Why Family Farms Are Disappearing with Brian Reisinger Artwork

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Why Family Farms Are Disappearing with Brian Reisinger

June 05, 2025 • Deborah Niemann • Episode 24

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Description

In this episode Deborah Niemann is joined by Brian Reisinger, journalist and author of Land Rich, Cash Poor, to talk about a subject close to both their hearts: the alarming disappearance of family farms in the United States.

Brian grew up on a multi-generational Wisconsin farm and brings a unique perspective as both a writer and someone with deep roots in agriculture. Drawing from his family’s story and extensive research, Brian explains the historical, economic, political, and technological forces that have shaped—and in many cases, harmed—family farming for over a century.

What You’ll Learn:

Why family farms have been disappearing for over 100 years
The ripple effect of labor, policy, and market changes on farm viability
The critical role of government research and how its decline hurts innovation
Why private companies should care about saving small farms, too
What we can do to protect the 2 million farms still standing today

📘 Featured Book

Land Rich, Cash Poor by Brian Reisinger
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Deborah Niemann 0:04
Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever size your living space, you can do more than you think to lead a greener lifestyle. In the sustainability book chat, we are talking to authors and experts about all the different ways that achieving sustainability is within your reach.

Hello everyone, and welcome to today's episode. We have a wonderful guest with us today who has grown up in a very old farm family. Brian Reisinger is the author of Land Rich, Cash Poor, and now calls himself the son of a farmer. Welcome to the show, Brian.

Brian Reisinger
Good to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Deborah Niemann
So even though you don't want to give yourself the title of farmer anymore, you still have a lot to do with your family's farm, helping out and stuff when you can. So I just want people to know you do still have boots on the ground, just not 365 days.

Brian Reisinger 1:06
That's right, you know, I was so honored to grow up as I did, and I worked with my dad time I could walk. And there was a long time when it might have been my profession, you know, and I ended up pursuing a writing career off the farm, which I worked with for a long time, and my sister's now taking over. I'm so grateful, to your point, to be able to still have boots on the ground, to have come back around full circle, to be telling our story.

But also I help on the business side of our farm. When I'm there, they throw me in a tractor on my supposed day off, because that's kind of the fate of a farm kid. There's no such thing as a day off, right? And I'm just grateful that our family is there doing it, but we're living something that so many farm families are living, which is the crisis of our farms disappearing. And it's sort of, although I've written the book, it's kind of a story still not completely written, because we're all living it out as we speak, with everything that's been going on.

Deborah Niemann 1:51
Yeah, exactly now. The book was published in August of last year, 2024 and things have changed a lot since then. But I know, as an author myself, if you published in August of 2024 that means you were writing this like back in 2023 and prior. So what motivated you to write this book?

Brian Reisinger 2:12
You know what really drew me to write it is something I've been carrying around since I was a kid, which is, I can remember barely being tall enough to carry a milk pail with my dad, and there were people coming in the driveway saying, you know, this farm sold. This farm went under. I mean, we lived with that disappearance. I grew up in the 80s and 90s, we were living with it then, and I always wanted to understand that I didn't know why.

I knew my dad was doing something special. I knew we lived a way of life that was special. You know that growing up as a farm kid, but I just couldn't understand why it was becoming more rare. And as I pursued my writing career off the farm and I started writing about the economy and our political system, I realized that we had a system that was leaving our farmers behind.

And I felt that maybe if I combined that upbringing with the opportunity I'd had to see what was wrong with our economic system, maybe we could answer that question of, Why are farms disappearing? So the reality is that whether it's 2023, and you and so many of your listeners know this, whether it's 2023, or 2022, or 2010 or 1970 or 1920 there are issues that have really been unknown to our country, in many ways, that have been wiping out our farms.

It's really been happening for a century, and it's been waxing and waning, but it has never let up, and it has been due to various factors, but it has always put our food supply at risk, and we are getting more and more and more to the point we're going to reach that troubling tipping point where we may not be able to come back from it. So the book has an urgency to it from that standpoint, but in another way, you could have told this story in any of those past decades, because farmers have been facing this struggle for a century now.

