In this podcast episode, EWG President and co-Founder Ken Cook talks with Will Westmoreland, a farmer from Missouri with 25 years of experience working on rural campaigns, elections and the land. Westmoreland is a father, grandfather and political consultant. His passion for the health of rural America focuses on bringing innovative sustainable agriculture solutions to rural communities through the Back Forty group.
Cook and Westmoreland discuss the history and politics of agriculture in the U.S., especially in their shared home state of Missouri. They dive into the economics affecting everything from industrial row cropping to mom-and-pop agroforestry businesses.
They also explore how the Trump administration’s cuts to federal programs, including farm subsidies and conservation funds, will hurt rural Americans in particular. From hospital closures to declining school attendance, Americans from non-urban areas face greater challenges than ever before. Westmoreland offers his insight into why rural communities are struggling and how new coalitions built on curiosity – politicians wanting to know more about farming and vice versa – can overcome partisan politics.
Disclaimer: This transcript was compiled using software and may include typographical errors.
Ken: Well, hello everyone. It's Ken Cook and I'm having another episode. I have them all the time.
And this one I'm really excited about because I'm talking to a fellow Missourian who has roots in farming and in rural America. Will Westmoreland has been a farmer since childhood and he's been a political activist for over 30 years.
Like me, Will is now a social media influencer. I'm technically a “nano-influencer” so Will is more of an influencer, but I'm aspiring to be an influencer.
He addresses misinformation and policies that are directly affecting low income people, single parents, and farmers in rural America. He's also the founder of the Back 40 – a bipartisan media company that's focused on fortifying and growing rural America, family farmers, and ranchers, and the communities that surround them through public education, infrastructure, healthcare, and economic development.
Now, here at EWG, we've been supporting farmers through our farm subsidy database. They may not always think of that as support, but basically the farm subsidy database lists all the folks who get farm subsidies and the amount they receive going back to 1995. It's billions and billions of dollars of your tax money that goes to farmers through various subsidy programs, but also includes conservation programs.
We created it to advocate for those conservation programs that can help any farmer. It serves as a critical tool for exposing inequities in the current system where we spend way too much on subsidies to grow corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton, that we have in surplus supply and not enough on conservation. So it builds the case for reforms that could better serve small and mid-sized farming operations.
We're all about transparency at EWG and through the farm subsidy database, which thousands of people visit every day, we're leveling the playing field by ensuring public accountability for how your taxpayer dollars are distributed in agricultural support programs.
Now to dive in deeper into what's really important in rural America. Rural Americans are some of our most vulnerable, and they rely heavily on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, SNAP, used to be known as food stamps, and they rely heavily on Medicaid, not just individuals, but hospital systems in rural America.
Now that Trump's Big Beautiful Bill has passed and it's become law, we're going to see millions of people in rural America and elsewhere – but especially in rural America – lose SNAP and Medicaid access. The bill also tilts farm subsidies even more in the direction of big commercial commodity farming operations over small farmers, and these are the people that both EWG and Will's organization, the Back 40 are fighting for.
I'm so glad you're here. Will welcome to the show. Let's start off with your background and whereabouts in Missouri you're from.
Will: Sure. So I was born in southwest Missouri in Springfield, which I know you know where that is.
Ken: I do know where that is.
Will: The first seven years of my life, I was a city boy. My dad passed away when I was five years old. He had a really rare form of cancer and he passed when he was 30. So like a lot of younger dads, he didn't have any life insurance or anything like that. So we took advantage of every program in the social safety net.
We lived in government housing, we got food stamps. My mom worked full time and went to college, so like a lot of poor kids that grew up in Missouri, I've always had that chip on my shoulder. You know about these programs out there that Americans rely on to survive.
But when I was seven, my grandfather had enough of that and he showed up with some pickup trucks and some cowboys and some horse trailers, and he moved us to the family farm in Brighton, Missouri, which is in between – you'll know this Ken, everybody else will have to Google it, but it's in between Bolivar and Springfield, Missouri down in the southwest part of the state. And he had a 600 acre farm. From then until I was about to start high school, I lived on a farm.
