'Land Rich, Cash Poor' uses one Sauk County farm to explore ag crisis

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Reading Brian Reisinger's "Land Rich, Cash Poor" (Skyhorse Publishing) fills me with admiration for the resilence of Wisconsin farmers while making me question their sanity.

Subtitled "My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer," Reisinger braids together the multigenerational saga of his family's farm in Sauk County with analysis of how economic forces and political decisions have affected American farmers over the past century (spoiler alert: mostly negatively). While the contour of the farms-in-crisis story will be familiar to many readers, "Land Rich, Cash Poor" fills in sobering and sometimes surprising details.

If you've complained about the post-COVID increase in food prices, spending some time with Reisinger's book will help you understand what and why you're bemoaning.

Reisinger is a regular opinion contributor to the Journal Sentinel's Ideas Lab. He's been a newspaper journalist and communications consultant. He's worked for former Sen. Lamar Alexander, Sen. Ron Johnson and former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, all Republicans. But his book makes it clear that farm problems and their solutions rarely fall neatly along standard liberal/conservative fault lines.

Reisinger will talk about his book with Mike Gousha during a launch event at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 20 at Milwaukee's Boswell Books.

One family's farm is a microcosm of changes The author's great-grandparents, Alois and Teresia Reisinger, came here separately from Bavaria in the years before World War I. They settled on a 180-acre plot in Sauk County in 1912; the dimensions of the Reisinger family farm would change over the coming century. Given the farm's size, location and topography, "they were destined for dairy farming," Reisinger writes.

"Land Rich, Cash Poor" reminds us not only how physically demanding farming is, but also how dangerous it can be, with harrowing accounts of falls and accidents to adults and children. As Reisinger describes the lives of ancestors, farming also can be isolating and lonely, especially for taciturn men who feel the emotional weight of this perilous occupation. A couple men in this story develop drinking problems, including the author.

In addition to daily anxieties of survival, farmers also worry about keeping the farm together for the next generation, and who will succeed them. The author, his parents' oldest child, might once have been seen as the expected successor. But he knows from early on that running the farm is not his calling. Brian Reisinger grapples with a few bales of guilt about this; this book and his advocacy work may be one way he resolves this internal conflict. In a contemporary plot twist, his sister Malia becomes the person who leads the farm into the future. The author applauds and supports her.

He often uses the Reisinger family farm and his ancestors' decisions as a microcosm for understanding the effects of generational events on American farmers: soil erosion, the stock market crash of 1929 and ensuing Great Depression, rural workforce decline in the 1940s, consolidation and specialization, the multi-vectored farm crisis of the 1980s (which would prompt Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp and Neil Young to launch Farm Aid), the 2008 recession and the trade wars of a few years ago, which led to a steep drop in American agricultural exports. Reisinger calls on a herd of economists and ag scientists to explicate the impact of these forces. The long thread running through these years, from the mid-'30s onward, is the decreasing number of smaller American farms.

To talk specifically about COVID-19, Reisinger points out that it shut down key links in the food supply chain, such as meatpackers, who work in close quarters. Food prices rose because supply was inhibited. Meanwhile, farmers couldn't sell much of their products because trucking and distributions links were broken — while farm costs for fertilizer and other needs soared to painful levels. Consolidation has led to fewer players in the food supply chain — and a lack of alternate pathways for food when one player is disrupted. Soberingly, Reisinger points out that COVID-19-type disruptions may not be as unique as some people assume, offering recent bird flu episodes as an example.

To oversimplify, and Reisinger might not cosign my statement here, the American political passion for broad, simple solutions and sharp turns in policy fits poorly with farming, which is inherently slow and local. For a farmer, any substantial change in operation or product requires big investment, human and financial, and puts the farm at risk.

Like any self-respecting Ideas Lab contributor, Reisinger concludes by talking about possible solutions. His ideas are nuanced, locally oriented and pro-diversification of product mix. Cedar Grove Cheese, which bought milk from his parents, is one of the successes he cites as an example of turning away from making commodity cheese to something more individual.

Reisinger's platform includes investing in research and development, especially in technology that can help smaller farms; remaking government policy to promote a fair marketplace and entrepreneurship; reorganizing farms around new market opportunities (Wisconsin's Master Cheesemaker Program gets a nod here); and revitalizing rural communities.

"The next step is finding ways to gear all of our food decision-making toward new opportunities for farmers," he writes.

Author event Reisinger will speak at 6:30 p.m. Aug. 20 at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., in conversation with Mike Gousha. Its a free event. Register at boswellbooks.com.

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