Deborah Niemann 3:39
Yeah, exactly I know. When we first moved out to the country in 2002 there were a lot more farms around us than there are now, and in the last 20-something years, we just see farm after farm getting sold and the farmhouses getting torn down. And most people don't realize that who owns a lot of the farms around us, which we only know because we get a plat map. Since we own a farm, we look at that plat map and it's banks, like just one bank after another bank after another bank, and then they just hire a farmer to farm it for them. So that's just one of the things I've seen in our part of Illinois that has changed dramatically in the last 20-something years,

Brian Reisinger 4:22
You know, with my dad, I remember in the 90s and early 2000s we'd be driving in the pickup truck, you know. And he'd say, Well, that was a great farm. That was a great farm. You know, what's going to happen now? And I would say that, you know, you're describing this situation exactly right. And if you're lucky, maybe a family still owns it, but they're leasing it to a larger farm.

A lot of times it's owned by banks. A lot of times it's owned by other larger farms that had to get big or get out. And sometimes it's owned by other landowners who are kind of hobby landowners, you know. But like, the idea of it being owned by the folks that are operating the farm was such a deep part of our history, and there is still more of that in this country than so many other places of the world, but it is slipping away at a perilously fast rate, we have lost farms at the rate of about 45,000 per year on average for the past century.

And if we were to lose them at the same rate, it's wax and wane again over the course of the century. But it's averaged out to about 45,000 a year. If we were to lose our farms at that rate going forward, we would lose most the rest of our family farms in 40 years within the next generation.

Deborah Niemann 5:18
Yeah, one of the things I know that surprised me, like 10 plus years ago, I was very active in the Illinois Specialty Growers Association, and I was at their conference every single year, and it was so surprising, I would always go to the sessions on labor, and every single year, I would listen to farmers talk about how hard it was to get people to work on their farms, and this is especially hard for people who are growing the food we actually eat, you know, if you're growing corn and soybeans that are going to go to some factory and get turned into soy lecithin and corn starch and animal feed and stuff like that, that doesn't really require people power, but the food we eat, apples and pears and broccoli and stuff that requires human labor, and most Americans don't want to do that.

I know 10 plus years ago, we would listen to these farmers talk about how, like to get someone legally from Mexico would cost them about $10,000 as well as, like, a whole year of work just to get one person from Mexico to come in to do a job, because they had to go through all kinds of advertising and prove to the government that there was no one local that would do it. They even had to advertise in other towns and cities and stuff that had very high unemployment, and then all the paperwork and everything. It was a lot of money just to get somebody in. Of course, that situation has now gotten much worse. Do you want to talk a little bit about the labor situation on US farms?

Brian Reisinger 6:45
Yeah, absolutely. You know, it is a great example of farmers being caught between cross cutting political winds, and I'll just say off front so people know where to come from on it. For our farm, we were a dairy farm, and now we've sold our dairy … We're diversified farm where we raise dairy cows for other dairy farms, we raise beef for consumers, and then we raise a variety of cash crops, including experimenting with things wherever we can for especially food markets, things like that.

And for farms like ours, although we never had immigrant labor, there were an increasing number of dairy farms around us that also required immigrant labor. And to your point, whether it is milk in the Midwest or, even more pronounced, if, whether it is vegetables, fruit produce all across the country, especially in places like California, like there is a massive amount of our food that is made possible through immigrant labor. And the challenge that farmers have is in like, look, I think that it is fair to say, maybe to acknowledge that in rural America, where a fair amount of support for the Trump administration came from, there are people in rural communities and farmers who voted for President Trump.

Maybe they did it for reasons other than immigration, or maybe they believe in the notion of having a secure border and think he will do more on that than the Democrats would have done, but they also still live with the reality of where are we going to find our workforce from? And so that's a complexity that farmers live with, and some people criticize that. Some people understand it, and we could talk through the tangle of that.

But the reality, whatever people think of the politics, is that farmers are in a position of needing to make sure they have that workforce. Somewhere around half of our agriculture labor in America comes from immigrant labor. Now, some of that may be people who have a legal status to be here. A good deal of it may not be. And sometimes, on top of the hoops that you're talking about, sometimes there are farmers who just, frankly, don't necessarily know, or know if they have a way to know, because there is an industry around trying to get people there and able to work. And so sometimes it can be tricky even to navigate.

