We're here today on Bitcoin Study Sessions to talk about something that is near and dear to both of our hearts, which is the intersection of Bitcoin and agriculture.
For a little background in bona fides, I guess, Grant and I both came from farms in western Kansas.
He grew up in Decatur County. I grew up in Norton, out in the northwest corner of the state.
Um, and, uh, I myself, I've been involved in agriculture my entire life as a FFA through
state FFA officer, um, working with, uh, frontier farm credit as a, uh, as a lending, uh, lending
officer as well.
And, um, kind of seeing the back end of this, of what is the credit machine that drives
commodity agriculture, large scale, non-differentiated, and what direction is that
going? What are the pitfalls? We do have some historical references for that, which is wonderful.
And then how perhaps can Bitcoin resolve some of these issues that we see in agriculture?
Basically, coming at this from the premise of Bitcoin is for everyone, as we've talked about
before. It's for angels and demons, for criminals and politicians. I repeated myself, but it is
for everyone. And how can it help you if you're raising carrots in your backyard or if you've got
12,000 acres in Western Nebraska? So if you want to orange pill somebody, talk to them in their
own language and in their own locality, frame it in terms of what it's going to do for them in their
community. Yeah. And the reason, and that's kind of the emphasis of why we're here. So we're here
to discuss this article that recently appeared it's the cover story of the this december 2025
edition of farm journal magazine um and uh what what kind of inspired grant to want to talk about
this was i was just back for christmas and then this is a publication you've been trying to orange
peel your dad for five years you know yeah you know just kind of here and there but like it's
not right the really casual but loving way you try to do with family where it's not pushy
and you're not trying to sell an investment thesis to them.
It's just something you're interested in,
something you believe deeply in,
so you want them to understand it.
And yeah, I came back for Christmas
and this came in the mail
and to see Bitcoin on the cover of Farm Journal,
you had some information about Farm Journal.
Yeah, Farm Journal, I mean, it's a historic,
it really is an American institution.
It's been around since 1877.
So 149 years, I think is what that is.
I found a guy by a name, Wilmer Atkinson.
It has a pretty strong subscription.
They claim it's like 335,000,
which today for print media is unbelievable.
And it just goes out.
That goes to operators.
So that goes to people that have like 250 acres
or more, basically.
Yeah.
And so we find that this may be an opportunity
for us to stop speaking for a minute
about Bitcoin maybe in the theoretical or in the political
and really truly bring it home to the farm.
Yeah.
And yeah, so with that,
we're here to just kind of have a sort of
a free range discussion on this.
Grant's gone through the article,
I've gone through the article,
and we're gonna kind of talk about maybe
how this can relate, particularly my place here
is to sort of offer some of the experiences
that I had working in agriculture as a lender and with legacy companies
and like commodity companies and supplement companies
and also in kind of the tech world as well.
And just always a farm boy.
You never grow out of that.
Yeah, and you really don't.
I mean, that's the thing is that you never leave those lessons behind.
and years and decades later they they pop back up as something very valuable yeah so it's kind
of got this article on the cover the dawn of bitcoin that's good subtitle five farmers unleash
crypto as a store of value or medium of exchange so it's kind of the vocabulary issue at least
bitcoin first and then crypto so i like that it's kind of educational maybe that
taught crypto what you really the only thing you should be talking about really is bitcoin
and so this is farmers speak out on bitcoin five producers explain why bitcoin will fundamentally
change farming again a trade publication going to many operators many people in all sectors of the
ag economy and it's structured around five different not just farmers fighting for people
doing different things within agriculture and they're kind of their perspectives on bitcoin
and we'll try to maybe distill this it's a it's a really great article it's available online we'll
link to it so take a look at it it's not long um the author was is it chris dennett right
chris dennett yeah chris dennett yeah um so the it's structured around five different people and
we'll go through each of their insights um and see what we can glean from that so the first one
was zach smith he had 1200 acres of row crops and some livestock in iowa um and so he really
focused on store value, that function of Bitcoin. A lot of farmers and a lot of people use land as
a store of value. And he kind of observes that that use of land as a store of value,
people putting their money into as an investment, that raises the price of land for everybody. So
you have farmers out there who want to get land for its use value. They want to do something with
it, but the price is inflated because other people just want the land to put their money in.
so it doesn't melt away, right?
Their fiat.
And so he observes that,
the effect that outside investors have had
on the price of land for people who want to use it.
And then notes that, you know, farmers can do the same
and that he compares the utility of land
as a form of store value with Bitcoin.
And it's clear, of course,
like Bitcoin is something you don't have to maintain.
You don't have to go out there and keep the grass cut
and keep the land in order.
It's something that you don't have to pay property taxes on.
It's portable and take it with you.
It's finite like land.
And you can break it down into small pieces,
sell tiny pieces away.
You can't sell an acre.
You can sell 0.001 and sell it to Satoshis.
So Bitcoin just as an investment thesis
for people who are looking at land,
that's what Zach Smith observes
as the first person in the ag sector.
Anything to add to that?
Yeah, a couple of things I want to talk about.
So first off, the utility aspect of land
versus the investment aspect.
Yeah.
This is the same thing that we see with gold,
where gold has utility.
Gold is an incredible conductor.
Right.
But very little of it is used as conducting.
So I think the numbers is about like 10% of it
is actually used as what it is for utility.
And about 90% of gold is just hung around somebody's neck
or stuck into a vault.
And so what that does of course,
is that you've got nine buyers for every 10
that are gonna throw it into a vault
and not use it for what it's worth.
And if you think about that,
if I was trying to buy a gallon of milk
and 90% of the people that were buying a gallon of milk
were buying it just to put it away,
that would severely drive the cost of that milk up, right?
You've just, this is simple law of supply and demand.
You have more buyers and with more buyers comes a higher price.
And so land as an investment,
I guess the one thing that I want to say is that,
and this is going to be,
I guess we'll open this up with a very hot take.
one of the most concrete sayings in agriculture has always been if you own dirt you can't get hurt
so basically they're saying that if you own the land then you'll be able to have options
and those options are typically you typically only have one option which is that you can finance
your losses onto the land.
So you have a bad year or the way agriculture works, you know, in a decade, you're probably
going to have four bad years.
You're probably going to have four good years or decent years.
And you're probably going to have like one catastrophic year and one great year, something
like that.
You're in terms of the produce that you're going to land.
In terms of your return, right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, because, you know, there's the thing about obviously agriculture.
is that you can have an incredible harvest
and still have a horrible price.
And you can have, and by the way,
those things, because of the way
that commodity market works,
that happens more often than not, right?
