Wisconsin author explores loss of mid-size farms through his own family’s story

HOST: The land area used for farming in Minnesota hasn't changed much in the last few years. That's according to data released back in February. But there are fewer farms on that land. And the average farm has grown larger. This fits into a national pattern of farm consolidation that has been happening for generations. And for my next guest, it took generations of family history to understand why. Brian Reisinger is the author of the book Land Rich Cash Poor-- My Family's Hope and the Untold Story of the Disappearing American Farmer. His family farm is in the Driftless region of Wisconsin. And he has farming roots in Minnesota as well. Brian, welcome to the program. Thanks for being here.

BRIAN REISINGER: Hey, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

HOST: What a fascinating story that your family has. Tell me a little bit about how the land came into your family.

BRIAN REISINGER: Yeah, absolutely. Well, as you said, I've got farming roots in Wisconsin and Minnesota both. The farm that we're on right now is on my dad's side of the family. And it came into our family four generations ago when my great grandparents escaped pre-World War I Europe because they wanted to find a better life. And they did that by digging their living out of the dirt in the hills of the Driftless region of Southern Wisconsin, as you said. And they began a farm that persists to this day. And it was an exciting time. It was a very difficult time. And they really kind of went from that transition from subsistence farming into modern day agriculture in those early years in the 1900s prior to the Great Depression. So that's where we began. That's how deep our roots go.

HOST: Wow. And so you interviewed your own family members, neighbors. I bet that was an interesting experience as part of your research for the book. What was that like and like? What was some of the common themes that you heard from your family?

BRIAN REISINGER: You know, it was something that I was totally unprepared for in the sense of the force of the stories that I'd find. I'd been in journalism, business journalism for 10 years before working in public policy. And so I'd been working toward this professionally for a long time. But when I sat and talked with my family, I got the chance to interview every generation of my family, other than my great grandparents who passed away before I was born. And I talked with direct family members, friends of family, community.

And I reconstructed scenes of things that I'd heard that were kind of family lore. My grandpa had a brother who was injured in the fields as a young child and had a prosthetic leg all his life. My grandpa and grandma, actually my grandparents on both sides, including my grandma on my mom's side, who's from Minnesota, grew up in the Great Depression and survived decades of poverty before climbing into the middle class, had heard about these things. But I'd never understood them well enough to be able to tell the story. So I reconstructed those scenes. And what I was amazed by is just the resilience of the American farm family, certainly today, but going back all those generations, what people lived through.

HOST: Absolutely. And family stories only live on if we all ask. And that can be hard to do sometimes. But you say in your book, you call it, "The reason for this decline in farms, the perfect storm of economic, governmental, and technological forces." And you write that some of this was sort of natural as people found more opportunities in the cities. But at what point does this move away from farming become a problem?

BRIAN REISINGER: Yeah, absolutely. You're so right that in the sense that once our country was sort of settled, there was only so much land in Wisconsin and Minnesota and other ag states, right? And so one farm doing a little better than another and buying their neighbor, that sort of consolidation was always going to happen to some degree. It became unnatural when we hit the Great Depression and afterward.

And during the Depression years, we went from having more farms and a growing number of farms and more farmland to suddenly having less. And as you say, the amount of farmland in many states has is still about the same. But it's held by fewer and fewer farms. We began that decline after the Depression. And we never really stopped it. We always had that declining number of farms, whether there were good times or bad times.

And the three fundamental reasons are, one, on the economic front, we misunderstood how economic crises were affecting our farms. We didn't know how it was affecting things on the ground. And so the crisis was worse than it needed to be, whether it was the Great Depression, the farm crisis in the 1980s, the recessions of the past couple of decades. Politically, our government under both political parties over the course of a century have made decisions that contributed to the disappearance of our farms. 45,000 farms per year on average for a century across the country.

And technologically, we had technology that didn't progress in a way that included as many of our farms as we needed it to. We lost what's called scale-neutral technology, where it can work for large, medium, and small farms just as well. And so more and more farms began to be left behind by technological innovation.

HOST: Sounds like you have a little one in the background, maybe a future farmer.

BRIAN REISINGER: Yes, we've got the the fifth one. We've got the fifth generation back there.

HOST: Yeah, there you go. Well, I think, Brian, sometimes people just think, well, that's too bad. Less people are farming. Maybe that just impacts rural communities and the surrounding area. But it kind of impacts us all according to your analysis. Right?

