Resilience and Change: One Family's Agricultural Journey

[Yeager]

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Welcome into the MToM Podcast Studio. I'm Paul Yeager, and today on the podcast we're going to tell you about this book, Land Rich, Cash Poor. It's by a Wisconsin native, Brian Reisinger started on the farm as a kid. Left the farm has returned. It's going to be about his journey, but also the four generations of his dairy farming family in Wisconsin. We're going to do two installments of this conversation because we have so much to cover about the book. But Brian, also in the final chapters of the book, lays out some future ideas for agriculture and rural America. I thought it was a perfect match for us here on market to market, which, by the way, this is a production of Iowa PBS in the market to market TV show. This week we are going to talk about the history. How did Brian's family come from Germany in World War? Before pre-World War One set up camp in the hills of southern Wisconsin and how they have navigated the family generations, the dynamics, the economies, the booms, the busts and how they've been able to diversify their family operation now and over the years. This is, to me, just I'm really looking. I'm. I hope you enjoy these next two episodes. This was such a good discussion for me. In fact, I'm going to open up pretty personally on a couple of things involving myself, and I've talked about it before on this podcast is just kind of some of my story. it wasn't meant to be about me. It's just that the parallels. And so I was reading this a lot where it was written, Brian, I could say Paul very easily. So let's get into part one of our conversation about the book land Rich, Cash Poor, which is available right now. Wherever you get books. Every time I read another chapter in this book, Brian, I kind of felt you and I were kindred spirits of the, you know, maybe farming isn't necessarily our best option here. Why did you, I know why I didn't stay on the farm. It was hard for me to expand and we'll get into the whole opportunities. But what did you when you reflected upon this in writing? Why did you not stay on the farm initially?

[Reisinger] Yeah. You know, the simple and honest answer. And it was a little bit of a painful one at times, was I didn't have the talent for cattle and crops, and my dad and I grew up loving our way of life, loving our roots and where I grew up. But I just didn't feel quite like I fit in. Every farm kid has had a busted tool and a machinery mishap and an animal not respond well to him, and I just felt like I had more than my share, that I didn't feel like it was my calling. But when I went and pursued a writing career, first in business journalism, then in public policy, it always stayed with me where I was from my roots. And so this book was a chance for me to bring that full circle and maybe try to do right by my dad. As the first eldest son and four generations didn't farm, who's thankful that he's still farming, was thankful my sisters were going to take over, but who always kind of wrestled with that, to be honest.

[Yeager] You and I both, again, parallel fixing things. I was very good at breaking things. Were you good at breaking things?

[Reisinger] I was good at breaking things. Yeah, that was a forte. Hitting sheds. you know, I mean, every farm and every farmer or farm hand has their share of that. But I was pretty good at the breaking part. Yeah.

[Yeager] One of the things I say when I speak is I was very good at planting tractors. I can't tell you how many times I was told, don't go over that hill right there because you're not going to make it. and thankful we didn't have farm land that was ten miles away like some people have. This was only about a half a mile walk back to the house from where I was stuck, but I was very good at that. I'm sure you might have been to.

[Reisinger] I can relate to that as well. Absolutely. Can.

[Yeager] Did in your reporting, this is a conversation I had with my father when he was still alive. He had told me once that, I'd already been a reporter at this point and had called cold, called farmers, and went to their farms and asked them questions, and I and he said one day because, yeah, somebody from the Waterloo Courier called, and I said, no, I go, dude, you're killing me. that's what I do all the time is asking reporter, farmers to talk to this reporter. You got to help my brothers and sisters out in the media. Did you ever did your dad ever have anybody call him up?

[Reisinger] I absolutely did, you know, I think it's so funny that you're talking about some that actually, I think is a central thing. with the book on the farm, families in general, which is we're used to keeping our heads down and getting the work done. We're tend to be a bit of a stoic bunch. You and I are maybe a, part of the talkative segment of the population, you know, and I it is something that I saw.