But in any case, you know you have a real risk and what, here's what happens. So if the workforce goes away, if we don't figure out a way to have pursuit of a secure border not be mutually exclusive from having the kind of immigrant labor our country needs. If we can't find a way to do that, the labor disappears. There are many farms that won't be able to continue to operate. If they can continue to operate, they have to bring in far more expensive labor that was hard to find in the first place. So it can really contribute to a lot of farms being shut down, rendered inoperable, or the operations becoming much more expensive?

Deborah Niemann 9:01
Exactly. It was so sad to listen to the farmers talk about having their fruit rot on the tree, or, you know, just fall to the ground and rot knowing that they've got, like, 1000s and 1000s of dollars of produce that is healthy and good and could be eaten, but they just don't have the people to pick it. And in case anybody's thinking, Oh, well, why don't they open a U-Pick? That is a whole nother thing. Now you're getting into agritourism, which I used to think like, oh, that sounds like such a cool idea.

And then you go to a couple sessions on agritourism and hear from people who do that that's just crazy, like all of the problems that you have when you open your farm to the public, because now you've got the farmers version of Disneyland.

Brian Reisinger 9:42
Yeah, it's an entirely different business model, and there's value in it for those folks who can do it. But, you know, another example of that same thing is there a lot of farmers who maybe they're growing some corn and soybean, some row crops, because that's what they've had. That's where they know they can market their products. They want to move into other markets. They're maybe trying. Trying to do that, but it's a gradual process. It's just a small business. A farm is a small business.

And so whether they are changing from a, you know, kind of traditional produce farm to a you-pick farm, whether transitioning from a traditional row crop farm to a specialty food or a fresh and local food, it takes time. It takes money. And so we have to have understand that these are small businesses that need the room to do that, and it's hard to do that when the thing that is forcing you to do it is a sudden change in government policy.

Deborah Niemann 10:27
Yeah, in my other podcast, For the Love of Goats, I talked to someone who had a really big agritourism operation on her goat dairy farm. She talked about that and the challenges associated with it, like she said, One day they had to unclog their toilet, and it looked like somebody had flushed hundreds of toothpicks down the toilet. You wouldn't even dream of some of the things that members of the public will do when they are on your farm, and that it's going to cost you money and time to deal with those things.

Brian Reisinger 10:58
Absolutely and with what we did, you know, with the book, I wanted to take our experience on our farm in the hills of southern Wisconsin and try to find a way to make it a bit more universal. And so, you know, we went through the hidden areas of history that have driven the disappearance of our farms, and there have been different reasons over different periods of time. We wove that with our family story of survival, from the depression to the day, and any farm family has these kinds of stories.

The thing that might be unique about us is that my family has been willing to talk with me and for us to tell those stories in real, honest and raw way. But we see over and over different things being played out. For example, the loss of workforce was a real problem in the 1940s and 50s. In that case, it was the movement of sons and daughters of rural America to the bright lights of the city and to industrial jobs.

And some of that was natural, and some of that was good, and some of that went too far and made it so that, you know, it was the roots of some of the succession challenges that we have with so many of our farms now. So, in many ways, history continues to repeat itself, or maybe, I can't remember the writer who said it doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes, you know, but maybe, and sometimes it's a song we want to hear it. Sometimes it's not, you know.

Deborah Niemann 11:57
I have known a lot of farmers have taken advantage of government grants, which have been super helpful. I'm not sure that I could tell you about a successful farmer I know who grows food for people who hasn't benefited from some kind of grants, whether that was grants to put up hoop houses or to transition to an agritourism model or something. And so I know right now my Facebook feed is just full of farmers who are very upset that they were promised grants, you know, like last fall, and they did things like, there was one farm I saw they were promised a $200,000 grant last fall.

Of course, it's the US government, right? So you believe them because they've been trustworthy. Their bank believed them. This $200,000 was part of their plan for building a building that was going to be a food hub so that all the farms in their area could bring their food to that farm, and then it could be taken to the city to be sold.

