Please join our friends at Arcadia Books for an important and enlightening conversation about the state of farming in today's world. Brian Reisinger (Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer) and Daniel Smith (Ancestral and Poems from the Winter House) will discuss their shared experience of growing up on multi-generational farms and their current work with bringing awareness to the challenges facing the farming industry today.
From Brian's book:
The hidden history of an economic and cultural catastrophe that is threatening our very food supply—the disappearance of the American farmer. Taking on this story of heart and hardship, award-winning writer Brian Reisinger weaves forgotten eras of American history with his own family’s four-generation fight for survival in Midwestern farm country. Readers learn the truth about America’s most detrimental and unexplained socioeconomic crisis: How the family farms that feed us went from cutting a middle-class path through the Great Depression to barely making ends meet in modern America. Along the way, they’ll see what it truly takes to feed our country: accidents that can kill or maim; weather that blesses or threatens; resilience in the face of crushing economic crises, from inflation to COVID-19; and the tradition that presses down on each generation when you're not just fighting for your job, you're fighting for your heritage.
With newly analyzed data, sharp historical analysis, conversations with some of modern farming’s most notable champions and critics alike, honest debate, and personal storytelling, Reisinger reveals the roots of a problem with stakes as high as they come. A vulnerable food supply chain, soaring prices for American families, environmental and ecological dilemmas, the security of our farmland from foreign adversaries, farmer suicides, addictions, a deepening urban-rural divide, and more worries than ever about what’s for dinner. These are all becoming the hallmarks of a food system that has long stood as a modern miracle. Land Rich, Cash Poor offers the honest truth about these issues, and a candid look at what we can do about them—before it’s too late.
Brian Reisinger grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin and lives to tell the hidden stories of rural America. A columnist and consultant, Reisinger worked with his father from the time he could walk, before entering the worlds of business journalism and public policy. He has been published by USA Today, Newsweek, Yahoo News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/USA Today Network, PBS/Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Wisconsin Life,” The Daily Yonder, RealClearPolitics, The Hill, The Wisconsin State Journal, The Cap Times, Saving Country Music, and many other news, policy, outdoor, and cultural publications. Reisinger’s writing has won awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, first place in the Seven Hills Literary Contest, a Solas Award, and more. He lives with his wife and daughter, and serves as President & Chief Content Officer of Midwestern-based Platform Communications, splitting time between a small town in northern California and the family farm in southern Wisconsin. Land Rich, Cash Poor is his first book.
Daniel Smith is an accomplished poet, essayist, public speaker and agribusiness executive with a lifelong commitment to agriculture, the environment and rural communities. Smith operated his family’s dairy farm in northwestern Illinois for three decades, where with his wife, Cheryl, they raised their sons, Austin, Ryan and Levi. With the practicality of a farmer and the syntax of a poet, he has authored four books of poetry (Home Land, Fatherland, Ancestral, and Poems from the Winter House). His poems and essays have appeared nationwide in such publications as Narrative, Midwestern Gothic, Seems, Tundra, Midwest Quarterly, among others. Smith currently serves as President and CEO of Cooperative Network, and as a director of the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection. He formerly served as Administrator of the Division of Agricultural Development, where he directed the state’s domestic and international agricultural marketing programs. He is the former CEO of Midwestern BioAg, a national farm supply company. A graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, he and Cheryl live on a small farm in the Driftless Region of southwestern Wisconsin, where he writes, and together, they enjoy reading, hiking and their grandchildren.