So if everyone has a great year,
there's a great supply.
If there's a great supply,
then there's less demand, right?
If everyone has a horrible year,
then there's a great demand.
And so there's great prices, but you don't have anything to sell.
And so another one of the sayings in agriculture is that high prices cure high prices, right?
So if the price of corn goes way up, then more people are going to plant corn.
And next year, there's going to be more corn, and the price of corn is going to go down.
You see that in Kansas with corn more and more often replacing wheat.
Yeah, and there's a lot even behind the scenes with that.
with, I don't know, behind the scenes, it's not, it's not behind the scenes, but it's because
the United States has chosen maybe at the direction of, or at the request of, or definitely
under the lobbying impact of large international, multinational companies, such as like Monsanto
and Cargill, et cetera. Hey, you know, we, we want to have ethanol and we want to afford,
makes the uh uh the cushions and bumpers and stuff out of corn like how can we have more and more
products made out of corn yet they're all incredibly subsidized i think as they're all
subsidized like three dollars for every one dollar of ethanol that comes out and so you end up
creating a price for on corn that artificially boosts the market and because you do that you
artificially increase the amount of marginal acres acres that typically would not be planted
into corn because they're not suited for it.
Where you and I are from is not suited for corn.
It's a horrible place to grow corn.
But if you've got a company that is gonna, you know,
spend millions of dollars developing drought resistant corn
and then you're gonna drill a hole in the ground
and you're gonna mine water.
And then you're gonna spend $300 an acre on nitrogen
in order to get it to you.
You've got something coming up out of the ground.
So, but anyways, the thing that I want to say, the hot take here, in agriculture, the driving factor has always been to own the land.
Land is a horrific investment.
And I'm going to say that again so that people, land is a terrible investment.
First off, land does not keep up with inflation.
So farmland across the United States on average goes up around 5% to 6% per year since 1971.
It's obviously higher in some places.
in Iowa, in Northeast Kansas, you know, there's places in the pockets that it skyrockets.
However, that brings on another problem.
So let's assume that, let's even assume that you do outpace inflation.
Let's assume that your ground goes up 10% per year, inflation being, you know, around
7% per year on average.
And we're talking monetary inflation, not S&P, or sorry, not consumer price index, not the cherry-picked basket of goods that has been reselected over 40 times since 1980 to appear that inflation is lower.
That is the lie.
The truth of inflation is, inflation is how much money is in the market and how much did we produce?
And so on average, the numbers are somewhat depends on who you ask, but it's between seven and 12 to 13 percent per year.
Just assume seven. Let's say that you're getting 10 percent on your ground. Great.
So you're beating inflation. However, every single year that ground goes up, you get taxed higher.
Right. Because you get taxed every single year. This, by the way, is another issue I think that is not talked about enough,
which is that the taxation of land is taxing an unrealized gain so technically this is something
we don't do but we do uh just like we tax your house yeah every every year you you know if you
own your house every year you pay the government for the right to live in the house that you own
if you own your land every year you pay the government for the right to own the land that
you own. That's literally what you're doing. Yeah. And just one scenario that popped in mind,
I remembered going over a balance sheet for one of my farmers who had purchased ground,
I want to say in the late 80s, early 90s for around $800 an acre. And it was worth at that
time, it was worth like close to 8,000. So it 10x. So what does that mean for him?
he's paying 10 times the tax on it if the taxes haven't gone up and the taxes in most jurisdictions
have increased this is a problem we see in kansas in the northern tier of counties because the taxes
in nebraska are i think around eight times higher on agricultural land than they are in kansas and so
if you're in the northern tier of kansas counties not only do you have competition among your fellows
You also have competition from people in Nebraska who find that it's cheaper for them to buy land in Kansas and just drive across the state in order to farm it.
So you've got that problem.
So first off, land's a terrible investment because it doesn't keep up inflation.
Second, land is a terrible investment because you get taxed on it and you get taxed on the unrealized gain every single year.
Third, it's not finite.
I myself lived on a fake island.
Land is certainly not finite.
um and not only is it not finite um every year we'll we'll make more ground you know the everglades
you know that used to be a swamp now it's what groves or it's plantations and it's places that
we farm and stuff um anytime you want to make ground farmable you can there is a cost to it
but if that cost is less than the cost of buying the ground that is currently being fought over
there you go then you've got you got the opportunity and so um with land prices going
the way that they are um and again we want to make sure i want to make sure that we state this
understand that your land price is not going up understand that the thing that you are measuring
with is getting smaller the land is not getting any better it's not getting any more productive
In fact, if you look at the ground, you take soil samples, the amount of organic matter, which is the number one factor in the productivity of land, continues to decrease.
But doesn't that contradict what you said earlier, that gold, for example, has a financial premium on it or a monetary premium?
If investors are piling in the land because they perceive it as finite, won't there be at least some monetary premium on land due to investors competing for it?
I mean, there's a massive monetary premium on it.
Yeah, due to competition.
That's not to say that they're right, right?
I mean, it's just, it's incorrect.
Because you're being taxed on a monitor of premium too, so.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Yeah, so let's see.
Yeah, land is a terrible investment.
It doesn't keep up with inflation.
Also, you can't compete, right?
So as a, as a lending officer, um, by the time I got out in 2022, um, the majority, I, I really want to say, I don't know this, that this is true, but it truly felt like the majority of our business was land loans to people who were not involved in production agriculture.
who had had a HVAC company and sold it for a couple million dollars
and wanted to buy a section of land.
Or they're a doctor and they need to buy some ground
to get rid of some money before they blow it all on, you know,
small engine airplanes and cocaine.
They've got to do something with it.
And the average farmer simply can't compete.
And the reason, of course, they can't compete is that farming,
is not a profitable business.
Yeah.
You're in a commodity business,
which means that you sell the product
for the same cost as everybody else.
If you go to the store, you buy,
notice that if you go to buy a Pepsi or a Dr Pepper or a Mountain Dew or a Coke they all happen to be the exact same price And it not because all those companies have the exact same unit economics
It's because soda is a commodity.
And if you're dealing in a commodity business, the only way that you can compete is on scale, which is to get larger.
Yeah.
In order to amortize your costs over more acres.
and practically speaking the cultural trend that that cashes out as that manifests as is family
farmers are getting eaten up by big industrial operations and so the culture in kansas in the
midwest changes along with that you have an institution um one generation teaching the next
generation about the land being stewards of the land caring for the land and then suddenly that
long chain of stewards of the land is interrupted by industrial exploitation or use of the land.