So the construction had already started, and then they were told, like, oh, all the grants have been canceled. And that's just one story of one farm. I know there's a lot, because, like I said, my Facebook feed is full of them talking about how, you know, these things have happened to them, and they don't know what they're going to do about it. What have you seen?

Brian Reisinger 13:17
I mean, all of those things and then some. The reality is that agriculture and government are so interwoven. I talked to one economist for the book who called it a fragile Jenga tower, and this was, by the way, someone who was more conservative economically, who might have argued that certain types of subsidies shouldn't be in place, or if they are, they should be different. And he said, you know, whatever you think of these, if you pull one Jenga block, you know, you don't know what's going to happen to the rest of the tower, because it is so interwoven.

So we have to be very careful about these things. Well, another example of farmers being caught in cross cutting political winds. There are a lot of farmers who are very concerned about this. There are some farmers who, you know, look like might have again, said, Hey, you know, I think the federal government spends too much however, they're still impacted, and we need to make sure that when there are changes or cuts being made, that it's accounting for how it affects people.

So a good example is, like, there's a lot of farmers, including people who would have been supportive of reducing federal spending, who also, you know, signed a contract and put out money. And if you've signed a contract, and you've you've spent money of your own knowing that the federal government, believing that the federal government is going to come in with funding for that thing, any business in America, especially a family farm living on such tight margins, needs to be able to depend upon agreements. They've made contracts, they've signed that kind of thing. And so it is really challenging.

And you have farmers who are pursuing all kinds of things on their farm, whether it be for one type of policy goal or another, or whether it be to do something that can help their farm be more efficient, whatever the case may be, you know, it's a challenge. If they've signed in a contract, sign an agreement, put money out, then not making that improvement that would have helped them and maybe achieve some other goal, whether people want to agree with that goal or not, but they are also then out that money, you know? And so it's really challenging for people. And the other thing about all of this stuff is it all touches back on again, things that have happened over and over.

You know, we look in the book, for instance, about when did farming and government become so intertwined? And part of it was driven by a need. In the depression, there was an intervention to save a lot of farms. And then, you know, you can have discussions and debates about how should that have been done, and how should that have been carried forward. But the reality is that since that time, because of congressional gridlock and because of our government's increasing inability in the last several decades to really be able to be nimble into the reform programs, we have program after program that's out there, and we don't necessarily know what's working anymore.

You know, we need to figure out, like, what is it that will really get the you know, it's like, it's fair for family farmers to raise their hand and say, Hey, what's out there to help us, even though there's all kinds of things, because we don't know what's working what isn't. And so that's something that, even that question just again, ties back to this history that farmers have been living for so long. And it just struck me how over and over there was a reality on the ground for our farms that was not understood by whether it's our political leaders or leaders of industry, or whoever it was at different points in our history.

Deborah Niemann 16:05
Yeah, well, and just American eaters back, you know, around World War Two, there was still a very large portion of Americans who lived on farms, or their parents were on farms, and so they knew where their food came from. And the more and more that we move towards industrialization, and then computers and all that kind of stuff. You know, fewer and fewer people are on farms, and they don't know where their food comes from or what it takes to produce it. They just want it to be cheap.

Brian Reisinger 16:31
It's so true. And look, you know, there are elements of this that were advancement, right? So we went from Americans spending about 40% nearly half of their household budget on food, Americans spending about 10% that's a good thing. That's a good thing. We went from everyone farming, nearly everyone farming in America, which I think is beautiful and good, but like not everyone needs to do that, not everyone wants to do that. Having other opportunities in our industrial and our technological economy and all these things are the good things.

So some progress was good, and some of those changes may just simply mean that our country is moving forward, but we also had times, over and over and over again, where we've tilted the scales against family farms, and it really comes in three buckets. There is times we didn't understand how economic crises were affecting farms on the ground, from the depression to the farm crisis to today. There were decisions by governmental leaders on both sides of the political aisle that made things worse. And then there were technological and that kind of touches on what you just said, where technological progress made it so that fewer people had to break their backs to feed this country.