He did something unique. You can't really do this today, but back in the day, what he did is he would buy Holstein calves off of dairy farmers and then he would bring 'em back to our farm, raise them up, and then he would take those grown heifers and resell 'em to dairy farmers to restock their hertz.
So he would kind of take that expense away from them. And then we raised beef cattle. I had the great experience of just doing my chores in the morning and then getting to spend all day on the farm. And you know what it's like it just gets in your blood.
Ken: Yeah, absolutely.
Will: Like a lot of other people, I went out into the real world and I was a telecom executive for Sprint and AT&T and lived down in Texas, in Ohio, and in North Carolina. But in the early two thousands I moved back to Missouri. My mom and stepdad were getting a little bit older. I helped them run their 300 cow-calf operation in Bolivar.
Yeah, they were farming and leasing about 1100 acres, and I did that for several years and then my stepdad passed away and then my mom had some – these are all stories that everybody in rural America can sympathize with–
Ken: A hundred percent.
Will: Mom started to get some serious health issues and made the decision to sell the farm.
I do specialty farming now, so I've been involved in agroforestry: walnut trees, Chinese chestnuts, elderberry, this kind of thing. We've just started a new mushroom operation, so we're converting a mushroom house on the farm right now to grow mushrooms.
And then two new things I'm getting into because as part of this advocacy that I've been doing, I've been trying to figure out ways that I can market Missouri agricultural products.
We're in the process of planning the white labeling of elderberry products and berry products and things like that so that we can help buy Missouri Ag-products and resell them.
The other thing we're right at the beginning of is we're going to try our hand at milling Chinese chestnuts raised here in Missouri for gluten-free flour.
So I was really interested in the niche agriculture part of it, because I have visited, no kidding, Ken, I visited a farm a month ago here north of Springfield, three acres grossing over $575,000 a year—which is more than we made on a cow calf operation,
Ken: Yeah, yeah. No, exactly. What, what were they producing?
Will: Everything. I mean they had flowers as their biggest products, but they were also, believe it or not, they were selling like almost a hundred thousand dollars in frozen pizza every year made from the vegetables, et cetera, that they raised on their farm.
Ken: My goodness.
Will: Just really creative new ways to farm.
And you know, this game we play in farming. Well, if you don't do it full-time, you're not a farmer. If you don't row crop, you're not a farmer, if you don't raise cattle well, anybody that makes a living off the land is a farmer. So it's interesting as I've done this to see all these different ways that people are trying new ways of farming that are very productive.
Ken: Well, a couple of quick responses to that.
First of all, my dad died when I was five also. And he was the farm side of the family. My mom, her family grew up in St. Louis and that's where I spent my life. But I spent my summers on Cook family farms.
My uncle both had cow calf operations – spent a lot of time down there. And then I went to Ag school at the University of Missouri, partly because it was a great school of that interest. And every time the cattle cycle took a bad turn, my uncle said they were gonna get out of it. And every time it recovered. They stayed, they stayed in.
But it's really interesting when we published – and I know you're familiar with our farm subsidy database – which is very controversial in rural America. We put it out initially because we kept getting into fights in Congress where we wanted to move more money into conservation programs that would help any farmer.
Initially there was a pushback from commodity interest who said, “Well, that'll take money away from our baseline, from our price supports and income supports for corn and cotton and rice and soybeans and so forth.” I think we still have 4,000 to 6,000 visitors a day to this website where you can look up farms.
Will: I looked at it regularly.
Ken: People do. We thought people would really be upset with us, and a lot of them were. A lot of farmers were, but the angrier reaction was from full-time commercial row crop farmers complaining about the payments that went to the part-time so-called hobby farmers. I never really understood that animosity or that sense of disrespect.
Will: Oh yeah.
Ken: Row crop farmers were folks who might have just a few hundred acres, you know, might have a job in town, the wife might be a teacher, the husband might be driving a truck or whatever it might be to support the farming, basically.
Will: Right. That's right. Yeah.
Ken: But can you say a little bit about that, because if you're doing agroforestry and the other things you're doing, you're not fitting the mold [of big-Ag]?
Will: Yeah. I hear it all the time, “You're a fraud. You're not a farmer.”
You gotta have a thick skin to do social media and advocacy work. You know that, Ken.
Ken: Yeah, for sure.
