanctions and so forth. And we had Biden do sanctions and so forth and we had the COVID stuff happening in the middle of that. Was that the point at which things got super difficult for your family? Cause you, you began your book talking about your dad, who is you, and the, the quote that I read, grew up on the farm and it, you know, just kind of worked

into his entire life to the extent that he was one with it. And how depressed he was at the fact that he had to sell off his dairy cows in order to keep the farm going. Was that what happened? Was it that crux there at that point in time? You know, it was really the nineties and two thousands that pointed us in the direction of becoming smaller and smaller relative to the rest of the economy. And what happened during COVID, to your point, is when COVID hit and, you know, depending upon the situation and the perspective, the spread of the virus and or the government's response to the virus, that did was it put farms through a, you know, last additional shock. And for our farm, what happened is we were continuing on, and I don't know how long my dad would have continued on

working the farm, even though the economic scale wasn't there for a dairy farm anymore. He might've gone out forever if he hadn't gotten so sick with COVID. And I know there are a lot of people who had different experiences with COVID, lighter cases and different things like that. And we've had a lot of discussion, debate and difficulty

around how cautious should we be? But in any case, my dad got a case that he was older, he was 69, and he got one of those cases that sends you to the hospital and they're talking about, they're having ventilator conversations and things like that, right? So he got up from that and he survived it and he just looked at it and he said,

man, if something had happened to me and I hadn't come back, we would have had a farm that wasn't in any shape to move forward for the next generation. He'd gotten it through his generation. He'd ran his race, right? And we had no debt. We owned the farm free and clear. And it was what does the next generation want to do with it?

And if something happened to him, you know, what would we have done? You know, and so he knew that he couldn't continue like milking physically. And then we needed to evolve the business model in the way that my sister and he could work on into the future. So COVID for us really was kind of a final shock to the system. And it was a shock to so many people

because we had a situation where farmers couldn't sell their goods. Yeah, oh, it's crazy. It was absolutely crazy, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Destroying the food on the farms while the shelves were empty. And we're seeing a lot of that stuff in this idiotic approach to bird flu as well, where they test one bird with a PCR test. And then they get one positive, they kill millions of them. But you know,

there's also maybe some other things that are going on. As I reported, you've got situations where these big, gigantic egg corporations have already been brought up on charges and had to pay tens of millions of dollars to General Food and all the rest of these companies that were fixing the price. And so there's a question there, you know, is like, what is going on here with this? Or we look at the foreign situation with the Chinese buying up pork, for example, in North Carolina where I used to live. They went in and bought these different farms. R.F.K.

Jr. had a great video explaining exactly how they were taking over all the different pork farms and things like that. So we have these massive corporations. We even have foreign countries that are interested in getting a stranglehold on our food and then at the same time you got a lot of people who just want to have a they want a monopoly on everything. That's really seems to be what is happening. Yeah, you're absolutely right and you're hitting on a really important part of what's

happened to our food supply. So we saw it during cold, we're seeing it right now during bird flu which is the disruption of our food supply and reason that so you seeing it right now during bird flu, which is the disruption of our food supply. And reason that, so, you know, you can talk about bird flu and like, okay, in this case, should we have euthanized as many birds as we did? Or, you know, you can talk about the individual responses on the ground, but here's the thing, whatever the response is, the impact on that, on our food supply is outsized. And the reason for that is because our food industry is so concentrated that our supply

chain is vulnerable. So if we hadn't been wiping out 45,000 farms a year for the past century, and we had more businesses of more kinds and more sizes, to your point on small business, involved in the purchase and the processing and the transport and the wholesale and the retail of our food, if we had more links in that chain, there'd be more ways for the food to get from the farm gate to the dinner table, including direct sales from farms to consumers for those folks who want to do it that way. But because we've been wiping out farms and because we've been hammering the egg in the food industries as much as we have,

the reality is that our supply chain is very vulnerable. So you got in COVID, you got this almost dystopian situation where farmers can't sell their goods if they can, it's for a lower price in the basement. Consumers can't find the food they need if they can, it's higher prices through the roof. Same things happen with eggs right now. Bird flu does not have to have the impact that it's having, but it is so disruptive because if you have one distribution center that goes down because of something like that, that really affects the supply of eggs in a really big way, in a way that it wouldn't if we had many small operators in many parts of the country.

