Transcription
I think most Americans really root for farmers. We really feel like we need farmers. I got to tell you, they are really blowing through that capital right now with me.
Were farmers lied to? Absolutely not. We all knew this was coming. We talk about how agriculture is really important, right? We have to save it because it's so important. And I also kind of think that if it's that important, maybe it's too important to be leaving to the kind of people who make this kind of self-destructive decision.
Hi, Mom.
Hello, child.
All right. Today, we have a special guest because farmers have been in the news a lot lately, and you and I are both city kids, so we know nothing about this. So, today we're happy to welcome Sarah to the program. Thanks for joining us, Sarah.
Bye. Thanks for having me. One of the things that has baffled a lot of people is the fact that farmers voted for Trump even though he promised to do a lot of things that would seemingly hurt their business. And so part of what we're going to be talking about is that today. But before we even do that, I want to talk about who the American farmer really is. Mom, there's an image of the farmer in the American imagination. And as we've been diving into Sarah's content, we've realized that it's a lot more complicated than that.
As people who watch this know, I grew up in a very conservative Republican family. And we were all about independence and we were all about self-reliance and not taking government handouts. And to us or to me a city kid, the American farmer was like the essence of what it meant to be a hard-working, independent, you know, rugged individual American who didn't take handouts, didn't want government regulations, could do fine by themselves. I knew from watching some of your stuff, it just blew my mind. And I got to say to people watching out there, if you don't do anything after you see this, you got to go to Sarah's YouTube and watch it because it will really blow your mind.
When I read stuff like this that I just can't even get my head around about what is actually going on with the farmers of America, I make myself a little quiz and I say, "Okay, what did I think was going on?" So I can make sense of what actually is going on. So I I asked my spouse and I gave her a quiz and I wanted to kind of get started off with that. So I said, "When you think of the American farmers, give me the top three things you think about." And she said, "They're hardworking. They put in long hours. It's very difficult work." And I said, "Okay, how do you think that they're doing financially?" And she said, "They're not doing well. They've farmers have never done well. It's a really hard way to make a living." And I said, "Um, are they good stewards of the land?" And she said, "No, because they use too many pesticides," which is, you know, California. Uh, and I said, "Okay, why did they do you think they voted for Trump?" And she said, "Well, first of all, most of them are men, and second of all, they're so busy, they just don't even focus on on uh what's actually happening."
Now, personally, I never even that never even crossed my mind about why farmers voted for Trump. But for as long as I've been alive, farmers have started to become more and more Republican. You know, when I was a kid, that was not true. A lot of farmers were Democrats uh in the Midwest, but you know, it's gone the other way. And um I said, "Who do you think grows the food that we eat?" And she said, "Big corporate farms. They're the ones who are just taking over agriculture. and there are not very many family farms left. And that's kind of a a pre impression of a lot of people. And when I listened to your stuff and I did some reading, I found out it's really way more complicated than that."
Yep.
You know, yeah.
I mean, in just starting off with how many, you know, small family farms there are like less than 350,000 bucks that they make a year. That's the vast majority of farms, right? So, uh, farming is not a monolith, right? So, I'm a vegetable farmer, which is a very different business than growing grain or livestock. So,
obviously I can't speak for everybody in agriculture, but I can speak to how the field works in general. So, small family farmers are 89% of US farms, right? Uh, corporate farms, it's it's something like 4%. you know, and that kind of that really bore out with when I was working in agriculture all over the country, working with, you know, one-on-one with farms, you know, one or two a day. I went to about 300 farms in in that couple year spread, and you could count the number of actual corporate farms on one hand, you know, shareholder owned. Everything else was a family farm up and down the size scale. And it was so crazy because a lot of them would say like, "Oh, I bet you never work with little guys like us." Everybody said that. every single like just 80% plus of the farms we saw were little guys saying I bet you never see little guys and it was really interesting because if you look at the numbers and if you've been working in agriculture you know that it's mostly small farms and they all think they're the only one you know and so I want to say that it's not just city people who don't understand agriculture pretty well a lot of folks in the farm sector do not understand our own sector farms really like to tell people how agriculture works but a lot of farmers know a lot less about agriculture than they think they And that's heresy. I know. You always hear farmers griping about like, "Well, city people don't know where their food comes from." Well, farmers, do we know where our labor comes from? Do we really know?
You know, they're always griping about, well, people in the city just want the cheapest food. Okay. Well, how do you want things? Cheapest or not? You know, they're always griping about how labor and inputs cost a lot. That's human nature to not want to pay for things. That's not a city people problem. We're all like this. Right.
Right.
And so, we talk about the rural urban divide as it's, you know, as as it's a big political topic. And um you know that that it's a two-way street, you know, like you really just there's a lot of farmers who uh were not into this new administration, especially apple growers up in western North Carolina. They said, "Hey, we were finally just able to start selling apples to India again." And they these were diehard mega Republicans for everything except the trade war, right?