And there's a lot of incentives that there's a lot of, I guess you would call it a negative
incentives that contribute to that. One is that in the last two decades, we've really seen a rise
of these cash rent operators, which are guys that they have the equipment. And what they do
is they go around and they kind of treat themselves like a sort of like a salesman.
They build up a baseball card of statistics of themselves as a farmer.
And they go around and they try to bid for ground.
And, you know, most of the ground is not owned by the farmer.
Most of the ground is owned by the disconnected relatives of who used to farm it two generations
ago.
You know, the brother in Boston, the sister in Atlanta, the cousin in Houston, et cetera.
And they don't see the land.
They don't care about the land.
All they know is this guy is offering $60 an acre per year more than the other guy.
The hidden negative in that is that if you've got a one-year lease or a three-year lease,
typically they don't, I mean, three years is typically, is pretty typical where they'll
literally do a cash rent auction every three years and just put it up again and see who's
going to pay more.
So obviously, what's your incentive then?
Well, your incentive is to treat that land like a rented meal.
It's to beat it, right?
Right.
And to extract as much as possible.
You're not thinking long term.
And by the way, this is no condemnation of cash rent farmers.
This is no condemnation of this process.
this process arose because the cost of getting into agriculture had become prohibitively high.
And for a young farmer who was energetic and tech savvy, that's a way to get your foot in the door
is to buy a combine and run it over six times as many acres as you normally would,
buy a tractor. But these are guys that are often farming in six, seven, eight,
10 different counties, you know, running trackers all over the place and stuff.
So it's had a lot of downstream.
There's been a lot of downstream consequences.
So bring that back to Bitcoin then.
From Zach Smith's perspective, then people now, if they invest in Bitcoin rather than
land, does that fix some of that?
Yeah.
So the thing about Bitcoin compared to land is Bitcoin is finite.
Land is not finite.
Bitcoin is not taxed every single year.
By the way, how could you find a justification to tax Bitcoin?
I've said this before, but when I send you an email, what I'm doing is I'm sending bits
of data using electricity.
And you don't tax me on that email, even though I'm using electricity that comes from a provider
in my state and probably a server that's located in the United States.
when I send Bitcoin to somebody, I'm sending bits of information using electricity. And
the servers are not all located and not even mostly located in the United States.
It's just free open source software. So there's no justification to tax it. So if we ever get to
that point, I hope that there's a riot and a revolt. But yeah, so Bitcoin is actually finite,
unlike land um you can instead of if you've got your 640 acres you can carve off a tiny piece of
that if it's bitcoin and you can buy a diet coke or you could buy a car or you can send your kid to
college you don't have to um go through and by the way it's a it's a terribly costly process if
somebody i've been through this a number of times um oftentimes you'll have a guy that he owns the
section and somebody from town comes to him and says, hey, you know, this spot right here,
I'd really love to buy these eight acres from you and put a house on it.
And and he goes, well, you know, it's on the other side.
I won't have to see it.
Blah, blah, blah.
They're nice people.
Plus, he's going to charge them, you know, that land.
He's going to charge probably eight to ten times per acre what the rest of the land is
useful because typical building sites are usually bad pasture sites or bad farm ground sites.
Like you want to be up on the hill, you know, ground, you want to be down in the bottom
where the water is, where the nutrients are. So, so yeah, but going through that process,
you have to do a survey, you have to do an appraisal, you have to get it all marked and
measured out. And there's somebody with their hand out at every step of that process,
taking, you know,
charging you for the privilege of
selling your ground.
You know, with Bitcoin, you want to sell a little bit,
you know, you don't have to have it
appraised and assessed.
Absolute peer-to-peer transactions.
That's what it does. That's what it's designed to do.
Yeah.
And then, as far as being a store
of value,
that's what he's talking about in the article.
Bitcoin is an actual store of value.
And it
it outpaces inflation.
And the reason it outpaces inflation
is because it's better than the thing
that is being measured against.
So our next individual here,
who is one of the five people
big on Bitcoin and agriculture,
Vance Crow.
So he's an interesting person
who I hadn't heard of.
You had, he has kind of a media guy
within the ag sphere.
He does something called legacy interviews
where this sounds really cool.
I'm going to check this out
after we get done with this podcast
where it seems like it's kind of conducting oral histories of people,
which is as far as preserving the cultural heritage of the place you're from,
there's nothing more important than the stories that are lost
when someone passes away,
if they haven't committed that to some sort of more immutable ledger, right?
If they haven't recorded that.
So he does legacy interviews and a thing called Ag Tribes,
which looks like a YouTube channel, maybe a podcast on ag topics.
So he's a longtime, according to this article, a longtime proponent of Bitcoin. And kind of the point he makes here, or the journalist through him, is that people involved in ag lending will realize eventually that it's better to collateralize loans with Bitcoin rather than land or cattle or something like that.
that's the first point we get two things that one that land or that bitcoin is better collateral
and also that farmers are currently incentivized to spend all of their fiat money for tax reasons
and also for reasons of inflation the declining value of the dollar but bitcoin is of course
better on that front so those are kind of the two points that um vance crow makes here what do you
think about i think bitcoin is collateral is a really good point here for farmers yeah um
I mean, so Leon Nycom is the guy who introduced me to this idea.
He's talking about traditional residential and commercial real estate.
And the way that he framed it was this introductory idea of for every investment they had that was real estate, they also set aside a certain amount, a percentage of the value of that home or building or whatever to absorb any costs that would be needed.
So maintenance and updates and things like that, because Bitcoin is gaining strength and continues to gain strength because truly what it what it is, is a measure of human productivity.
When it when it reaches its its final apex, it'll just be a measure of human productivity.
Um, and so it increases and that idea makes a whole lot more sense than saying, oh, I'm
going to put aside this amount in order to replace the windows or this amount in order
to replace the carpets.
So how does that relate to agriculture?
So agriculture is a tough one because, um, because there's, there's not a whole lot you're
going to do to improve the land, right?
You can change your farming practices. You can move into like regenerative agriculture or do something in order to add nutrients to the soil. It's not like you're changing out carpet, changing out windows, etc. But what you're doing is you are building additional collateral so that like if you think about it, I'd take out a loan to buy ground and part of that money goes into Bitcoin.
so the ground goes up five to six or maybe 10 percent a year bitcoin goes up 30 percent a year
you can see how in just a few years you will no longer need the land to be the collateral and you
can just use the bitcoin as the collateral so then you as the farmer can own the land free and clear
and you can walk around feeling as though you don't have that weight on your chest that if i
have a bad year, I may lose the farm. Yeah. That my loans will get called like they did in the 80s
when people lost everything in the late 70s as well. And the benefit to farmers is just
emits because you can set aside money that you otherwise would have. And this is the second part
that Vance points out is that farmers are incentivized to spend everything at the end
of the year. Like no farmer ever pays taxes. If they do, then they're doing it wrong. Right.
