Government Efficiency Impact on Agriculture

Speaker 1 0:00

Welcome to Just Say hey , the podcast podcast where we talk about the things that matter to small farms .

Speaker 1 0:04

Have you been paying attention to the DOJ , the Department of Government Efficiency ? Well , you know you read a lot about and you're reading good and bad from both sides of the aisle . No matter which way you align , left or right , I don't think it matters . I'm not sure there's a lot to be against in its concept . Now , you might disagree with some of their decisions and some of what they're going to release . Now that should be open and there should be a healthy public debate on this . But from its concept , it's not funded by taxpayer dollars . It has a definitive expiration date . They have said that this will expire . This Department of Government Efficiency will expire on July 4th 2026 .

Speaker 1 0:48

Oddly enough or oddly enough , coincidentally or not coincidentally 250th anniversary of our country waste , fraud and abuse . It's not the first of its kind . There have been several of these commissions or panels or advisory organizations over the years . There are several nonprofit organizations that do the same thing . I think they're just putting a very public face on it and , from what I understand , all they are doing , all they can do . They have no governmental power . They can just make recommendations to the executive and legislative branches of government , as well as making it public the waste and fraud and abuse that they see in their investigations . So , with that said , they are going to take big swings at releasing information , trying to look for inefficiencies .

Speaker 1 1:40

And I want to talk about what this is going to mean , or what this could potentially mean , for guys like us out in the field farming . What does this mean for the United States Department of Agriculture ? And I think what we're going to see , at least in my opinion . I think you're going to see at least attempts to realign certain agencies within the USDA . I think you're going to see some budgetary shifts . I also think that there's going to be some big changes for the agricultural community , some of them good , some of them not so much . Let's get into it .

Speaker 1 2:18

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 , All right . So I think when you look at the United States , when the USDA's budget I think that's a good place to start here I mean when you look at their budget for the fiscal year of 2024 was $228 billion . Well , you know , that sounds like a whole heck of a lot of money and it is . But of that $228 billion and this is coming from the USDA's website , this is not , you know , not , this comes right from them that 71% of that budget no-transcript . So 71% . So of that $228 billion , $162 billion is spent on SNAP , the supplemental nutrition .

Speaker 1 3:30

I think that when the first recommendations regarding the USDA come out , that one of the things they'll do is they'll try to realign this agency . They'll make the recommendation . This agency doesn't need to be under agriculture . This is probably a health and human services , because it feeds SNAP . If you're not familiar with what it is , it's basically the old food stamps program . You get a , I guess I mean , I don't know but you get a card and they put money on this card that you can go buy approved foods and supplies with , anyway . So 162 billion gets spent on this program and that's an approximate number . That's 71% of $228 billion . So , of that $228 billion , only $66 billion gets spent on all the other programs in agriculture . So you know , I think they're going to say this is better . You know , we've got a whole administration for making sure this stuff gets put out . We already have this in several of the health and human services departments , so I wouldn't be surprised if they try to realign that agency , which , for the farmer , you know , I think that my personal opinion , that's a good thing because it allows the USDA to focus on , you know , what it's supposed to , which is agriculture .

Speaker 1 4:44

Now , part of that budget is forestry . 5% of the USDA budget is spent on forestry , 13% is on conservation and commodity , so that's $29 billion , almost $30 billion , and then other expenses are 12% , so there's $12.7 billion or $27.4 billion spent on other things like rural development , research . I mean , I can read some of them . I guess you can guess at what they do , but I'm not even sure what they do . So here's a list of the agencies You've got the Agricultural Marketing Service , the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service service , the animal and plant health inspection service , the agricultural research service , economic research service , foreign agricultural service , food and nutrition service , which is probably I would assume that the SNAP program is under that food and nutrition service . Fpac business center no idea . The forest service , the Farm Service Agency we deal with them . Now most communities and counties and agricultural places have an FSA office . The National Institute of Food and Agriculture , the National Resources Conservation Service , the Rural Business Cooperative Service , the Rural Development , rural Housing Service , risk Management Agency and the Rural Utility Service . That's an awful lot to put under . You know one agency and I would think that when you see these guys and these people going through Doge and looking for inefficiencies , I think you're going to find where they're going to see , and I'm talking specifically about the USDA , one department in the government and all these agencies fall under there .