Oh yeah, absolutely. You talk in your book about the commodity trap. Talk a little bit about that. Yeah, you know, that's something that the community I grew up near and so many fall into. And what happens is when you start out, and you know this as a business guy, when you start out with a new industry

or a new business idea, you might be selling something that's a little different. And it could be a sophisticated product or it could be just something that you do a little differently, a dish that a local restaurant prepares in a way that sets them apart. It's high in innovation and it's lower in its availability. Over time, industry gets more mature and a lot of this stuff is natural, but we fall into it in an unnatural way. So it gets it gets more developed and evolved and you know at some point you know growing the people in Iowa will get mad at me for this as a Wisconsinite. The corn, the field corn in Iowa and the corn in Wisconsin very

similar right? They'll say no. A commodity is a product that is basically very similar regardless of who's producing it and there's certain things and goods that make sense to produce that way. But what happens is if an entire industry farming and an entire community that's based on one industry slide into that where now your whole economy is just based on producing corn the same way that every other community and every other state that produces corn does it. Well then the only thing that you can do to be able to make more money and survive as things get harder and as you know, the economy has its ups and downs as you produce more of it for cheap. It's good to be more efficient to produce more something for cheaper. That's a good thing. But when that's the only

card you can play, and you don't also have innovation doing something new, different or having a new thing that people are willing to pay money for you don't have Economic growth and opportunity you're just sliding into this kind of downward spiral where the only thing you can do is Produce more of it for cheaper and that's it and what happens is that squeezes out? Industry that squeezes out small businesses and consolidation is a normal thing shifting toward commodities is a normal thing. But when you go so far, that there are so few operators who can make it. And by the way, when you've got misunderstood economic crises and faulty government policy and technology tilted against the little guy, all three of those things making it worse. Now we've got kind of this unnatural, unholy shift where it's not normal competition. It's not normal consolidation, it's a completely twisted market

that is tilting the tables against American entrepreneurship. Oh, I agree, yeah. And so the question is, you know, what do we do about that? When I look at the, when I look at engineering, because I was also worked for a while

in the semiconductor industry, and what we saw was the commodification of like memory chips, for example, and it wasn't too long. At first, the memory chips were, oh, this is, you know, we've gone to integrated circuits instead of board-level stuff. And so this is a real innovation. But then it became, you know, commodification happened.

And so then it became who could produce it more efficiently. And so these Asian countries are doing a very good job of doing that and doing it cheaply And so it essentially drove the US country companies out of that, but they were able to succeed By going to CPU design and things like that. We see that now with Nvidia, you know They're they're very successful because they have focused on some innovative specialized thing But how does that translate? You know, I can see how that works with technology, but how does that translate with food? Because food is fundamental, I'll let you point out, you know, corn is corn, you know, when you go different places. How are you going to escape that commodification thing?

Yeah, if I come to you looking with a crazy innovative apple, you may not want to eat it, right? Well, they have produced some of those and That's right. You're right, I don't want to eat them yeah the genetically modified ones yeah. Bill Gates is doing some of that in a lab and I wouldn't even tell him. I know. It's got to grow naturally out of the ground but no you know the way that it works is actually the intersection of agriculture and technology so this ties back to your exact point. So when I talked about economic crises, government policy and technology tilting against us, here's what happened with farming and food and technology.