[Reisinger] It's actually what's makes me so grateful. But my dad and the rest of my family talk to me for the book because I talked with every generation other than the fourth, other than my great grandparents generation. So every other of the four generations, I spoke with a lot of family members, a lot of community members, and was able to piece together and reconstruct a lot of stories that happened well before I was born. And I'm just so grateful that my family was willing to do that. I think that's maybe what's been know, notable about us. A lot of people have been surprised. I can't believe that farm families go through this or through that. I say every farm family does the difference is that, you know, we've decided to come out and tell our story. For what it's worth.

[Yeager] I can think of bosses that have told me, we need to find a farm family, that we could do a thing where we open up their books and we look at their dollars and cents, and. And I'd like to cold ask. A farm is really hard to do. Now. You don't necessarily get into dollars and cents other than your parents had to get help, from a neighbor with some spare hay when times were tight in the mid 1970s. Or. Yeah, basically we don't. Your sister doesn't know if she has enough to feed her kids. That to me resonates with people and I think will resonate with with many farm families as well. Knowing what it is that you've gone through, is that accurate?

[Reisinger] Yeah, I think it is. And what we've experienced is in that so many farm families encounter, right? I mean, in the first generation, in the early 1900s, farming was very dangerous, very uncertain, a big gamble, but it also was a growing enterprise. There were more farms being added. It was very entrepreneurial. It was a dynamic thing. then the next generation lived through the depression and climbed in the middle class, but dealt with some real scarcity. And then my parents generation and our generation, we dealt with that middle class letting that I was grateful to have, getting harder and harder each year, slipping away each year so that now we're at the point where, you know, my sister not only works in the farm, but also has another side business. She works in cosmetology. Most farms, unless they're unless they're larger and have achieved scale and have gone that route, which is a route that families, you know, they decide what they need to do. But farms that are midsize or smaller, they're generally supplemental income. And so we've we've lived that kind of roller coaster up and down through the decades and where we're at now is we're seeing that farms of the size and type of ours, it's harder and harder to grind out that leather.

[Yeager] Or you have the wife works on the farm and the husband works in town. my case, mom went back to work as a nurse in 1985, and she went in at a different economic level than other spouses, in our neighborhood where they may have gone in as a waitress or a teacher's aide, not as a nurse at a higher level. And that changed our, trajectory as well. I'm not going to deny that. and I think you had a family hotel, a major as well.

[Reisinger] Yeah, we've done all kinds of things. My mom has had different side businesses, at different points. my sister, as I said, has worked 2 or 3 jobs at different times. She's worked at as bartender, mail carrier, etc. and then at one point in our history, we had a small family business, my grandpa on my mom's side, their small home town outside of mass, and the family was getting together and they were they were putting together a small hotel and trying to see if they could make it go with that. So my dad and mom scratch together money that was going to go potentially toward a milking parlor to grow our farm bigger and to to achieve more scale. And they instead put that toward a minority interest in the small business. And my grandpa was starting. So we've tried and done all kinds of different things. And that's what you see. You see farmers all across, you know, the Midwest and other parts of the country, they might be starting a side business. They might be working a factory shift. you know, they might be going to work at a local retailer distribution center in addition to farming.

[Yeager] And I should clarify for mom, if you are listening, I do know that you worked as a nurse before having kids. I do know that, it wasn't that she returned. it started a new career, but the guy that took over our land, who's now retiring, when he started farming, he had a side job as a tool and dye maker. And he and I have had countless discussions about the original NAFTA and, the harm that it did to his industry. did you. It's too early to ask about a second frame of the book, but you mentioned your home community. Did you ever think of, a second book could be about, you know, profiling your hometown and how it evolved through all these times because you get into the whole part of, you know, how to maybe change rural economies and rural communities. But, yeah. Is that the next book? Brian?

[Reisinger] It's a great question. Actually. I've thought a lot about that. And the reality is that, you know, the so many of our small towns and rural communities all across Wisconsin, Iowa and elsewhere were built by the farms. You know, it was the farming economy that built these communities. And as our farms have disappeared and as the rural economy has changed, so many of these communities have suffered and many of them have shrank, lost economic opportunity. And the question of what do we do about that is, I think, a really pressing one for our country. There's no question about it.

