When Americans sit down for dinner or prepare their breakfast, seldom do they ask themselves where their food comes from. And unfortunately, the farmers who have kept them fed for generations may be going extinct.
Brian Reisinger, a fourth-generation farmer himself and author of “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer,” is seeing firsthand the economic and cultural crisis that’s threatening America’s food supply.
Rick and Bubba of the “Rick and Bubba Show” grew up in rural Alabama, and this hits close to home.
“We were an agricultural society, and boy, have we moved away from that,” Rick tells Bubba. “And unfortunately, it’s as if the farmer has, like Brian says, disappeared.”
“I like to say we’re not only losing the farms that feed us — which is true, this affects food prices, the security of our food supply, all kinds of economic issues — but we’re also losing a part of ourselves because this is a big part of our American values and a big part of who we are as a people, and it’s slipping away,” Reisinger agrees.
While Reisinger grew up learning from his father how to be a farmer himself, it’s a way of life that most Americans are now divorced from.
“It’s a beautiful way of life,” he tells Rick and Bubba. “I grew up working with my dad from the time I could walk.”
“The values, things you learn, you get up at sunup to work with your dad, and you do it till sundown. You come in at odd hours. The barn, when there’s a cow having a hard time delivering her calf, and you see your dad help deliver that calf and you see the calf take its first life breaths, you learn about the circle of life,” he explains.
“Not everybody has to grow up on a farm, we don’t have to force everybody to do that, but we’re losing this to such a degree that I really think it’s affecting our culture,” he adds.
But this isn’t happening just because the culture has changed.
“We come out of the depression, when the disappearance first started happening,” Reisinger explains, noting that the government “had all kinds of programs that were meant to control the price and the supply.”
“They had farmers leaving land idle. They had animals slaughtered. They did all kinds of things to try to bring the supply down and the prices up,” he continues, adding, “Our government began just piling more programs on top of one another.”
The government has continued to attempt to control farmers and their land while allowing foreign governments to buy farmland as well.
“It’s one of many things that our country allows that other countries don’t allow us to do,” Reisinger says. “The issue that we face with that is the incredible pace of foreign ownership of farmland.”
In just two years, foreign-owned farmland in the U.S. increased by 15% — and China is one of the biggest owners.
“That’s alarming,” he adds.
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