How To Build Resilience in Struggling Rural Communities

Hey everybody, this is Chuck Marone. Welcome back to the Strong Towns podcast. I get a lot of books, a lot of books. I get all the books. I have mounds of books that people send me and I don't get to most of them, but every now and then one jumps out at me as being one that I have to read and I have to chat with the author. I got this book called Land Rich, Cash, Poor, My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer by Brian Reisinger. It's really about the history of farms and interwoven with his personal family story of a farm that's been passed down for many, many, many generations. And it resonated me with a lot of ways and I asked the author to come on. So Brian Reisinger, welcome to the Strong Downs podcast. Hey, good to be with you, Chuck. Thanks for having me on. We both have wives that work for public radio. Is your wife a reporter? She has been a reporter and a producer and she's currently an editor. So she's done everything, but she's got a washer as they'd say. She got seduced into the editor role. My wife is a reporter. She's resisted it for years and I feel like we're getting close the kids are now just this fall out of the house and you know there's this you fill the void of competency like there's a they always need good editors and at a certain point you're just like i'm just gonna do it and i feel like we're getting close to that but we'll see you know that game yeah yeah let's talk a little bit about you first because you grew up on a farm, but you are a writer and you do a little bit of both. Can you just talk about that first? And then I want to get into the book and all the stuff that you wrote about, but maybe just give people a sense of how you spend your days. Yeah. I'm a bit character in the book, but I do wrestle with something that informs the exact question you're asking about. So I grew up working with my dad from time I could walk and I didn't have his talent for cattle and crops, but I loved our roots. And I ended up pursuing a career off the farm in writing. And I was the first kid in my dad's family and four generations to go to college. And I was also the first eldest son not to farm in terms of taking over the farm. And I've come back around full circle. I've got my writing career and consulting work now. And I also help out on the farm on the side, volunteering on the business side, helping us with our planning. I come across a lot of solutions in my writing and talking to people across the country. And then they throw me in a tractor and let me help out in the fields and the farm yard on my, on my, you know, supposed days off. So I've got a mix and I've had a way to come back around, but our farm is continuing now and my dad farming and my sister, we're going to take it over. So I'm kind of our, our storyteller and our solution searcher and, uh, and the, the hired hand on the side or the, the spare hand on the side, I should say. Can we talk about, cause you said just now I didn't have the talent for the cattle and crops, it's funny because I've felt the same way. I watched my dad feel the same way too. So I grew up on the farm that was homesteaded by my, it would be two greats, great, great grandfather. And, you know, passed down, passed down, passed down. And my grandpa was the genius, right? Like he's the guy who knew everything. And my dad was always calling my grandpa to come over and help with something. And I, I watched my dad feel incompetent at some things, but, you know, also like really good at other things. And then for me, I'm like, my knowledge is so diminished from them. I feel like there's an atrophy of knowledge that comes from having a farm that for us, it was how we fed our family, but it wasn't like the source of income, but yours was how you fed your family and a source of income. Do you sense that atrophy too of just knowledge that comes from, I've always attributed it to having more security. Do you sense that? You not being good at it would not have been an option 60 years ago, 80 years ago, right? Yeah, that's absolutely right. I think there's something that I think about a lot that is containing what you're saying. I kind of think of it as the march of generations and it takes a couple forms one is that that fact that you know you don't have to have all of the same skills it took for two three or sometimes even one generation ago to survive and that's a in a way that's a good thing that speaks to human comfort and human advancement you know and the other thing that i think is tied up in the march of generations is that building compounding pressure though because like you know i think most farm families have a version of this you know i look back at great grandpa it's like well he escaped world war one and doug is living out of the dirt in poverty for two decades you know grandma and grandpa got through the depression mom and dad got through the farm crisis why can't i make it that's the kind of pressure that builds for generational farm families particularly when the income full-time income is tied up in it and so i think each generation benefits from the prior generation and marches into a level of a little bit more comfort and maybe loses loses something that the other had. But at the same time, there's that building pressure to make sure that you figure out a way forward. I know for me, even though I've found my own path and my writing has allowed me to come back around and kind of engage in the farm in my own way, telling our story and engaging in the business side and helping out when I can, I still feel, you know, what am I doing to help that farm keep going? You know, so we all, I think we all wrestle with that. So it's that March of Generations that I think has good and bad wound in it, you know? Well, you wrote something, you know yeah yeah no it was it is struggle and yeah joy really you wrote something in the book that was i mean you're a number of things that were profound but this one struck me because it it it helped me kind of understand my own biases or roots a little bit you said the job for the farmer is to endure and you had a more poetic way of saying it but but basically like what you're trying to do is just make sure you're still around. And I know with Strong Towns, with the work that I've done here, it was really bothered me when cities, when local governments, when collections of societies do things that make us fragile and undermine our own ability to endure. And I've never known where that came from. Like, is it just a weird tick that I have. And I recognize that it comes from the farm. Because when you plant a crop, if that crop doesn't go, you literally don't eat that crop then. If you go out for a hunt and you actually need to fill the freezer for winter and that hunt is unsuccessful, you have a certain amount of panic to you. Can you talk about, and take