We stopped having what is called skill neutral technology in this country, meaning a large farm or medium farmers, small farm could all have different sizes and types of that technology that's scalable for them. It's affordable for the small farms and practical for them to integrate. Right. And we stopped doing that kind of in halfway through the 20th century. And here's why. Farm wages were much lower than factory wages. And we had a big challenge with a lot of people moving from rural areas to urban areas to chase industrial jobs and making sense. But we needed to have

farms be able to grow and keep up a little bit. So some of that technology helped farms be able to take on more acres and more animals or fewer people breaking their backs to do it and it allowed farm wages to grow. It allowed us to not have to depend on labor quite as much and it also meant that fewer people had to grow their own food. So at some point technology that helped farms just kind of be able to produce more and get a little bigger was a good thing. But in the mid 20th century, we got to the point where we kind of balanced that out that wasn't needed anymore. So now the technology that's made to just make farms bigger, more and more field rows, more and more animals packed into a building, all that's doing is making it so

that big farms can get bigger. And it's not something that a small farm can do because it doesn't make sense for them or they can't afford it. You got to take out too much debt to build a big building or whatever it is for the small farmer. And so we lost that scale neutral technology that we could have large medium and small farms doing different things in our economy. And you had perfectly good medium and small farms that were competitive other than they couldn't afford that next technological innovation. So they fell behind even though they were efficient,

hardworking, resourceful, scrappy. In some ways, as you know, sometimes small businesses are more innovative because they got a little freedom to figure something else out or take a different risk that a bigger one isn't gonna, so innovation can come from all places, but not if the technology is tilted

against certain players in the market. And now you've got a situation with, John Deere is pretty famous about this and coming in and saying you're not gonna be able to fix your tractor. You know, farmers are always the jack of all trades and being able to do that. And so I guess if you're a large, you know, farm concern, you don't really care about that. You know, I don't want to fix my tractor anyway, so fine, I'm with it. But if you're a small farmer, that becomes a real barrier to being able to own and operate that and so sometimes that technology can be twisted and used to make it more difficult.

Instead of being an assistance, it makes it more difficult for them as well. Yeah, that's right. And look, my dad probably drives John Deere green tractors, you know, and that's it. That's been a brand in our family for a long time. And the reality is that I think it's actually in the interest of all of the companies that exist in our food industry, in our agribusiness industry, in our manufacturing and all the different industries intersected agriculture.

I think it's in their interest to be long term to be able to build, continue to build machinery that can be used by farms of all sizes. Because here's why. If we don't do that, if we keep losing farms at the rate of 45,000 a year per year for the next century, likely like we did in the past century, we're going to lose most of our remaining family farms in the next 40 years, just mathematically speaking. And so those great big farms that people are taking shots at whether they should be doing that or not, those are going to be the only ones left. Now, that is fewer customers for suppliers, that is fewer customers for buyers, that you know, all of the larger agriculture and agribusiness and food companies, they at some point need

to have a robust farming sector and we can't have farming, I guess, you know, for lack of a better phrase, get to the point of being too big to fail. It really doesn't benefit these other industries to not have a robust farm sector that's got some economic diversity to it with large, medium and small farms alike operating and playing different roles and being there, especially during supply chain crises and other things like that, you know? Well, I agree. We look at it and we all understand that this kind of consolidation of everything

is not in our best interest, but it is the interest and the obsession with the people who are doing the consolidation and they've got so much money. So what do we do to push back against that? Because you address that in your book as well. I wanna give people a positive vision of things that can be done that we are not necessarily helpless about that. What are some of the things that

you talk about in terms of helping smaller farmers to survive? Yeah, well these are things that I found as we looked in the book at the hidden areas of history driving the disappearance and weaving out my family's story of survival from the depression today. I found just places where it seems like we made a choice in our country that we didn't have to. So can we make a better choice next time? These are things that right left in big small industry outside farming inside farming all trying to find things that we could all find a way to agree on. And there's a number of things. The first is we need to have a research and development revolution in this country. We don't have enough research and development

that is done to figure out what's that next great innovation for farming and for agriculture. When we do to the point of our prior discussion there, it is technology that really is tilted against the medium and small size farms. So we need a research and revolution where we've got more innovation happening and more innovation reaching more farms. That involves private sector and that involves public sector. The next thing that we need to do is we need to make sure that we have fair markets internationally and domestically and that means that getting it right on trade meaning we get tougher to wipe out some unfair trade standards and things that have made global trade while free trade is good it needs to be