[Yeager] We're going to get into here a little bit later about, you know, the last chapter of the book, but the first few chapters really parallel, your family life. You mentioned the four generations, how they came to this country, and got started. But to me, there was a theme throughout every generation felt, challenges, but they also felt cycles. Did you feel that any of those cycles were the same for each generation?

[Reisinger] That's a great question. As you say. You know, we go all the way back to the early 1900s, and what we do is we weave the hidden layers of history that are driving the disappearance of farms in our country with my family story. And so we talk both the big broad macro story of why is this happening. We tell the story on the ground through the lens of our family. And, you know, I think that some of the cycles were the same. I mean, certainly the depression and the farm crisis of the 1980s are very similar in the sense that, yes, they were different and but, you know, they both dealt with economic catastrophe that in many ways were worse than they needed to be. And in both those cases, our country didn't understand the way that farmers were being hit uniquely. there were others that were different, you know, and I think we're surprising to me, you know, the Great Depression was obviously devastating. And the unique thing about that was that it had hit farm country earlier, and so much of our country didn't realize that was going on. So the problems were deeper than people understood. The 1950s was different. The 1950s was a time of prosperity, but it was still a time of record farm loss. And the reason for that was that our economy was moving into the kind of era of being big, you know, bigger business, bigger government. And there are benefits to that, and there are challenges to that. And the farmer, whatever their size, are often the little guy in the economy that emerges in the 1950s and afterward. And so even though is a time for prosperity, including for those farmers that were making it through, there were still a lot of farms that were left behind in that era. And so we had record farm loss there. So it was it was interesting to me to see economic crises, mishandled and that there are some similarities, but also some differences in the sense that even times of prosperity we saw were challenging for farms in certain ways.

[Yeager] My early in my career of reporting was the 2001, economy issue that we had. And then I really kind of, was in a different position when we went through the Great Recession. And one thing that I picked up from that and still think about to this day, is this whole Midwest is last and last out or first and first out. Where do you see in your research? Maybe not necessarily your farm, but just that those cycles that we just talked about. What do you think is rural life today? Are we still last in, last out?

[Reisinger] I think you're right. That last in, last out has generally been a trend that we've seen. I think as things have progressed, we've seen the last out part persist. We've seen ways that economic crises sort of continue to linger and last in rural America, in ways that maybe the rest of the economy has moved on from, whether we're last in or first in or in, in a unique way that people don't understand is really the question now, because there are times where, you know, we get hit sooner, or differently than people realize. But I think that the whole idea of farms being last that is, is still very much the norm, unfortunately. And it's because so often we don't necessarily see the lasting impact. a good example is the farm crisis, where it was a geopolitical issue and it was an economic issue was also a change in technology at that time. And we're still living with some of the echoes of that era in terms of not only farm loss, but how it's reshaped farming. So I think last out and maybe never out in a way is is what farms are dealing with in a certain respect.

[Yeager] But I don't know if I could sell that last in, never out. that would be hard to. But I mean, there's plenty of people who think that is exactly the truth.

[Reisinger] Yeah, well, we have we really have two economies in this country. We have the rural economy that cause of some of the challenges in the way our country has not understood it really hasn't had new rounds of growth and new types of prosperity for a long time, and then the urban economy for everyone else. So even though we have a lot of farms that have resilience and are surviving, it is still a proud industry and we have some farms that have made it by getting larger and achieving scale. We have some farms who've made it by diversifying. We've had other farms who've had to sell, but those people still find useful things to do because God knows that resilient, skilled people, even though there's all that resilience going on, it really is a situation where the rural economy hasn't caught a break for decades now, in a big picture way.

[Yeager] I have a friend I grew up with who, went to the East Coast, worked in New York finance, still works there. And we were talking about, companies and what he does. He's a hedge for. He's a hedge guy, or not a hedge guy, but he's a guy that comes in, they see a company, they find out what's profitable, what's not, and they ship it to the side, and then they resell that company. Agriculture has in a way, been like so many other companies. Whereas you talk about technology and efficiencies and we've put the others to the side and we've become very good. But the margins are very small. I think you kind of talk about that. There's a there's a margin discussion there. But I mean, is agriculture just like every other company in America now?