this wherever you want, but I feel like there is the underlying theme of your book is this enduring. How do we endure? How do we make it to the next generation? How do we make it to the next season? How do we make it, you know, through this crisis? What does it really mean to endure? Yeah. You know, I think that's such a good question. I don't know that I've been asked it. I'll tell a brief anecdote and I think it reflects what I feel about what you're saying. my mom and dad were born or excuse me were married in 1976 and that year was a drought um in southern wisconsin the the the ground was just crumbling away as you know from the book and you know they had to get through that through hard work and by banding together the neighbors if they hadn't done that they'd had to take on massive amounts of debt just to make it through that year and they were about to sail into the farm crisis of the 80s where farms with too much debt got wiped out by government policy and all geopolitical issues and and all kinds of other kind of cross-cutting factors and you know as my dad was facing that and he was asking himself that question will we make it you know he was asking a question that my grandpa had asked before that not only in the depression but decades afterward off and on as he climbed in the middle class my great grandpa had asked it himself when he was found on our farm and the harshest winner on record in 1912 and so i think the thing that connects with what i grew up with is that farming and And there are other walks of life and other occupations that do this too. But farming connects with the human existence on such an elemental level that you learn some really basic lessons that I'm grateful for, but that also I carry my own scars from, right? So, you know, you learn all kinds of things. You learn about the circle of life. You see calves born and you see calves lifeless. You learn about the cycles of the weather and the earth and sort of the things you don't control. you learn about miracles you know planting something in the spring and and seeing it come up in the fall and you learn about just survival and i think it's really easy in our society to we get all spun up about all these modern day both conveniences and comforts and challenges that we forget that it wasn't all that long ago that people were just trying to survive and that it isn't too far away that there are some people still like that now for us we had a middle class living growing up that was slipping away. A farm our size helped my dad help me. I worked to get through college working for newspapers and my dad helped me. Today, a farm our size wouldn't be able to do all that it did, all the lifting that it did for our family. Families like ours are working a couple jobs and farming. So, you know, I just think it's something that it was a blessing in a way to grow up with that daily reminder of what it's like to survive. And I carry it each day. I I mean, it drives your work ethic. It also is the thing that makes you get into defensive crouch mode, maybe a little quicker than I need to, you know? But again, I think a lot of people might relate to that in their own way. Yeah. Yeah. When we grew up, the neighbor lived in, we had an old farmhouse and it was one of these that had been built like in the early 1900s and then added on to a whole bunch of times. And we ultimately tore it down and built a new one, a house in the same spot. but the neighbor lived in like a real log cabin. Like the, the logs in the barn were like tilted over. And I mean, they were like three feet diameter. They were original logs. And you know, these guys didn't have, I remember they got the first phone. I was probably 10 or 11 and they called us on Christmas Eve. That was when they hooked up the phone for the neighbors. They were old school, like the, the milk truck would come by and pick up the milk every day. Cause they were out milking the cows. And you had this scene in the early part of your book where you all went back to the original family house that was no longer in use, but was still there. And you, you went and found the well and you did these, can you put yourself in the mindset of the people who built that and put that together. I think it's important for people to maybe hear at least our modern telling of what that must've been like, because, you know, you describe having, having babies at home and the treachery of that, you know, the whole idea of, you know, having to try to make it through a winter in Wisconsin where there's no heat in the hole upstairs. And, you know, there's a whole bunch there. What about that period of time stands out for you? Kind of that original founding of the farmstead? The thing that sticks out to me is how raw and unprotected of a life it was from not only the elements, but all the forces that have been hidden farmers for a very long time ever since. But we've had electricity and mechanical machines and other things since, right? Back then it was all by hand and there was nothing to shield you. So I mentioned my great-grandfather alice rising or he and my great-grandmother theresa they both came over from bavaria and this was uh shortly before world war one because they knew that their homeland was going to get torn up by global conflict so they came here and when i say they dug a living out of the dirt i mean it literally um i guess we still dig our living out of the dirt but i mean they were doing it by hand and uh he climbed into the hills of southern wisconsin looking for a farm that he could afford he did it in the winter in 1912 the great blue northern blew through there It was so cold and the change in temperatures was so sudden. There were actually winter tornadoes. And it was the coldest, hardest winter in the records to this day. And apparently he decided that wasn't anything to keep him from looking for the farm he was trying to buy. Which is just one of a million things about him that just blows your mind. And the next thing that they did, they found this farm. they took out a mortgage that basically amounted to debt that he and my great-grandmother would pay off for the rest of their lives a small part of debt was passed on to my grandparents that they paid off partially because they expanded the farm a little bit all the work was by hand they'd raise in the morning they had a wood stove one small wood stove in their bedroom that went up through heat rich heat the whole house the upstairs an entire part of it didn't get any heat to it and they'd go out and they'd milk cows by hand they'd carry water by hand they do the field work by hand. I mean, it was backbreaking. To give it one example, right now on our farm, we'll do about five hay crops. We'll cut it with a mower, a haybine, pulled by a tractor. We'll rake it a couple times with a rake or a merger that's pulled behind a tractor. And then we'll either bale or chop