Trump Claims Credit for Beef Prices, SNAP Benefits Frozen, AWS Outage Hits Farms

JR Burdick [00:00:00] The Ag Tribes report is brought to you by Legacy Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are, so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guests, Darryl and Jill stamp on the Joy of filming their legacy interview.

Vance Crowe [00:00:16] What do you think you'll tell your kids about the experience?

JR Burdick [00:00:19] Oh, I'm gonna thank 'em a lot. I realize this is more for them and their kids and their kids than it is us, the grandkids, right? Don't know these stories. I can't wait to for us all to get together and see it. This went better than I thought it was gonna Time does go fast. So it's, what time is it? It's almost three

Vance Crowe [00:00:41] O'clock.

JR Burdick [00:00:41] No way. Yes. God, you talked so much. I know. Welcome to the Ag Tribes report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crowe. The report begins in 3, 2, 1. Let's begin.

Vance Crowe [00:01:03] Welcome to the Ag Tribes report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week I bring on a representative of one of the many ag tribes that make up US and Canadian agriculture. This week we have none other than the great JR Burdick, who longtime listeners of the podcast know I've had in my studio. And we had one of the most interesting conversations I've ever had with a farmer about the trials and tribulations, how to make it back from being, having a devastating loss. And really now, JR is a prominent figure in ag Twitter, talking about his thoughts on the Bible, on raising cows in the right way of bringing up raw milk. He is a become a good friend, and I am happy to welcome him onto the show. Welcome, Jr.

JR Burdick [00:01:48] Hey, Vance. Great to be with you. Looking forward to it.

Vance Crowe [00:01:51] So what have you been paying attention to lately?

JR Burdick [00:01:54] Oh, I've really been looking at financial markets. I've been looking at, especially the, the influx and the inflows of money into ai. I've been really interested in that and watching kind of, i, I I use ai. I think AI is, is here. I don't think it's a, you know, a conspiracy or anything, but the financing behind it is getting a little bit goofy. And I'm watching that and I'm thinking there's gonna be some hiccups through that because the circular accounting is going to come home to roost on this.

Vance Crowe [00:02:28] Yeah, I think now that you mention it, I have seen some posts on X of like who owns what and, and people having their minds kind of blown by this. I've just passed it by, but you think something to look at.

JR Burdick [00:02:39] Oh yeah. Well, Nvidia is 13% of the NASDAQ market right now. And you, you start to poke around in there and you see that they are the customer of their customers. And it's just this circular, I'll give you money, you give me money back, and where is the, where is the return in that? You know, and, and you kind of go, Hmm, this could be, this could be interesting. But all technology that has happened in, in humanity kind of started that way. You look at the railroads of the 1850s, 1860s, 1870s, that was kind of what was going on. And that led to the 1890s recessions that happened where they, they lost everything because they, you know, the circular accounting got back to 'em.

Vance Crowe [00:03:30] Well leave it to you to go look into railroads and how that can give us the future of ai. I love it. Well, we better get to the news today. We are going to be covering Trump's wild post that really riled up cattle ranchers about his impact on cattle prices or beef prices. We're also gonna talk about how the government shutdown is threatening snap benefits for millions starting on November 1st. We'll also look at how the AWS outage disrupted farmers during harvest. And we're gonna talk about how FSA offices are set to reopen to, in order to process $3 billion in farmer payments amid a government shutdown. We're also going to do the Bitcoin land price report with JR who knows an awful lot about Bitcoin. We're gonna do his Peter Thiel paradox to find out what he believes that nobody else does. And we're gonna talk about his worthy adversary, somebody that he respects, but strongly disagrees with him. We're gonna try and do that in just 30 minutes, so we better get started. First up, let's talk about Trump. Everybody saw this in a post on X yesterday. President Trump defended his tariff policies on foreign beef imports, claiming that they're, that the, the tariffs are the reason US cattle ranchers are thriving in the first time in decades, including a 50% tariff on Brazil. But he called on ranchers to lower their prices, emphasizing that consumers are a big factor in his thinking. This comes days after the USDA announced plans to quadruple Argentine beef imports to address a 14% jump in US retail prices.

Vance Crowe [00:05:04] The remarks sparked outrage from ranchers and industry leaders. The National Cattleman's Beef Association issued a statement on X saying they can't support Trump while he undercuts family farms with the potential hormone laced imports that threaten food safety and jobs. Ranchers like Brett Kenzie from South Dakota and Mark Holloway from Texas took to x calling for mandatory country of origin labeling and mocking the price fixing settlements. This brought up so much jr. What did you see and what do you think of Trump's approach to claiming the the cattle prices are his victory?