Will: You've heard all the same things as well. There are a couple things that I've noticed about that it can go both ways, but I have noticed that the bigger gripe seems to come from larger farmers where I like to use it just when I'm being a little bit petty, and I always tell people I do try to take, I do try to take a nonpartisan approach to these things and I try to be respectful, but I always say to people, don't put me on Mount Rushmore because on election night I was still sitting there telling my boys, well maybe we've all gotta eat outta trash cans before we get it, you know?
But to your point, I think what a lot of bigger farmers, well just farmers in general, forget.
If you go back and you look at the plat mat from your county from the 1920s all the way from the 1890s to the 1940s, in most of our rural counties out there, there are more farmers on those plat mats and more family farms than there are today.
So when you start talking about hobby farms and small farms and that kind of thing, it's not a bad idea to take a couple of minutes to remember that back in the day, an active, progressive, good family farm that supported the family was 60 acres, maybe a hundred acres.
Ken: Yeah. And did all kinds of economic activity.
Will: And we shouldn't forget that. And then the other side of the coin is, and I've griped about this, I'm not gonna be anything but completely honest with you. I've griped about this too, where I go in and I look and I see that RJ Reynolds is making money for not growing crops on the acreage around their worldwide headquarters or something.
And I get frustrated by that because I'm like, why are we paying these big corporations not to grow on the acreage surrounding their world headquarters or something.
Ken: Now say a little bit about your kind of breakthrough social media conversations that you had with the world. How you processed the early weeks and months of the Trump administration, and if you can, Will, say a little bit about the reaction you got from folks.
Will: You know, there's a mixed reaction out there and sometimes it comes from my own side.
So the genesis of all this is that back in the summer, around June or May of last year… I'm not only a political consultant, but I've really focused on rural races. We did all of the outreach for Warnock and Ossoff down in Georgia.
I've worked for John Tester, not personally, but we did work for him as a consulting firm. And then we have done a lot of work around the country to try to get Democrats elected to rural office. And I don't try to hide that because I don't want to try to be somebody that I'm not. I'm a Democrat.
I've always been a Democrat and I've got a list of reasons this long as to why I think farmers should be Democrat.
But at the same time, I really wasn't happy with a couple of messages that I was hearing out there. And the older I get, the more willing I am to stand on my front porch and yell, “get off my lawn.”
So the messages I heard that I didn't like were, “We're never gonna win Rural people back. All rural people are stupid. All rural people vote against their best interest. All rural people are racist.”
And you know, my grandfather used to say, don't get out of broad brush unless you're gonna paint the barn.
That used to be one of his favorite quotes. He used to use it and I thought, “Boy we sure are painting with a broad brush.” So I went on to social media, Ken, just like you did in the beginning, you wanted to deliver a message. Well, I wanted to deliver a couple messages and one message was this is what politics looks like behind the scenes.
Like the minute some people hear that I do political work, they envision some television show where I'm trying to manipulate public opinion and all these other horrible, nefarious things. When in reality, I've got five grandkids in the state of Missouri and three of 'em are granddaughters, and I know how much I enjoyed the rural way of life growing up, and I want to see that preserved for them. It's that simple.
It's not any more complicated or less complicated than that. So I wanted to talk about that. What happens behind the scenes? How does polling work? How do we convince people to vote a certain way? How do we deliver messaging?
And then the second thing that I wanted to talk about is just to be really frank with you and I watch your podcast, so I know you feel the same way, “we just have a huge amount of bad rural policy out there right now.”
Ken: Yeah.
Will: So we're not only working against the stream flow of trying to compete in an environment where we can't control inputs, outputs, costs, profits, or anything else.
We're taking on our own government in terms of just bad rural policy where we're losing our healthcare, we're losing our schools, we're not farming for profit anymore. Now what's the best crop insurance return rate we can get? It's just, it's not a good time right now for rural America.
So I went on to talk about those two things and what happened is, there was a young farmer up by St. Louis, Missouri, named Skyler Holden. He's all over social media, everybody knows his name. He had done a video about how he took advantage of the rotational grazing program that was out there where you could go in and do padding, plant warm weather grasses, put water in place, put up new fencing, all these things and move the herd around.