that with a chopper and a wagon or chopper box that pulled behind a tractor That is a weeks process at times And you do it over and over and over from late spring to early fall maybe five times if you're really industrious. My grandpa, or my great-grandpa, I should say, had to do that by hand. I mean, they drive the horses through the field and he had to pitch the hay onto the wagon with a fork by hand. It's just one of thousands of things I could describe that just like incredibly brutal, even by the standards of hardworking farmers of today. Yeah. I remember baling hay and my job was to drive the tractor. Cause I was, that was the kid. You would think that the kid wouldn't drive the tractor, but the adults needed the people with muscles needed to stack the hay. I have no idea how they did it. Like really, it just boggles your mind how they were able to accomplish what they did. It does. You know, in farming, as you know from your childhood experience, a lot of the listeners know it's still a dangerous occupation today. But, you know, back then, in the same way, you were not only a victim of the cold, but the farmland accidents and other things that can happen are all the more brutal because you're all that much closer to work. And, you know, one of the stories that we tell, just know briefly, is, you know, my grandpa's little brother was crippled as a boy in the fields because my great-grandpa was driving in the horses and wasn't able to see him in the tall hay. And so he lost his leg. He survived. But it was things like that. I mean, when I talked with that generation, the number of injuries that happened to the 14 kids on that farm and the fact that they all lived is a miracle by itself. Yeah. Yeah. As you were talking about the one little stove that would heat the upstairs, and I read this in the book and it didn't occur to me until just now the original farmhouse and we probably lived in that three or four years before we tore it down and rebuilt it didn't have heat in the upstairs either and that's where I slept and we had a little wood stove that would heat the upstairs I remember getting getting up in the morning and you'd have like five blankets on you and just being really cold to get out of bed yeah um that's that's kind of funny. So to me, the people that I held in awe were the dairy farmers. And, you know, I talk about this, you had a real farm. We were like farm adjacent. I mean, there were a few years where my dad couldn't work because of a mill accident he had, but then he went back to school and became a teacher. And then, you know, we kind of transitioned even more to hobby farming. You know, we would maybe have a dozen cows, but they were beef. It was beef. And, you know, we got rid of the pigs at a certain point and, you know, that kind of thing. I was always in awe of the dairy farmers I ran into because they were the, that was the toughest job to me. It was, I mean, you plant a crop and then you watch it grow and there's a certain, I'm not going to say easy leisure lifestyle, but the people who were milking cows worked every day, all day, never ending. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because this is what you're, I mean, you're from Wisconsin. This is what Wisconsin farmers do. Why dairy? And then what's that life like? Yeah. You know, dairy grew out of the geography of the place that I think is an interesting case study in how places, rural areas, communities are shaped by their natural surroundings. So what happened is Wisconsin had really fertile soil, but it was these great big soaring hills and plunging valleys and it's called the driftless area and people might be familiar with that um the glaciers never came far enough south to to flatten like other parts of wisconsin are a little flatter but the glaciers never got to our area and so there's these great big um hills and valleys and bluffs and so the soil is really fertile but what it means is we don't have wide open uh uh fields like you have in kansas nebraska why they got flat in southern wisconsin didn't i don't you know I have to ask the glaciers and they're not here to explain themselves, but you know, those hills mean that it wasn't quite as economical to just grow wheat or just grow corn or whatever. I don't mean just, cause that's a worthy thing too, but you're living only on that, right? We're doing corn and beans up here, but that's cause it got, everything got flattened by glaciers, but you go South of Minneapolis and you get into that driftless area and then over towards you that's where you're at yeah exactly and so what that meant is okay we've got fertile soil but we can't grow enough crops to make it on crop volume alone so what do we do so farmers who are experimenting because that and that's it's kind of like charlotte's web you're growing and raising everything farmers who are experimenting combined with researchers and industry advocates figured out that if we use that fertile soil to grow feed for cows and milk cows we can become a center for dairy. And so that was a niche that emerged. And that's why that happened. And to your point on the hard work, every type of farming is hard and challenging. 12 hour days is not a foreign thing to any farmer, give or take in different ways. What happens with dairy is you have to milk those cows two times a day minimum. Sometimes it's more, but two times a day minimum. So you're up at four in the morning for milking, and then you're milking at four at night. And then all the rest of your work is happening in between. So what it means is there's more work crammed into the day. You start early, you end late, and there's more work in between. and it's every day. I mean, I remember my dad, the number of times we went on quote vacation, I could count on, I don't even need a, I don't even need a full hand to account when I was a kid, he'd have to have a guy who would cows and be just for a day or two, a lot of times, you know? Right. That was the thing that was astounding to me was that you plant a crop and there are days where you have to work 16, 20 hours. I remember, you know, we had whole periods of time where it was like, when are we having dinner? Well, when the sun goes down and in Minnesota, that might be 10 30 at night in the, you know, the peak of the summer, it gets pretty late, but the, the dairy people, Christmas, uh, school play, um, you know, football game across the state, like it didn't matter. They had to be home and do the, do the milking the cows. And it was just, it made me in my, in the back of my mind go, I never want to be a dairy farmer. Um, I feel like dairy is the, is the way maybe that will be most accessible for people to talk about consolidation because you know i watch my neighbors and they were you know i talk about them as if we had a close relationship with them they were hermits back in the woods who milked cows and the milk