Speaker 1 7:02

Part of the conversation that has been being that has been had is about the bloat in the bureaucracy and if you farm and you have to report your acreage to the FSA , you probably see it . And when you go into that office , I mean our local office . Great people , I mean really good people . I like dealing with them . They're nice , they're friendly , but at the end of the day I'm not their customer . The bureaucracy has become so bloated that I am not their customer . Their customer is their boss and the bureaucracy . When I ask them questions , they're really trying to answer their problem , which is filling out the paperwork properly to keep the bureaucracy cranking , not solve real world problems . And that is no fault of the local guys in the office . That is the fault of poor leadership , poor management at the higher levels of the FSA , of the FSA . And they can like that I say this or they can not like what I'm saying , but it's absolute truth . When you walk into that office you are not the customer . I mean that's just poor leadership . But we deal with them and they're good folks . I mean they really are .

Speaker 1 8:21

The guys in our local office anyway have dealt with two counties office . We farm in two different counties . Fantastic people , I mean just good , good , family people . They , they're part of the community , you know . But when you deal with the other agencies , if you ever have to and I've only had of this whole list of agencies , I've never had to the only two I've dealt with are the food , uh , the farm service agency and , uh , we had a couple of meetings with the NRCS guys and and everybody gets all up in arms about conservation . If you're a farmer , we want to be conservationists , we really do . I mean I want this ground to be productive and healthy and , you know , grow crops for decades to come . I don't want to damage our water supply , I don't want to damage the ground . Now , you know an NRCS is . I mean , they're the . You know , if you read off , they're the National Natural Resources Conservation Service .

Speaker 1 9:12

You want to talk about a bloated bureaucracy that really does not care about the local farmer ? Go talk to those guys once . And I'm the local people , good people , good people . The bureaucracy is so overburdensome that you can't get anything done . I mean , we talked to them about building a building , a storage building , and to get a building built , which you know in the commercial market , if I walked out and got a contractor , you're talking about three weeks to get it . You know , get a site prep and maybe another , oh , couple of months to do construction and finish work and everything like that . So you know , let's say , on the outside , you're six months on the outside to deal with them .

Speaker 1 9:58

You're talking about a multi-year project to build a simple hay storage barn . I mean , or you know , we had talked to them once about , I think we had had initial discussions about a hay storage barn and another one about , oh , cattle , we had talked about doing a covered cattle barn and it was , I mean , insane regulations . Some of them , and I'm sure some of those regulations are good . I really am . I mean , I'm not completely against regulations because people will take advantage and do stupid things , things and we want it , we do . If you've read the history of the dust bowl , the market and farmers , through bad farming techniques and things like that , created the dust bowl . I mean it was a horrible event , felt all across the country .

Speaker 1 10:54

But there's a fine line between protecting ourselves and making the bureaucracy so cumbersome that nothing gets done and nothing gets done at a huge expense , not only the expense to the benefits to the economy that small farms could provide , but the fact that nothing got done and we , the people , paid a ton of money for nothing to get done . So you know , I think you're going to see , I would think that natural places to look would be things like streamlining and again , fsa tiny portion dealing with farmers , less than 1% of the USDA budget . I mean the Rural Utility Service don't we have a Department of Energy ? Rural Housing Service don't we have a Department of Housing ? Rural Development ? A lot of these things that I'm seeing here are duplicated other places within departments .

Speaker 1 12:01

So when you have an agency , you have the staff of somebody has to be the head of the agency and then you have to have management all the way down to where you get to the people that actually do the work . I've been involved in businesses before where we have bloated management structures , you know , and not enough people actually doing the work , and that's a bad place to be , because the salaries , the overhead , all of those things become almost unmanageable . So what do you do in business ? Well , you cut down the management structure and focus on the people doing the work , because they're the people that are making the company money In the government . What do you do ? Well , we need more people to put more money at it . I mean , you know I think I talked about it a couple of weeks ago on a podcast was the USDA office has enough room for 7,500 employees to be there on a daily basis , but there's only four to 500 that actually work there .

Speaker 1 13:08

So what do we do with all that real estate ? What do we do with the building maintenance , with the heating and cooling and all of these things that happen ? And I know that in the grand scope of having a $36.5 trillion debt and a budget that we have to borrow money to pay for stuff , I know running the air conditioner in a building is small potatoes big sweeping changes we do , but actually being able to get big , sweeping changes done when everybody's infighting and the politicians can't agree on anything . Add your pennies up . They eventually get to dollars . New dollars get to . You know , we have to start somewhere . We have to start cutting this budget and we have to make .