At the end of the year, their accountant tells them how much, this is how much you need to spend
in order to not pay taxes. And they go, okay, it's time to upgrade this tractor. And I can,
I need to buy, I'll buy a new pickup and I can trade in my planter and upgrade,
maybe put new row units on my old planter you do whatever but the point is that what you do is you
end up buying things you don't need yeah and the problem is that comes back and bites you in the ass
really really hard because when you have a bad year you're not the only one who has a bad year
so when you have a bad year it's more than likely that everyone around you is having a bad year
and so when you have a bad year and you don't have the money that you need to pay the loans
and you need to sell that tractor that you bought the year before because you had to spend money.
Guess what?
So does everybody else.
They also need to sell that tractor.
They need to sell that combine.
They need to sell that semi.
And so now we're back to the law of supply and demand.
Now you've got a large supply of assets that previously were bought at a high value
because the year before everybody had a good year and everybody had to buy a pickup and a Baylor,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
And so the prices were up because demand was high.
now everything's turned around and it's on the market and it's there's no buyers for it right
like who's going to buy when they didn't have the good year yeah so it it bites you it bites you
twice and so if there's a way to avoid that um and even though i am we talked about this when
adam samaka was on was on the podcast i'm not opposed to taxes i am fundamentally opposed to
the way the tax decision in the United States works or doesn't work. And again, we have to ask
the question, and I hope that there are farmers listening to this because this should strike them
exactly where their heart lies. But the question is, why do they need to tax you if they can print
the money? Full stop. Why do they need to tax you if they can just make it up out of nothing?
And the truth is they don't. They just make it up out of nothing whenever they feel as though
if they were to tax you even more, you would vote them out of office. So beyond that,
even in that system, it is usually cheaper to just pay your taxes, take the hit and keep the money.
And so if you were to do that, let's say you could tax your 15% or whatever it is,
you put it into an asset like Bitcoin that's growing at 30%. So then your money ahead,
instead of putting it into a, you know, a $400,000 tractor that next year is going to be worth 320.
Right. So, yeah, you know, all of these things like a tractor is a depreciating asset.
Cattle are kind of here and there. Right. You know, like you have great risk with cattle.
Cattle get old, they die. They can get stolen. You know, there's all these things that
are inherent risks to expanding your operation just because you have money that you have to spend.
And the thing is that farmers don't really have an alternative to that right now.
Yeah.
So this does provide an alternative.
And the thing is that it gives you that cushion.
So the next year, when you have the bad year, now you've got this cushion.
You've got this cushion in Bitcoin and it should be able to get you through the next year.
So you talked about Bitcoin as collateral from the farmer's perspective.
There's also advantages from like the lender's perspective.
Huge, massive.
Like if you're a lender, you should love to have Bitcoin.
Why should I love to?
It is an incredibly horrific and painful process to take someone's land and sell it.
Yeah.
Right.
It takes months, maybe a year.
There's a huge cost to market it.
You have to pay three or six percent to the auctioneer.
If it's a distress sale like this, obviously it's going to be a distress sale.
So it's a distress asset.
People are going to pay what it's worth, typically.
It's hard to get a hold of, et cetera, et cetera.
If you own Bitcoin and you have your Bitcoin as collateral, when you don't pay your loan
and it comes time for the bank to do what they do and call that loan and clear it off
the balance sheet, literally all they do is sell the Bitcoin.
So the most liquid asset, like, I mean, they can sell it in a millisecond.
They don't have to have an appraiser.
There's no auctioneer.
There's nobody to come out, look at it, check it over.
You don't have to advertise it, get buyers, et cetera, et cetera.
It's just done.
Yeah.
You know?
Yeah.
And it's secure.
Great collateral.
So the next operator individual within the ag sphere.
One more thing I want to say is that one of the things that I have had experience with,
not personally in my portfolio, but other lending advisors had told me about, you know, they give a
loan to a guy, he buys the land and, you know, 10 years later or whatever, he declares bankruptcy
and they have to sell the land. Well, that land, probably not in the same condition that it was
when they bought it. Yeah. You know, guy didn't keep up fences, guy raped the land for the nutrients
and now it's hardly raising anything. Yeah. You know, bulldoze stuff here, use it as a dump site,
et cetera, et cetera. Like there's all kinds of things that you can do. And I don't think people
quite understand how, how little verification is done on land and on assets in the agriculture world.
If you get a loan, typically an appraiser is like, if you're one of my customers,
typically an appraiser is going to come out. I think it's every like three years,
maybe to verify that what you put on your balance sheet is actually what you have.
So I've got 72 tractors and they come out three years later. I have none. Yeah. Like,
where'd they go? Like, I don't know, man. Yeah. They walked off. Right. Bitcoin is,
it's instantly verifiable. You can't, you can't degrade it. Like you can degrade the land,
let the, let the trees grow and not clear them, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah,
just another point on that yeah bitcoin as pristine collateral compared to land is it's it's
so much better in this thing it's so much better for both parties it's better for the farm for the
operator and for the lender that's great yeah and the next individual it kind of talks about a link
in the chain now given that as we've already discussed and you've really fleshed out very
clearly there are a lot of advantages for bitcoin for people who are dealing with the land so kevin
Kimley, the next individual.
He's an entrepreneur and ag economist.
And his point really is that farmers are really well situated to understand Bitcoin too.
Not just the advantages as you've described them, but kind of brass tacks get right down
to it.
A farmer they will understand the idea first of all of barter just like trading something this for that some beef for something you have They understand okay I can trade a new thing for something else They also tied maybe to cash to get things
So he makes that point.
And so really then it just becomes an educational project of teaching people that Bitcoin is
another thing that can be exchanged for other things.
And so his project is something called Bitcoin, which is some sort of, you can, you look into
this, you can explain this, but it's a way for farmers to learn about Bitcoin.
um farmers are he says natural entrepreneurs so once they learn about a new tool they're going to
want to and be able to apply that tool so so what is bitcoin uh hold on i had it pulled up and i
lost it as i understand it it's educating farmers by helping them set up nodes which are nodes
which are called Bitcoin nodes.
Yeah.
Something like that.
Bitcoin node.
Yeah.
