Brian Reisinger’s “Land Rich Cash Poor” emerges as an anthem to the family farm in America, romanticized despite the never-ending work even in good times, which have been sparse in the last century.
The book follows a procession of efforts by other authors laboring to explain America’s farm troubles but few are as lyrically written or as deeply and personally detailed.
Reisinger was destined to become a fourth-generation farmer until he went off to college and decided his calling lay beyond the cows and fields of his family’s Wisconsin farm.
Increasingly since the first machines started to revolutionize agriculture, farmers have been driven to expand or sell, find niche products for their output, get second jobs in town or diversify their farm. An Irvine, California, farmer, for example, built an event center on his property and now hosts weddings and other gatherings. Absent the diversified income, the farmer would have been land rich but cash poor.
The book is well sourced and bogs down only in the early going when Reisinger laments the loss of “our way of life” at least five times.
But that’s a small nick on an otherwise polished takeout on what ails American farming outside the view of most consumers who only see the end result of farmers’ toil: Full grocery shelves. And despite the inflationary pressures in recent years, the book notes that Americans generally paid just 10% of their income for food in 2020, down from 40% in 1910.
The book also links the demise of the family farm in America with the rural-urban rift in America; small towns that supported groups of family farms often have shrunken as land-rich farmers sold out to escape becoming cash poor.
Here are some of the steps Reisinger prescribes to pull American farming out of its cycle of perpetual crises.
• Start a research and development revolution
• Remake government policy around competition
• Reorganize farms around new market opportunities
• Revitalize rural communities
Reisinger is disciplined in veering into any political discussion of agriculture but politics clearly has been damaging to the American farmer. For example, the Nixon administration’s negotiation that opened the Soviet Union to American grain sales turned into another punishment for farmers when President Jimmy Carter embargoed sales to the Soviet Union after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan.
Less compelling is Reisinger’s argument that the loss of family farms is destroying our capacity to feed ourselves; modern American corporate agriculture lacks the image of the happy family farm but big-company farms clearly produce food in great quantities.
Still, the farm challenges that Reisinger chronicles remain serious and worthy of our elected officials’ attention. Don’t expect much though this coming election, given the volume of other issues we face.
Reisinger doesn’t mention it, but consider the potential for farm upheaval if Donald Trump should be elected and follow his stated plan to deport millions of improperly documented immigrants, which will leave American farmers lacking enough labor to harvest their crops.
That will leave even more farmers land rich but cash poor.
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