Hannah Borg; Returning to the farm, young farmer on rural youth culture.

About this episode

Hannah Borg, a 24-year-old sixth-generation farmer from Wakefield, Nebraska, joined Vance to discuss her family's unconventional pivot from a four-family cattle-and-crop operation into commercial poultry production — specifically as "pullet growers" supplying the breeder-hen supply chain that ultimately produces Costco's rotisserie chickens. She walks through the full chicken-to-Costco supply chain in granular detail (day-old chicks from an Oklahoma breeding barn, 21 weeks of pullet-raising, a Fremont, Nebraska hatchery, broiler barns, processing), using it to illustrate both the industrial precision required (tight weight/consistency parameters so every rotisserie chicken tastes and behaves the same) and the biosecurity stakes (a half-million dollars of birds at risk, avian flu memories from her childhood). A large portion of the conversation is a candid meditation on multigenerational family-business dynamics — four families, three living generations, an 87-year-old grandmother still involved day-to-day, the "beautiful and chaotic" negotiation of working with your father as your boss, and how emotional heat during tasks like cattle-working requires active communication repair. Borg pushes back on Vance's assumption that young return-to-the-farm stories are rare, arguing she's surrounded by peers fighting to get back home, and delivers an extended, nuanced critique of "sustainability" and "organic" as marketing-driven, geographically blind terms that erase the specificity of soil, climate, and 35-year no-till practices already in place on her farm. She reflects candidly on her own susceptibility to one-sided documentary narratives (a commercial-fishing film that briefly turned her against fish despite her own frustration with inaccurate farming documentaries), echoing Vance's Dunning-Kruger framing of confidence collapsing as expertise deepens. The conversation closes with a warm, unguarded account of rural young-adult social life — bars, county fairs, small-town concerts, a trustees board, a heritage-photography side project inspired by her grandmother's old photo albums — that pushes back gently on urban assumptions of rural isolation or deprivation.

“My dad made a comment, he's like, I'm not planting these trees, this grove, for me, I'm planting this for you guys... I'm honoring our ancestors... but also working towards the future.”

“I don't wanna be called a consumer because I'm your customer... when I'm talking about the city people, they are our customers. They consume our product, but they are the customers walking into the store making a decision.”

“That starts with a good vaccination program, that starts with a good feeding program, a good lighting program, a good ventilation program... you think differently when you're raising chickens [versus] raising cattle.”

Key moments

• ~10-14%: Full explanation of the Costco rotisserie chicken supply chain — pullet growers, breeder barns, Fremont hatchery, broiler barns, processing — and the six-pound weight-consistency target required for that $5 rotisserie chicken.
• ~20-26%: Multigenerational family-business dynamics — four families, 135 years of farming, grandfather's intentional succession communication, and her father's tree-planting "I'm planting this for you guys" moment.
• ~33-36%: Candid account of family communication breakdowns during high-stress cattle work, and her father's "let's just sell the farm" venting versus what he actually means.
• ~49-53%: Critique of "sustainability" as marketing religion — her family's 35-year no-till practice already meeting standards companies now market as innovation, and cover crops' real tradeoffs (soil moisture competition in dry years).
• ~64-67%: Documentary self-critique — briefly swayed against eating fish by a one-sided commercial-fishing documentary despite her own frustration with inaccurate farming documentaries; ties into Vance's Dunning-Kruger framing.
• ~85-88%: Rejection of the word "consumer" in favor of "customer" — a reframing of the farmer/public relationship as mutual dependence rather than one-way education.
• ~92-98%: Rural social-life account — bars, county fairs, small-town concerts, a heritage-photography project inspired by her grandmother's photo albums, pushing back on assumptions of rural deprivation.

Notable quotes

“We have a half million dollars worth of birds at our place... disease walks in on two feet.”

“In the religion of sustainability, they talk like farmers are starting at zero... we've been no tilling our ground for 35 years.”

“I watched a documentary on commercial fishing... I don't even like fish, but I'm not going to eat any more of it... come on Hannah, be better than this.”

“I don't wanna be called a consumer because I'm your customer... I'm paying that subscription fee, I don't wanna be educated.”