Speaker 1: 0:00

Welcome to Just Say hey.

Speaker 1: 0:01

The podcast a podcast where we talk about the things that matter to small farms I was reading in Farm Week I don't know if y'all subscribe to Farm Week Farm Week is the publication of the Illinois Farm Bureau, ifb. Illinois Farm Bureau has recently come under fire lately because of a decision by their one of their partners or their partner country insurance, to drop a requirement to be a member of the Illinois Farm Bureau if you're going to be insured by country companies, country insurance, country financial. It's kind of one of those things. They've come under a lot of fire. The American Farm Bureau Federation, I guess is the national organization, has voted to expel Illinois from their roster because of this deal, because Illinois Farm Bureau gets a lot of money from membership.

Speaker 1: 0:56

My mom is a god lover, not a farmer, grew up on a farm, music teacher for longer than she'd care to admit, but she is required to be a member of the illinois farm bureau if she's going to be insured by country companies. And I'm not a fan of anybody forcing me to be a member of anything. I'm just not. I, I really am not and anyway. So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about? I really am not and anyway. So I want to talk about that. I want to talk about Doge because I just think it's. It's fun To to see how stupid Our government can be and pointing out some of the atrocious wastes. I mean just horrible waste. But as we look at that waste some of the changes and there's a lot of big changes on the horizon. I mean the things they're talking about. If even half of those come true, they're going to impact a lot of people. They're going to impact farms. They're going to impact how we farm some for the better, some for the worse. But it's a time that we all need to stay cognizant of what's going on, so let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 2:10

Welcome to Just Say hey. The podcast where we talk about what matters to small farms, whether it's business, marketing, agronomy, equipment, livestock, health. If it matters to small farms, we'll probably talk about it here. So let's get into it. Be a member of the Illinois Farm.

Speaker 1: 2:26

To be insured by country companies, you have to be a member of the Illinois Farm Bureau, even if you don't farm, have no connection to farming no, you don't even care about farming. If you're going to be insured by country financial, country insurance, country companies you have to be a member and they're dropping that requirement, controversial in some circles. Afbf, like I said, american Farm Bureau Federation has voted to get rid of Illinois. I think half the country would agree to getting rid of Illinois. Wouldn't be the worst thing in the world Our government's kind of kooky but I don't like being told that I have to be a member of anything. I don't like being told that I have to be a member of anything. It's, in my opinion, for what it's worth, not that anybody's asked. In my opinion, being a member of an organization that you don't agree with don't have any impact and you're just giving them money because they're requiring you to Is ridiculous. It is, you know. I think it brings to mind the biggest one I can think of.

Speaker 1: 3:30

The most glaringly obvious, in my opinion, is the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the NPR. I have never now don't? I'm going to say this right up front. If you're a fan of NPR and you're a fan of Corporation for Public Broadcasting, I understand. I like a lot of their programming. I have seen a lot of it. I love some of their stuff. Heck Car Talk was an NPR program for years, one of my favorites, but that can be better done in the private sector. And the thing that really gets me about the NPR thing and you'll see in a second why I think it correlates to the IFB deal is NPR produces a news program, great commentators great. I mean. They do a good job with it on the production side. It's a good sound. I like it, I like the look, I like all of that stuff.

Speaker 1: 4:24

But what I don't like is they have a decided I mean almost anybody say they have a decided political viewpoint and their newscasts, in my humble opinion, try to sway you to their viewpoint. And I think that's fine. I think that in the free market that you should be able to do that. You have the freedom to do those things. Where I disagree with it is I don't want you to try to sway my opinion with my tax dollars. I want you to give me the unbiased news, provide opinions on both sides and allow me to make a decision. I'm not the most intelligent guy in the world, but I want to weigh what's being done, opinions on both sides. I want to weigh that against my life experience and my experience as a human being and decide for myself. That's not what goes on. If you want to do that, do it with your money. Don't do that with my money.

Speaker 1: 5:38

The country is forcing everybody to be a member, and I say forcing. It was a requirement to. If you were going to be insured by country companies, you had to be a member of the Illinois Farm Bureau and they're dropping that requirement. I think that's great. If the Illinois Farm Bureau provides value to farmers, we'll be willing to pay for it. But you have to show that you provide value and that's how the free market works. So you know I'm not a fan of that. I side with country and probably a rare time you're ever going to hear me side with an insurance company. But we're insured by them. I've always had pretty good luck with them. You know I don't like being forced into a decision, being forced to be a member. Maybe I'm wrong. I mean, if you think I'm wrong, let me know in the comments. Let's talk about it. But it's sort of like our tax dollars go into some of these. And I brought up NPR just because I was reading an article about it and I have a decided opinion on it, obviously.

Speaker 1: 6:42

But this new Doge deal going on, with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy going to head Doge for the incoming president-elect, trump. It's an outside agency. And I say it's an outside agency. It's not even an agency. It is not federally funded. And the cool thing about it that I like is there's an expiration date. It's set to close down July 4th 2026. I'm sure that there was a plan to this, but country's 250th birthday.