fair trade. So we've got to address that and then our domestic markets to your exact point we have to have an economy set up that allows small business, the individual American entrepreneur to be able to thrive in addition to larger industry. And then the third thing, there's more, but the third kind of basic concept is that we all need to orient ourselves around what can we do to create more opportunities for our farmers. And that means the farmers being willing to move from some traditional crops and products into new crops and products, figure out what is it that they can shift off of because they've got these broken markets that they depend on and there's a certain amount of income

there. So you kind of continue to do what you know because you know you can make some money there. It's not enough. It keeps diminishing, but it's something and you don't have a market for other things. Well, farmers need to be ready and willing to make some changes as we have a growing market for those people who care more than ever where their food comes from. And then those people need to act on that

caring about where their food comes from. We need more people who are willing to buy locally and regionally from farmers, willing to buy in specialty food markets, willing to go to farmers markets and local butcher shops and permanent outdoor markets and patronize you know, CSAs and things like that in addition to the normal places to buy their food. Can't expect everyone to just throw out the way they buy their food, you know, but you

can, we can all take half steps. So if everybody's doing that, it can really help. So if we do those things, we have a research development revolution, make sure our markets are fair and we make sure that we have farmers and consumers moving in this direction together toward people caring where their food comes from. We can begin to see some changes. And I hope we do it, but the challenging part about it is that it requires all of us to do a little something at once. We're all jumping in the water at the same time and making it tricky to get people to do that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, when I look at these situations, you know, the farmers in France

or the farmers in the Netherlands or something like that, and they're pushing back against, you know, in the Netherlands, they're banning fertilizer, you know, what are you doing this for, you know? And they're protesting, and I'm looking at it and it's like, okay, so the farmers are doing this, but the people who eat the food are just kind of sitting on the sidelines like, oh, well, whatever, you know, you know, my food doesn't come from the farm, it comes from a box, you know, or whatever. You know, there's this total disconnection that they are going to be fed by this or not fed by this, depending on how this comes out. To me, it seems like, you know, there's this

– there's also the situation – I talked about how I think that it was Joanne's fabrics. It was a huge thing because women used to make their own dresses, right? And women used to also be interested in cooking or men as well. And so we're losing this interest in doing things ourselves. And a big part of that is, hey, I just want to buy something that is pre-processed food, stick it in the microwave and eat it. Fast food, even if it's a fast food that we get out of the grocery store. Now maybe people are going to start looking at this and start to realize that that's going

to negatively affect their health. There seems to be a big disconnect about that. If they were concerned more about what they eat, they might be more concerned about learning how to cook and things like that. But it seems like, you know, we got this huge hurdle to get over because we've become so pacified and so dependent. And so really just lazy. You know, we don't want to make our clothes. We don't want to cook our food.

We don't want to know how to grow our food even or where it comes from. And it seems to me like that's a big part of it. I did a video a few years ago it was for a farm association we talked about locovores you know instead of a carnivore you know that's going to eat meat somebody's eating locally and there's great stuff that's out there in the the farm to table stuff or you know farm tomarket type of things but people have to want that and right now that's really kind of the only innovation that I'm seeing as a consumer is that some farms are out there trying to sell high quality food to people but it also comes at a price and that's a bit of a problem as well

because then it becomes kind of this designer food and only a few people can afford that so you know is know, is there some, is there anything that you're aware of that people are taking a slightly different path to try to do things in terms of direct from the farm to the consumer? Because that's a real issue. And of course, government regulation is a big part

of stopping that in many cases as well. Yeah, you hit the nail on the head. And I think that there is reason for hope, but there's a lot of work to do. And what I mean by that is we had this kind of paradigm that's set up where the cheap food was the stuff that you could buy off the national supply chain in all the normal conventional ways that we buy items, package and all that. And then the other healthier food and the food for those who cared where it came from was just more expensive.