company would come and pick up a couple jugs every day and take it and do whatever that was when i was in the early 80s, that farm's been abandoned for 30 years now. I don't know as you could even do that today at that volume. No local milk producer is going to do that. If you don't want to do it through dairy, you don't have to. But I feel like dairy is a way because there is a certain economies of scale. And even the personal nature of knowing each cow, knowing what they need, knowing, you know okay this one does need to be milked three times today for whatever reason replaced by a more mechanized industrial approach can you just talk about that and help people understand what that has been like absolutely so there's been this kind of relentless push um toward get big or get out and the farms that are getting bigger don't like it any more than the farms that are getting wiped out i mean people are just trying to figure out how to survive and some are doing it by getting bigger and some are doing it by selling their land or figuring out another way to to make a living and it's driven by a lot of forces we get into economic technological political but just to give people a sense of the scale because i think you're hitting on something really important in dairy when my dad was buying the farm for my grandpa when they were getting through that drought and that farm crisis and all this stuff the average size of a dairy herd in the 80s was about 80 cows and our farm growing up was 50 to 60 cows so we were on the small side of average you know small side of middle 80 cows in the 80s by the time we were working to pass the farm from my dad's generation to our generation the midpoint was 1200 cows from 80 cows to 1200 in just one generation and what that means is to your point a farm that produces you know x amount of milk from 50 to 60 cows is incredibly hard and in many cases impossible to produce the volume that you need to to compete on the global scale and so what you end up facing is the price that you get for your goods is rarely going up if it is going up it's not nearly enough to cover the cost and so there's a tighter and tighter squeeze every year and so more and more farms get squeezed out and again that ties into a lot of big economic forces and it ties into the concept of commodity trap that I know a friend of the program, Chris Gibbons, talks about a lot. It's an economic system that really squeezes our farms out of existence in this country. Can we talk about debt? And then I'd like to get to the commodity trap because I felt throughout your book that there was this kind of dance with debt where as a farmer, you're faced with one of two choices. One, you take on debt and you become more fragile. In essence, you become more desperate. And I read your great-great-grandparents or your great-grandparents paying down the farm, and that was a big deal to hand off as little amount of debt as possible. But you reach this point where the economics of farming, you're either going to take on debt and grow and become fragile as a result, or you're going to not take on debt, in which case you're going to get run over and you're not going to keep up. Debt is ubiquitous in our economy today. And it's looked at as this way to, oh, we're going to inject liquidity and we're going to grow, grow, grow. And I feel like its most brutal form comes in farming. Talk a little bit about the relationship of the farm and debt. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, a farm is not a business that builds up capital or has massive amounts of cash flow or moments of major profitability. Taking out debt is scary for anybody. But when you're doing it after you've got, you know, an infusion and you've got a growing market and all that, you know, that's a little bit of a different situation than saying what you're saying in farming, which is, okay, you might have debt mortgage on the farm, which is, by the way, not just a mortgage on your home or not just debt related to your company. It's all of it. So it's your home. It's your job. It's your community. It's your heritage. And if you've got a mortgage on that, basically you've got a mortgage on your existence, number one. Number two, the debt that needs to be taken out oftentimes for operating each year. A lot of times farms will take out what they call an operating loan in the spring, and they'll plant crops based on that. And then they got to hope that their fall harvest is bountiful enough to come in and pay off that debt. And by the way, if it's a really good crop, the price for your crop is lower. If it's a bad crop, the price might be higher, but your crop might've been wiped out. So there's this kind of foundational relationship with debt that is very deeply existential. And certainly taking out debt for any company or any homeowner can be existential as we learned in the Great Recession, right? But outside of crisis times, debt is, I would say, a little bit more of a tool. It's still stressful to have. But in farming, it is that existential opportunity slash threat in a deep way at all times and in a way that kind of can roll from year to year in a little bit of a casino style, scary fashion. Feels casino style. And it feels like we force farmers into casino style because I, okay, if I start a business and I take out some debt and the business goes bad, I will declare bankruptcy in that business and that LLC will lose money and the bank will lose money, but it doesn't take my home. I can still go start another business. I can still like do the same thing. Um, my, my wife's family, her uncle did eggs, did chickens. And, you know, it was one year chickens were really good and we had a bunch of cash and we were able to, you know, do things. And the next year eggs were really bad. and we barely made it through. And you save money and you... I watched them lose their farm through debt. And these were people who didn't live extravagant lives. They didn't... There's nothing about them that you would say was living high on debt. They were just trying to keep their place. It's the gambling aspect of it that... Let me put it this way. And then I want you to react to this. I feel like the way you describe your ancestors on the same farm were the most prudent people imaginable who would forego every luxury to try to pay down their debt. And the descendants of that have been, in a sense, forced to be in the most casino-like system possible just to hang on to what they were bequeathed. There seems like a deep cognitive injustice to that. