By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

Brian Reisinger grew up on a four-generation family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin and worked with his father on the farm from the time he could walk. An award-winning writer, rural policy expert, speaker, and consultant, Reisinger’s first book, Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family's Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer – published by Skyhorse Publishing this past August -- weaves the family’s farming history and its fight for survival with an issue that is currently affecting every American dinner table. 

The Chester County Press recently spoke to Reisinger about his book, the disappearing American farm and its connection to what could become an agricultural catastrophe in Chester County.

Chester County Press: What inspired you to write Land Rich, Cash Poor?

Reisinger: I grew up on a farm knowing that farms were disappearing. I remember as a kid having a sense that my dad was doing something special, but that something special was going away, and I wanted to know why. As a writer and a journalist, I felt pressed to answer that question, and it’s a question that a lot of families who are in the business of growing our country’s food and feeding families across the United States are also asking. It’s a question that I have been carrying around for a long time. 

At one point in your book, you write that farms in Wisconsin are disappearing at an alarming rate, to the tune of three a day.  As someone who is part of a four-generation family of farmers, what has that experience been like for you?

When I think about my upbringing and what farming has done for my family, community, and for me, I think of it as a dream that has become a nightmare. It was such an incredible place to live and grow up in and it’s still an incredible place. Working with my father from sun up to sun down, being there when a baby calf takes its first steps and accomplishing the miracle of growing a crop – I am so grateful or these experiences. 

It's a situation where a beautiful thing in this country is slipping away. As those in the agricultural industry in Pennsylvania know, it is something that affects every single dinner table, whether someone has set foot in a farm field or not.

In the opening page of your book, you wrote about seeing your father’s tears. Watching the changing face of your father during those difficult years is a pain that is shared by every farmer who has ever seen a family farm suffer, including farmers in Chester County. I don’t think anyone who has never worked in the agricultural industry knows what that pain feels like.

If their father is a good man, I think every son grows up thinking that their dad is Superman. You grow up seeing your dad work endless hours or more when it’s planting and harvesting time, and you understand the importance of the work. It creates a false sense of invincibility, but that’s not always the case. For farm families, mental health and farmer suicide is a huge issue, and farming is consistently one of the top five industries for suicide in occupations in America.

When we had to sell our cows on the farm, it was like a death in the family. I remember wondering whether our father was considering hurting himself, because he was questioning his purpose. I write in the book that he in fact had been thinking that. I am grateful that he came through that. He did it by talking to us, talking with members of the Farmer Angel Group, and he started thinking about his grandchildren and I am grateful that he did. 

The agricultural industry in Chester County – particularly its mushroom growing and composting facilities – is currently facing a crisis of another kind. Pennsylvania is home to an estimated 155,000 undocumented citizens and around 30,000 of them work in the state’s agricultural sector. As a result of the mass deportation efforts now being imposed, these farms may lose thousands of their most trusted and reliable workers. 

Paint the true picture, in economic terms, of what the loss of farms looks like for a town and a region. In other words, what may happen here in southeastern Pennsylvania?

You’re touching on one of the many ways in which family farms are subject to cross-cutting winds when you involve politics. There are a lot of people in rural communities who believe in securing our border, and at the same time, there is also that dependence on that workforce and the people who are subject to these actions are having a huge impact on that. Whether it is mushrooms in Pennsylvania, dairy in Wisconsin or fruits and vegetables in California, coast to coast this is a reality. 

There is the question of impact and there is the question of solutions. The impact is something that is terrifying if solutions aren’t figured out. You will have the food that we eat and the crops and products that farmers grow not getting harvested if we do not have an adequate workforce. For our farmers, not only will they not make the money they need to keep their farms going, their crops will potentially go to waste and that leads to greater food scarcity, or food that is far more expensive because of its scarcity or finding the money it takes to find the labor to replace the existing workforce.

Are our local, state and federal governments a part of the solution, or are they a part of the problem?

For the better part of the last half century, they have been a part of the problem. We have seen an economic crisis that left our country not understanding the impact on our farms, governmental decisions that have been enacted have made things worse, and technology has moved farming forward but needlessly has left so many of our family farms behind. 

The reason we have been given the false choice between securing our borders and having a sensible immigration policy is that Congress has failed to roll up its sleeves and deal with the issue for decades. That’s what has put us into that heart-rendering position of feeling that we must choose between a secure border and having a workforce to feed the country.

This is one chapter in an on-going story that has contributed to the loss of 45,000 family farms per year over the last century – a total of seven percent of our farms over the last 100 years.  If we continue on that pace, we will lose most of our family farms in Pennsylvania and across other states within a generation.

If you could share one piece of wisdom gleaned from your own experiences with a farmer in southeastern Pennsylvania who is preparing to embrace the unknown of workforces lost to mass deportations, what would you tell them?

Barreling down on the specific issue of deportation of farm workers, our farmers need to be engaged with their local farm bureaus and other organizations who work with our government. They need to be in touch with local, state and federal officials and they need to be talking that if this is happening that there is an H2A program – an immigration initiative that allows a foreign national worker to come to the U.S. legally and work temporarily in agriculture. The program is really important, but as it stands right now, it is not robust enough to deal with the notion of people who do not have legal status in this country being moved out of our agricultural industry.

You will hear some say that they are focused on bussing criminals out of this country, but others are saying that this is going to interrupt farming operations. 

The truth is that ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and the federal government have ways to be discerning, so if anyone is concerned about the loss of workers, they need to be advocating with their local representatives. There is a way to focus around criminal activity and not around agricultural and economic activity being disrupted, but it will require vigilance from people.

Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer by Brian Reisinger is published by Skyhorse Publishing and is available in hardcover and as an E-book. To purchase the book and learn more, visit www.skyhorsepublishing.com

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].