JR Burdick [00:05:41] Well, every politician is going to take anything good and claim, claim responsibility for it. So we have to, we have to stand back and go, well, that's politics. You know, I think, I think we have to have that. I remember in 1996, the first time that corn hit $6 a bushel, Al Gore was at the Farm Progress Show in Illinois, I think it was. And he was taking credit for that. And it was like horrible drought and horrible wet year and 93. It was just, we drew down all the stocks, but he was taking, you know, the Clinton administration got you farmers $6 a bushel. So, so I give, I give Trump a little bit of a pass on that. It's like they're gonna take, they're gonna take credit for good things and we have to admit that the price of beef is pretty good. But at the same time, I took a lot of offense to the tone that I took from that. You try not to read a lot into it, you know, every text message you get, you, you try to just take it at face value. But this one, I just couldn't, couldn't take it. It just the face value. And I, and I, I immediately went to, okay, I've never been able to set the price of any of my commodities. And he's sitting there going like, cattle prices gotta get the, get the price down. And we're all sitting there going like, well, we don't have any control over that. But then at the same time as the two gentlemen you mentioned also mentioned, I never saw a true social post from him about the cattle pricing fix, the, the lawsuit settlements that all of the big four packers are involved in right now.

JR Burdick [00:07:17] I'm like, Hey, if, if you wanna do something about the price of beef, you talk to those guys. They were obviously either holding down the price of beef given to ranchers, they're their live price, or they were, they were jacking it up and they were screwing the consumer on the other end. And I just want him to just say, Hey, I'll do fair posts across everybody and then it'd be nice if he would do these posts when the, when cattle trading isn't happening on the CME. So you see these huge swings in the, the cattle market and you'll limit down moves and limit up moves and it's, it's all over one guy's post. And, and to me that, that's my big thing is the guy's got too much power. He should not be able to move that price like that.

Vance Crowe [00:08:08] Yeah, I mean, he's the bully pulpits is really powerful and you gotta give him some credit. And actually, I didn't realize this until after his post about how much Brazilian imports had been impacted by the tariffs. You also have the Mexican new world screw worm that's keeping back those imports. But I saw a great chart on XI wish I have it right now, where the guy was showing when prices started going up and it was way before tariffs. This, this has been going on and it's because what every cattle rancher, everybody in ag knows is that we have the lowest cattle herd that we've had since the 1950s. Yeah. The prices going up because demand is skyrocketing. People are finally getting different nutritional information about the value of beef. The cattle herd is going down when prices were bad and people were trying to to survive, then all of a sudden prices go up and they're shipping everything heifers out to, to market. Now all of a sudden the herd's down, if you got supply up or you got supply down and demand up, you're gonna have higher prices. So it did seem like it was one of those areas where when you know a lot about it, you can see that trump's kind of being a blowhard here.

JR Burdick [00:09:16] Right. And the, the bad thing is it, it dampered the enthusiasm of the cattle rancher and the, the producer to keep cattle. 'cause we all remember 2015, we all remember the cow that stole Christmas in 2005, and you're gonna go out there and you're gonna bet your farm literally on next year's calf crop, how many cattle you're gonna put in your feedlot, all those things. And it doesn't matter how much insurance protection you buy, you get two or three 12, you know, truth, social posts like that, and all of a sudden all your equity is gone. And, and I don't think, I don't think that, I think that's the bigger issue is he's not understanding. You've got to encourage us to, to build this cattle herd. And that's a long-term investment. That's not gonna happen in six months, eight months or whatever. But we have to be sure, and young people especially have to know nobody's gonna cut the legs out from underneath me because all of a sudden I've got midterm elections coming and I've gotta get the price of beef down and you just have decimated everybody's financial sheets with a post.

Vance Crowe [00:10:28] Well, secretary Rollins was out there trying to clean this thing up today, you know, she was like, look at all he is done. We've opened up more ranch land than we ever have before. We've started offering loans for new and beginning ranchers. But I, you know, I was in a room full of farmers just yesterday, farmers and ranchers, and all of them said, golly gosh, that Trump, I wish he knew better. I still love him though. He's not losing any votes over this.

JR Burdick [00:10:54] Oh no, no. Because the, the rest of the issues are so important as well. You know, where else are you gonna go? And, and we do have to remember, I mean, a year ago at this time it was the Biden Harris administration. You know, we, we forget how fast this thing has changed and how depressed a lot of us were with just all the other things that potentially impact us. And we have to balance those two. But we also have to make our voice known and say, Hey, you know, shut the hell up. Well,

Vance Crowe [00:11:25] We could probably talk about this, the whole show, but a lot of other things are happening, including story number two, government shut down, threatened SNAP benefits for millions starting November 1st. You're the one that brought this to my attention. The US government shut down now and it's second week is set to, I think it's actually our third week it set to our, our third week to disrupt SNAP benefits for millions. Unless congress acts soon starting November 1st, new allotments won't be processed. EBT cards card reloads could freeze entirely leaving families without food amid already high grocery prices, states are sounding the alarm. Tennessee's Department of Human Services warns November benefits may not issue urging recipients to check local resources. Louisiana's governor office says, over 1 million residents will get nothing for November calling for state backups and advocacy groups like Food Research and Action Center estimate that 20 to 30% spike in hunger risk advising folks to stock up now and hit food banks. October payments should go through, but the clock's ticking on negotiations. What do you think, jr? Is he really gonna let SNAP benefits not go out to millions of people on November 1st?