So the way a lot of people farm, probably over 50% still, when they raise cattle, they have a big piece of land and they just throw the cattle out there and they let 'em graze. And maybe they move them between a couple of big pastures back and forth so that they can get on clean grass.
What rotational grazing does is it emulates what happens on the African Serengeti. You put up paddocks and you divide up your grassland. You put water in there, you plant grasses that do better in warm weather, because whether you believe in global warming or not, it is getting hotter and it's more difficult for cold weather grasses like fescue, et cetera, to grow. And what that lets you do is it lets you put more cattle on the same amount of grass and it's healthier for the grass.
So the federal government has offered reimbursement programs to build that model because the cow herds are low, and if you can raise more cattle, you can build our herds up quicker. And secondly, it's more economical for the farmer.
So you've got beef cattle ranchers and farmers all over the country that have taken advantage of this program. And the way it works is you sign a contract, you pay to put all these things in place outta your own pocket, and then you get a check back from the USDA.
What's happened is, all these farmers spent this money and the Trump administration and USDA came back and said, you're not gonna get your reimbursements.
Ken: Yeah, yeah.
Will: So Skyler had an $80,000 hole blown in his farm budget.
Ken: That's a lot of money.
Will: He made a video about that, you know, about not getting his NRCS money.
Ken: That's the Natural Resources Conservation Service, by the way, it's an agency of the Department of Agriculture. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Will: No, you're fine. And when he did that, the response to him was, I mean, it was brutal. You know, he admitted in the video that he voted for Donald Trump, or you could go back if you didn't hear that and look at his old videos. And it was obvious that he had, and then here came the responses, “Well, this is what you voted for. F around and find out. And you're in the find out stage. And I hope you lose your farm. I hope your family is homeless. He even got death threats.” It was, it was crazy.
I watched this video and it was the Saturday before the Super Bowl. And I told my sister, I said, you know what, I'm gonna go out and make a video just responding to this kid because he asked the question, Ken, at the end, why is this happening to me? Why are people reacting this way?
Ken: Yeah.
Will: And I wanted him to understand that. So I just did an eight or nine minute video saying, Skylar, I don't wanna see you lose your farm. I'm not an FAFO kind of guy, but let me explain to you why this is happening.
And I explained how right wing talk radio and the abolition of the Fairness Doctrine and all these other things led to us walking down a path where we don't always vote for our best interest. And I turned my phone off. I went inside, had dinner, and went to bed.
When I woke up the next morning, that video had over 3 million views and I had like 300,000 followers.
I'm, you know, I'm kind of a dumb country boy, but I was smart enough to know the reason that video did so well is because of the approach I took with him. Which is, let me explain it to you without belittling you.
Ken: That's right. I felt like I was sitting around with my Uncle Claude when I listened to your reaction there. I used to have a conversation with Dan Glickman and he said, “I was a liberal but I spent all my time fighting to protect wheat subsidy payments when I was a congressman from Kansas, he later became Secretary of Agriculture.” But he said, “My district kept getting so conservative that it didn't matter that I brought back huge amounts of benefits to my farmers. They voted me out on assault weapons and abortion.” And he said, “I just had different views on those two things, but I understood the imperative of my farming community and defended them, but it didn't matter. And it got more conservative than I was comfortable being, and it happened very rapidly.”
And I think that's some of the dynamic at work here, the tribalism, that makes it impossible to even talk about the differences.
Will: Well, I speak in front of a lot of Republicans and I always joke around and say, “Ma'am, maybe I'm a little bit of a masochist because even though I like going and speaking in front of groups of people that believe the way I do, like I did yesterday, I'm gonna be going down to Texas later this summer to talk with a big group of people that probably don't agree with 80% of what I'm going to tell them.”
But I feel like where I can make a real difference is standing in front of groups like that and trying to change the minds of maybe one out of 10 or two out of 10. I live in southwest Missouri. You're from here, you know exactly where I live. It's the, it's the worldwide headquarters of the Assemblies of God. It's the worldwide headquarters of the Missionary Baptist Church. And there are a lot of really conservative farmers and ranchers down here that fall onto the very conservative aspect of what we call the culture wars.
