ATR: John Deere Layoffs, More Farmer Payoffs with @HurstBlake

About this episode

Blake Hurst, a third-generation Missouri corn/soybean/greenhouse farmer and former decade-long Missouri Farm Bureau president, delivers one of the sharpest, most economically rigorous guest performances in the ATR catalog. He systematically dismantles tariff-funded farm aid as circular ("get rid of the middleman, sell our soybeans to China directly"), pushes back on ethanol boosterism with real numbers, and delivers a widely-praised Peter Thiel Paradox: that the US may already have too much farmland in production relative to demand, given a $3.90 corn price below total cost of production and a possible approaching peak in global food demand (citing GLP-1 drugs' effect on consumption). Vance awards it a 9.2 — one of the highest on-air ratings given in the series. The Bitcoin segment features unusually substantive pushback: Hurst calls Bitcoin a bubble he wouldn't risk his kids' inheritance on, while expressing more interest in stablecoins for cross-border payments.

Key moments

• Circular-logic take-down of tariff-funded farm aid, using a "get rid of the middleman" framing (~22-24%).
• Extended real-numbers rebuttal of the "great trade deals" tariff rationale, spanning seven years with no deals to show (~26-30%).
• Detailed defense of ethanol as a strategic food-reserve hedge, with hard numbers on corn-to-ethanol economics (~44-50%).
• H-2A labor economics segment: Hurst's greenhouse crew no-show on Mother's Day led to reliance on expensive legal H-2A labor — direct pushback against "they're taking American jobs" framing (~65-70%).
• Substantive Bitcoin-vs-stablecoin debate where Hurst articulates a coherent bear case (volatility disqualifies it as a store of value for cross-border commerce) that Vance doesn't fully rebut (~57-65%).