Right? And here's the reality. While there are still truth to that. The other thing that's going on is we've got this supply chain vulnerability that's driving up the price of conventional food. And that's happening at the same time. You got more and more farmers realizing that we need to take the local food movement out of The corners and out of the more affluent areas and it spread it further to more people buying more that way

So you got more people interested in that at a time when our conventional sources of food are more expensive than ever Eggs is a really good recent example for the same reason we talked about bird food the same reason that Much of our food got more expensive after covet We get these supply chain disruptions where this great big supply chain that can provide any kind of food you can imagine any time of year, any part of the country. That's a miracle. Yeah.

But it is a bull, you know, and it hits these shock waves where suddenly there's spikes in price of food. So if that's happened at the same time that farmers and consumers are thinking more and more about where their food comes from and farmers are innovating more and consumers are getting more creative in price of food. So if that's happened, at the same time that farmers and consumers are thinking more and more about where their food comes from, and farmers are innovating more and consumers are getting more creative in terms of how they buy their food, we may have a world where balance this out a little bit and people get some of their food that is, you know, from another part of the country because that's the only place that it's grown, just like bananas need to be imported, you know, and there's a role

for that. And then people also get a lot more of their food from local regional sources and farmers can sell into those local regional sources where they're selling, you know, fresher local food. They can also sell into specialty food markets. A good example is Wisconsin cheese. So Wisconsin got surpassed by California milk production in the 90s around the same time that I was talking about the farmer becoming a little guy. That's what happened is the great big farms in California that were bigger than Wisconsin

could produce more milk for cheaper. But Wisconsin said, wait a minute, we still have a lot of dairy farmers left even though they're suffering and we have a lot of small cheese makers. So let's specialize and Wisconsin is the only state that has a master cheese maker program. And that's why you'll see Hook's cheese from, you know, right near where I grew up in Wisconsin. You'll see that in California and Texas and all over the place, because that's a specialty of the cheese maker. They sell something special and unique. It's their variety. So we need more farms selling locally and regionally and more farms selling into markets that have these specialty foods where people who care, you know, about that food

just a little more can buy something that really fits their taste. Well, that's great. When you look at the title of your book, Land Rich and Cash Poor, that is the leverage that they're using in many cases to drive the farmers out. And so, what is it that, how do we avoid that as the cash keeps going further and further down, the temptation for all these people just to sell out and shut it down? We've seen that with a lot of the people who've been severely damaged by the USDA's program, a mass culling of chickens.

It's like, okay, I'm done. I'm just going to sell the land and get out with this. You know, what can be done about that? Of course, tax policy and some other things like that. Yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right. Land-rich cash, for that dilemma, for people who haven't read it or studied it,

it's a simple concept, which is it's harder and harder to make money, make a living on that land when you own it, but it's worth a lot if you were to sell it. And so the dilemma that farmers face is, each year it gets harder and harder where dad and mom are, you know, fearing that they're going to face they would have to say to the kids, we can't make ends meet anymore.

And the alternative is they can sell it. And when you do that on a family farm, you lose everything else because a farm isn't just your mom or dad's job. It's your home. It's your community. It's your heritage. So that's the dilemma. Farmers are locked in the whole amount of this land that means more to them than anything and

They you make less and less money each year And so the problem that it creates to your exact point is it makes people think farmers are wealthy, you know You could have land that's worth about a million dollars But the living that can be made on that man is is getting squeezed out and is really very modest and probably at this point isn't full-time income for the family anymore. They're probably working two or three jobs. So having that land on paper and having the tractors on paper,

yeah, you could go sell that, but that's one little mini bonanza for one generation of the family. And in the next generation, the family will level out and have, what are they gonna have? Well, they lost the land, they lost their heritage, they lost their way of living and so you know farmers really are not in a position of being wealthy they're in a position of being working class with a target on their

back and so then what do we do about that? One issue is the inheritance tax you're absolutely right you got land that has been taxed as property and has been taxed whenever there's money made off of it from an income standpoint or a sales standpoint. And then they tax it again at the family's most vulnerable moment. You know, the older generation has passed away. The next generation that would have normally

probably bought the farm from the prior generation is now inheriting it. But if they have to pay a massive tax on that on top of how hard it is to make a living and the fact that that's happening at a time when their family is going through a really difficult time, there are so many families that have no choice but to sell the farm and it gets sold for development