[Reisinger] Yeah, it's a great question. It's many of the same forces, many of the same forces. We have situations where we've gone from having new opportunity and new markets that we're finding to really perfecting how we operate in an existing market. You know, how much, how many bushels of corn can you get out? You know, how many, what's your hundred weight? You know how many hundredweight of milk can you produce? You know, just producing more and more with less and less resources. And there's value to being efficient. There's value to being. We'll do that. But when that's the only game in town, we talk about that a little bit in the book. When you get into the idea of what a commodity trap is. So when farms and any small business has a new crop, our new product or a new innovation, it opens up new types of markets. When you're doing the same thing and you're just trying to do it more and more and more and more and more efficiently, more and more and more cheaply. And that's the only thing you're doing, even though that's a worthy thing of doing. That's the only thing you're doing. It really is something that squeezes out so many in the industry. And and, you know, really it becomes about scale at that point.

[Yeager] You write about in this book about China. But I had a question right before we started rolling that I was going through the came into the TV show about South America and asking, where is their upside? I mean, if you've seen the pictures of how big these fields are in South America, they are absolutely going to be more efficient, wider scale. There's not these 40 acre, 20 acre, ten acre fields that we have that you have in Wisconsin that we sometimes have in Iowa. We are talking miles with no fence around. They are going to be really efficient and grow a whole lot of crops. China already wants to buy mostly from Brazil anyway and not from us. Where does the American farmer fit in? And have to keep in mind knowing what's lurking in South America?

[Reisinger] That is such a good question. What we need to do in this country and what the American farmer can be part of, is we need to do more to secure our domestic food supply. Right now, we're wiping out 45,000 farms per year on average for the past century, and we're doing that at the same time that we're importing more food than we're exporting. We've got an ag trade deficit in. A lot of people in farm country are aware of that and are frustrated by that, because we won't be selling more products abroad. So we definitely need to be selling more abroad. We want to address that deficit for sure, but the issue that we have is we have a vulnerable supply chain. Our food system is a modern miracle, but it also is vulnerable during Covid and other things that, you know, make food native, move through that supply chain, make the price go up. And at the same time, we've got more and more folks across the globe who are going to be producing more and more food more cheaply. So what we need to do in this country is focus on our domestic food supply, and how much of that food can farmers here in America actually provide. And some of that will be through the general commodity markets, where they've got goods that are going out across the country and across the globe, and some of that is through more local and regional markets, where we're selling specialty food and local fresh food and having more connection between farmer and consumer. I think if we want to be competitive, we have to be able to do all of those things for what that's worth. And that means some farms do some of one and some farms do some of another, and maybe some farms do a little of a couple things. But we have to be able to be that agile if we want to compete in this environment.

[Yeager] So it's really going to be a d, all of the above approach? 

[Reisinger] I think so.

[Yeager] when you look at your family and their history in the, in the conversations you had, was there, a sense of romance of, oh, we made it, it was great. Or there was still a how in the heck did we make it? Like, let's go to your, three, your grandparent generation, the three from you.

[Reisinger] Yeah. It was always opportunity and peril hand in hand. And, you know, a lot of people who grew up on farms, experiences just in the same way that the hardship and the beauty is hand in hand. So it's always that big picture sense of opportunity. You know, when my grandparents talk about their childhood, they talk about a simpler time. They talk about the beauty of living close to the land. You know, they also talk about, you know, my grandpa had a brother who was crippled in the fields. And we tell that story in the book. And so that that that hardship and that opportunity go hand in hand. A lot of the toughest times they had when they couldn't afford medical care was also when farms were, you know, growing in number in this country and had all kinds of opportunity. Farms weren't just locked into growing commodity corn, for instance. They were growing anything and everything to figure out what we put food on the table and money in their pocket. So I think it's always been both. I think it's always been the hardship and the beauty, the peril and the opportunity going hand in hand. And that's why I think you you get these complicated situations where people are attached to a way of life that is, is so difficult, you know, but so beautiful as well.