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think that's right. Even farms today still are exhibiting kind of a characteristic you describing there I was shocked to learn like in the 30s and 40s when we were getting things like running water farmers were twice as likely to have running water when they finally got it in the barn as they were in their house because they were trying to figure out how to do that investment to be able to help their farm grow a little more, make it the next, and they were going to live still boiling water to bathe in the house. you know and farms today still have that even the farms that you see that have you know nice tract or whatever that's a big investment that they made to be able to harvest their crop at the scale they need to just to survive and the farmers probably got a pretty wrinkled billfold it's just got a couple dollar bills in it for when he's got to throw cash on the table in town and that's just a reality and and where we're at is you're right because of economic crises that we didn't understand their impact on our farms because of governmental decisions by both parties over time and because of the way that technology has advanced farming, but also left many family farms behind. We have created this situation where these hardworking, prudent, resourceful people are forced into these no-win situations where each year the income is getting a little bit smaller, to your point. And I imagine there's some variation of that, that the chicken farm that you grew up knowing was impacted by. Yeah. Yeah. What is a commodity trap? How do farmers get trapped in this? Yeah. So the commodity trap, I don't want to be too circular here, but I just want to note that I learned about it from the Strong Towns podcast. No, that's really cool. I'm happy that we did that. Yeah. I was researching, my wife listens and I was researching a wide range of topics related to really the hidden areas of history driving the disappearance of our farms. And I knew that connect with rural communities and therefore small towns and our urban economy in a variety of ways. And she mentioned this to me. And so Chris Gibbons, very smart guy who talks about and formulated this notion, the commodity trap is basically when an economy, a local economy for a community or for a region becomes tied so closely to a commodity that they are basically pressured out of existence. And here's how it happens. if you're raising custom beef on grass fed and you're able to sell it as a unique thing and market it in a way that people feel like it's a it's a unique product there's some innovation there a lot of farming because the crises that swept over us and because of the pressure that there's been to get just more and more food at lower and lower prices have been forced to do what's called commodity crops and that's a corn that's the same in wisconsin as it is in iowa they get mad in Iowa when you say that because they're real corn people down there. It's a thing. You, you, you don't go to this, you don't go to the grocery store and buy Iowa corn. You know, they've, they've tried to do that with beef. Like, Oh, it's Wisconsin grain fed, you know, whatever beef. You can't do that with corn. You can't do that with wheat. You can't do that with soybeans. Right. And so what happens, and I called Chris to talk to him for the book after, after listening to the episode with him. And what we talked about is the fact that when you have something like that, a product like that, corn or whatever, that's just a, you know, it's just the same wherever it is, wherever it's getting sold. It's basically a unit, you know, and that's it. And so there isn't any innovation where you can set your own price. You're accepting the price on the global commodity market. So that means that your price is set and it is what it is. It's going to go up and down some, but it's not going to. Yeah. Here's what a bushel of wheat sells for. You want that or not. Right. Yeah, exactly. And so when you're based around that, what it does is it forces you. Normally in business, there's a lot of different ways to make a better profit. You can cut some costs. You can produce some more. You can find a new innovative way to do something. You can find a new way to sell it. You can find a new market. In a commodity crop situation or in any commodity trap, there really isn't a lot of things you can do other than reduce costs. There aren't a lot of new markets popping up. There aren't a lot of opportunities for innovation. There aren't new ways to package it or sell it. You're basically saying, I got to produce more of it and I got to do it more cheaply. That's what the commodity trap is. It forces everybody to just get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper for more and more and more. And every business contends with that. But when that is the only thing dictating your business, it forces you to get bigger or get out. And there's a lot of reasons behind get bigger, get out. But that dilemma of the commodity trap is central to it. And here's what happens. It's not just one farm. It's all the farms in a region and it's all the small towns in a region. It's all, you know, it's all across the heartland. And so you have all of these rural areas and communities that had economies based on, you know, milking cows or growing corn, or it also happens outside farming, by the way, you know, timber, you know, whatever it is, a lot of these resource driven communities, mining, you know, things that where the resources were growing out of the land, they were at one time innovating. We're going to milk cows in Wisconsin instead of growing wheat, right? There was innovation. But over time, it falls into that commodity trap. And all you can do is produce more of it for cheaper. And that forces people to get bigger, get out, and it decimates our communities. I feel like there's a certain efficiency argument that we at Harold as being the way business should operate. If I can produce a product cheaper, that's good for consumers. But when it comes to farms, it's a lot more complex than that. Can we talk a little bit about the relationship with small towns then because you know i watch places like wisconsin dells which is near where you're at and you told me you worked for the baraboo newspaper at one point which is right outside of and to me you know we used to bring our kids when they were really little uh we would take a weekend at the dells right um that's something people from minnesota do and they go on water slides and have a lot of fun and it's really great but wisconsin dells is like this kind of cheeky tourist trap place has nothing to do with the region. It's just a way to like bring in revenue from outside. Right. What has this consolidation of farming done to small towns and small town economies? Yeah. Well, we grew up going to the Dells. We call it blue collar Disney, you know, and it's a good one. Yeah. That's really good. So I'm glad you asked that because it's the next logical step. So when you have a commodity trap that's affecting a type of economy of farm. This is something that is wrapped up in a huge chain reaction we've seen throughout this country, which is it's not the only way that towns