So that's another thing I hear all the time is, "Well, farmers must have been lied to." Absolutely not. We all knew this was coming because he already did it once. How do you get lied to by your own eyes? There's this narrative out there that you just mentioned, which is the farmers were lied to. Trump backstabbed them. He betrayed them. But I remember the campaign, too. I remember the things he promised he was going to do. He said that he was going to put tariffs on everything. So, it the trade war is not a surprise at all. He also said that he was going to mass deport huge numbers of undocumented immigrants and I know that undocumented labor is a a big part of the labor force for farmers. So were farmers lied to and if not why did they vote for him?
Yeah, absolutely not. I mean this was all stuff that he campaigned on quite prominently and also was was doing or working on last time. So none of this came as a surprise. I think the important thing to note about agriculture. So I just talked about how it's it's not a monolith. Agriculture is a a diverse coalition of wealthy people. US farmers are 95% white. That's there in the stats. And 98% wealthy. Like to remind people most small family farmers are millionaires with a six-f figureure income. We always see this statistic about oh they're losing money on the farms. And it we're we're presented this as if it's a tragic thing because we're I think we all grew up with this uh this knowledge about how small struggling family farms are getting pushed out of the business. And that was absolutely correct for about a hundred years. After you spend a hundred years pushing out the small struggling poor people, who's left, right? The not poor people. That's who remains, right? And then you also have people, dentists, doctors, lawyers. You can only make so much money before your accountant tells you, "Hey, let's talk about what to do with this extra money." Buying a rural property is a really popular thing to do if you have extra money. You know, and we always talk about Bill Gates. We don't talk about the millions, you know, of of doctors and lawyers out there. That's fine. and they can do what they want. But that is who a lot of small family farmers are. That's that's kind of what you have to be to become a small farmer at this point. You either have to inherit your land or you have to make a lot of money somewhere else.
So part of the calculation here is really if you're a wealthy person, voting for Trump makes a lot of sense because he's going to cut your taxes and what he's also going to cut regulations. I imagine that's part of what was going on. But the other thing is in terms of labor, there were some promises made by the Trump administration that would allow farmers to more easily exploit labor.
Talk to me a little bit about that.
Right. Yeah. So again, this is a whole different group of folks. So we talk small family farmers. Again, this is 20 to 25% of US farms just don't grow anything. And it's it's not because they're homesteaders who are growing stuff of their own consumption. They literally don't grow anything. We have stats on that. So that suggests tax shelter, right? So we'll start with that. 20 to 25% of US farms are tax shelters owned by wealthy people. And that's not Bill Gates. That's like rank and file hometown wealthy people. So those folks aren't hiring anybody because they're not growing anything, right? So by the time you're talking labor, you're talking kind of your bigger small farms, you know, up to medium and large scale, which again, all of those almost entirely family. So the the thing that's in the news is ice raids, right? Ice raid this, ice raid that. These are very prominent. They're they're happening in cities a lot of the time. So they get noticed and they get in the news. What is not showing up in the news is the alternative. Ice raids are targeting undocumented workers. I've worked in fields with undocumented workers. These are like my my colleagues. This is how I who I learned a lot of what I I know about agriculture from just the hands-on stuff. I think a good way to think about undocumented workers is freelance because they're gig workers. If the job stinks, they leave. So that's why there was so much efforts to like, oh, I'm going to call I'm going to call, you know, immigration on you. That's part of why was not just to underpay people, but to make sure they stayed the entire season. Just stay with me or I'm going to call immigration on you. The fact that these people were foot loose and could leave a bad job or an underpaying job or a dangerous job. That was a management problem. And so the alternative to undocumented labor in the US has been H2A. H2A can work just fine. Just the way we're doing it is is not very good. So the way H2A works, we talk about undocumented. H2A is documented. You have a visa to come work in the US as a farm worker. The H2A visa is not a ticket to come into the US and go look for a job. It is a matchmaking service because employers apply for H2A workers and workers apply for a job and then you know the the Department of Labor says okay let's go here you go there right? So your visa to work in the United States is tied to you are working for that company or you are working for that family and once you're no longer working there your visa is gone. So if the job stinks you can't leave.
It sounds like indentured servitude.
Well, my husband's a historian of slavery, so I'm like, actually, indentured servitude is a different legal institution, but but yeah, it's it's bound labor. It's a form of bound.
It is, but you get you get to come over, but then you get tied to a specific family, you know, and your stay in the country is tied to that family. So, they have immense power over you.