Speaker 1 13:59

In my opinion , having less regulations for businesses to follow makes it easier . I mean , if I talked to a guy the other day who is looking to start a small food business and you know and I'll say we have , we have . The regulations on starting a food business are insane . They are so far out of the realm of most people's ability to start that they don't even try . Yet we have a very I mean , you see people talking about it all the time . The food products in this country are not good for us , but our bureaucracy has made it so only the big guys can get into the food business . Now you're going to say , oh well , you can start a cottage industry . Okay , well , when you start a cottage industry , at some point you move beyond . Hopefully , your business grows and you move beyond the cottage size , at which point you have not made enough money to pay to overcome the regulatory state . So we need to do something to change the regulations and the rules to allow small business to grow , to encourage competition , to encourage people to produce food that's good for us and tastes good and is economically and ecologically friendly . The market will do that . Let small businesses loose and try to do that when you have .

Speaker 1 15:34

You know this guy I was talking to a good friend of mine . He wants to start this and it's a good thing and you know his products are really good . I mean , realistically , he's going to fight so much red tape if he ever wants to take this beyond just being , you know , a hobby that makes a little bit of money for him to grow that into a business . The regulatory state has just become . I mean , you can't tackle it as an individual guy . Then you have to go get investors and then you have , you know , by the time you get through you can't do it and I feel for those people because I've been one of them . You know you can't get past the regulations to get anything done , you know . So we get back into this , into that regulatory state .

Speaker 1 16:18

And we talked about when I'm , in the beginning , talked about the Supreme Court decisions that I think are impactful In the sense that so there was . One was Virginia versus the EPA and the other was the Chevron deference ruling . And the Chevron deference ruling got I think it it was June of this year and Virginia versus the EPA . What it basically said was , in my understanding , that bureaucratic rules , so rules to support the bureaucracy of an agency don't get treated as law . You can't assume that they are law and the bureaucracy can't enforce them as law . I mean , I think , the actual you know the way that they talk about it if you look at the Chevron deferences and this is a summary the Chevron doctrine or Chevron deference was a legal precedent that required courts to defer to federal agency interpretations of vague statutes . So the Supreme Court overturned the Chevron Deference rule and said that now the judge in any given case can make the interpretation of the statute , that the EPA doesn't get to determine the law just because of the way they interpret it .

Regulatory Changes Impacting Small Farmers

Speaker 1 17:47

And I think it provides a for small business . It opens up a lot of opportunities and I'm not talking about , you know , let's go kill the environment , that is not it and have even a chance of success because they can't out out regulate or , you know , out form it . They can't fill out all the forms to deal with the regulations . So regulations are supposed to be there to protect we the people , protect the environment , protect all of these , you know , protect us as a society . What they end up doing is regulating out , making it impossible for the small guy to compete with the large megacorporations , which then you start to have monopolies or companies coming close to monopoly status , to monopoly status . Go look at the food industry and look at the brands , look at whatever brand of food you want to , and you can probably trace it back to four or maybe five major food conglomerates . And what I think these rulings will hopefully do is open the playing field up , let the little guy compete with these big guys and hopefully we end up with better products , better for us products . So , as farmers , what is this going to mean ?

Speaker 1 19:18

So you know , I'm always a big fan of , you know , people ask me my stance on government and I am a liberty guy . I don't mean I'm a wacko hiding out in the woods with , you know , a bunch of pinto beans . I think the government should be absolutely as small as possible and that we should have more liberty . And it's always the tradeoff safety versus freedom , versus freedom , and I will almost always come down on the side of freedom . You know , should we be safe as a people or should we be free ? And I will almost always come down on being free and my responsibility to provide safety through good decisions , through , you know , those type of you know , through good decisions and being aware and being up , you know , trying to keep you know , make sure my information is coming from good places and all of these things .

Speaker 1 20:14

But you know , when we look at the regulatory state , it has become problematic and I think we as farmers , those of us who raise a crop , who that is not a commodity crop . Now , I want to be clear about that . You know there is , there are commodity crops corn , soybeans , wheat , you know any of the grains like that . There are commodities , which means they're . The market sets a price for them . You want to go sell corn ? You call there's a , there's a Chicago board of trade , you can . You know , you look up , you might get a little bit more here or there , depending on transportation and other things like that , but it's a commodity . The market goes up and goes down .