But here's what I found to be working for me, and I'm just gonna be, like I said, I don't know any other way to be, but honest.
I think first of all, a lot of it depends on the messenger and there's just something about a 57-year-old white farmer that when you get up to talk, people expect that you're gonna say one thing and then something different comes outta your mouth. And I think that there's a little bit of a shock value there that makes them listen, if that makes sense.
Let me hear what this guy has to say. And the other thing is when I'm dealing with these culture war issues, I just say, listen. The bottom line is we live in a country where you can believe anything you want to believe, and Americans have been that way since the very beginning. If you think something is wrong, you can believe it's wrong. I'm not telling you to believe otherwise, whether I think morally you should or not.
All we're arguing for in the Democratic party and people that are, you know, more centrist liberal in their views is that we, at a minimum, regardless of who we are, we ought to be able to live in a country we're not discriminated against because of the color of our skin or lifestyle choices and these kinds of things. And to me, that's not a radical viewpoint.
Nobody is trying to get you to believe that any lifestyle or culture issue is right or wrong. We're just trying to get you to understand that everybody deserves the same rights you have. And that's as far as I walk down that road on the culture war issues.
And what I try to do is turn it very quickly back toward, can we agree on three things: that in rural America we want to keep or develop a good healthcare system with hospitals that are open, because we have a lifestyle that's very conducive to poor healthcare choices, injuries. I had a farm accident when I was a kid. It almost ripped my left arm off and I laid on the ground for an hour and 50 minutes waiting for an ambulance to arrive. Once it got there and I was triaged, it was another hour before I got to the hospital. Well, if it happened today, I would get to a medical center in 36 minutes because we have a local rural hospital now.
But across the country we've got 700 rural hospitals that are about to close. In Missouri, we have 64, and we're getting ready to cut Medicaid. Even though they said they weren't gonna do that, that could double those numbers. So those are the arguments that I make now that we want good healthcare. It's going away for a reason, and the only way to stop it is for you to vote in our best interest.
Our schools are struggling and suffering because of privatization. We've got really bad Ag policy right now, and even though farmers and ranchers only make up 12% of the rural population, they make up 50% of the gross domestic product in rural America. All the businesses in a rural community are typically built around that farming and ranching.
So I talk about those things and I have a lot of luck.
The last thing I wanted to say on that, Ken, is the polling might surprise some people because in the eighties and nineties, it was built very strongly around these culture issues. The polling that we've got out there right now shows a little bit of a different story. For instance, 70% of rural Americans don't think reproductive rights should be and abortion should be illegal.
That's a big change. We passed an amendment here in the state of Missouri with rural support to protect a woman's right to choose. 60% of rural voters believe that taxes should go up on the wealthy to support better programs for the middle class in farming and rural communities.
So what the polling is showing now is that a lot of this voting is based on economic angst. They see the ceilings in their downtown businesses caving in—
Ken: Yeah,
Will: because there's no business anymore and they're voting for the person that's screaming the loudest that they're gonna help them, whether they do or not.
I'm trying to throw my lasso around: how do we get them to understand that there are other choices out there that not only make the promise, that they keep the promise, and those are the conversations I've been having.
Ken: Well those are the vital conversations to have. You know, the bar was set pretty low for an environmentalist too.
For me, having been around farm folks all my life. I came to it from a perspective of, “I just see things not working as well as they should be.” I do worry about the expenditure on the commodity programs that seems to be painting people more and more into a corner with fewer and fewer choices.
And it's not like rural America, the small towns are thriving under that economy. You know, the farms are getting bigger machinery and chemicals are displacing labor – mre and more all the time.
And your school populations are dropping. There was a story in the New York Times some years ago about I think they went to a five man football team in rural Texas because they were the only guys – the quote was from a guy who said, “We're running out of boys.”
Will: The 400 top rural counties in this country are losing population and economic growth right now as we speak. The 400 largest.
And I'm sure it goes much deeper than that on the bench, but to your point, rural America is shrinking. The average age of the farmer is increasing. The tax base is decreasing. Businesses are going away across the board. It's not a good scene.
Ken: Yeah. And more and more reliant on you know, crop insurance. The predecessors to that, that provided the income transfer, because the imperative was we have to grow more stuff every year. And what we're gonna do with it is a separate, separate question.