BRIAN REISINGER: It does. What I found this is a hollowing out of rural America that, not only affects families that grew up where I grew up, but also affects our food supply. So we have food that has been much more expensive than people would like. And it's been getting more expensive far faster than the rate of inflation. Part of the reason for that is our vulnerable supply chain. As we lose more and more farms and have a more integrated food industry, it is easier for that supply chain to get disrupted.

One big distribution center going down can suddenly disrupt the food coming to the grocery store. The prices are higher. It also affects the health of our food. It makes it harder for us to solve environmental dilemmas. We have a deep, deep, rural-urban divide between farm country and the city. And it keeps us from solving other problems. It contributes to our mental health. So there are so many ways that this affects our food supply and our broader economy and culture, no matter whether you set foot in a barn or not.

HOST: So you do lay out in your book some potential solutions. What do you think is the most effective place to start?

BRIAN REISINGER: Yeah, the biggest thing that we can do is we could start a research and development revolution to re-inject innovation back into American agriculture. American agriculture has been innovating for a long time. It's been progressing. It's becoming more productive. But it's getting harder and harder to do that. And as I said, we have more and more farms, including many of our small family farms, that have been left behind. The research and development, actually from the federal government, is at the lowest level since the 1970s. That's a real problem.

And not only that, but the research development that we do have, there's still a good amount of it done by the private sector, is mainly focused on how can we help those big farms take on more acreage and more animals instead of figuring out how can we have farmers of all sizes, including small farms, be able to innovate in the same kind of footing? What's that next wave of technology that can help farms of all types and sizes grow that next generation of crops in new places in new ways. That would be something that could really revolutionize things and help us give a brighter future to our farms and therefore our food supply for everyone.

HOST: So some federal government data that was released, the agricultural census earlier this year, did show this trend of consolidation you're talking about. But it also showed, this is interesting, an uptick in the number of younger farmers. Are you seeing evidence that people are giving farming a try? I know in the case of your family, your sister is running your family farm.

BRIAN REISINGER: That's right. That's right. I'm grateful to see my sister's work and take over the farm from my dad. There's an incredible interest in young people in agriculture and in working the land. The big problem that we've had is that they haven't seen economic opportunity in it, whether it's my nephews, whether it's other kids. There's all kinds of kids in 4H and FFA,. But they're not told by their guidance counselors, hey, go into farming. That's a bright future for you because so many farms have been going by the wayside.

Now, the reason that we're seeing more young farms, in some cases, we're seeing on the very smallest end of the spectrum, we're seeing some more farms sprouting up. And what's going on is these are what's called market farms. These are small farms that grow fruits and vegetables for farmers markets and things like that. There's greater interest than ever in where our food comes from. More and more people buying from farmers markets and other places in addition to traditional food sources.

And so, there is, on the smallest end of the spectrum, little glimmers, little green shoots of hope there. But what we need to do is figure out a way for more of our farms to be able to participate in that kind of an economy, more of our farms to be able to meet consumers where they are, which consumers care more than ever where their food comes from. We need more farms able to pursue new entrepreneurial opportunity to meet those needs.

HOST: What do you hope that people take away from your book? And maybe people who don't have a very direct connection to a family farm, but we're all eating food, so, I mean, what is your hope that people and readers take away?

BRIAN REISINGER: I hope people will take away the resilience of our farm families and that if there still-- even though we've lost 70% of our farms, there are nearly 2 million farms still there. And 88% of them are small farms. And they are resilient farm families. They're making part-time income right now. They're not able to make a full-time income on the farm. And so I just hope that people can take away, what if we did something with that resilience? What if we made it possible for these families willing to work against unworkable conditions? What if we made it possible for it to work for them again?

I think about my dad. One of the stories we tell is he had to step up at the tender age of 8 in the 1950s when my grandpa--

HOST: Wow.

BRIAN REISINGER: Yeah, my grandpa slipped off a corn crib and broke his back. And he ultimately got back on his feet. But it was one of the harrowing stories that we told about my dad at the age of 8, taking on the work of a man. And he never let it go. And my dad loves it. He's on the tractor right now. It's in his blood and his bones. And so if we can get a way for farm families that have that kind of devotion and resilience to be able to do more in feeding our country, there's so much that we can improve about how things work in America.

HOST: Brian, thank you for coming on today and sharing this work. And my best to your family.

BRIAN REISINGER: Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

HOST: Thank you. That was Brian Reisinger, the author of the book Land Rich Cash Poor-- My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.