Yep. And I mean, that's the goal, right? So, the I think when people talk about exploiting workers, the focus is really on being underpaid. That is a big part of it. But there's a lot of other things you can do to exploit people. Um, because again, if you exploit people, they tend to leave. So you also have to find a way to keep them there while you're exploiting them. And that was kind of the missing piece of the puzzle. Now again, H2A can work just fine. There are lots of people coming to the US on H2A visas who are not being enslaved. Um, they talked to H2A workers. It was just an informal survey. They said, "Have you been trafficked?" And it was about 20%. Which is really high, you know, for a legal worker program. And that's before you start asking them very detailed questions like, "Has someone ever taken your passport? Have you ever had just been paid way less than you were supposed to be? Have you ever been taken to a secret second location after your day was over and made to work somewhere else off the books? Those are all things that happen to people quite frequently under the H2A program. So that's before you start people asking people detailed questions. 20% will say, "Yeah, I've been trafficked."
So the the H2A program, to my understanding, it's a program to allow um you know, foreign labor to come in for seasonal work. There are some restrictions on it to uh you know there's a minimum wage that they have to abide by. They have to offer it to you know nativeborn people first etc etc. But it sounds like this program has been heavily exploited. But there was an effort to crack down on some of those abuses in the past administration and now with Trump, some of those things are starting to get rolled back. tell us about that evolution of the story of you know the past few years with this program and some of the examples of the kinds of abuse that employers inflict on those workers.
Sure. Yeah. So the biggest slavery bust in modern US history was in southern Georgia in 2021 and it actually worked there a few years before um for a farm that was running its own H2A program and they I asked them why because most farms don't do that. They basically work with a temp agency that gets that brings people in. Just a quick introduction. The worker can only work with one company. So farms might only need people for six weeks. So to do all that for just six weeks, it's not worth it for the farm or the worker in many cases. So what a lot of farms will do is they hire a temp agency and the temp agency brings people on over to the country. So they work for that temp agency all year round being rented out to different farms. That's a great way to fill up, you know, a nine-month calendar full of work. You know, being able to go to different farms. That's kind of how they get around that around that. And again, that can be fine. That can be a normal temp agency. In the case of southern Georgia, it was not. There was a slavery ring that was going on. Again, a lot of the stuff that we talked about, passports being taken, if you don't work faster, we're going to have our friends in Mexico come attack your family. Gosh, being taken to undisclosed locations and forced to work additionally for for no pay, underpay, that kind of thing. So, there are a lot of this stuff going on. And when I was working in southern Georgia, it was for um a family farm that was really on top of their game. And the slavery bust was called Operation Bloom and Onion because the farms this was happening on were growing big Videlia onions mostly. A lot of that was going to the Bloom and Onion uh trade for for Outback Steakhouse. The family farm I was working with um was kind of the people who kicked off the Videlia onion brand, right? So they had a good marketing. They knew how to make their own money and they also set up their own H2A program, which is really weird for a firm to do. And I said, "Why?" And they said, "There's some crazy stuff going on with the H2A contractors around us. we don't want to get involved with it. It was an open secret. It was an open secret that this was happening. Um, and people just kind of went along with it because I think there's this mentality, you know, like if I ask too many questions, I'm going to get in trouble or you'll know too much and then when the law cracks down, then you'll have to testify and say, you know, things and you can't play stupid and that might be a problem. So, it was an open secret that this was going on. When the DOJ finally busted this in 2021, the people responsible for running the slavery ring, renting people out to farms had made $200 million. Slavery is a great business if you can get it. And that's what's going to get quoted uh the alpha bailers, right? But so like this just goes to show like there's a big temptation for people to do this. So that's why the DOJ put in these new anti-slavery protections and they didn't put out a big flag and say this is to combat slavery. they kind of try to do it very low-key, you know, um because it kind of makes the farm sector look bad if we have to use anti-slavery laws. You know, no one wants to make farmers feel bad, especially considering, you know, we have a, you know, a history of using slavery on farms in this country.
It's interesting because this is a legal program, right? And right, we hear so much from the right-wing about the immigrants. They just need to come the legal way. They just need to come the legal way. It's the undocumented ones are the problem. It feels like uh probably a few people who are looking to come to this country know what kinds of abuses have happened in the legal way. It seems like there's an incentive within this to actually create more quote unquote illegal immigration. It sounds to me like what you were saying was if you come here without papers and you work on a farm and you don't like the farm get the bricks one day the farmer will wake up and their labor force will be moved down the road where they'll treat them better. They don't have a passport to take. There's no they came on their own. You don't have ties back to Mexico.
Oh yeah. And your employer doesn't know who your family is back in Mexico so they can't threaten them. So, in a way, you're a lot safer if you work without papers. Meanwhile, if you go into this visa program, like you said, probably a lot of it is on the up and up, but once you get these farm labor contractors involved, it becomes a really different story. I remembered when you said that um way back when when the farm United Farm Workers was getting started in California and I was doing volunteer legal work for them. I remember that the biggest problem was farm labor contractors. They couldn't get through them to the actual owners of the farm to cut, you know, labor deals that would make sense for everybody. And the the contractors just stood in the way because they profited so much from the deals that they cut with the um with the labor and the farms. So if you get into this visa program, it sounds like you have a lot of risk that you don't have if you do it without papers.