JR Burdick [00:12:34] No, they, we still have a printer and we can still, we we, we, we seem to find the money and they're going to find the money, but they're using this as leverage to, you know, make one side or the other who, whichever side of the aisle you're on, you're ma using this to make the other side look bad, put pressure on 'em, Hey, you gotta do this by November 1st so that we can, you know, not have, you know, women and children be affected by this, this horrible calamity. And so I, I don't think that they're going to let SNAP benefits go unpaid. There will be some kind of a snap stop gap to make this happen. But I, I think we're missing an opportunity here. This is a great opportunity for states to jump up and say, this is why we should block grant those programs to the state so that instead of having one entity control 50 states people's worth of those, those citizens worth of their groceries, get it to the state, then each state can then take care of their own people. All the federal government has to do is say, you know, you've gotten, you know, $15 million

Vance Crowe [00:13:48] And never gonna happen, man, never gonna happen. I know because the government, they want that power, right? Absolutely. They want the ability to be able to wag, you know, millions of people into fear and to be able to, to generate that. But also they love it because they love the farm bill. And the farm bill being tied to SNAP benefits makes it so people will pay attention to AG in a different way and it is going to stay a national issue. There's just no chance they're gonna let that go. It's too much money.

JR Burdick [00:14:16] Oh, I absolutely agree with you. I just want somebody to stand up on principle and say, Hey, here's an excellent example of real worldwide, you know, life example of why we should do this and have it be local. But, but no, they're, they're just using this and, and more people know about the SNAP benefits and, and the, the issue that's there than they do about the price of beef. You know, that that's the, the whole tariffs on beef, all that stuff we get, we get siloed off and we look at that and we go, that's a big deal. But you gotta understand for most people it's, Hey, I'm not, I gotta get my EBT money. They do not care about the price of beef as much as they care about getting that SNAP benefit. And, and you look back, what was it, four months ago, I think Secretary Kennedy said that they were gonna eliminate the use of EBT for, for sodas,

Vance Crowe [00:15:11] Soda and those things. Yeah,

JR Burdick [00:15:12] Yeah. And you know, that was a big deal and people were really upset about that. So, so EBT payments, you're exactly right. Those SNAP benefits have to stay in the, in the USDA, they have to stay national, otherwise we, we really lose all of our cloud.

Vance Crowe [00:15:32] Yeah. I never met a government that wants to give up power. Alright, moving on to story number three. AWS outage disrupts farmers harvest operations on October 20th, a major AWS outage in its US East one region crippled 64 services, including John Deere's Operation Center, a cloud-based platform for real-time harvest data and equipment tracking. Iowa farmer Benjamin ish posted on x that the full day downtime was more disruptive than the ongoing government shutdown. Without GPS enabled combines and truck coordination, his team switched to the less efficient short row harvesting, relying on radios and phones. Other farmers on X reported similar frustrations, but no widespread crop losses due to the issues the outage caused by a DNS service failure hit during peak corn and soybean season raising concerns about over-reliance on cloud tech Jr did your dairy farm go down when AWS shut down this week?

JR Burdick [00:16:35] Our, our dairy farm didn't, I'm a pretty low tech when it comes to my equipment and, and cows don't really care about the internet, of course, but we did have problems with our payment processing for our customers. So that did affect us from that standpoint. So when, when we make our deliveries to different locations, we do have people that pay with what's a card? We have a card reader attached to an app on the phone. Well, the app on our phone wouldn't work. And so people were standing there going, what would we do? We just redirected them to our website, different, different servers, different networks or whatever, and they were able to purchase on our website. But again, it was at the, the first person we were sitting there and my wife and I were going like, well, did you push this button? You know, restart the phone, reset this thing. We kept doing all that and, and the people are sitting there going, I know there's money on my card, I know that. And we're like, it's not connecting, it's not that, you know, and, and so we had people were like, oh, what do we do? And it was a, it was an eye-opening experience for me because it was like, all right, we really don't deal in, we are already a cashless society, really. And so one little thing like that and all of a sudden how do you, you know, we don't carry a lot of cash with us anymore. And how do you,

Vance Crowe [00:17:57] You know, I had an experience, a couple of man that was about a year ago, I, I was invited to the Arizona Cattle Ranchers. I go out there, I'm staying in a, in a, you know, resort 'cause you know, thing. And I started looking on X and it said there were all these people not able to access their credit cards and that flights weren't going. So I go down, you, there's a casino there, so the ATM limits are way up. I could get as much money out as I wanted, but I, I got out a bunch of cash and when I was flying a a couple of weeks later, I was sitting next to a guy who said, I got stranded, my credit cards didn't work. You couldn't get a rental car. And he's like, how much cash do you have on you right now? And I I, you know, I had like maybe a hundred bucks or something. He's like, from now on I carry enough cash that I could pay somebody cash to get me home from wherever I'm at. And I was like, probably not a bad idea. In today's day and age, there's some little toothpick holding up an entire bridge and if that toothpick breaks, you're all in big trouble.