And so Bitcoin, if I'm not slurring my word,
like corn, like the crop, of course.
And if you've ever, you know,
if you want to learn about Bitcoin,
you know, set up a wallet,
do something with Bitcoin.
And a node is something that
it takes a little bit to do.
You know, you have to have the laptop
or whatever to get it going,
kind of learn what a node is
and how Bitcoin functions.
You kind of maybe get a feeling of autonomy
within the operation of Bitcoin once you have a node.
So it's a tool and it's also just a way to get people
maybe thinking that Bitcoin is a real thing
because it involves, oh, here's what the node does
within Bitcoin.
It's not just a thing out there, right?
Let me take a shot.
So for farmers to think about this,
if you want to think about Bitcoin compared to a bank,
you can think of setting up a wallet
as opening an account.
So it's like opening an account with a bank.
The difference is that Bitcoin is a bank that no one owns and it's free to use.
So I can set up an account.
I don't have to give any of my information unless you go through certain places, but I
can set up an account using Mana Wallet in literally, I did this in literally 30 seconds
and I have, it's have, I have an account.
setting up a node is like having your own private vault at that bank except you hold it um so your
your node is the thing that not only verifies all the other transactions um and it gives you an
opportunity to to see that but you can store your bitcoin in your own personal vault yeah there that
no one else um can literally no one else can touch um so it's an exercise in self-sovereignty
that inherently every farmer wants to believe
that is their driving force.
I think the unfortunate thing is that
in traditional large-scale American agriculture,
what has happened is that we have,
we have like, agriculture is a welfare,
it's a welfare industry right now.
You think about no tax, that's fine.
If you think you deserve it, that's fine.
And I think they deserve it too.
No tax on inputs, that's cool.
But insurance subsidized at, I think, 65%.
You know, I would love to have my car insurance subsidized that high.
I would love to have my house.
And of course, the claim is always that, oh, we're feeding the American people.
You kind of are.
But really what we're doing is we are feeding a machine that is supplying Washington, D.C. with a lot of dollars and doing a lot of useless projects that otherwise don't make a whole lot of sense.
And, you know, every year there's these huge disaster payments and emergency payments, et cetera, et cetera.
um so anyways um yeah that's just kind of my own personal rant on that and again it's not this is
not condemning agriculture this is not certainly not condemning farmers at all but what it is saying
is that i believe in the value of the american farmer to the extent that i don't think that they
need a government backstop i do think that they can do things on their own but when you have to
playing that game you have to play by their rules and so their rules make it very difficult for you
to do anything that's differentiated it makes it very difficult to do organic or um or any sort of
like uh any sort of product that is not a a commodity um to differentiate yourself from
from the people around you is that because you wouldn't get the subsidies that are available
standardized so like if you wanted to grow saffron right super high value crop yeah um
i think uh i think i think my brother and i looked into this one time i think there are
places in kansas you could grow up or in the midwest at least um but whatever it is saffron or
um almonds you know like i mean people forget that or wine like people forget that or that
Kansas used to be like the number three wine producer in the United States like a while ago.
Yeah.
And we had groves of nut trees in Southeast Kansas, et cetera, et cetera.
But if you want to grow those crops now, they're not in the program.
So you can't get any subsidies.
You can't get any insurance.
You can't get any coverage, nothing.
And so it just forces and funnels you into this, you know, go grow corn.
Yeah.
Grow corn and soybeans.
Yeah.
You know, go grow corn and soybeans because those are the things that we can then overproduce and then we can create a new industry and we can create new jobs which are subsidized by the government so that we can take the gluten out of this and we can put the gluten back in and we can smash the beans and make biodiesel.
and we can, you know, we can, we can extract the ethanol from the corn and do all these things that at the end of the day, they're spinning the wheel because they are not productive in terms of actually producing more than they consume.
viable industries if they have a product that can be economically created. But if what you're doing
is you're artificially increasing supply, which decreases price, but you've got farmers hooked on
this heroin drug of commodity payments and subsidy payments and all kinds of support that they can't
get off of, you know, it makes it very difficult in order to go somewhere else and do your own
thing.
Yeah. And so the next individual kind of dials in on that. So this is Dennis Campbell at the helm of
Crystal Creek Enterprises in Iowa. Corn, soybeans, and some wheat. And evidently it's a
internationally renowned operation and kind of very innovative in the way that they think.
And so here's a quote that really talks about that aspect of farming being under the overbearing hand or whatever of government.
So he says, I don't believe any more than anybody else.
I don't know any more than anybody else, but I believe Bitcoin at a minimum is becoming a major tool in the toolbox to protect ourselves against an out of control government.
Just for crop insurance.
you can spend $45 to $55 an acre
insuring 250 BU an acre,
HTH corn, bushels an acre.
What's APH?
Average production history.
Yeah, so just it takes your like last 10 years
and how much you averaged.
Yeah.
That throws out the high and the low or something.
This is the point I think you were making.
Even if Bitcoin only gave some independence
back on crop insurance,
that by itself is enough for me.
Yeah.
So the independence there
would then be independence to branch out
and do different things.
You know, like the trade-off is always that it's, you know, it's going to be a smaller, like going to be a smaller market.
And it may be a little more intensive in terms of like the work that you have to do.
But maybe I want to go fight sweet corn and maybe I want to play organic sweet corn and I can get literally 10 times the price or 50 times the price selling it by the year.
Yeah.
Right.
But I can't get coverage for that.
But there's nobody that's going to come for that. And, you know, you know, first, you know, it's going to take me, I think, three years to get verified as an organic producer, which they have this verification that truly has no standard.
This great story came out a couple of years ago, the largest organic producer of corn and soybeans in the United States.
So I was in Missouri. Turns out that effectively nothing of what he did was organic.
and uh it was just a facet it's fun it's a fun story to look up because he yeah he bought fake
boobs for his girlfriend in vegas and uh his wife and uh they found out they weren't happy about that
neither was the church that he was a deacon at um i mean it's just rough all the way around he
bought an apartment for another girlfriend in paris something like that but government money
incentivizes that type of thing for money coming and yeah if you you you get all that you get all
of that tantalizing, you know, government support. But what could you do if you weren't doing that?
You know, like maybe more people would have small herds of cattle and they would sell locally.
Yeah. You know, maybe more people would raise heritage crops of wheat and they would create
local bread. Right. And there's people that want to do that. And there's people that want to do that
A, for the autonomy and the sovereignty of it, but there's also such a growing population of people that want to do that for the health benefits of it.
We have a new food pyramid now.
Yeah, we do.
And I can attest to that.