Yeah, absolutely.
They can threaten your family back in Mexico. They can not provide you with water. They can take your passport, which is basically a sign of that you're being trafficked. You know, they can abuse you sexually. They can abuse. I mean, there's a lot of sex abuse involved in all kinds of other things. So, you're kind of pushing people to say, "The law is not going to protect me. Why should I come here through this program? I'd be better off sneaking across the border."
Yeah. We tell everybody, "Oh, we just want you to do it the right way." Well, this is what happens when you do it the right way, right? It's a one in five chance that something insane is going to happen to you. You might as well take your chances. And if you're a country where you're like, "Well, we need you to follow the law." But when you follow the law, people break the law on you. Then what's the point? Why follow the law when the law is run by a pack of animals, you know, like in a country that doesn't respect its own laws and what's the point of following the law? And you really can't insist that other people follow it if you're not going to do the same. This is a huge workforce and when you have a huge workforce where slavery is being allowed, even if you don't care about the people who are being enslaved themselves, it has trickle down effects on the whole rest of the economy. Once you have the biggest trafficking bust in in 21st century US history, $200 million, you realize you have a big problem on your hands. We'd like to talk about Monsanto and Cargill and ADM. The farm labor contractors are now a huge agricultural middleman that we're not even acknowledging exists. It's a huge agricultural lobby at this point. And it's human trafficking is very easily the business model. So in 2024, we put in some anti-slavery protections. We didn't call them that because that would be giving the game away. You know, makes people feel bad. And then in 2025, Trump rolled them back. So actually it could be that a lot of farmers are not too upset about these ICE raids, especially these big corporate things because once you deport the workforce, then you can go and say, gosh, now we need laborers. So let's expand this legalized slavery visa program and get even more workers. We just need more workers. So, make it bigger and make it easier for us to use them and let us pay them a little less because now we've lost our workforce. Isn't that sad? Well, it's not very sad because we profit actually much better off of the so-called legal system. Yeah. So, that was the idea. The Trump administration literally put out a in the code of the Federal Register says, "Oh my gosh, there's no farm workers anymore. Crops are running in the fields. We have to massively expand the H2A program." This was right after they got rid of those anti-slavery protections and cut the minimum wage. Here's the problem. Uh, because the government shut down, they can't process H2A visas. So there are currently no H2A workers coming into the country. So all the farm workers are in jail or a lot of them. And nobody can get H2A workers either. So there's neither documented nor undocumented workers available at this time. And so um again, that was the idea that it would uh make agriculture great again by letting people do more with less, we'll say. But that's falling through as well.
Why can't you get welfare recipients to work in the farm?
A lot of them already have jobs actually.
Americans already employed. Sorry, busy.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it turns out that one thing about hiring American workers who we know are willing to work hard, the the idea that American workers will not work hard, of course, is a lie. But if you are an American worker, you have more recourse to complain about unsafe conditions, wage theft. Um, so it's it feels like it's the employers who are dictating the terms of the exploitation that they want to get away with from their workforce and Americans are a little bit harder to exploit.
Yeah. there was um so I was doing a lot of work in the southeast here uh in agriculture around the time that the farms were switching over from local labor which mostly meant you know black neighbors and uh switching to H2A crews and I was working with a farm that was a family farm and they kept saying over and over again I think it was their first year with H2A workers they don't complain they don't complain they don't complain they don't complain and on this farm I also noticed this farm had switched to a different chemical because their chemical salesman had just sold it to them they're like it's new you love it it's And so I go up to the area where the workers are working and I'm like, "Oh, that's a farm chemical I haven't smelled before and that's bad because I smelled all the ones you can smell and still live." Right? So if I smell a new smell, this is not good. Right? And so I had a brief conversation with the workers. I was like, "Dang, it stinks up here. What's going on?" I go back down and I talk to the employers. This is a family farm, right? Uh, typically on a family farm, the men take care of the field and then there's if there's anything you do with the product after you harvest it. That's women will often take care of that because it feels more like cooking than it does like like farming, you know. Um, and so I talked to the ladies of the family and I was like, "Hey, um, what what are you guys using? Let's look up the hazmat sheets, you know, like for this thing, the MSDS." And they were like, "Oh, don't worry. Don't worry. We told the crew if they smell it and if it's too strong, let us know." And I said, "According to this MSDS sheet, if you can smell it at all, it's destroying your mucous membranes." Did you read this? I asked them, you know, I I see how you can miss this because you're only going to smell it if you're up where the workers are working. Um, do do you ever go up there to check on things? And one of them said, "Well, no, because I'm pregnant and it might be dangerous." So, she knew.
Mhm.