JR Burdick [00:18:52] Yeah. So I think that this is a, a good time for us all. I, you know, for years when I was milking a lot more cows, I always kept a secondary skid loader on, on hand and I had a backup feed wagon so that if the main thing went down, I think what farmers should be taking away from this is, is test your resiliency. Can you, can you function? Yeah, we all can go out and run the combine and and and do those things. But if you're used to being able to car, you know,

Vance Crowe [00:19:20] A hundred

JR Burdick [00:19:21] Or 200 acres a day and now you're, you're hamstrung, have you thought through how are you going to overcome that? And and that's what we did with our business. After that, we, my wife and I on the drive home from that delivery point, we started to talk about how do we get around this so that, so that we can still keep our income flowing in so that customers still get their product because milk, milk is perishable. You know, we can't tell 'em to come back in five days and get it or whatever 'cause that that product is gone. So, so it made us really look into our system and what's our backup plan, what's our strategy? Who can we, how can we get around this? And we, we started to work on that.

Vance Crowe [00:20:01] Well, speaking of backup plans, story number four FSA offices reopen on Thursday to process 3 billion in farmer payments amid ongoing shutdown after three weeks of closure, do the government shutdown, the USDA farm service agency offices are reopening Thursday to handle core operations, including processing over $3 billion in farmer payments like a RC and PLC farm loans, crop insurance and disaster relief. President Trump directed Ag Secretary Brooke Rollins to reopen about 2100 county offices with limited staffing two employees per office five days a week to support farmers during harvest. The admin blames democrats for holding up the funds while Dems like Representative Angie Craig welcome the move, but question the delay and push for using the snap contingency funds next to avoid the, the November disruptions we were just talking about. So it's funny, snap benefits are going away, but farmer transfer payments aren't,

JR Burdick [00:21:02] Right? Yeah. And that's going to be a, a publicity issue that we're gonna have to talk about why are we more important than a little child getting their nutrition, you know, their, their meals for the next few weeks. But at the same time to, to me it gets back to we're, we're way over reliant on, on things that we have no control over. And, and that's, that's my concern. That's where I look at this. I always look at things kind of differently than a lot of folks I operate outside the, the, the government payment system. I'm not involved in any of those anymore. So, but I, I have a neighbor that came over and talked to me and he's like a young farmer probably or late twenties and he was like, I've got all these grain checks from the elevator, but I've got a beginning farmer loan, so FSA has to sign off on them so I can deposit them so I can make my payments so I can buy more fuel for this fall. And he's in a real bind and you know, he was, he was rather nervous about it and I was like, you know, everybody understands we're all in the rural community. Go and talk to people, you know, and, and that's where community is going to override. And you know, the fuel guy is gonna go to him and say, Hey, I know what's going on. I'll get you 500 gallons of fuel so you can keep harvesting or whatever. And you know, when they open up and you get your your funds, you can pay me. But that is a, that is a real problem that's affecting a lot of people.

JR Burdick [00:22:35] And how are they going to, if you had a payment due on October 15th, you can't get your cash check cashed until November 1st. You know, are you gonna get hit with lay fees or, or all the other different things that could happen. And it's gonna be interesting to see how that works out.

Vance Crowe [00:22:52] I throw out the statistic all the time, but right now, farmer and ranchers, the average amount of the, your financial statement is 13.5% comes from these sorts of transfer payments. That is not an insignificant amount of money. That is a huge amount of money. And if you're trying to keep up with paying your, your employees if you have loans, like you were saying, it's tough. But that said, I've been in ag long enough to know they never make you wait for the money. The government doesn't want the money sitting in DC they're trying to pump it out into the system. So I'm pretty sure everybody that's got these FSA payments, they're gonna be made whole.

JR Burdick [00:23:29] Oh yeah, yeah. And, and I've got a couple of older farmers that have been in withdrawal because they haven't, haven't been able to go and sit to talk to the ladies once a week at the coffee shop. You know what I mean? It's, they're just like, can't wait till it opens up so I can go down and see 'em. I'm like, what are they your girlfriends? I don't, I don't understand it. And so, so it's kind of funny and comical in that sense.

Vance Crowe [00:23:53] Alright, that's gonna do it for the news this week. If you have news that you think we should be reporting on the ag tribes report, send it to me on X at Vance Crowe or you can always email 'em to me Vance at Legacy Interviews dot com. Moving on now to the Bitcoin land price report. And woo, it has been a wild week. If you are new to Bitcoin, these sorts of wild fluctuations have gotta have you white knuckling yourself because these are price fluctuations that are absolutely crazy. But if you've been in the game a while, this is nothing. In fact, all we're seeing is an opportunity to pick up cheap stats as of press time today, Bitcoin was valued at $109,857. It is down more than $10,000 since the last Ag Tribes report. And that's quite a bit. But if you're a Bitcoin or it's not that big. So JR how much does an acre of land cost in Linn County, Missouri?