But what happens oftentimes is you weigh down the market and the prices drop, incomes drop, and you need government support to come in.
My first farm bill was in 1977. We've worked on everyone, every farm bill, ever since, every five years, 4, 5, 6 years, depending on the cycle. What I've noticed about it, and the same thing just happened with the budget document that came out, it seems like there's never time to think through the, the deeper problems and try and address those.
It's always, “we've gotta rush to get that bill through to reauthorize the programs we have. maybe add a little more money to them, maybe shift the rules around a little bit, but the same structure remains in place.”
When we started working on conservation, seriously. My first real effort was in the 77 and 83 and 85 farm bills when we changed the conservation provisions. That was encouraging to me because environmentalists were suddenly walking into a situation where I was arguing to them, “We're not gonna have a regulatory system here, right? We need to have an incentive system. We need to have mostly carrots to get farmers to do the right thing for two reasons. One, just the logistics of enforcement would be completely unworkable, but even more importantly, these folks wanna do the right thing. It's just expensive. And yeah, they're in need of support. So let's, let's provide cost sharing, you know, let's provide the conservation reserve program. Provide the kind of support that the, the young man you're talking about was, you know, felt like he had been abandoned on.”
That investment in rural America. I'm proud that I've worked for years and there's now a $6 billion baseline for conservation that didn't take anything away from agriculture. It added 6 billion.
Will: Yeah.
Ken: I'm proud of that. I don't always like how it's spent, but it feels like coming together around that always felt like something that would help bring, at least in the environmental realm, environmentalists and farmers together. Let's solve this problem.
Will: You know, you just hit on something that's really important and that is understanding.
First of all, I literally talked to a guy that was considering running for office on the Republican ticket. And I would expect this from an urban Democrat that was running. But I was telling him, I said, you know, the Corn Growers Association and the Soybean Association, those are not liberal left-leaning organizations. There are a lot of people that end up running in rural America on the Republican ticket that were part at one time of those organizations.
I said, “But the corn growers have said that these tariffs, along with the reciprocal tariffs that have been put in place by China, could cost us 80% of our foreign corn sale.”
And he literally, without blinking, made the comment, “Well, that'll just bring down the price of corn that we eat here in the country.”
You know, they always say ‘count to five or count to 10 or whatever.’ And finally I just said, you know, maybe what the first thing you need to do is Google sweet corn versus dent corn.
Ken: Yes.
Will: Or the next time you're driving through Iowa will pull off on the side of the road and grab an ear of that dent corn and try to eat it. Try and eat it. Good luck.
So a lot of people make laws, even though they're from rural America, they don't understand agriculture.
But to your other point, it's interesting how when people hear about these incentive programs that the Biden administration put in place, a lot of farmers in rural America wanna write 'em off, but then when those payments got cut and went away, or if you break those programs down by what they're trying to accomplish versus who put 'em in place, they love them.
Ken: Yeah.
Will: And I don't think there's anything at all wrong, to your point with incentivizing good farming practices. Because you know, there's some pretty scary stuff out there on the climate if you're a farmer. Yeah. I mean, we've got studies out there that show by 2050 we may have 20 days during the summer where we can't work outside because we won't be able to sweat.
And I remember one time I went to this veterans planning organization, and they were talking about moving all the military bases. You know, they're moving them in from the coastline now, and there's always one guy in the audience that says, “Oh, it's great to see the government making choices based on the climate change hoax”
I'm gonna use a little bit of colorful language here, but I'm just quoting this full bird kernel. He looked at him and he said, “Mother nature doesn't give a shit about what you think about climate change. The world's getting warmer, and unless we wanna try to launch a F-16 from eight feet of water, we gotta figure out how to cope with it.”
And I thought, man, that's the perfect way to put it. We've got to cope with these things and these, some of these programs are designed to help us do just that.
Ken: I think that's right. And you know, my colleagues at EWG, most of them are far younger and some of them, you know, haven't had much experience with a political world where bipartisanship was common.
And on environmental issues, not only was it common, it was essential. I mean, it's not an accident that we haven't passed a major environmental protection rule in decades because that bipartisanship, that was the foundation of it, has gone away.