I lived in Colombia for 66 days.
I ate like a glutton, like a pig, and I came back 17 pounds lighter because everything I ate was organic.
Before, I was not a believer in organic food.
I thought that it was all hogwash.
Yeah.
You know, hey, let's shoot the cattle up with, I can't remember what, but, you know, as long as it's past the time where, you know, such and such company tells me that trace elements of that are out of their system, there's nothing wrong with it.
And you can spray all the Roundup you want.
I can drink Roundup and it won't kill me.
I don't know, man.
Almost every farmer I know has cancer.
Yeah.
Almost every single farmer I know has cancer.
And that's.
terrifying like um just to think about so you know i i and again like i was the guy who was
totally not on the side of that yeah i was raised into that propaganda i just remember like helping
my dad with stuff and just help managing the fertilizer and the anhydrous and all the chemicals
and stuff you got to use and even as a young kid i'm like this is not good i said this chemistry
class now yeah we're not right well we can't sit here we're supposed to be big time gardeners
you know that's really what we're supposed to be like big time gardeners and and fun zoo keepers
you know but instead we're running these chemical experiments and shooting up cattle with steroids
and um spraying noxious chemicals onto what we call noxious weeds yeah yeah and you you know you
smell it like that's the thing yeah all you need to do in order to know that that's not healthy for
you is smell it and you go oh god no no no yeah yeah yeah and so dennis campbell made one other
point but it's kind of similar to one we made earlier that um just as you can't kind of peel
off an acre and sell it you also if you want to buy 500 acres you don't have the cash for you can
buy 500 with a bitcoin and then save up and keep it in a savings technology and it's going to
appreciate over time given based on historical kind of performance so he just makes that point
that 500 can be you can buy that in bitcoin right yeah well and not only can you buy it in bitcoin
You can also, there's, I don't know, I think in Arkansas is where I first saw this three or four years ago.
And I know that there's more of them popping up, but fractional ownership of land.
Yeah.
Like with a split, you know, split payment, you know, verified on the blockchain.
It's very easy to have 37 different people each putting in a different amount to make a million dollars in order to go buy X amount of acres.
And so, I mean, that's what the next individual kind of talks about.
So we'll move on to him.
Matt Gilbert, an entrepreneur from Texas cotton country.
So he first kind of describes almost like a speculative attack that farmers can engage in.
So the smartest thing somebody in agriculture could do is go down and borrow a bunch of money against traditional collateral and use that money to buy Bitcoin.
And then later on in kind of Chris Bennett talking to Matt Gilbert here, he talks about tokenizing agricultural land, that commercial assets have already been tokenized.
and that ag will follow.
And then he kind of discusses that,
that a family in Iowa,
an investor in Mississippi
and stakeholders from across the nation
can jointly tokenize a farm.
The blockchain ledger
transparently records every transaction,
making ownership, lending, and risk
radically clearer
and more efficient than ever,
which will overhaul deed registries,
middlemen, banking and title services,
drastically cutting costs
and speeding processes.
Yeah.
Every time a piece of land is sold,
you have to pay someone literally to do nothing more than look up that that land is that land.
Yeah.
And they get paid for it.
And it's big business.
Title companies are big business, highly profitable.
And there's no need for them to exist.
You know, if I have that title and it's on the blockchain,
I can transfer it to you when you post the money.
and you know we just this is with with blockchain technology in particular um we just we don't need
middlemen we don't need middlemen but back to the thing about um performing a speculative attack
it's it's absolutely true i mean you go i don't know what operating loans right now are they're
probably between seven and nine percent or something like that operating loan so an operating
loan would be your short-term money that would be the money that you need to get the crop into the
this year to pay for this year's expenses, seed, fertilizer, chemical, et cetera. And that's,
it's typically going to be your highest interest rate loan and your lower interest rate. And it's
going to be highest interest rate because it is collateralized by chattel. The way to think of
chattel is something that can die, burn, be stolen, be carried off. So chattel, cattle are the ultimate
chattel yeah um but you know your machinery um you know your your uh your your corn in the bin
your hay bales out in the out in the windbreak etc etc that's your collateral your chattel
collateral and then you've got land collateral and land is a much better collateral um than
chattels because it's hard to steal land right it's hard for it to walk off you can't burn burn
it in the night or crash it or you know your your wife's husband can't steal it and wreck it drunk
yeah etc etc so um your longer term loans are going to be secured by land so you know say you
get your between a three more like a five but um five to a 30-year loan um you're going to secure
that with the end you're probably looking you know i don't know five to seven or something like that
right now. When I was there, you know, in the craziness of zero interest rates, you know,
we were doing land loans for in the mid twos, high twos, mid twos, and they would get a full
percentage of that back as a dividend payment at the end of the year. So your effective interest
rate was like 2%. Imagine if you had taken that 2% and bought Bitcoin as it, you know.
And, and by the way, that's, that's kind of the scary part, I think, of all of this is
that what that of course does is that it speeds the collapse.
Yeah.
Like you, you want to be the guy who starts the speculative attack.
You don't want to be the guy who finishes it.
Right.
Because if you're the guy who finishes it, if you're the guy who places the straw on
the camel's back that breaks it, then your loan gets called immediately.
Right.
Okay.
The value of your ground drops.
to back where the utility value is instead of the monetized value.
It's going to have no monetized value.
It's the money that you're measuring it with has no value.
Yeah. Right.
This again is what happened in the in the 80s
when basically the farm credit system overextended
and a bunch of guys couldn't make their loans
primarily because they were on variable interest rate,
which very few people do variable anymore.
Everybody is fixed.
So that that's good.
But, yeah, I mean, if you're a farmer and you want to do something productive that will sustain your operation and put you in a position to set up not just your next few years, but set up your family farm for the next 10 generations, take out all the money you can and buy Bitcoin with it.
Yeah.
Not financial advice, whatever.
Right.