However, we also have a world where so much of the technology now has been geared around larger farms, rather than having technology that can work for large as well as medium and small farms, something that's called scale neutral technology, so that farms of all sizes could innovate in similar ways and maintain whatever size and whatever type of market they want to be in. And so economically, governmentally and technologically, we tilted the tables against our family farms in ways that often we didn't understand until it was too late.

Deborah Niemann 17:55
Yeah, I think I remember reading that you had a century farm like your family's been farming for over a century now. So I'm sure you have a lot of stories from your family's experience of challenges that they've had through the years. Could you share one or two of those with us?

Brian Reisinger 18:11
Yeah, absolutely. You know, broadly, it was amazing to me, although I'd heard stories as a kid and different tidbits of things, it was amazing when I got the chance to talk to my family, different generations, different branches of family, every generation, except for my great grandparents, who had died before I was born, all the things we lived through, and you know, as my great grandparents fleeing pre World War One Europe and finding a way to dig a better living out of the dirt, my grandparents surviving the depression, climbing the middle class, and each one of them, I was just so struck by the beauty and also the hardship really going hand in hand.

And anybody who has ever worked a field row, whether it's by tractor or by hand, knows that. You know because it's beautiful to be living and working close to the land. It also is difficult because of weather, because of farm accidents, because of the economic risks involved. One story that really comes to mind, that I think a lot about, because it says so much about the resilience of our farm families is my dad at the age of eight.

So my grandpa, at one point, went out in the cold winter air to climb up on top of a corn crib and replace a cap that had come off blown off in the wind, and he slipped off that corn crib, and he fell 30 feet and hit the frozen ground and broke his back, and he did get back up on his feet. But in the meantime, you know, my dad, at the tender age of eight, had to step up and do the work of a grown person. And I think about that and talking to him about that time, and I can't help but think about how hard that must have been.

I had times where when I was a kid, I had to step up on the farm. When things happen with my dad. I know what that feels like, the weight, but he had to do that at the age of eight. And then at the same time, he grew in to be a man who's done it for 60 years ever since, and he loves it. If he could be on the back of a tractor right now, if he's not, that's what he'd be doing. And, you know, it's seeing what comes up from the ground. It's working closely through animals. It's sun up to sun down at you know, I remember growing up with coming down to the bottom of my dad to help a cow that was struggling labor by the calf, and seeing those first moments of life, you know, and to think that my dad is a man who lived all that, and that really his work on the farm began with such a tragedy like that.

It just shows how, again, that hardship and that beauty goes hand in hand, but again, it really just shows the resilience, and it's part of what gives me hope. And as we think about solutions, as we think about where do we go from here, I always think about the fact that, you know, we have so many farm families still holding on, even though we've made this not work economically in our country. Imagine what they could accomplish if we made it work again.

Deborah Niemann 20:23
Ever since I moved out to the country and started to learn more about where our food comes from and how the whole farming system works and everything, it's just amazing. Like, it's been a mess for a really long time, and I had always heard that from both sides, from Republicans and Democrats both like, yeah, it's a mess. We know it's a mess, but we don't know how to fix it. I know in your book, you do talk about some solutions. So how do you think we can fix this?

Brian Reisinger 20:50
That was one of the more challenging aspects. I was writing about this problem. I felt compelled to try to find some solutions. And the good news is that as I looked at our history and the spots where the forces wiping on our farms intersecting my family's story, I did feel like I found these places where, okay, we made a choice we didn't have to, or made a false choice between two things we didn't have to pick between, right? And so we did find some places where I think we made the wrong choice and could make different choices. And there are many of them.

For a purpose, in the book, I tried to focus on those that I thought we could get different stakeholder groups to agree upon. So to your point, whether it's Republicans and Democrats, or whether it's people within agriculture or outside agriculture, whether it's farmers and people who care about environment, even though there's a lot of overlap between those groups, there isn't always. I tried to pick those solutions that it felt like, Hey, I think people could rally around this.