She knew there might be some kind of problem. So, that's the kind of thing you run into. And they would say again over and over, they were just so delighted with this new crew because they said they don't complain, they don't complain, they don't. They said it to me so many times and I was like, I bet they do. You just don't speak Spanish.
And they're probably afraid that if they complain
Yeah. Yeah, cuz it's H2A, you can't get a new job. You're you're stuck there. And again, this was a family farm. I think there's also a mythology that it's big corporate farms that are doing the slavery. That is absolutely not the case. I'm sure a lot of them are, but I was working with a lot of small and medium family farms. Um, and they all use this one labor contractor, you know, and they're just like, "Oh, they're so great. They're just a great little resource for local guys like me. We'd never be able to make it without them." And I Google them and I was like, "They have been convicted of human trafficking."
Mhm.
Do any of you know about this? And it was crazy because, again, it's a rural community where everybody's very tight-knit. They know what their neighbors had for breakfast, but nobody knows the H2A contractor they're all using has been convicted of things. Somehow, nobody knows that. Yeah. It's it's a very tight-knit community where people are kind of quietly doing crimes together sometimes. You know, it I I'm starting to understand a little bit more about why farmers voted for Trump. It wasn't ignorance. It was actually understanding a lot of what he was going to do. Partially based on things that he had done. So one aspect that I want to talk about is these tariffs and the trade war. Out of the farmers who rely on exports for their revenue, they must have known this was going to be a bad bet. But then when you look at it, you realize, well, it was kind of a safe bet because they probably figured they'd get a bailout one way or the other, right?
Mhm. Yeah. Something you'll see people say over and over again is, "Well, we don't want bailouts. We want markets." And I'm like, "Then why did you vote for this guy? You knew exactly what was going to happen. Don't give me this." It's not that just that China's not buying from us this year. China has worked with Brazil, Argentine, and other countries to grow enough soybeans that they don't need the United States anymore. It doesn't matter if you make a trade deal. It's over. And it's not because China's being mean to us. It's because we made choices. And this is not even the first time that US growers have tried to start a trade war. you know, deny selling their products with the idea that then the world will have to do what we want. And then they're always surprised when the world finds a way to move on without them. And yet, the market's not coming back. So, this whole we don't want a bailout, we want markets, it's too late. You already voted to not have markets. And so, the idea that the farm sector thinks they're going to get markets back is very wishful thinking in my in my book. I'm I'm always happy to be proven wrong about that, but I think that's very wishful thinking. The only other alternative is to let a lot of people go bankrupt or have bailouts forever. Those are the two options.
Who would go bankrupt if we just said you made a bet big farms who kind of bet the farm so to speak on soybeans or whatever commodity. It sounds to me like they're they should be treated more like a American manufacturer who has a product they want to sell overseas and then the market goes away because somebody makes it cheaper or who knows why. We don't bail those manufacturing companies out. We just say, "Well, you made a bad bet and that's capitalism."
It's kind of funny because when I talk to folks about agricultural policy, there's this assumption that because I'm a Democrat, I must be very nice, right? Um, I totally believe in safety nets for people. Businesses get the cutthroat capitalism, right? And if you are selling a product in exchange for money, if you're exchanging money for goods and services, you are what? A business. And so you can be a family who owns a farm, that's a business. I think we're very used to thinking of family farms as uh and making sure they're making enough money as a poverty relief thing from a 100 years ago when a huge percentage of the population was farms. Now it's less than 1% and they're quite wealthy people. I don't think there's any good argument for these people needing to be on any kind of welfare if they're wealthy, if they made a bad bet with their business. I think there's definitely good argument for we need to work on reshaping US agriculture to feed the domestic market to better supply our own needs. We're importing potatoes now. We don't grow enough potatoes because for the last 20 years selling soybeans to China was soy. Nothing is easy to grow, right? But in terms of things that are like least to most complicated, soybeans are close to the bottom. And with a growing middle class in China, everybody wants to eat meat, you know, and so they just bought a lot of meat and also soybeans for animal feed. Because of that ballooning middle class in China, the demand for soy was just going through the roof. And so for the last 20 years, there's been kind of a bonanza and a lot of US agriculture just switched quietly to growing soybeans for the Chinese market. The traditional US strategy was grow bread basket stuff, right? a lot of grain, you know, a lot of meat, export that, import other things like sugar, coffee, French wine, right? We're not even doing that anymore. Even the bread basket stuff, we've kind of switched to growing soybeans for export to China. Like that's why we're importing potatoes. We are a net importer of potatoes. We have switched so much of our agricultural economy to supplying soybeans to China. And then we deliberately kicked that out from under ourselves. We talk about how agriculture is really important, right? We have to save it because it's so important. And I also kind of think that if it's that important, maybe it's too important to be leaving to the kind of people who make this kind of self-destructive decision. So I think maybe it would be good to focus on getting new people into agriculture, bringing new capital into agriculture. We need to invest in growing potatoes again perhaps because the soybean market is gone. There's a lot of stuff the US used to grow and manufacture food ourselves and we're just not doing that anymore because it was easier to grow soybeans for China and that is gone because of our own decisions.