or it gets sold to a millionaire or whatever the situation is. Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. And we've seen that here locally as well with a local dairy. Had that same situation, a death. And now there's a couple of dairies that were there. Now there's just one. And we still go there to get milk. But the other dairy and other farm

has just been chopped up to a lot of retail. By the way, let me show people the book cover here. Land Rich, Cash Poor, My Family's Hope, and The Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer by Brian Reisinger. You know, when we look at this in your own personal example, tell us a little bit about what your sister did after you have this dairy farm that's been built up over a century, many generations, and then times get tough. You have to sell off the dairy cattle there. Uh, but your sister has continued. What has she done?

Yeah. My sister came forward with all kinds of innovative ideas that are the kind of thing that give you hope for the next generation, which is really what's going to be able to move this situation forward through the crisis. So my sister came to my dad and as we were thinking about selling the cows, because the economic scale just wasn't working anymore, and a little bit hit us and all of these issues. My sister began talking to my dad about, you know,

having what we call a diversified farm. And so we raise now, we raise heifers that become milk cows on other dairy farms. So we supply those farms. We raise beef that is sold to consumers. And we also cash crop. And we are constantly experimenting with new types of livestock and new types of crops to try to figure out what's that next food product or what's that next agricultural product that can make sense for us to do. And what we're finding is that it's working

from the standpoint of we're hitting the income targets my sister projected. And it's just an ongoing challenge because expenses are always going up for farms. So we've found a path forward for the time being, and we're hopeful about the future, but like every generation, it is always difficult and it's unclear the future. So we're living this out as we go. And, you know, I'll just say one thing about my sister, the really incredible thing about her is just her courage and her spirit And you know a lot of people root for her being a woman in a man's world taking the farm over and the reality is that She descends from four generations of farm women who have done the work of men for a hundred years

There's a lot of independence. That's right. I don't know and use the word feminism But there's a there's kind of a farmland feminism if you will there's a lot of independence. I don't know if you can use the word feminism, but there's kind of a farmland feminism if you will. There's a lot of independence and strength from women who've grown up in farm country. They just never, they might've been celebrated if they'd picked their head up from the work to tell their story, you know? And my sister's fourth generation of that. And so I'm incredibly proud of her and it's amazing to see where this goes and we all work on it together. You know, my dad still owns it, my sister's working to take it over and for me, you know, I pursued a writing career off the farm and I'm grateful to be able to tell her story and I help out a little bit on the business side and like any farm kid, when I'm home

they throw me a tractor on my quote unquote day off and I'm glad to be part of it in that way and we're trying to figure it out as a family but we couldn't do it if it wasn't my sister leading the way on the ideas for what we need to do next. Well, it's such an important thing. It's a hard life and it's not for everybody, but I was talking about one family and a farm in Virginia and they were talking about how positive it was for the kids. You learn a work ethic. You have to do things. You have to do things.

You have to do hard work. It's a necessity there. You have to be able to be a jack of all trades in order to make this work because again, you're cash poor with this. And so you have to learn how to do things. You have to get up and work hard. And that's a wonderful thing. But it's also something that if we look at it as a society as a whole, Jefferson was very much focused on the importance of an agrarian society just from the standpoint of political independence and not being so dependent on everything as you are in an urban environment. I look at this and I kind of wonder, I've seen now, I've talked to some farmers who

have set up, done like a mentoring program. You know, they want to teach other people how to farm. They can make a living doing things like that on the side, you know. Even having people come, pay to come to the farm to learn how to do things. And so there's a lot of people out there who are, I think, are interested in learning how to grow some things and they don't know anything about growing them, or how to take care of animals or chickens now because of eggs, you know, so there's an opportunity there. And I think once people start to taste the better quality food, I mean, they really get a taste for it, right?

Part of it is that they've grown up eating packaged food, and maybe if you get a situation where it is, and it might be out of necessity that people start getting farm fresh food. They get a craving for it and a taste for it and they want to be able to either support the people in the area or learn how to do it themselves. To me that seems to be the hope because people have to want this. You know, they have to have to want a local farm to market or farm to table type of experience I think. Yeah, well here's the thing, not only does it taste better, you feel better. Yes.