JR Burdick [00:24:52] It's running right around 7,000 an acre right now.

Vance Crowe [00:24:55] Okay, so at at 7,000 an acre, that means that you could buy one acre of land for 0.063 Bitcoin, or in other words one Bitcoin would buy you 15.7 acres. How does that sit with you?

JR Burdick [00:25:12] Boy, I like Bitcoin and I like land, so, and I'm, I'm the guy that would, would trade Bitcoin for land. So I don't quite have that much Bitcoin yet though.

Vance Crowe [00:25:22] So where are you at on Bitcoin? You got a nice big sign behind you. Bitcoin accepted here. What did, where are you at? How, how in deep are you?

JR Burdick [00:25:31] Well, I am, I like Bitcoin. I like it. I I've always been, my idea behind Bitcoin is I like it because it's kind of that middle finger to the system. And so I'm, I'm the Gen Xer that's, I'm, I'm the burn it all down and let the ashes sort themselves out. But I like Bitcoin, I like the idea behind it. I like the people that are involved in it because you, you've got two groups of people. You've got people who under who are enthusiastic about it, but realistic about it in that it's, it is a tool that can be used and we can have it for trade and commerce and, and, and also we store wealth and kind of have this cultish group too that I've, I've sat around the campfire with you recently and they're like, you know, Bitcoin could be the end of nuclear war. I'm not quite that far into where, where Bitcoin could take us. So, but I like Bitcoin from the standpoint of, you know, it it gives us another avenue. For example, all your money, you know, every, everybody says, well it's, it's all on the web and what could happen, well the same thing happens with your money. It just happened on Monday. You know, I'm like, your, your concern is, is equally valid for fiat as it is for Bitcoin in that. But the difference is I have control over it. If once the electricity comes back on, I know where it is, I've got my passwords, I can get it out of my wallet, I can do things with it. And so it's not held in somebody else's cloud that's gonna be lost and and you gotta get it off the exchange.

JR Burdick [00:27:06] You know, that's, that's the big thing that I've learned.

Vance Crowe [00:27:08] Yeah, well really the fundamental difference between the credit cards going down and Bitcoin is that the credit cards, if there are a few servers that go down, the entire system is out. But in order for you not to be able to spend Bitcoin, the entirety of the internet all over the world has to go down. Right. And even then it's, you, there's, it would be very difficult, right? As long as you have a node and you're able to submit a transaction, you can move money. It may not be convenient, but it is certainly better than you just show up at a screen and it says, oops, nothing to see here. Right. And that's a fundamental difference. The credit card companies could go down and you don't have a choice, but Bitcoin, as long as you can get somewhere to the internet, you'll be okay. Yeah.

JR Burdick [00:27:55] Yeah. So, and, and I am still, I'm still looking for my first transaction in Bitcoin. I have been begging to get people, but I've got some people on the internet now that are asking and, and we raise hogs as well. So I think my first Bitcoin interaction and and exchange will be for a half a hog coming up here soon.

Vance Crowe [00:28:15] I didn't know you did that. I I didn't know that at all. How do you raise your hogs

JR Burdick [00:28:18] Out in a pasture and they're just pasture raised. I don't feed 'em any soybean meal or soybeans. They're red waddle hogs. And, and that is, I, I don't advertise that a lot 'cause it's like my weakness, I'm not, I mean, hogs grow, they just do. It's, it's kind of like, it's kind of like once you get that kid as a toddler and all of a sudden they're a teenager, how'd that happen? They just grow, you know, and hogs are kind of that way. So I started out a couple of years ago with three sows and a boar. I've got 14 sows and two boars now and I've got, I don't know, 50 head running around of different sizes. So. Well

Vance Crowe [00:28:59] JR you might have just made your first Bitcoin sale. 'cause I've been in the market for some Missouri hogs. I've been looking for ones that are fed acorns or hickory pig nut pig nut hickory. Yeah. But yeah, we, we will have to talk after the show.

JR Burdick [00:29:12] All righty. Sounds good. If,

Vance Crowe [00:29:14] If you are interested in purchasing the bi in Bitcoin and you'd like to help support the show, use the link in the show notes to purchase it with river.com. River has worked out an arrangement with us that if you buy Bitcoin there, they send the show a little bit of Bitcoin. So it's really helpful and it's the exchange that I use. So look for the link in the show notes below. Alright, moving on now to the Peter Thiel paradox. This is where I'm gonna ask JR Jr what is one thing that you believe that almost nobody you know, agrees with you on?

JR Burdick [00:29:45] Well, I was struggling with this and then this morning I had a young, or a couple days ago, I had a young man call me and he wanted to sit down and talk with me for half an hour this morning. Turned into an hour and a half conversation. He's a Gen Z guy and he, he really wants to see our community restart. So I think from that conversation and another conversation I had today, I see this, these young people really wanting rural America, rural main street to be, to survive and to thrive again. And they're not looking for a, a career. They're looking for a place they want people that they can connect with. They want their friends to stick around. Both of these two young men told me, I'm tired of the brain drain and the talent drain of our rural communities. I want to keep my friends here, I wanna stay here. What can we do? What can we do to make it more attractive? And they were both like, it's not about activities. They said we, we've, we've lived in Des Moines, we've lived in Kansas City, we've lived in St. Louis, and you know, and they, they want to build a new park and they want to have a new group of, of entertainment set area or, or whatever says. And that's what we wanna raise our kids back here in the soil. We want to have, we wanna walk down the streets again and see our buddies owning that welding shop and, and having that car repair place and having, you know, running the convenience store, running the gas station.