Mom, I'm curious. you grew up sort of idolizing free market capitalism, you know, uh you were a big Barry Goldwater, a Goldwater girl. It's interesting because these farmers made a bet on Trump and now they're being punished because they made the wrong bet. And yet it feels like the the market is not working because they it's heads I win, tails I win. You know, like right
I can make a bad bet and if I make a bad bet, oh well, I get bailed out so it it'll be fine either way. I think this shows a lot about the the system and who it benefits.
Yeah, this is very offensive to me. You know, I really grew up with the bootstrap idea that you pull yourself up by your bootstraps, you make your decisions, you work hard, and then you're rewarded for that. And people who got government benefits were welfare queens and they were lazy. And you know, giving them all these welfare benefits meant that there was no incentive for them to work hard or to work at all. And everyone thought that was terrible. And how can you do that? It's so stupid. But now, you know, like the idols of my childhood, the farmers are becoming welfare queens. You know, when I was always thinking about welfare queens, that was my myth that they drove these great big pink Cadillacs into the welfare office to pick up their checks. They weren't doing any work and then they drove home to their mansions. And those were the people that I just thought they were that was just terrible. And now it turns out that that's a very good description of farmers. You know, they're like, I don't care if I grow a crop that nobody wants and I can't sell. It doesn't matter because the government is going to bail me out and give me benefits anyway. And that's the absolute opposite of the American ideal of working hard and being rewarded and not regard, you know, relying on the government to bail you out of your own bad decisions. I mean, now they're complaining that people who are starving because the food stamp program is running out of money and they're calling those people welfare queens and all this, but they think nothing of giving billions of dollars to farmers who made a bad bet. And the farmers are like, "It doesn't matter. I grew a crop that nobody wanted. I kind of knew it because what did I have to lose? I was going to get paid for it anyway. The government was going to bail me out." And that seems just ass backwards. It's not the government's money, right? It's the taxpayers's money. And you got to keep in mind 98% of farmers are above median income. And so it's farmers basically holding up the rest of the country and saying, "Hey, you poor people, help me out." I think one of the most interesting things about farm history in the US in the last hundred years, we talk about the small struggling farmers getting kicked out. So when we talk about farmers, we tend to think peasants, right? Um, but the peasants got kicked out. It's I don't want to say it's the lords who were left, but it's upper class people. And so you have landed upper class people demanding that the poor people, it's very Robin Hood, you know, it's like
it's almost like uh we're reverse Robin Hood. We're sort of moving backwards back into feudalism. Um, it feels like in many ways.
Yeah. We're demanding like I'm feeling bad so we need to have the commoners put some more money in my coffers. Like that's it's all it is. That that's kind of wild. Like we think we left that behind. We did not. No.
I feel like an argument will be made that there's a couple arguments that will be made to to justify the bailout. One is that the sector that it's too big to fail. it's too necessary that that we we can't let uh these businesses fail because it's we rely on it so much. That's one thing. But the other thing is, you know, we're talking about family farms that that image that we still have from a hundred years ago is going to be leveraged because the American psyche still has that picture in their head of who the farmer is. And of course, we have to save them because, you know, they're struggling so hard and plus it's too important. We need to keep this sector afloat. What are your responses to those arguments?
Yeah. Well, I'm not going to lie to you. Some people are going to get boned, you know, if there's no bailout. And um again, the question is not are people going to suffer tremendously. The question is, is that the taxpayers's problem? So again, like this is part of why I'm doing so much work to educate the public on who the American farmer actually is because again, we've got this idea that they're they're small, struggling poor folks and it's they need welfare. That's absolutely not the case. 97 98% of farmers are above the median US household income. That's after you take out farm debts and expenses. 97 98% are above the median income and most of them are living in rural lowc cost of living areas. So it's it's not a poor population. And this is not to say every single farmer out there like 2% of US farmers is 2 million people. That's still a few thousand people who are actually not doing well. But deal with that through poverty alleviation efforts, not trying to help farmers because 98% of them are fine. Right?
Going back to the discussion of who society thinks of as a leech on the state, who we think of as dependent on government, who we consider a welfare queen. Contrasting the calls for a farm bailout and then meanwhile as you talked about mom, we've got these SNAP benefits that are set to expire because of the government shutdown. Of course, there's more to it than that. Trump absolutely could continue funding that program. But what we're seeing on the right wing, because I go on Twitter, because I'm perhaps a masochist, but u also partially because I really want to understand the narratives that are coming out of the right-wing fever swamp because you see them on Twitter and then you see them pared by Donald Trump and, you know, Carolyn Lev and all those folks a day later. And what's happening right now is that they are just reviving the well fair queen uh myth in full force. I wrote down some tweets that I saw.