sprouted in America. But one of the main ways that towns sprouted in America is that they were communities that grew in and around American agriculture. So you had farms getting founded, there were more and more farms, we were growing food, people were assembling, communities were growing, and a lot of times the farms built up these small towns. And so when you reverse that process. We've been wiping out farms at a rate of 45,000 a year for the past century, 45,000 a year for a hundred years. And when you do that, you are hollowing out the economic base of these places and it spreads. And that commodity trap issue that ties with all these other economic issues that are wiping out our farms, that commodity trap issue is therefore not just affecting the farm, it's affecting the entire community that is based around an economy where, hey, these farmers are the core of our economy. And there's other types of small businesses and other things, but a lot of them are serving farmers and stuff like that. So when you lose farms at 45,000 a year, it ripples through the rural areas to the communities. And that has happened for 100 years. A lot of times that that was happening, it also coincided with our shift from a rural economy to an urban economy. So because the farms were failing and because of other issues, people were leaving rural areas to go to the bright lights city to find manufacturing jobs, etc and then by the time we digested all that well now we're getting into the 70s and 80s when we start to lose those rust belt jobs right the manufacturing jobs are going overseas or getting automated so think about that for a second you think about small towns and rural areas we had you know growing prosperity and then we started losing our farms 100 years ago we started losing our people and then we started losing our manufacturing jobs on the tail end of that so that story that you hear about, you know, the way that the Rust Belt phenomena devastated small towns and communities, that's true. But many of these small towns and communities were already being devastated by a downward decline of the number of farms and the number of people followed by the number of jobs. And so it's a foundational thing that has impacted our entire country in a way that I think is hard to grasp if you don't really look under these issues. I think it is too. We had the grain processing in the downtown. We had all these lumber-related things that were going on. We had tractor repair. All those things are gone. All those things are gone along with all the downtown retailers are gone. My grandma worked at, I wouldn't say high end, but a nice clothier. It wouldn't have been like farm clothes, but then, but next to it was farm clothes. Right. And you had all these like retailers and now they're all gone. And yes, we have Walmart and we have the dollar store and now we have a Costco and you have all that, but that local economy is completely gone. And we are now, you know, instead of farmers and producers, we are consumers. And it's just a very different, I'm starting to feel old because I remember what it used to be like. And I'm one of the last ones to remember what it used to be like, because that generation is gone. I mean, my parents are getting up there and they probably you know, remember it obviously more vividly than I do, but it's hard to look at small towns and see anything left of them beyond just, you know, their existence as consumers. And I, I struggle with that. I don't know if you have that same struggle or not. You're nodding. I totally do. I think that, you know, we can look at a point not that long ago when, when small towns and communities in rural areas were their own economic engine they both produced and consumed and i think that's what you're talking about here you had an economic base that maybe was resource-based farming or logging or mining there's others and small businesses of all kinds sprouting up around that hey you know the the farming economy all the farmers here you know in our area they need this you know they need plumbers they need electricians all that kind of stuff that you had local grocery stores you had all you all this stuff grew out of a natural economic growth and it was a virtuous cycle right and so there are different things that disrupted that in the case of different communities but in many cases it was the beginning of the loss of our farms that disrupted that cycle and now it's a downward trend and these farms that are caught in these commodity traps and these communities and regions that are caught in these commodity traps don't have anything to replace it with and so just like our farms are producing as much as possible, as cheaply as possible. A lot of the businesses that are able to exist in real America are bigger companies that provide a lot more for a lot less. And we've got people who had free people with economic building blocks at their disposal now, just kind of subject to the whims of the economic forces, hoping they can make a living. We don't do partisan politics at strong towns and I rarely talk about elections and you know, what have you, but I do feel like this is a place to kind of pause because there is this gap that I go, you go in between, I go in between, you know, of a red America and a blue America. And, and I remember sitting here in my small town, hearing this narrative of, well, you all are very privileged and you all have, you know, so much going for you and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. And I remember looking around going, I feel like me very privileged in comparison to my parents and my grandparents and certainly my great, great grandparents that, you know, founded the farm. Like I live a life of luxury that they could not imagine hot water i mean for crying out loud but i also like look at the decline and the decay and how like no one's really doing well i feel very sympathetic to the core critique and the core hurt of both sides of our political drama today i think you're like me where you go back and forth between two different political worlds you know wisconsin real wisconsin is very different than suburban Sacramento. Do you have any like insight or words of, of grace or whatever that can, because it, I don't see it getting better, but a lot of it is because we really don't understand the other's pain and, and we don't have much empathy for it. Right. Yeah. No, that's right. It's political divides. It's class divides. There's a lot to it. So just to briefly, you know, let people know kind of where I come from on this, you know, I, growing up on the farm. As I mentioned, I was the first in our family to go to college. And, you know, so I wrestled with this from the very beginning and I have ever since. You know, I live in part of the time in Northern California and my wife's family, and I split my time between there and the family farm in