But why would you not borrow at 6 7 8 in order to make 30 Yeah yeah and at that point it yeah at that point it becomes more financial engineering but
that's all you're doing anyways that's all you're doing people say that they're farming but really
like you're just trying to figure out a way to make it work yeah and that's what you got to do
is you got to figure out how to make it work and this is a way to make it work in the I remember my
dad saying you know they talking about how hard it was in the 80s he said there was a time when
you could buy i think he said the price of aluminum had gone up so high that you could buy milwaukee's
best beer and then sell the empties and make your running back you know as it's like all right well
you know you gotta do something to make it work yeah and uh you'll see guys in tough times my
grandpa did this the last couple of years of his life. He was out there, you know, things weren't
good in terms of, in terms of prices like 2012, 2013, 2012 was a horrible year in Kansas and
they're out there cutting up scrap iron and hauling it off. You know, whatever makes it work,
you know, plant some potatoes, do something. But I think farmers and ranchers should look at Bitcoin
as this is something that I should consider as a way to make it work. Yeah. Ultimately,
the reason that people get involved in farming and ranching is not for the money it's for the
lifestyle right they want to be out there among animals among nature they want to be doing these
things that makes them feel productive and valued and how can we protect that lifestyle yeah and
And I think Bitcoin is a vehicle that allows you to do that, not just for the next couple of years, but once you understand it truly for the next 10 generations of your family.
Yeah, the happiest farmers were those that had the luxury through independent wealth or just the legacy of wealth to do it almost as a hobby.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's like, you know, very few people are like that because the name of the game is take as much credit as you can and expand your operation as big as you can.
Because the only way that you can make more money is on scale.
Yeah.
Is to have more acres, to have more cattle, to go to put up more bushels so that you can take your costs.
you know if i have a two hundred thousand dollar tractor and i'm breaking that cost down over a
thousand acres it's way cheaper to break that cost down over five thousand acres combine new
combines a million dollars now um so how can i take how can i justify right you know spending a
million dollars for a combine the only way i can do it is to take on more and more and more and more
and more and more and more acres and as you do that then you create a more and more complex machine
with more and more moving parts.
And the thing that we know about complex machines
is that they work until they do not.
And when they stop working, they explode.
Yeah.
So that's the five individuals
that are bringing Bitcoin into agriculture,
but kind of offering different perspectives.
This article, just imagine the sensation
of being a farmer,
being open to whatever it's going to take.
You get the farm journal,
like it comes to you every month.
you get some interesting topics. Some of the topics are in this one, one way to save on fertilizer,
tips to choose your 2026 seed corn, real practical stuff. And then the cover article, December 2025,
the dawn of Bitcoin. And so again, farmers are entrepreneurs, farmers are people that are open
to new types of ideas. And just some of the rhetoric too with this article, I encourage
everybody to read this and to put yourself in the position of a farmer who is an entrepreneur,
who is open getting this.
You know, just as Bitcoiners,
kind of we don't want to watch price action,
but we're kind of stuck to it
because it just kind of is what we do.
We're looking for any news of bullishness
to kind of maintain our spirit,
maintain us at high spirits
and kind of maintain that power
to keep on hodling on.
This is one story that really does that for me.
And to read it, the guy, Chris Bennett,
ends it with a little kind of
conclusion paragraph section
called What is Money?
and he asked that question and he encourages people to go out and buy the bitcoin standard so
farmers out there getting recommendations spend twenty dollars it may be the best twenty dollars
you ever spent going to get safety ends book going to take a look at that maybe you know a
whole generation of farmers not by this one article of course but more and more maybe they
will be orange-pilled um and the way this article starts too just compares so the this is the dawn
of bitcoin you kind of you know ask and rhetorically maybe this is the cotton gin the steel plow right
this may be the next thing for agriculture as it may be the next thing for every industry that is
going to touch and transform yeah and i guess one thing i i just want to say personally is that
it pains me so much to as somebody who was you know i was a chapter ffa officer i was a state
ffa officer i was involved in agriculture my entire life and to go inside the system of
agriculture and see how difficult it is to make it work yeah you know you don't own your land
anymore the bank owns it and and maybe you never did in the first place but you're you're stretched
you don't even get to own your seed anymore you literally rent your seed every year because you
you have to you're not allowed to you're not allowed to keep seed on your farm
in storage to plant the next year because monsanto owns the genetics yeah so they're
not selling you the seed they're renting you to see um the subsidy payments the the commodity
support, all of these things that have weaved their way into taking away sovereignty and
the ability to make sound decisions and instead force people to just play the game.
Yeah.
There is no group of people better suited to look at the board and go, I'm not going
to play this game anymore than foreigners.
and this would not be the first time in the 70s there were the tractor brigades um brigades and
it was 1978 was the first one 79 was the big one but this was because we disconnected our money
supply from gold in 1971 and inflation just went crazy during the 70s and by that time you know
the dairy industry had been utterly broken. Everybody was suffering. And thousands of
farmers got into their tractors and they drove from Nebraska, Kansas, the Dakotas, Texas,
all of, they drove tractors, 14 miles an hour, 20 miles an hour to Washington, DC.
And they protested and they protested peacefully. They cleared snow. They,
but they were there because they, they knew that the money system was breaking.
Yeah. And now is a time when we can look around and we can, I think, very confidently say the system is not breaking. The system is broken. Yeah. And we have reached the point where.
that type of resistance um and we've seen it in we've seen in europe with the the tractor uh
protests that they've had over there where that you you're just breaking people you're just you're
just breaking people to the point that they have nothing left and um i guess my message would be
i hope that anybody who listens to this if you're a farmer or rancher you're involved in agriculture
learn about bitcoin because it is hope it is hope for you to make a change that protects yourself
from the vagaries and the overreach of a government that has simply gone out of control because it's
just blind it's not evil it's just blind yeah um and it's a it's a parasite that needs to feed
itself and it got really hungry and it forgot that if it kills the host it kills itself um
so yeah that's my father and farmer farmers are the hosts we live on the produce of farmers they
make us secure as a nation and it always struck me too you know the complex fiat machinery that
we've built and that one has to manage in order to be a farmer and yet a farmer typically the most
self-sovereign individual you will meet in other respects somebody repairs their own machinery
somebody can't do that anymore like i mean that's that's another thing that i forgot to mention but
like i mean that's a huge lawsuit i think it's a i think it made it to the report called right to
repair like um and it's primarily against john deere i think i don't know if there's anybody
else involved but yeah um you know they said like this is your tractor but you are not allowed to
repair it we have to repair it we and it's going to cost a thousand dollars every time they send
somebody out there just to change an air filter or sit and the the stories about that you can look
this up online stories about right to repair abuses are horrific yeah you know so yeah they
would if they could right and just in our nation's history people went west because they wanted that
bit of sovereignty which was how many acres at a mule or whatever right they wanted to own something
and be free from control except for their own their own decisions and yet like now you're forced
to play fiat games, to win fiat prizes if you want to be a farmer.
And that's tragic.
It's spiritually sad.
And yeah, I hope that Bitcoin can be integrated.
It can be a part of reforming that.
Yeah, the cows have come home and thankfully they brought Bitcoin.
So we're happy for that.
We very much are.