And so we unpacked several of them, but the overall arc of them is that they build into, how do we create new entrepreneur opportunities for our farms, because it makes sense sometimes that certain markets are going to go away or not work anymore. It makes sense that one type of farm is going to be better off in this decade than another. But the problem is we don't have that rebirth. Farms that have been in, you know, families for generations, did something for three or four generations, and they have to keep doing it in that broken market, not because they only want to do that, but because they say, Well, what else can I put in the ground that I can see I have a place to sell, you know? And that's, that's the challenge is that we don't have new things happening anymore.

Like Wisconsin in the 19 oughts and 10s and 20s was emerging as the dairy state. That was a result of a lot of work by farmers who were farming many different things, finding what would work. That was a result of research by universities and by other people who are interested in trying to figure out what could build a good, strong economy for my home state. And this happened over and over. So what can we do?

The first thing is we need to have an R and D revolution in this country. We need more research and development, and that has to be reformed, also in terms of government and private sector. So on the government side of it, research development spending is at its lowest level since the 1970s and there's a lot of research and development that happens in the private sector, but too little of it, whether it's public or private sector, is geared around that scale neutral technology I talked about, where it can help farms of all sizes.

So we need more research and development, and we need all of it, if possible, to be scale neutral, so that farms that are not only large, but also medium and small, can find new types of innovations that could be new crops and products that could be new practices that make them more efficient and increase their margins, all kinds of different things. We need to pair that with some other changes. We need to make sure that our markets are fair, both domestically internationally. We need to make sure that the farmer as the little guy can continue to operate in them.

And then we also need to capitalize on something that is a good thing right now, which is that people care more than ever where their food comes from. People having the kinds of conversations that you and I are having and that you're often having with your listeners on this podcast, people care more about that than they ever did, and so we need that to turn into greater consumer demand.

And there are other parts of the solution, but those are some of the big components, where, if we can have more innovation coming back to American farming and help farms of all sizes, we can make sure that we can make sure that we have markets that are fair to, you know, farmers who are the little guy, and we can make sure that we have consumer demand growing from people who care where their food comes from.

That means farms that are stuck in old, broken markets can begin to sell more food to people who want to get their food, maybe locally, from a farmer, then get it fresh, or from a specialty food market, where they know what they're getting, whatever the case may be. So we need to move in all those directions. The challenge, of course, is that we kind of have to hold hands and jump into the water together, because a lot of these things have to happen at once and for it to work.

Deborah Niemann 24:12
So take you back to, like, a minute or so when you said that we're spending less on government research, on farming than we have since the 1970s I just want to mention like that was before millions of dollars of grants were taken away from farmers, right?

Brian Reisinger 24:31
Yeah, that's just the historic number. That was the case a year or two ago as I was doing research for the book and and it certainly hasn't reversed. And America, over the long term, has really gone from being a global leader in innovation for agriculture to being a drag. Look, we still have innovation going on. We have a lot of farm families who, even if there isn't innovation accessible to them, they're resilient. They're resourceful.

I mean, farmers, as you know, are not only farmers, but they're mechanics and electricians and carpenters and all that. But the technological advancements have slowed, and the technological advancements that are accessible by a wide swath of our farms to become more scarce. And so American agriculture has gone from being really a leader in innovation to a drag. On average, there are other parts of the globe that are innovating more quickly than we are now.

Deborah Niemann 25:13
Exactly. And one of the things like, if you say, Oh well, we're just gonna let private industry take care of it all, private industry focuses on where they can get the most bang for their buck, where they can get the biggest return on their investment, and that, of course, is going to be developing, like big new stuff for the larger scale farms, and so that therein lies the problem.

And like, you know, that's kind of like a problem with why we don't have much private research on creating new antibiotics, because most drug companies don't want to spend their money on a drug that people are only going to take for like, five days, maybe once their whole life. So that's why, like, government plays a really big role with these research grants to get research done that private industry is just not going to do because they don't feel like they're going to make enough money from it.

Brian Reisinger 26:01
Yeah. And that's right. And that's then, historically, the challenge. And I think it still is one of the things that I say, and I make this case, and I make it honestly, I think it is true is that, you know, we're at the point now in terms of disappearance of our farms, again, 45,000 a year for the past century. That means 70% of our farms are gone. That means, again, if it continues, we'll lose the rest of our family farms in 40 years, I think we're getting to a point where it is in the interest of private industry to begin to recognize the vulnerability here, and we saw it during COVID the supply chain locking up, right because we had industries that were too concentrated.