[Yeager] In your perspective, working in Wisconsin and then, working in Nashville, working in DC. what's the commonality with agriculture between those three regions? Because they're three very different spots.

[Reisinger] Yeah, they are very different. The big commonality that I saw was that there are so many people who don't realize how our economy has left the rural economy and farming behind. in terms of the type of agriculture done, you know, Wisconsin has so much dairy. Tennessee, they have a lot of different types of crops, whether it's tobacco or other types of crops down there that they've grown. It's a lot more field and row crop. in DC, in the DC area, you know, broader Baltimore area. It's very interesting. There are a lot of farms that are doing some commodity crops, you know, corn, soybeans, etc., but also doing some creative things. I talked with one farmer for the book who they're doing, you know, hay, corn, soybeans. They're also doing high oleic soybeans. And they also do a whole lot of different innovative stuff with cover crops and other types of sustainable practices. So there's a lot of experimentation in the kind of Chesapeake Bay area, for what that's worth. So, you know, there's there's differences everywhere you go, you're going to find a different farmer finding a way to survive it, a different thing. But the resilience and face of the kind of ongoing, crushing economic situation is really the commonality.

[Yeager] we talk about the estates often on market to market. And, you know, we mentioned, you know, they're very much corn and soybeans, and then you get a little west and it's wheat. But the areas that you mentioned they're in in Tennessee with the tobacco and Maryland, you also look at they're reliant on clean water for Chesapeake Bay and the environment in those areas. Would you say that those spots, those other to not Wisconsin, Wisconsin, to an extent I think is in this ballpark, but they've been more those farmers have to be more entrepreneurial by nature just because they can't do 1 or 2 commodities on large scale. They have to have something from all of these different silos.

[Reisinger] Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's very much right. You see that a little bit in Minnesota two up to the northwest of all of us. You know, you see them do they got sugar beets up there, you know. So there's a little bit of that too. And, you know, there's there's good and bad. I mean, the ongoing specialization that has occurred where so many farms have focused around 1 or 2 crops or products, that meant that they were focusing on the crop or the products that could make them the most money that could be the most profitable. It it got them through some difficult times, for sure. The flip side is as we've lost diversity, it has limited the options for some farms. You know, it used to be that farms where I'm from and and I talked to a lot of farmers talk about the old days in Iowa too. You know, it used to be that, you know, you might you might. Yes. Have a main crop, but but you're also raising beef cattle. You also, you know, had a trailer, pigs you could sell when, when one of your prices was down, you know. And so some of that hedging that farmers used to do even one generation ago, but certainly two and three generations ago, some of that hedging is gone. And so now we really depend upon 1 or 2 types of crops. And, there's ups and there's downside to that. You know.

[Yeager] I have, many, many memories. and I again talk about this too, when I go out and speak about my father begging in the 80s, if we could just get the crop above, if we could just get corn above $2 a lot, 250 things could change. Things could be different. He lived long enough to see beans in the teens and corn at ridiculously high levels, and was able to get out at that point. Not everybody is so fortunate. Your dad, had to deal with a milk price. He wasn't, well, all your relatives who dealt with milk prices, that's not something they set, and they can't really. Well, I'm going to hold today. I'm just not going to milk these cows. and I'm going to sell tomorrow when I think the price will be up. You have to do it every day. 3,900 pounds of milk a day or whatever it is with the. That was always the tough thing for me that at the Dairy Farmer, I think the stress that the dairy farmer went through. Did you have an appreciate when did your appreciation for the stress that your relatives have gone through, really come home to you?