I grew up in an area where we had some types of fresh local food available to us, but there also wasn't a lot of food awareness for a lot of the country for a long time. And we didn't necessarily have as many local stores as we once did buy from, so a lot of people end up driving down the 30 miles down the highway to the big chain to get whatever's packaged. And so I had a mixed experience with, you know, on the one hand, drinking milk straight from the bulk tank. On the other hand, having frozen pizza for dinner, you know, and, and things have really progressed where people have all walks of life in all areas, including in urban and rural areas, care more about where their food comes from.

And my wife and I've made that shift as much as we can. You can't get everything without going to some of the conventional places, but you know, and a lot of places are willing to carry more fresh local food if they know people will buy it, but you can do a lot and boy, you know, you feel better. Yeah. It's like you sleep better. You have more energy. It makes a difference to grow something that came up out of the ground natural.

It just, it does at the end of the day. Yeah, I know this last year, started doing our own chickens even before this bird flu thing happened. And then my wife learned, I started growing vegetables for the first time. We've done that. And it was just so much better

than anything we could get at the grocery store, you know? And so we really enjoyed it. And it's really kind of built our taste for doing this type of thing. And so that's really where my hope is that people have to change. You know, we grew up in the 60s, everything was going more and more towards packaging and convenience. So you get your TV dinner packaged in aluminum, you know, you put it in the oven and then later on they put it in something's non-metal so you can microwave it and everything. And it's just TV dinner packaged in aluminum, you know, you put in the oven. Then later on they put it in something's non-metal so you can microwave it and everything and it's just and it tastes awful and it's bad for you. And people are now becoming

aware of that. So we may have an inflection point where people start to care more about taste and about health and things like that and and that might work out for everybody's benefit. Hopefully it will., it is a very interesting book and really do appreciate you giving that hope and those ideas to people. And it's a fascinating story too. It's wonderful to have somebody talk about what it was like growing up on the farm and to take a critical look at the bigger picture that is happening to it. And as I said before, it is something that we can all relate to in a lot of different areas because this consolidation is happening very rapidly and is happening across all sectors. But in the farm in particular, we've got to be concerned about that because that's what we need to have to eat.

And these people really do want to just serve it to us from the lab. I mean, they want to take it to the nth degree in the opposite direction and I'm starting to see a lot of pushback against that and so maybe that'll work out well for the local farmers. Well that's my hope and we did our best to, as you said, take a look at these issues honestly, wrestle with them where there was debate and we did our best to tell our story, you know, from the depression to today and that survival story, the things we've been through. We did our best to tell it honestly, the good and the bad. And my hope is that we can tell a raw and honest story that gets people thinking about these issues and gets us all working to solve them together. And

so I appreciate the opportunity to talk about the book. I agree. And I want to say one more thing before we stop, and that is I thought it was very telling that the very last chapter in your book, or it's kind of an appendix, you talk about suicide and trying to get help. That's how dire things are. And I've reported on what is going on in India. When Monsanto would go in and use glyphosate and GMO seeds and everything, and these farmers who are extremely poor, they then, after they use it one season now, they can't grow anything

else there and they've got to buy their seed from Monsanto and they couldn't afford and they were losing everything and massive numbers of suicides that were happening there. But with all these other market forces that are there, that's just how bad it is. And, you know, of course, with this rapid change that is happening now, that is something that everybody needs to think about. Talk a little bit about that and about the pressure that you saw on your father and in your family. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for asking about that. You know, the opening pages of the book and the closing pages of the book deal with a story from our family where, you know, the opening pages of the book and the closing pages of the book deal with a story from our family where, you know, the day after we sold our cows, we were, as I

said, shifting towards some hope for some new types of farming we want to do, but also selling the dairy herd that you milked morning and night is akin to a death in the family. And for the farmer, trying to figure out how to move forward and whether we're going to make it or not, there's that pressure. And then there's the pressure of the generations that came before, you know, great grandpa escaped pre-war one Europe, you know, to dig a better living out of the dirt. Grandpa survived the depression. Mom and dad made it through the farm crisis. Why can't I make it? That's the kind of the generational pressure that builds. And my dad was staring down the barrel of realizing that he had been the first in a hundred years that Wasn't any milk and cows on our land