We just didn't have enough farms and small businesses between those farms and the consumer to have multiple paths for our supply chain. So when you had one big distribution center go down, it led to huge spikes in food prices at the same time that farmers are having to dump milk or euthanize animals or let produce rot, and in the same way, if we continue to lose our farms, the reality is that whatever the size of company out there, they're going to have fewer farmers that are suppliers to them. If they're agribusiness or food company, they're gonna have fewer farmers that are customers to them if they're an agribusiness company that supplies seed or fertilizer or whatever the case may be, we cannot let farming get too big to fail.

And that seems like an odd statement, but the reality is that at the pace that we've been on for the fast century, that will happen in the next 40 years. And so all of these companies that exist out there, either as suppliers or buyers around farmers, they have an interest in trying to find a way for farming of all sizes to be economical, because otherwise, our farms will continue to set consolidate until there are just too few suppliers and too few buyers for all of the agribusiness and food companies out there, where that point is visible on the horizon. And so I try to make the case about the role that government plays here, and I also try to make the case to private sector leaders about the role the private sector plays also, because it is in their interest to make sure that we have a resilient supply chain and then we have a resilient, strong farming sector. And you can't do that if you keep hammering it and keep on letting farms disappear at this rate. You just can't.

Deborah Niemann 27:57
Yeah, exactly like this is so important because, like, this is how we eat. You can't live without eating, you know. And like you said, that was something we saw during COVID. I know my husband and a couple other local farmers, they took their picture and at the local Coop grocery store where they sold our eggs and a lot of local produce and stuff, they were, you know, focusing on the fact that, like you know, our local farmers are here for you, and they're still delivering, even though we've got this big tragic thing happening, and that wasn't always the case with larger distributors, you know, because so many issues happened with the larger supply chain. This has been a really awesome conversation. I've really enjoyed it. Do you have any final thoughts?

Brian Reisinger 28:37
I do try to leave people with hope, as you said, and there is even hope in the numbers. Believe it or not, we've talked about how dire it is and how much we've lost, and how at risk we are of farming really becoming in a state of jeopardy here in the next 40 years that is irreversible. But the reality is also that we still have nearly 2 million farms left. Even though we've lost 70% of them in the past century, we have nearly 2 million left, and 88% of them are small farms.

According to the government, you can talk about what's small or big, and can talk about what are big and everybody has a definition, but for the government, for their purposes, 88% of small farms. That means we have nearly 2 million farm families still holding on, even though it really isn't economical for them anymore. And the way that they're doing it, many of them, is they are working two to three jobs, right? So they're farming for supplemental income, and then they're also pulling a factory shift, working construction site, pouring concrete, working the local food movement, whatever the case. We retail, all kinds of things.

So imagine if we took those farm families that have those nearly 2 million farms that really aren't economical anymore, we made it economical with some of the solutions that we've talked about here. We harness that resilience, and we had those nearly 2 million farm families now having growing entrepreneurial ventures again, we can not only halt the decline of rural America, but we can also make those growing entrepreneurial ventures be places that new sources of fresh local specialty food can come from for our consumers, and so for those people who care about where their food comes from, we can solve problems for them too, and we can help with the cost. Food. We can help with the health of food. We can help with so many problems if we just find a way to try to harness that resilience that those nearly 2 million farm families are still showing every single day, whether our country realizes it or not.

Deborah Niemann 30:10
This has been so awesome. Thank you so much for joining us today. If people want to talk with you more, how can they find you online?

Brian Reisinger 30:17
Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me at my website, https://www.brian-reisinger.com/ and I'm on there, and I've got all different ways to find the book, to interact with me, to get on my newsletter, any in every way that we can keep this conversation going.

Deborah Niemann 30:37
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

Brian Reisinger 30:39
Appreciate you having me.

Deborah Niemann 30:42
And that's it for today's episode. You can find show notes at thriftyhomesteader.com/bookchat, as well as a transcript. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss any future episodes. You can also find Thrifty Homesteader on Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. See you next week on sustainability book, chat you.