Wisconsin because I'm blessed to have work and writing that can take me back and forth. And so I literally have a foot in each place most times of the year off and on And the way I look at it is this and also I you know The other thing it is my work in earlier parts of my career journalism and public policy before I got into my own writing and consulting on bipartisan, nonpartisan, private sector stuff, I got the chance to see government in a lot of different ways. The way I look at it, it really is the loss of our farms, I can say in a truly nonpartisan sense, is subject to decisions by both parties over time. But the deeper issue that you're talking about, the rural-urban divide is much more systemic than did we make good decisions about the issues I care about. We have a country where one part of the country, the rural area, votes all in one direction, and another part of the country, the urban area, votes all in one direction. I don't mean that everybody votes that way. I just mean that the forces are so predominant that one party dominates one type of life and the other party dominates the other type of life. And what that means is we are divided on many of the foundational things that we need to understand each other and to solve. And a great example of that is farms and food, the thing that I focus a lot of my time on. So our farms are disappearing and that impacts every American dinner table. Our price of our food is going up. The health of our food is going down. The security of our food is in danger. We're going to lose the rest of our farms in the next 40 years if we keep losing them at the same rate that we did in the past. I'm 40. By the time my daughter's my age, we'll have lost the rest of the farms like where I grew up. We don't do something. That's a huge problem and it's affecting urban america it's making their food more expensive and less healthy and less secure but the issues that are driving that rural decline are not something that urban politicians are focused on and the impact of that decline on you know the urban areas is not something the rural politicians are focused on the rural politicians are focused on the frustration of the people in rural areas that feel economically abandoned and the urban politicians are focusing on the challenges and problems of folks that are living in urban areas and so you've got like one set of politicians that understand one part of the problem and you've got another set of politicians understand another part of the problem if they're being good elected officials and understand their constituents so even a good faith elected official who understands their constituents only understands half of the issue and this is the case for food it's the case for so many of our issues in this country and so that divide on that inability for rural and urban to understand one another not only is a source of frustration where one thinks why is the other voting that way but it is also keeping us from solving some of the foundational problems affecting both groups of people. Yeah, that's well put. I remember, because I'm a civil engineer, and transportation is a big part of what I've done my entire professional career. I remember being a little bit bewildered by the political response to rural decline, being, let's build more highways. Let's build more roads. Let's make the road out to that farm that used to be gravel or when I grew up, like two tire tracks on a poorly maintained road. Let's make that paved. And I remember thinking, well, this makes it easier to ride a bike and I can get to town now in three minutes instead of four. But what did this massive investment actually do for us? I feel like we've not responded well to distress. Yeah, I think that's right. Look, infrastructure is an important thing, but what we did was we did things like that or other things that didn't address the foundational issue. The foundational issue for not only our farms, but our rural communities was that the economic opportunity on which they were built was slipping away. and you can't replace that with anything other than new economic opportunity or it's a recipe for decline i talk about this a lot with our farms that are caught in that commodity trap our farm the one that my dad is still owning and my sister's work can take over you know we grow commodity crops because that's what there's a market for we have a place to take that we don't have a place to take artisan tomatoes especially garlic but we're always working to diversify we're trying to figure out what's that thing that can break out of that commodity trap so we're raising beef for consumers and pasture-raised chickens. And so there's a lot of farms like this that are traditional farms that are trying to experiment into something new. And it's an example of something that's true of all kinds of businesses in rural areas and communities in rural areas and small towns in general, which is the economic opportunity that was there for them, that entrepreneurial thing that, hey, if I do this, if I take a risk doing this, it's going to lead to a growing business. I can hire people and I can buy this and I can support these folks. That kind of virtuous cycle, you can't replace that with anything other than a new source of that kind of economic growth. And we've been really band-aiding over this issue for decades. We haven't figured out what it is our rural communities need to have a new economic horizon. And so we're kind of just rearranging deck chairs. And I hate putting it that way, but that's what's happening. What do you think about? Because I watch these farmers now who we're going to do hay rides and have a corn maze and I'll do weddings on the weekends. And it pains me in a, I mean, I'm, I'm, I am happy for them because I feel like they're, like you say, innovating and trying things. But I mean, if you stay at a holiday inn and you have scrambled eggs, you are eating the most like manufactured overpriced. If you go to a McDonald's and you eat an egg McMuffin, you are eating an egg that has come from a certain process. If you go to a farm and eat a farm fresh egg, it's like heaven. I mean, it's a completely different product. I feel like there's an opening there, but it also pains me to watch these people. I mean, can you imagine your grandparents hosting weddings in the barn to have money on the side? it's a it's an incredible change in a lot of these farms you know like the classic as people do it every fall you know the the pumpkin farms and stuff i mean a lot of these farms make their you know what they need to meet their bottom line in the fall and they harvest other crops and they do other things and it all helps but at the end of the day it's how many people can they get out there to to um pet the pony and buy the pumpkins you know and i think it's a on the one hand it's entrepreneurship and it's, and it's, it's a good