Speaker 1: 7:21

I hope that what comes out of this is we expose a lot of the waste in our government and hopefully we can get that the waste and corruption in our government. I mean, we all assume it's there. I mean, you know 500 and some million dollars to study the difference between country frogs and city frogs. What was it? There was a seven. I forget how much it was, but there was hundreds of thousands of dollars spent to determine whether different types of fish increased their sexual activity. On cocaine. Okay, wasn't even in America, they did this in a foreign country. What was it? I mean the stuff that we're finding out, that we, the people, have been paying for it. It's just ridiculous. I just I think it's. You know, if it wasn't so horrible, I would you know I'd probably be crying about it. But you know, you just got to laugh at it and hope, and the hope is they bring a lot of this stuff to light.

Speaker 1: 8:27

Hopefully change happens and hopefully it is a, you know, a change, change that can unify us as a country and unify us as people. But in change, I think that we have to be a little cognizant of changing too much, of changing too much. So you know the reason I say that is if you look at our society over the past I don't know, let's take 50 years and you align it with kind of the two, you know, sort of seemingly opposing ideologies of liberal, you know, liberal, and conservative, and we have this pendulum that swings too far conservative, too far liberal. And what we need in my again, in my humble opinion, is centrists, people who can compromise, because in a country, in a political environment as complex as the United States of America, there has to be compromise. There just does. I mean, you know the the idea of winner take all and that type of a mentality. That type of a mentality it's great, it's great on the football field, but we have to be able to compromise to get things done. And hopefully we compromise. And I'm going to say this, I'm going to say a word that I politicians can take the will of the people, learn to compromise, to get things done. And with that, there's going to be a lot of change going on.

Speaker 1: 10:10

I think the incoming administration a lot of radical things happening and I think we need to be prepared for change. I think we need to be prepared for some glass getting broken too. I mean this you know, with change on this massive of a scale, there's going to be some bumps in the road, but right now I think I saw the stat the other day that the United States is $36.5 trillion in debt. It's like $200,000 for every taxpayer in debt. The interest payment on the debt alone is over a trillion dollars a year out of a 6.5, 6.8 trillion dollar budget. That's more than the spending on the Defense Department, on our national defense, you know, and I don't want this podcast to get political. That's not my point. I national defense, you know, and I don't want this podcast to get political. That's not my point. I think that you know. The point in this is that there is going to be a lot of change and with that change, bad things can happen.

Speaker 1: 11:19

But there's also opportunity and when we need to be cognizant and need to stay vigilant watching this change happen and look actively, be searching for how it's going to impact our business and our businesses as farmers. I mean, right now grain prices are really low. Corn last time I looked it was like four and change. Soybeans were nine and change I think Wheat was five or six. I mean they're not great prices. Our goods coming into their country. We're going to tax their goods coming into our country until they play by the same rules and they reduce the tariffs on goods coming from not just China. There are others but they're the biggest and the most. You know they get the most coverage.

Speaker 1: 12:29

But I think we as farmers need to be looking and say, hey, is this time to diversify our operation? Or do we think these changes are going to be positive for green prices and we're going to double down? Or we're going to stay pretty conservative and make sure we've got plenty of capital or make sure we have plenty of assets. You know those are things that we as farmers have to be thinking about through this whole thing. I mean, if you're a large grain farmer, maybe you're not as agile in changing your crops and changing all of that, but if you're a small producer, you know what you can. You know there's going to be some opportunities to like RFK set to take over the provided he can get confirmed set to take over health and human services, which is the, you know, among other things, food and drug administration, centers for Disease Control and the National Institute of Health, I believe, are the three biggies that's going to have an impact on food. We grow food with that we have to.

Speaker 1: 13:34

You know, if there's going to be some sort of a change, should we be looking at what food is going to be desirable for going to? If they're going to try to force Americans and at this point I think you're going to have to force Americans to eat healthy I like a bag of chips as much as the next guy, but maybe I should eat a carrot or two, but let's not go crazy but there's going to have to be some radical changes if we're going to change some of the childhood obesity, if we're going to change some of these chronic diseases. I think there is an opportunity to do that, but it's not going to be without its pain points for the consumer, the American people, or us, the farmers. So what are the steps? You know what are, what are the steps we go through, how do we do that and that's where we have to stay vigilant, be looking for, you know, be looking for these opportunities, you know, I think going back and reading, listening to the things RFK has said in the past, I don't know that they're. Listening to the things RFK has said in the past? I don't know that they're. You know, I don't know what to think. I read all of it. You try to think what of its political maneuvering and what of it is. You know, really the way he believes, but set to be a man with a lot of power to change some obvious problems in our country. So, you know, I got to keep an eye on that.