[Reisinger] But, you know, I think it there's that old saying by Mark Twain where he says, I think he says when he was 14, he couldn't believe what a fool his father was. And then by the time he was 21, he couldn't believe what the old man had learned. You know, and I think about myself and almost a constant ongoing state of ignorance that I'm trying to shed just from the standpoint of you grow up as a kid thinking, you know, what's going on and you know, and, and you just have no idea the load that your parents are carrying for you. And I would say that I really started to understand and realize the weight that my dad was carrying when I was a business journalist. I was a daily news reporter, covering the Great Recession. And I went out did something that you're talking about. I went out and talked with not just my family, but I wanted to talk to farmers and tried to get talk and tell my story. And the fact that I knew my way around the barn helped in doing that. But it was still top, you know, because because it's a tight lipped bunch. But, you know, I, I heard stories just like I knew my dad was living just like I knew I grew up with from the lens of someone from the complete outside. And I started to realize as the what was happening then, of course, was prices of all kinds were cratering in the in the early days of the Great Recession, they came back up. But they hit real sudden lows. And it was a real shock to the system. And, you know, realizing that my dad lived by this kind of barometer of life, of the milk price. Right? I mean, the good part about dairy farming is you got that milk check every month. You know, you're not saying, boy, when can I sell this corn to be able to make it for the next couple months. You know, your time in the sales and all that stuff. You got to milk, you know, going out and money coming in each month. But you are hostage to that price because to your point, you don't have the ability that, you know, hold that milk store back until it's a good moment to sell the milk. Like like our farm does do with corn and, and other types of crops. You know, there's times where you might store it and, and then go and sell them the prices a little better. So it's really a burden that you're watching that thing, that price and you're, you're fortunes live or die with it.

[Yeager] The whole knowing where to go on the farm, your way around the barn, it helps build credibility when you can say, oh, you're using, you know, that milking device or you know, oh, you know, you know where to go in the farm field and not get run over by the tractor. That helps to when you have to cold approach a farmer. your dad, you mentioned towards the end of the book that that hard conversation that your sister was trying to have and you were trying to have with him, and you're yelling, about we have to do this or it's not going to happen. Why do you think he was so resistant?

[Reisinger] You know, those conversations between the new generation and the old generation are so incredibly hard. And I encountered it in a couple ways. One is as a as a boy growing up, I work my dad every time I could walk. And although I realized at some point I wasn't the one to take over, there's always a little bit that push pull, you know, my dad was always looking at me saying, is he going to be the one to take over or not? And then as my sister stepped into that role, I watched it with them. I participated in it from the standpoint of I help, you know, with the business side of our farm, and we're all making family decisions together on certain levels. And then I tried to tell that story for the book. And the best way I can describe the difficulty of the situation, so many farm firms, I'm sure will relate to it, is a guy like my dad, and for that matter, my grandpa and my great grandpa. They work for an entire lifetime to hold on to something that feels like it's slipping away before you even happens, you know? I mean, farms have good times and bad, but over the decades, the good times have gotten not quite as good as they once were. In the bad times have gotten deeper, and you're always facing weather and uncertain prices and all the things that make farming hard. So you learn to clutch, you know, you learn to hold on to something, and that makes it so hard when you have to turn around and and let the next generation come up, even though you want to do that. You know, my dad is so supportive of my sister. And so it's hard. You got you know, my dad, I think works really hard to communicate and works really hard to talk with us about what we need to do. And yet there are stories like we had in the book when, you know, we sold our dairy herd because we knew that we either had to get bigger to achieve scale, which some families do, or we need to diversify. We decided diversify. So we're shifting toward raising heifers for other dairy herds, selling beef to consumers, and cash cropping. My sister had changes. She wanted to make the operation order to do that, and every change costs money and every change brings about uncertainty along with that opportunity. And, you know, when you're when you started out farming, like my dad, you know, at the age eight, because your dad slipped off a concrete and broke his back. And, you know, you've been working ever since. And when you're married in 1976 and there's a drought, your first year marriage, and when the first decade of your marriage is through the 1980s farm crisis, boy, you you've learned how to steer that farm and the idea of someone doing it differently and the kinds of risks that creates and the cost that creates, that's a legitimately scary thing. So that's what I've tried to bear in mind as we've gone through that with our family. But it doesn't make it any less hard for everyone involved. You know.