The sort of immune system of regulated industries kind of weaponized the Republican Party to be opposed to environmental regulation. We've lost the same bipartisan spirit in agriculture.
Will: Yeah. We have.
Ken: At the core of it, the inquiry for what should we be doing? What should the investment portfolio for rural America look like? What's the right balance? That conversation, I think, still never happens. I just find it at my advanced age of 73, that's one of the things that makes me most heartsick. Yeah. Is that the place for those conversations has really dried up.
I'll blame both sides. I vote democratic. We operate EWG in a nonpartisan fashion, and work with Republicans all the time. But the fact of the matter is, it's not the same when you start off tribally, as opposed to, “we know we're gonna agree to disagree, let's have a conversation.”
Will: That's right. Because you know this conversation we just had a little while ago about the farm bill and subsidies, I've talked to a lot of Republican farmers and ranchers that feel the same way you and I do.
Yeah, they don't want to see all this, uh, help going to large corporate farms and ranches, and they wanna see it be more targeted and they think it ought to be oriented around creating better practices and best practices. I will tell you this one thing we're doing, when we got all these followers after election day, we kind of had a choice.
We said, “Do we just shut all this down? Or we do, we try to do something positive with it.”
That's where we created the Back 40. So I just thought, what there's no better name because you know, the Back 40 is where you try out your new crops. It's where you have your bonfire with the family. It's where you go to kiss your first girl, whatever it might be. Yep.
We created this group called the back 40. And when you look at our demographics in regard to the people that are part of the back 40 and watch our lives and that kind of thing, it's 50-50 rural and urban. And it's 50-50 men and women and it's 50-50 young and old.
I just say that not to brag about our, you know, online demographic, but just to say there's something in what you said that's true, that there are a lot of people that are still interested in the farm. There's a romanticization about it. Maybe there are only a generation or two separated for the farm, or they care now about where our food comes from because we have all of this siloing and with COVID we saw the price of food go up drastically.
I think to your point right now is a time when we can strike while the iron's hot. People are interested in learning how to grow their own food. Again, they're interested in where our food come from.
Ken: Totally.
Will: I watch your podcast, so I know you have a lot of scientists and things like that on, I'm not a scientist, but I'd just ask a simple question.
If it's true that we could sequester all the carbon in the world that we put out just by farming the right way, why wouldn't you do that?
Ken: Yeah, yeah.
Will: It's that simple. And the other question I ask is. If the federal government can put dollars out there to teach farmers the right way to do that, and in the end we can solve a problem that obviously is causing us issues as farmers, why would we not wanna be a part of that?
The only reason you could give me, when I say you, I mean the collective you, it would be partisanship.
Ken: it came from someone with a D next to their name.
Will: That's right. Or a tree hugger.
Ken: No, I think, I think that's right, and I feel like I have plenty of things about Kennedy that I'm critical of but I do think he has opened up the conversation beyond where it was. In a productive way to get people thinking about where their food comes from.
You know, highly processed food is not, is not a form of food that puts a lot of money in farmers' pockets. Quite the opposite. That's, that's where farmers get their, their least share of the food pie.
And I think it has helped people think through, well, you know, yeah, “maybe we could do these things a little differently.” If we can talk differently, Democrats and Republicans are now talking, very differently and in unison, we've gotta do something about these highly processed foods and all these additives and so forth.
There'll be fights over pesticides. We know those are coming, of course.
But the fact of the matter is we do have an opportunity to ask some basic questions that I think will be challenging to the power structure which is: what other options do we have for rural America where small towns will flourish, where we'll have kids in schools and on football teams?
The health challenges in rural areas now, we won't have to be fighting to keep hospitals open. I think that's a future that people could get behind generally, no matter where they live.
Will: And that's why we're talking about it, because I've seen it with my own eyes. If I could offer some good news out there to everybody that's listening or watching the podcast is that it’s working.
I go out there every day and I speak to groups of 10 people and groups of 500 people, and it is resonating. And you know, right now the programs that are out there are designed to foster a specific kind of farming. “We're gonna help you buy 300 acres to 500 acres of land. We're gonna help you get a herd of cattle, or we're gonna help you buy the equipment you need to row crop. Congratulations. You're in your mid twenties, early thirties, you're a million dollars in debt, and if anything happens in the marketplace, you're gonna go under.”