If you're on Snap, you shouldn't have a car. You shouldn't have a house. You shouldn't have a smartphone. You should have an effing job. Here's another one. EBT ran out. Good. Perfect opportunity to get a job and start contributing to society. So, the way they're portraying people who are getting SNAP benefits, of course, is that they're all unemployed. They're lying and saying they're all illegal aliens. They're saying they're obese, eating junk food. They're, you know, spending money doing their hair and getting tattoos when they should be out working when the reality is that most
gonna keep the tattoo artists employed.
I know. Exactly. Yeah. It's it's it's good for the economy. But the point is that most of the people who receive SNAP benefits, if you're not a child or someone who's u disabled, are working full-time jobs. The fact is that SNAP is actually really a subsidy for the large corporations who employ them who aren't willing to pay them a working wage um a living wage rather. And so who really are the welfare queens in this society? Mom, we started our entire program with you talking about working for the welfare department and how that was one of the things that transformed you was one of the things that made you leave the right-wing movement is because you saw the reality of poverty in America and that there were these lies being told about who the people really were who were receiving government benefits. just reflect on the whole idea of the demonization of people receiving SNAP benefits versus who we're really bailing out in this country.
I mean, it really offends me because the reason that so many people need help with paying for food is because they don't make enough money to feed their families. And that lies right at the feet of these, especially these big corporations that could afford to pay their workers enough so that they would support their families, but they choose not to. And the reason that they can get away with it is that the government steps in and says, "Okay, we'll take care of that part of it." So, they're using our tax money to subsidize companies like Walmart and let them get away with not paying people enough to sustain their life. I mean, if you really look back at it like a hundred years, like you were talking about a hundred years ago when capitalism was like rampaging out of its mind, the idea was you could you should pay your workers only enough so that they wouldn't die or if they died of starvation, they would do it slowly enough so that you could hire somebody else. They didn't care about their having a healthy workforce or anything like that. They just wanted a cheap workforce as cheap as possible. And there was no government help for people then. So they were like, "Well, let let the people die." And the government said, "Oh, that's terrible." And they had two choices. They could have said to corporations, "Okay, you have to pay people enough so that they can buy their own food and their own shelter." Or they could say, "You know what? The government is going to step in and take up that problem. The money should not be coming out of my tax dollars. It should be coming out of the corporation's bottom line. I think frankly some corporations should be required to pay the cost of food stamps or what they call SNAP now instead of putting it all on us. Like I said in the very beginning, it really pisses me off when wealthy people get bailouts that they neither need nor deserve. And it sounds to me like the American farmer that I revered for so long is one of the one of the ones who has gotten the most expert at figuring out ways to take money out of the tax system and put it into their pockets and they're one of, you know, some of them at least are in a class of people who don't need that money. Yeah. And it's rough because again like I'm in agriculture, right? I want the sector to th I want there to be a farm sector so I can keep working, right? This is what I do. But I don't think shooting ourselves in the foot and then demanding other people make it up to us is the way forward. It's one thing to hear from Rush Limba on the radio how poverty works. It's another thing to actually talk to people and find out how they got there and find out how impossible it might be to get out. You know, like if you work in agriculture, you see a lot of people with a lot of money making really self-destructive decisions and you start to understand why they're so angry that there are people out there making self-destructive decisions because they know they're doing it. They know their family members are doing it. They know their neighbors are doing it. But no one
can say that because then you're a jerk. And so we blame it all on poor people because then it's safe to complain about that behavior. It's safe to complain about that behavior if we blame it on somebody else.
>> Yeah. Projection is a big part of this philosophy for sure.
>> So I I can't tell you how many >> Little House in the Prairie. We had that edition. >> Hours. Oh, not just that. I got >> I got the whole >> Oh, yeah. I can't tell you the number of hours I spent reading this to my kids. You know, the pictures of wholesome family farm. I mean, that was my view of farmers. And I got to say, I think most Americans really root for farmers.
>> You know, we really feel like we need farmers. They have a lot of goodwill that have been built up over since this the founding of the republic about farms and farmers and the yman farmer and the salt of the earth and stuff.
>> I got to tell you, they are really blowing through that capital right now with me.
>> This is another thing I'm worried about if I'm going to be a farmer. Like y'all have stunk up the brand. What are we going to do about this?
>> Yeah, their brand is really tarnished with me. I mean, you become welfare queens. You know, you're running businesses with crony capitalism. There's no incentive for you to make your business better because you get bailed out if you make stupid mistakes.
>> And then you complain about other people doing it. And meanwhile, there's this huge market of enslaved, basically legalized slavery, and you're getting all these tax breaks. And your goodwill is is kind of running short with me. They have a >> a a budding PR problem here. I mean, that's one thing. And the second thing that I have to ask you in this question is when do you think it's appropriate for the government to bail somebody out, a farmer?