So that's the article.
Do you have any other insights?
Thank you, Lucas.
You have so much expertise in this topic.
I'm kind of the city boy, farm boy, the one that doesn't know a lot,
but you have a wealth of knowledge here.
And I appreciated hearing all that really did.
I just want to, like, if anybody from Farm Journal or Chris Bennett,
you know, Vance, everybody that was involved in this article,
man, thank you guys.
Yeah, absolutely.
Because it's so encouraging to hear as somebody who,
you know, all I ever wanted to do was play baseball and farm
and wasn't good enough to play baseball.
There was no way that we could farm.
Like, it just wasn't going to, I would have been in horrendous debt
working 100 hours a week.
And there's guys that go ahead and do that.
and I've bought them.
But I think this gives hope
for a new generation of farmers.
Like this has been the thing
that we've been so worried about
in agriculture so long.
The average age of a farmer
is in the high 60s.
Yeah.
Right.
And the cost to get started
on farming is so prohibitive
that if you're a 20 year old guy,
you just can't do it.
You got to go to town
and get a job
and you got to get a wife
who has a job.
Like that's the thing.
Like you always have to have
the ideal thing
is to have a wife
who's an accountant.
Yeah.
You know, that's my mom's
a CPA or as a tax preparer.
There you go.
Yeah.
See, it worked out well for you.
It did.
Yeah.
Now, my brother wanted to take over the family farm, briefly contemplated it, but just balked
at having to manage the complexity of that and all the debt he'd have to take on and
just, yeah, it was terrifying.
Yeah.
It's just a money game right now.
The banking system, especially the farm credit system, and I worked at it.
They're wonderful people.
They truly are.
But it really is just a mainline vein in order to stream government debt into the pockets of farmers.
Yeah.
And put them on the hook of it.
You know, the farm credit system was developed off of a German system called Landschaft,
which is created because farming has very particular lending needs, incredibly long payback periods,
where typically if you're going to run like a donut shop or whatever,
a couple of years, you know, until you hit profitability. But it's going to be a long time
with agriculture because you've got such huge startup costs and such huge input costs every
single year. So, you know, the Germans developed this program that the Americans copied that was
supposed to be a lender of last resort, which means that if none of the community banks can
give you a loan, then we'll step in. And that's just not what it became. It became going after
Tyson and it became going after the largest operators and the most profitable operators
in the United States.
And instead of taking the bottom 5%, they're trying to take the top 30.
And again, I don't curse them for that.
I think they're wonderful people, but it's just a factor of the systems that we create
so much debt as a government that somebody's got to suck it up.
And agriculture has been one of the ways to do that.
Yeah.
Yeah. And agriculture has been such a preservator, guarantor of our nation's freedom as far as
one of the things that America depends on is creating people with a strong sense of sovereignty,
a strong sense of wanting to defend their native land. I mean, we have a second amendment because
we presume that the citizenry should be able to defend themselves, should want to defend themselves,
should know how, should feel that they have something worth defending. And I just feel that
that like the family farm, people who owned a small plot of land, became stewards of that land,
was such an important part of the fabric of the United States, creating what we are. And,
you know, as we industrialize and lose that, we lose something very important, which is
that type of person who is the true patriot. The spirit of the American farmer.
Yeah. And I just want to read a quote. I'm reading Nature as a Measure,
the selected essays of Wes Jackson. He is a founder of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas,
and he notes, our task is to build cultural fortresses to protect our emerging nativeness.
They must be strong enough to hold at bay the powers of consumerism, the powers of greed and
envy and pride. One of the most effective ways for this to come about would be for our universities
to assume the awesome responsibility to both validate and educate those who want to be
homecomers, not necessarily go home, but go someplace and dig in and begin the long search
and experiment to become native.
I think Bitcoin will do that.
It can offer hope to do that and give them the collateral to do that.
And it'll make our nation better and preserve our heritage.
I've got one for you too.
So when I was little, I would get up on Saturday mornings during the winter.
You got to go check the cows and you take a veil, a fade to the cows.
and be in the truck with dad and listening to Paul Harvey on the radio.
All right.
And maybe take a sip of dad's cold coffee that he left in the truck from the night before.
But yeah, I remember, I remember this.
And so I just want to say, this is God made a farmer.
Have you heard this?
No, go ahead.
What is this though?
This is from Paul Harvey.
This is Paul Harvey.
And on the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker.
So God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody willing to get up before dawn, milk cows, work all day in the fields,
milk cows again, eat supper, and go to town at the state past midnight at a meeting of the school
board. So God made a farmer. I need somebody with arms strong enough to rustle a calf and yet
gentle enough to deliver his own grandchild. Somebody to call hogs, tame cantankerous machinery,
come home hungry, have to wait lunch until his wife's done feeding, visiting ladies,
then tell the ladies to be sure and come back real soon and mean it.
So God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody willing to sit up all night with a newborn colt and watch it die,
then dry his eyes and say, maybe next year.
I need somebody who can shape an axe handle from a persimmon sprout,
shoe a horse with a hunk of car tire,
who can make harness out of haywire, feed sacks and shoe scraps,
who planting time and harvest season will finish his 40-hour week by Tuesday noon
and then painting from tractor back, put it in another 72 hours.
So God made a farmer.
God had to have somebody willing to ride the ruts at double speed
to get the hay in ahead of the rain clouds
and yet stop in midfield and race to help
when he sees the first smoke from a neighbor's place.
So God made a farmer.
God said, I need somebody strong enough to clear trees and heave bales,
yet gentle enough to tame lambs and wean pigs
and tend the pink cone pullets who will stop his mower for an hour
to splint the broken leg of a meadowlark.
It had to be somebody who'd plow deep and straight
and not cut corners.
Somebody to seed, weed, feed, breed,
and rake and disc and plow and plant and tie the fleece
and strain the milk and replenish the self-feeder
and finish a hard week's work
with a five-mile drive to church.
Somebody who would bale a family together
with the soft, strong bonds of sharing,
who would laugh and then sigh and then reply
with smiling eyes when his son says
that he wants to spend his life doing what dad does.
So God made a farmer.
So now you know how we've got to end this.
You've got to be your best Paul Harvey here.
Only one way to end this podcast.
The rest of the story.
I'm Paul Harvey.
Is that what he said?
And now you know.
And now you know the rest of the story.
Yeah.
What a great guy.
I'm probably listening to that tonight.
Yeah.
Great.
Been a pleasure.
Been a pleasure, man.
All right.
Thank you very much.
We'll catch you guys on the flip side.
Thank you.