When there's this whole other option out there where people can farm in these different ways with specialty farming and agroforestry and these other types of farming, just think about it.
If we could set aside five acres for young families in these rural counties. We could help them purchase that five acres and help them implement the farming to, in their very first year, make over a hundred thousand dollars. Why would you be against that other than partisan politics?
Now all of a sudden, on that same 500 acres where you used to have one family, you've got 10 families, and their kids are going to school and they're paying taxes. Maybe mom's opened up a boutique in town where she sells western clothing and these kinds of things. I see these little boutiques all over the place in rural America. Why would you be against that other than partisan politics?
So to your point, Ken, breaking through that shell and getting people to understand that if we don't start working together, regardless of our political differences, we're gonna lose rural America.
I mean, I hate to use dramatic words like this, but it's just gonna become a fiefdom. You're gonna have these large corporate farms with the farmers who used to own the land working on them, and you're gonna see siloing. And to your point, we're gonna grow massive amounts of the crops that are most profitable because they require the least amount of work and the good foods that we need to eat right off the farm that are good for our health, et cetera, are gonna go away. And it creates a whole other set of problems that we have to deal with later on down the road.
So that's what we're trying to do at the Back 40 to your point, is just have these non-partisan conversations to say. Look at the policy on face value. Is it good for rural America? It is, we both agree on that regardless of party, then let's find politicians once we elect them, that will vote to put that policy in place and leave all the other stuff off here in the parking lot.
Ken: And I think it, it all starts with the thing that tribalism kills first, which is curiosity.
If you don't have a basic curiosity about how someone's living their lives and hearing their stories, what excites them, what they struggle with, what they're up against. I think you can't have a conversation about much of anything. So Will, I'm here for it.
I'm so grateful that your voice has come to the forefront and thank you.
The best conversations I have about agriculture are with people who disagree with me. That's where my learning curve is steepest. Like, “I didn't know that, or I didn't think about that.”
I love all that. I wanna learn about that.
Will: It's still one of the few things you can do where you can look back at the end of the day and see what you accomplished. Do you know what I mean?
Ken, can I just tell you a really neat story to end things up? Because I remember one time we went to a farm show – and you said curiosity – and it made me think about this.
They had a planter there, it was a new planter that had been created. I don't remember what the pitch was for this planter, but I remember my grandfather pointed this out after the fact. They hooked the planter up to this really expensive John Deere tractor and they drug it across this field, and the planter was planting the seed.
All the young guys, whenever it got to the end of its row, all the young guys went over to the planter and got up on the tractor and they were looking at all the bells and whistles and the paint job and all this, and all the old farmers were walking out there into the field, you know, hobbling out there, getting down on the ground, digging to see where the seed was, how deep it was, and he asked me when we left, he said, did you notice that? And I said, “No.” I was probably only like nine or 10 years old. I said, “No, I didn't notice that.”
And he goes, “That's the difference between an old farmer and a young farmer.” He said, “The young farmers like the bells and whistles. The old farmers were gonna make sure that seed popped once it was in the ground.”
And I thought that's the kind of curiosity we need. I love the fact that you mentioned curiosity, because if we could get back to that, it would solve so many problems. You know.
Ken: I'm about the bells and whistles and the gizmos, and I'm also about how that planter sets the seed in the ground. Just the right depth, just the right cover, because without that, all the bells and whistles won't amount to anything except debt.
Will: You got, you got a $600,000 paperweight sitting out in the garage.
Ken: Exactly right. Well, will thank you so much. It's been great visiting with you. Let's do it again.
Will: You bet, Ken. I'd love to. I'd love to.
Ken: Thank you to Will Westmoreland for joining us today, and thank you out there for listening. If you'd like to learn more, be sure to check out our show notes for additional links to take a deeper dive into today's discussion. Make sure to follow our show on Instagram at Ken Cooks Podcast.
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Today's episode was produced by the remarkable Beth Row and Mary Kelly. Our show's theme music is courtesy of Moby. Thank you Moby. And thanks again to all of you for listening.