thing that people want to come out and get more in touch with their food supply. Um, but also these farms are kind of left in a position of, um, doing that instead of doing only what it is that their ancestors had done, they're kind of, um, putting on what they're really good at. Yeah. And, um, so I, I think, you know, I mean, but look, there are reasons for hope. Um, and when I think about that dynamic, part of the hope is in there because more people than ever care about where their food comes from. And we're not going to change the entire food economy where we're going to undo all of this. But in a world where people care than ever where their food comes from, if every American consumer took a half step toward a farmer, meaning you can't get everything that you need from a local farmer's market, but if every consumer took a step toward that, farmer's markets, online marketplaces, buying from local butcher shop, getting in touch with the farmer down the road, CSAs. If every American consumer took some kind of a half step where just a portion of your groceries came from, you know, you know that it's coming from a family farm on some level. Grocery stores that'll carry local goods, many will if they know people will buy it. If our market shifted in that direction, it would be a gargantuan shift and it would be new entrepreneur opportunity for our farms and more choices for our consumers. But the challenge is it requires all of us to change our mind a little bit all at once, you know? Yeah. So I met Chris Gibbons at a conference where he was on a panel. I was asked to moderate this panel and I didn't know Chris and I didn't know the other fellow that was on the panel with him. The other guy was a farmer and he was doing farm to table stuff. And I found his story fascinating. He was from Western Montana and he said, all of our product here gets put on a train, shipped out to Duluth, and then we get whatever price that commodity is fetching us in Duluth at the port. And then when we buy a finished product, it gets dropped off in Duluth and we pay whatever the price in Duluth is plus the shipping cost back to Western Montana. So he said, what happens is because we have the longest transportation route, we get the lowest cost for our product of anybody in the country, and we pay the highest markup for finished goods. So he said like Cheerios are ridiculous because we're sending the wheat to Duluth and then we're getting Cheerios back. So you know what they did? They started making their own Cheerios and they started making their own stuff. And I, I saw in this, like a glimmer of hope for how actual like local, because the transportation costs are not coming down. They're going up. There's a part of me that feels like as this system runs, you know, the system I talk about a lot, the Ponzi scheme part of transportation, you know, as this, as we get less about how do we wring every value out of making things more connected and start allowing places to actually grow, I have a hope that there's a huge room for farming there, right? Yeah, I think so. What you're talking about is exactly this kind of scenario where if there's enough demand for something, that's where that entrepreneur ingenuity can let you break out of this trap. And I think that we're in a place where we're seeing green shoots of it. Another thing that can help fuel it is COVID was an incredibly awful economic and social catastrophe and physical health catastrophe. But it also opened people's eyes to the fact that a lot of work can be done from anywhere. And there are rural areas, depends upon the geography of it and other demographic trends, but there are rural areas that actually grew during and after COVID. Because people were like, I don't have to live in the city to do this. I'm going to go live in this small town. And so when you think about a couple of things, people carry more than ever where their food comes from. People return in rural communities, which means not only people, but the ideas and the money that comes with them. Some of these trends are just, you know, they're just changing a little bit. And it's not reducing all the tectonic shifts that forced our farms out and decimated our rural communities. But it's changes that, you know, kind of impact that landscape a little bit differently that mean that there is an opportunity. But we all have to pay attention to it and we have to lean into the ways that we can help it because otherwise it will just be mowed under the massive economic forces that came before it. Brian, you do writing. Your writing is, I mean, your book is beautifully written. You're a great writer. You do farming. You also do consulting. Can you talk a little bit about the consulting work that you do and then how people, if they're interested, can get a hold of you? Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, with my writing, I work on my own book projects and also columns on rural issues all the time. And complementing that, I work as a messaging consultant in public affairs. We work on bipartisan, nonpartisan, private sector issues, trying to figure out solutions to problems for different industries. And then our farm, as you say, you know, my dad working at my sister, we're going to take it over. I help on the business side and pitch in wherever I can. And the best way people can get in touch with me about any of this is on my website, which is at www.brian-reisinger.com. That's B-R-I-A-N, Reisinger, R-E-I-S-I-N-G-E-R.com. And yeah, we're keeping busy there. And what I'm trying to do is just tell our story and find solutions for places like where I grew up and other folks that I work with along the way. That's beautiful. Your story, Reisinger, made me go back and dig up my family tree again. Because, you know, I tell people like I'm Norwegian. I am. But the maroon part is actually Prussian, which is not too far from where your family originated, too. And they came over here about the same time as yours did. So early 1900s homesteading, that kind of thing. So the Bavarians and the Norwegians and the Polish, you know, they all came up and worked hard and enjoyed their beer when they had a chance. And that's right. Formed a lot of our Midwestern culture. Yeah. Yeah. This made me smile. All right. Brian Reisinger, thanks for your time. Thanks for being here. Thanks for writing such a great book. Very nice to chat with you. Thanks for being on. Thanks so much, Chuck. It's good to be there. I appreciate it. And we've got the new paperback edition out on Amazon and bookstores nationwide. And I just appreciate anybody who's trying to highlight these issues and focus on how we can solve the problem. So thanks a lot. I'm grateful you're here doing what you do. And thanks everybody for listening. Keep doing what you can to build a strong town. Take care. This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org membership.