JR Burdick [00:31:20] And I was just blown away about how intense both of them were about this. And, and we're making a plan. They both live in my community, we're gonna start getting together once a month, brainstorm, how can we do this? And I asked them both, I says, okay, what organizations do what, what organizations are already here that we can get involved in? And they were like, there isn't any because they're all the old timers and they just get around and they, they reminisce about the old days, but they don't have any vision. They don't have any desire to build it. So I, I pressed those two guys and, and the one guy said it really well. He says, I want a place and I'm tired of being, I think he said it this way, I'm tired of being controlled by the placeless. And he said, the people in dc the people in Jeff City, they don't care about me and I want people around me that care about me. And both these guys happen to be want, they've got young families, all of them are under five, but they wanna homeschool their kids. I was asking about the school system and they says, we really don't care, but both of them are products of our local high school. You know, and so they were looking at it and they were going like, I want a different outcome for my kids. I don't want to tell them that the best place for opportunity is 200 miles away. I want them to want to live here, be near me, grow up here. And and that was exciting for me. I just saw that and I was like, man, that is, we cannot revitalize America and revitalize Main Street and rural America without that talent.

JR Burdick [00:32:56] Those young people that vibrancy and those guys, I mean, they're gonna do it.

Vance Crowe [00:33:03] Well I, I hear so much that I already agree with here, but what I think is a little bit different is you're doing something right. There's so many times people say this is what's wrong, but, you know, taking the action, getting together, seeing what rolls out is really important. And an interesting thing you said there was, you know, they're not interested in a career that's an almost mind blowing concept because your career has been so deeply embedded into the psyche of our, my generation that to your point, they don't, you know, they call them placeless people. Like there's this term somewhere versus anywhere people and somewhere people live somewhere, not because it's grandiose or it's perfect or it's got a great job, but because it is somewhere and you're a person in there anywhere, people, they want cosmopolitan, lots of restaurants, lots of opportunity, but that comes at the cost of being somebody, right. Being a, a thing that that group needs. So I really like what you're, what you're saying there.

JR Burdick [00:33:59] Yeah, yeah. It was, it was a, it was a fun day, took through my day completely off. I didn't get half a done what I wanted to, but invested in people. And I think for me as a Gen Xer who's typical Gen X guy, kind of cynical and loner, it was neat to have two young people reach out to me, say, Hey, we, we like some of the things you're saying, what can we do?

Vance Crowe [00:34:25] You're full of shit. You are not cynical. You are the opposite of cynical. Cynical doesn't take action. Right, right. You're, you're a guy. I mean if people did, don't know what I'm talking about. Go back and listen to my conversation with JR. He's one of the more popular podcasts I've ever done. But I would say it's the opposite of cynical. It is looking at a tar, dark and difficult world and saying, I'm gonna take another step forward. So I, there, there I disagree with you. I don't think you're cynical.

JR Burdick [00:34:52] I'll be your worthy adversary today.

Vance Crowe [00:34:54] Well speaking of which, let's go to that. Who is one person that you respect but you strongly disagree with?

JR Burdick [00:35:01] Well, I really struggled with this one today because I, I have gotten over the past four or five months as I've studied and talked to more people, I, my adversaries have become my enemies. They're, they're the people on the other side of me that don't want to clash and come up with a solution. They just wanna stay in their spot and they don't wanna be moved. They don't wanna reason together. They don't want to. The the, the polarization has gotten to be so great that it's, it's hard to find an adversary. When I think of an adversary I think of somebody who's moving in the direction you are but is a competitor sort of. And also a person who is, who's saying, I've got a better way than you so I'm better than you and you're, and I'm gonna make you better because I'm being better. And I don't see that right now, especially in agriculture. There's this, there's this, we're, we're, we're so polarized is the best word for it. I want all my government payments and they gotta come to grain farmers and if this doesn't happen and then the beef guys are over here going like, we're tired of tariffs and the ag producers are up there going, you know, we, we want these imports and exports so that we can get the price down and we don't have any cohesiveness. We've all siloed off into our different spots and we don't make one another better. And I think that's really what's happened in rural America.

JR Burdick [00:36:33] As we've become specialized and we've become so isolated from one another, we don't understand the concerns of a soybean grower and a beef grower. 'cause we're two different people now. Whereas, you know, so many years ago we were the same person. So I just, I I racked my brain this morning and I just, I couldn't come up with somebody who I respected. But I will say I respect Jared Mcda McDaniels, but I just, I just don't agree with him.