>> Uh, again, I believe in safety nets for people. I don't think losing your farm or going bankrupt, I don't think your farm going bankrupt should condemn you to poverty, but we already have those laws in place. Safety nets are for people, not businesses, and farms are a business. You know, losing your farm should not plunge you into poverty. And I think that's when it's appropriate to intervene because farmers are losing the PR and the goodwill, right? The new thing we're hearing is, "Oh, but if we let them go bankrupt, then all these corporations will buy them up, and that's why we have to see them. We might hate them, but corporations are worse." There's a lot to unpack there. Investors have been really into farmland for the last, especially since the 2008 real estate crisis because housing became worthless, but farmland kept its value. So, institutional investing in farmland was kind of a thing before that, but it really took off after the 2008 financial crisis because also the Chinese soybean market was exploding at the same time. So, farming became a lot more lucrative than typically it has been. Uh you'll never hear farmers say we've been in kind of a golden age the last 20 years. Even if I say it now, they'll be like, "No, you're crazy." But it kind of was. Look at soybean prices for the last 30 years and tell me we've not been in a golden age. You know, um and that's that's the cool thing about agriculture. We never think we're in a golden age when we're in it. It's only later that we're like, "Oh, we want to get back to that. We were complaining the whole time that was happening." Anyway, the reason institutional investors have been interested in farmland, one is because of the soybean boom and number two is because of all the bailouts that we give to farms, >> right? How people decide you're farmer is do you own farmland? So owning farmland means a ticket to bailouts. We have made a decision as a country so far that if you're a farm, you should not be allowed to fail. Well, making an asset, if you own this asset, which farmland is, if you own farmland, the US government will not allow you to fail. If you want to put up a bat signal to get investors into your asset, that's what you do. Guaranteed income at taxpayer expense. That's why the investors are there. If you want to get rid of investors, stop bailing out the farms. You make it a normal business that has risk in it and you'll stop having, you know, low like riskaverse investors flooding to your asset class. That's a very unpopular opinion because we have a lot of farmers and a lot of wealthy people in this country who have a lot of wealth tied up in farmland. If we don't bail farmers out, the price of farmland is going to collapse. I think the price of farmland is too high. I think an acre in Illinois is like $13,500 right now. That's for a farm. That's not for developing it. I think that's too high. That doesn't make any dang sense. The only possible reason farmland can be valued that high is because of bailouts because there are guarantees kind of baked into that from the US government.
>> So if if we don't do the bailout, that's actually a way to lower the barrier for entry to other people who might make different decisions >> and to make it less appealing for investors. They're buying it because the value of farmland always goes up. Well, if you make it so you can fail while owning farmland, it's not going to be as valuable. The price will go down. They don't want to buy a falling asset, you know. Um, if you look at US history, um, the fourth and fifth generation farmers from today bought their farms in the Great Depression. We talk about people losing their farms in the Great Depression. A lot of people also bought farms. That's where a lot of today's fourth and fifth generation farms came from. You also, you never really see like a commercial family farm that started after the 1980s because that was the last time, I think, that a lot of farmland was available. Ever since then, if you see a new farm that's kind of like selling food at commercial scale, it's almost always quoteunquote corporate. That's kind of where those started to to show up because the price, especially the last decade or two, the price of farmland has gotten so high that normal people can't afford it. So that's another reason that so many of the purchases are corporate right now and investors is because normal working people who would actually run a farm to grow food can't afford to get in. If you want a functional food system, you we can't be doing things the way we've been doing.
I you know the other thing is you know Trump is of course not going to listen to any of us about all this and he will likely move forward with the bailout which I think is more of a bailout for himself than it is for anything to silence the complaints of farmers right now mitigating the harm of his failing tariff policy to avoid any political blowback. Well Sarah thank you so much for joining us. We've I mean we could talk to you forever. We want people to go to your YouTube channel which is incredible. There's so much amazing information. Where can people find you?
>> Yeah, we're at uh Farm to Taber. I can't take credit for that name. A friend came up with it and I was like, "Dang, I can't think of anything better than that. We're just have to go with it."
>> Um but yeah, Farm to Taber on YouTube. I'm on some other platforms. You can find me through YouTube.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Thank you guys. This has been fun.
>> Thank you again, Sarah, so much. Thank you, Mom. I love you. And to our audience, we all love all of you, too. It's true.
>> Thanks for spending time with us, guys. Have a good night.
>> Thank you all so much for joining us. And thank you again to Sarah for coming on the show and providing us with so much useful information. Please again, make sure to follow Sarah at her YouTube channel, which is written in the description. And uh make sure to like and subscribe to our channel if you haven't done that already. and check us out on Patreon for bonus content and early access. Thank you guys all so much and we'll see you next time.