Speaker 1: 14:58

I don't know who has been proposed as the Secretary of Agriculture. I did see a stat the other day that kind of shocked me. So the USDA, the US Department, united States Department of Agriculture Department, united States Department of Agriculture Annual budget is half a trillion dollars. Of that half a trillion dollars, I think 90 or 95, 90% of that money is for the SNAP program, food stamps, it's supplemental nutrition and whatever 90 plus percent of that budget goes to and I might be wrong, but it's high, it's 80, 90, something like that you know goes to that program, the USDA handling that. I know I understand why, how it could get there, but in today's world probably, you know, does that need to be there? I don't know. I mean, hopefully people smarter than me are thinking about this because that seems like there could be a better place for that, for that, the administration of that, that wouldn't be burdensome. I mean, I saw the USDA again.

Speaker 1: 16:17

Farming stuff I mean it's 10% of what they do is directly has direct impact on farmers. The other part is basically a state benefit program Huge budget, huge budget. Very little of that goes to farmers. You know, I don't know that. I've seen it.

Speaker 1: 16:43

You know, when you look at these programs and I think part of what is going on and if you follow the way Elon Musk has run a lot of his businesses in the past, when he took over Twitter and changed it to X, I think what he did on the outside looks very noble. I mean the idea of stopping the bots, the foreign actors, foreign governments who are trying to sway American public opinion by with fake posts, fake news, fake. You know, all of these things from a Social engineering point of view is fascinating, how they're doing it, why they're doing it. Maybe not so good, but I applaud Elon Musk's attempt to rein that in by charging a little subscription fee if you want to get rid of a lot of that stuff, because if you're making millions of posts and you have to set up a new account for all of these posts, well it could. It probably gets more than they want to spend. So it just by the financial side, would get rid of a lot of it. But again, I applaud him.

Speaker 1: 17:50

But if you look at the way he has has run his businesses very efficient, very, very efficient. Twitter was 7,400 employees I think it was 7,500, something like that Took it down to 3,000 and rebranded it. Didn't see much of a hiccup. So you know, when you look at his track record he's looking for, in my opinion again, I'm an outsider here but when you look at, when you read about it, he's looking for these efficiencies. So if you are USDA and 90, high 90% of your work is administering what's basically a health and human service, a food stamp program, snap, if you're administering that program and that's your budget, well the American people think that you know. Oh man, usda has $450 billion going to help farmers Yay, farmers, no, not. What happens?

Speaker 1: 19:00

So realigning some of it is not going to be cutting out agency, it's going to be realigning tasks or administration of things to streamline that process. We have a lot of bloat. Have you ever heard of a government agency that got created and then went away? Meant agency that got created and then went away? I haven't. I've never heard of one. Maybe they exist. They're sort of like unicorns. But that idea of realigning and reshaping how the agencies run and what tasks they're doing seems like a pretty natural fit to gain some efficiencies.

Speaker 1: 19:40

And a guy like you know, elon Musk, if you look at his history of running businesses, he has always been very, very efficient. Line those, those businesses, because efficiency for him as a capitalist means he makes more money. We as a country need to spend less money. We're on a trajectory to bankruptcy. I mean we're. We're getting there. 36.5 trillion dollars, I think, is the number I saw for our, our deficit. I want to say I think the calculation is well, it's like every, it's like $250,000 for every voting American, how much you owe just for the. You know the privilege of living here, and that doesn't include the stuff we have to borrow this year. We have to pay money to service that debt and the payment to service the debt is huge. It's bigger than the Pentagon's budget.

Speaker 1: 20:45

This is a time of a lot of uncertainty. I read, I'd say, a year ago. This time I probably read, you know, stayed up with the news, maybe an hour a week. And now, just because I think for our business, our farm, I'm reading and diving into things, probably half an hour to an hour a day, half an hour to an hour a day because I want to gain some insight into things that are going to happen or things that I think will happen, so that I can be better prepared, so that our businesses, our farm, can be better prepared for these changes. And I want to see those opportunities because when they come, because in chaos there's opportunity. And I think for the next while we're going to have some chaos, stay vigilant on the information, Stay vigilant on these things.

Speaker 1: 21:42

I think there's going to be a lot of shakeup and you're going to see a lot of misleading things being said in the press, in the public space, by so-called influencers. I don't know much about some of the influencers, but I think there's a lot of things that are going to be said in the media over the coming months and year that we need to take with a grain of salt and dig out our own information. What we believe is truth, don't accept. I think you are doing yourself and doing those around you a disservice if you accept these things that we see once as truth Without looking into it a little bit further.

Speaker 1: 22:24

Be cognizant of all of this change going on. I'm going to try to bring it to you. So follow the podcast, because I'm going to try to bring this to you. When I see these things happening, I'm going to try to highlight them here on the podcast so we can at least be Talking about it. Have conversations with those people that we respect. So, with that said, you have a blessed day. I'm going to get out of here. Good luck and God bless.