Vance Crowe [00:37:01] Alright Jared McDaniel. We'll take that. You know, to your point JR I, I, this is worth me saying so long time listeners of the podcast. No, I'm on the FCS financial, the Farm Credit of Missouri and we came to a board meeting this week and I've always been kind of cynical about committees and boards because my experience with them at the World Bank and corporate America, your school projects, right, you get together and the only way it's any good is if there's one leader that makes it happen and then they kind of get the other people to go along. Well, yesterday we had to make a tough decision with our board and we, the way that group fought about ideas, the way they were like, this is what I think and I'm worried about this. I noticed so quickly that this was a group of people that the idea kept getting progressively better. It kept getting more sophisticated. Our options widened open. And I sat there being totally astounded. I talked to my wife afterwards and I was like, I am literally honored to be among people that are solving a problem synergistically. I actually thought that that was not a real thing. And now I see if you bring the right people together and you give them the, the proper motivation, the the collective whole can come up with something better than, than any one individual. But this is not occurring in anywhere places. It, it is only occurring maybe in rural America.

Vance Crowe [00:38:32] It's the only place I've ever seen it.

JR Burdick [00:38:33] Right, right. Well again, and unfortunately when you get stuck in a place where you don't wanna share your ideas, all you do is emote and it, and you can't argue with emotion. You, you can never out emote that other person, you know? And unless you become angry and irate and then nothing happens or you just start to cry, you know, or however that works. But the greatest emotion isn't going to solve the problem, but it'll shut down the argument. And I think that's where we're at right now in, in America as a whole. And that's why you saw the people crying about the EBT. They weren't talking about the problem, they weren't talking about solutions. They were just emoting, I deserve this, I need this. And then both sides use that emotion to then better their position instead of, do we have a solution here? Why can't you guys all sit in a room together and come up with, I mean let's face it, it's, it's the matter of we're gonna go in debt or we're gonna go in debt a little more. It, it's, it's not super complicated, it's just, you know, and then you're gonna, where are you gonna move the xs on the paper? We're we're still gonna be in debt, we're still gonna be at a crisis at some point. So just get over it and go on and stop emoting about this.

Vance Crowe [00:39:54] Well, JR you did not disappoint. It is so good that you were able to come on. Why don't you tell everybody a little bit about Nourishing Family Farms?

JR Burdick [00:40:02] Well we are a small grass-based farm in north central Missouri, Linn County, Missouri. We sell raw milk cream, some other dairy products we sell, we're getting ready to sell hogs, we pork and, and those types of things. We are in the process. We harvested our small grains this summer and we're in the process of getting our fanning mills and all those things set up so that we can start to sell wheat berries and, and we've got a person that's getting ready to do flour and I'm working on a couple other really interesting opportunities that just presented themselves this week that we're in the early stages of that I think will be beneficial to our community and, and a wider range in agriculture. So

Vance Crowe [00:40:48] Another big way that you reach out to the world, in fact I think it's probably the way I found out who you were, was you do these things where you record yourself in the milking parlor. Yep. Just kind of talking about things. Talk a little bit about that.

JR Burdick [00:41:01] Well I've actually been off for about three weeks because I'm busy with harvest, busy with all their things on the farm and I was delivering a calf and just the way large animals work, she stepped back and hit my phone and I haven't, I haven't had taken the time to go in and get a new phone because it's just a

Vance Crowe [00:41:20] Pain in the, so

JR Burdick [00:41:22] You know, I, I told my wife, I says it, it's still, I can still answer a phone call and I can still text. So it does the basic things. But my parlor pit, it kind of started, I was really upset about what was going on with mandatory electronic. Id started doing a couple of minutes about that and then Elon bought X and he was telling everybody, you know, Hey you are the media now. And I kind of took that to heart and I wanted to start sharing some thoughts and then I got some positive feedback and then I got some criticism and the criticism motivated me more. 'cause it was like, yeah, well screw you. I can still talk. What? You can't shut me down. And I just kept posting about that and I've, I've met a lot of neat people through that, had really good discussions and, and I don't, you know, as you probably noticed, I don't think like a lot of other people, so my, my takes are really off the wall on some things but, and I, I really like putting history behind what I talk about so I can say, Hey, this is where we were in the past, this is where we're gonna go in the future. And, and so, so yeah. So I'm hoping some things will settle down. I'm hoping that next week I'll start that back up.

Vance Crowe [00:42:40] Yeah, you gotta go get that phone fixed. Well, JR if people wanted to get ahold of you, they wanted to learn more about Nourishing Family Farms, where would they go?

JR Burdick [00:42:47] Well go on X it's JR Cow Farmer is my handle on there. Reach out to me there. You can also go to our Facebook page, which is Nourishing Family Farm and our website is www.nourishingfamilyfarm.com. And look, anything of those over, we've had, we've had really neat conversations with people all over the nation. The the sign you see behind me was given to me by a bunch of Bitcoiners in Tennessee. They, they had listened to a couple of different podcasts. I'd been guests on, yours was one of them, David Bassett's Bitcoin and was another. And they sent me that, they sent me a node, they sent me a whole bunch of cards. It's, it's a whole bunch of placards. So I, I've got stickers on my truck now. I'm just like a billboard for 'em. But really neat to get to know those people and, and meet 'em and learning a lot more about the intricacies of Bitcoin that I didn't know before.