Speaker 1 21:00

For those of us in the farming community who produce a crop that is not a commodity , we have to go out and sell it . There's not a guaranteed market . There is not , and a commodity isn't 100% guaranteed market , but it's . You know , if you have corn , you can sell it . If you are selling a product that is not a commodity crop , you have much more impetus . You've got to be a salesman , you have to be able to market , you have to be able to do these things and I think , looking at the regulatory changes , or the potential for regulatory changes , and between now and the time we actually start seeing this stuff happen , I think you're going to hear me say the word potential , because we don't know .

Speaker 1 21:45

We don't know what's coming . We can just look at what we see in the news and look at what we see at different media sources and look at the . You know the things that are being said by these people who are going to be , you know , putting forth their ideas for reduction . Elon Musk change companies , buy companies and change their operating . So you know you get a feel for the types of things that he's going to set forth . He's going to say look , we've got a lot of duplicate overhead here . We've got a lot of duplicated costs . We've got duplicated jobs . A lot of this can be refined .

Speaker 1 22:31

Move , agencies merge and you have to deal within what's legal . So you can't just shut an agency down because agency was created by Congress . It probably has to be removed by an act of Congress and that will be tough . But the idea of getting rid of a lot of unnecessary regulations will decrease the power of these regulatory agencies and the biggest part is decrease the complexity and the I'm looking for the word the cumbersomeness , the , you know , unencumber people to follow the guidelines . Hey , we don't want to pour poison into the water stream . That's pretty obvious . We all want to drink water . So if we do that , that's bad , you know . Allow people to use some good judgment , but also allow people and small businesses to make strides in competition against major food conglomerates .

Speaker 1 23:32

I think if you look at , you know who knows whether he gets approved or not RFK Jr . If you know if he gets approved as the secretary of HHS , the , you know , I think he's going to look at a lot of these things , trying to get healthier foods in the hands of the average American . You know , can we buy less processed foods ? Less processed , you know , less processed foods is going to be better for us . I mean , I think you look at the new secretary of agriculture , the woman .

Speaker 1 24:08

I think her name is Brooke . I should have her name on the top of my head Brooke Rollins , that's what I thought it was From what I've read about her . She does not have a strong agricultural background . What she does have is a strong financial and organizational background , and I think the reason he's asked for her to be put in place and I say he , president-elect Trump , the reason I believe he's put somebody like that in the USDA is to root out some of the large food conglomerates from having power in that organization , having power in that organization . Look at some of the large companies from having as much power and look at , you know , have somebody who's going to be receptive to big , sweeping changes in the agencies .

Speaker 1 24:58

So , you know , I think that's why we're seeing all of these moves and there's a , there is a sense in the people I talk to on a daily basis that we need change . I think that goes across party lines . I don't know anybody that says we need more government and you know I haven't met anybody that says , you know , I think the federal government should be bigger . I just don't see that . I don't see that . Maybe I just run in the wrong circles .

Speaker 1 25:34

But I think keeping an eye on this is really important for us as farmers , because we are in a very regulated industry and it's one of the rare regulated industries where small guys still have to work a lot . You know , we farm , we have things we have to do . We have to certify our acres every year , we have to go in , and you know there's hoops we have to jump through . And keeping an eye on what's going on with these potential changes is important because they have the opportunity to , or they have . You know , there's the chance that these changes could provide big opportunity to small farmers . Or what's worse is that they're going to provide big changes that we're not prepared to deal with . So we have to stay vigilant in making sure we're reading a lot , we're talking to people . We're , you know , figuring out what the truth is coming out , which is getting harder and harder to do .

Small Farmer Podcast Wrap-Up

Speaker 1 26:37

So anyway , I hope you enjoyed this podcast . There's a lot to unpack here and it is a very complicated subject , and staying focused on what's important to the small farmers is well , it's important . So with that that , I'll let you go . Y'all have a wonderful rest of your week . I apologize for not getting the podcast up last week , um got a bunch of a bunch of people asking why I didn't do it . It was thank , it was a long thanksgiving day , thanksgiving weekend , and I just got lazy after a hard season . I just took the day off . So anyway , y'all have a blessed day .