We were grateful to have our land and have a plan for the future, but he still woke up asking himself you know, what am I here for and I Had an experience with my dad that we talked on the book where I was standing there on the porch of a cabin dad that we talk on the book where I was standing there on the porch of a cabin. That's out back at farmhouse where we both grew up. And I was wondering whether he was thinking that. And I found out in the course of talking to him for the book that he was. And so here we were standing right next to each other, but we were a world apart

because how alone he felt. And I'm grateful that, excuse me, he um I'm grateful that he continued on and the way that he did it was he thought about his grandkids you know he started thinking about the next generation he said you know I got grandkids here and I got to teach him things and he realized that the farmer goes on whatever happens to the farm because there's two words here there's family farm there's the family part and he focused on that and it's the same thing that carries every farm generation forward just think about the next generation and so I'm grateful that through that and through all of us talking about it in a way that a lot of our families don't find themselves able

to do we're able to bring them out of it and I asked my dad really candidly if we wanted to talk about that the book we decided we were gonna bear everything in the book but I asked him do we want to admit that and he said yeah we do because I want other people who feel that way to know that it isn't that way, you know that they aren't alone. That's good and that is a key thing. It is turning the father's heart to the children right? That is the restoration. That is the salvation of a culture. If you think about the next generation you prepare for them. Otherwise you know, we all get to a point where we say, what's the point of this? Well, the point of it is for the next generation, the love of the family, creating the family, propagating that, that is the heart of a civilization. That's why

the family farm, as you point out, is so important. Oh, yes. Well, thank you so much. And again, the book, Brian's book, Brian Reisinger, Land Rich, Cash Poor, My Family's Hope, and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer. And I would also say the disappearing family that is happening. That is something that really does build a family. And I think that is one of the most important aspects of the family farm.

Thank you so much for joining us, Brian. It's been a pleasure talking to you. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate anybody who wants to find Rich Cash Park and do it on Amazon or anywhere else online. Also, independent bookstores all across the country. I just appreciate anybody who keeps the conversation going on these issues. And I appreciate you shedding light on them.

Thank you so much. That would be great. Yes, Amazon. Yes, and any independent bookstore. Thank you so much. That'd be great, yes. Amazon, yes, and any independent bookstore. Thank you so much. I wanna cover some of these comments here people had about farms before the program ends. Brian Devenkartney says,

we love our little farms here and we do our best to support them. T Norman, artist says, it doesn't require a large amount of land to grow and raise at least some part of your own food. Everyone used to have chickens in the yard and all the old movies. May 2022 says, anyone your own food. Everyone used to have chickens in the yard in all the old movies. May 2022 says anyone can grow food. If you have a patio, a corner, a room, etc., you can grow food vertically. And I think that's a real opportunity really for a lot of these farmers. They've got

a great deal of knowledge that has been lost by the public in general. One of the things that Brian was talking about was how pervasive farms were in the early part of the 20th century. And he talked about how many of them have left, but a huge number of, you know, a huge percentage of the population worked on a farm at least one way or the other, and we've lost that. Nights of the storm, farms, banks, retail stores, etc., all being consolidated. The key to control is taking away options and forcing consumers into only one or two choices.

They do it with rises in operating costs and regulations. Tariffs will expedite this consolidation process." I agree. I agree. Well, thank you so much everyone for joining us. We don't have time for more of the comments. One person is talking about my mozzarella recipe. I'm going to read that comment after the show.ightShow.com. There you'll find links to live streams, videos, audio podcasts, and support links. Live stream the show at DLive and TRIX every Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. Eastern. Videos at BitShoot and Ujtube, new audio podcast, The Real David Knight Show, at Podbean, iTunes, Stitcher, I Heart, and more.

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