Vance Crowe [00:43:52] You know, there is a truly profound bridge between farmers and Bitcoiners and David of the podcast Bitcoin and is a great example of it. Not a farmer really interested in it. Bitcoin becomes that bridge. And so if you're somebody that's looking to build out an audience, one of the reasons I think JR may be lacking a little bit in the Bitcoin purchases is 'cause Linn County Missouri's a little bit out there,

JR Burdick [00:44:18] But,

Vance Crowe [00:44:19] But if you are a farmer somewhere near a city, I guarantee you if you put up that, hey I'm, I'm accepting Bitcoin, people are gonna pop up that you never imagined and you may get a customer for life. Alright JR that's gonna do it. I really appreciate you coming on.

JR Burdick [00:44:34] Thanks, I'm glad to be here.

Vance Crowe [00:44:37] Alright, that's gonna do it for this week's show. I really had a good time. I really appreciated JR coming on and I wanna mention again, if you've never heard the podcast that I did with JR Burdick, it is a fantastic one. He tells a story about how his cows were killed with electricity coming up through the ground and he had to start all the way over. And he talks about his strife and the challenges he faced. I had no idea the kind of man he was gonna be before I interviewed him and now he's become a close friend. Well if you are thinking about getting your loved ones a special Christmas present, I would recommend you look into doing a legacy interview. This is where I sit down with your loved ones to record their life stories so that future generations can know their family history. If you're interested in doing this and you'd like to watch that video of your parents, your grandparents telling their stories, sign up to do a legacy interview before the first week of December and we will get that video back to you in time to watch it over the holidays. And many, many people have told me just how impactful the video was, watching it with their loved ones, getting to stop the tape and ask for more clarity, hearing more. And people just really love it. Another big thing that I have been working on is a course called Interest Based Communicating and this is a course that is designed to help people communicate. So I'm gonna leave with a parting message about the the interest based communications class. Alright, we'll be back next week with another guest.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [00:46:10] Good negotiation is one where both parties walk away slightly disappointed. That was probably my default world model BV before Vance. Well, Vance had a lot of these models that he created. I ingrained a lot of these models so deeply from working with Vance for a long time that I started to recommunicate them to my friends and my friends' eyes had the same sort of light up of understanding of like, this is a thing that could help me be more effective in life. Whenever Vance let me know that he was working on sort of putting this into more of a workshop forum, I was like, yeah man, I want that for my team. Like now if my first two employees go through this so that we have this shared set of context and a shared set of language that's gonna create value for my team going forward. I wanted to get better at communication myself. I knew I had good ideas in my head that I wanted to be able to communicate to potential investors and I was not super confident in being able to do that before. I thought that negotiation was basically for people in a boardroom, like CEOs, words like shareholder are involved. So I thought that you had to have a lot of resources at your disposal to even care about negotiations. Both people had to lose or both people weren't happy in the end. I found that what you both want is achievable by understanding the needs of the other person more. A negotiation is really a way to solve a problem that you have. You can rearrange the world in such a way where all parties get something that they're happy with. So you don't need to possess great resources to be involved in a negotiation or to really benefit from knowing how to negotiate.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [00:47:47] RJ and I initially were two different businesses. It became clear to us over the long term that we would be much more bullish on our shared future if we like found a way to like actually be one entity, one whole working together that required us to have what to many would be very hard conversations because we were both CEOs of our own independently funded businesses. But we were able to have conversations and get to the root of what our actual interests and what our actual skill sets were. Having both people understand this pattern of communication was useful to pull out those tools when we needed them the most in like difficult conversations. It's very helpful to have that quick language to do something more productive than continue to like misunderstand or whatever, whatever else you're doing. Building relationships isn't just you communicating to the other person. It's also figuring out how to let the other person communicate to you so that they trust you. Getting into a real conversation and and diffusing tensions before you, you know, get to business. A lot of people have a default model where they're like, I wanna raise my own money. I wanna start my own business. I wanna do my own thing. We find that they have specific interests that could help us. We become allies instead of competitors. I guess the course gives you tools to know that you can say the right words to like extract those things out of the ether and put them in your life. Learning interest-based communications from Vance might actually be the single highest leverage skillset that I ever developed before starting this company. I'm by default an introvert. I think that I've developed the ability to interact with people in such a way that it's energizing and it's fun and I look forward to interacting with strangers on a regular basis.

Ad segment / testimonials (multiple voices) [00:49:25] You should just take it, do it already. Yeah. I feel like you should just do it like, no, I don't know. I feel like it's life content. It's like definitely fun life content. I am doing exactly what I want to be doing with my life. Interest based communications did that for me more than anything else that I've learned.