[Yeager] You could use the example of just large companies, even just egg companies. I think a John Deere in 1976 is way different than they would have been in 2022. When you're having this conversation, 2021 having that conversation with your family, they've had to change. And they're a longstanding fortune five, fortune 50 business, for that matter. So, yeah, you know, there is resistance and change, in a, in a company like that. And you absolutely know that farmers are going to have that resistance. At what point, you know, you said you had written some things and he hadn't read. When did he read the book? And when did you get your first honest reaction about it?

[Reisinger] Yeah. You know, I will never forget it. the book had come out and I think it was in September. he had listened to the audio version, which they had me read. I'd never experienced that before. They had me read it and, and it was apparently good enough for him to keep listening. And he was listening to the book and following along with a hard copy. And him and my mom did that together over the course of a couple days. And I came in. I've got a little cabin in the woods out back of the farmhouse where we all grew up. And, I go out there to get away from it all now and then. And I came back from doing a little work out at the cabin, and there were tears in his eyes, and he came up to me and he said, it's the truth, and I, I will. That is the best review. I, you know, I get emotional even just thinking about it. that is the best review that I'll ever have is the fact that, you know, this man who lived it and he shared the good and the bad. We talked about all kinds of challenges that our families had. We were honest about them. And for him to say that was the truth, really, really hit home. And so I will always treasure that fact, and I always treasure that memory.

[Yeager] As a reporter, you'll appreciate this, that when you find someone to talk to you, to personalize the story, whatever it is, mental health, financial health, whatever it is, when you find someone who says yes and you kind of like, why? It's like, I don't want anybody else to go through what I went through. Yeah. And that's kind of what your dad is saying, too.

[Yeager] It's the truth. And he knows in his mind, in his subconscious that, you know, I know I can't be the only one. That's what dad's always reaction was. I'm not special than anybody else. And I'm like, dude, you are the same as so many. And it's important for those in town to hear what it is that you're going through. Same thing with your dad and your mom and your grandparents. It was important for everybody to hear whether they're in Madison, Nashville or Washington DC, to hear what it is those farmers are going through.

[Reisinger] Yeah, that's so right. You said it exactly right. And you know that carried through all the issues. We talked about this as a family. How much do we want to share? We decided we want to put it all out there because people if you want them to appreciate your triumphs, they got to be there for your trials. You want to care about the issue. They got to hear and connect with it. And so the best way to do that is not a story. You know, we did that even with, you know, some of the hardest of issues. You know, I mean, the issue of mental health in farming and in rural America, we have mental health crisis all across this country. But in rural America, it is a bit more silent. And with farming it is very severe and at times very silent. And, you know, after we sold our cows, even though we were transitioning toward diversified farming and we had some reasons for hope, I remember sitting there, we tell this story in the opening pages, the book sitting there on the porch of our cabin in the sunshine, me hoping that we were looking toward a brighter day and my dad just breaking into tears. And I remember worrying, you know, about the issue of farmer suicide and having heard and grown up hearing these stories and knowing that it's one of the top industries for that, I couldn't help but wonder. And you know what? I what I found when I was reporting the book and talking to my dad is he confirmed that that was the case, that he had been thinking about that. Now, I'm grateful to say that my dad is okay, and he made it through in the way he did. That is by thinking about the next generation, thinking about his grandkids. And that's what pulled him through in all of us talking and communicate. And what he said about that when we talked about other to share it was people got to know, you know, you don't want people to think that they're alone in that. And so that's that's why we told that story is the exact reason that you just said.

[Yeager] My thanks to Brian Risinger, we are going to do a second installment on this topic. And I also want to let you know at the end of the next segment, we are going to have a special new segment. Introduction. Julie Knutson is going to be with us next week. We will lay out what I've kind of been teasing and what I've already been writing about in the newsletter in the Market Insider Newsletter, some of those behind the scenes things. We're going to do some of these in video form and explain them as best we can. So that's coming up here on Market to Market on the MTM podcast. New episodes come out each and every Tuesday. Next week when we talk with Brian again, we're going to pick up with Covid and what is happening now and what could happen in the future to help both rural America and agriculture as an entire whole. We'll see you next time right here on the MtoM podcast. Bye bye.