(mellow ukelele plucking music) - [Jessie] We think of the knowledge that we've gained as ours whereas knowledge should be shared.

- [Michael] You'll go talk to five different farmers in a 10 mile stretch of ground and they'll all tell you how to do it different part of it's based on experience and age and however the generation before you did it - [Jessie] The farming community are not gatekeepers of knowledge.

- [Shane] I'm a Dust Bowl descendant.

My family survived that, but we couldn't survive the 1970s "get big or get out" model.

- [John] Don't quit because it's hard.

- [Michael] There's gonna be a lot of people that are gonna struggle to keep their heads above water this year.

Tractors don't run on hopes and dreams.

They run on diesel fuel.

- [Jessie] Farmers are responding to the economic pressures that have been put on them.

(calm violin music) - [P.J.]

It's discouraging when prices are low but you still have to farm.

It's happy when prices are high But you still have to farm.

We really have to look at agriculture from an equitable lens.

- [Jessie] We're at this crossroads.

It's an antiquated system that is just at a tipping point.

- [Jessie] Hay prices are astronomical.

They're crazy.

- Yeah.

- Since we're getting 300% more off of our pasture, we don't have to feed hay.

- [Shane] With these rotational operations, you can sequester up to 2000 pounds of CO2 a year per acre.

We're offsetting 40 or 50 people through our operation.

I don't like, think that we individually are gonna save the world but we can make a small impact where we're at.

♪ Heart Land by Robin & Linda Williams ♪ ♪ In the heart land ♪ ♪ We rely on ourselves ♪ ♪ And one another ♪ ♪ Hand in hand ♪ ♪ We must stand ♪ ♪ In the heart land ♪ (music fades) - [Narrator] Production funding for this program is made possible by... (mellow piano music) - [Shane] We're managing about 400 acres of grassland.

Besides the crops, we have cattle sheep, pigs, vermiculture, honeybees, laying hens.

We raise meat ducks.

We have dairy cows, - rainbow trout, - rainbow trouts - [Jessie] Horses - [Shane] and horses.

I think that's it.

- Yeah.

- For now (chuckles) - #^ I'm a fifth generation farmer.

My great-great-grandfather.

He was one of the first African-Americans to come out of slavery and buy land here in Northumberland County.

We are a commodity grower and we sell to companies that make primarily feed and and even ethanol.

Our operation spans across four counties here in the Northern Neck of Virginia.

- [Michael] We buy stock or cattle out of the stockyards, bring 'em here straighten 'em out, get 'em going on feed raise 'em up to about 800, 900 pounds and then resell 'em.

My dad farmed.

His mother, she grew up on their family farm.

Their daddy farmed.

So, I'd be fourth generation.

There's right at a hundred acres on this farm.

Yeah, I actually own that island.

That little island right there.

(laughing) That's pretty cool to say.

I own my own little island.

- [John] I been working about 1600 acres in the county and it's been a uphill battle.

This farm has a thousand acres.

I was trained as a tobacco farmer, cotton and peanuts and neither one of those commodities I grow today.

So, farming has changed and those commodities have changed.

(Old folksong music) There's no reason on God's green earth that a farmer should have to go from a hundred acres to 1500 acres to make the same money.

- [P.J.]

You can have a high value crop and bring in more revenue on one acre than I make at a hundred.

It's all specifically on what you're growing and the value of the crop that you're generating.

- [Jessie] We have these large swaths of land that if were owned by more people for a smaller amount of land I think as a country we would be healthier, happier.

(Old folksong music) (ducklings chirping) - [Shane] There are 250 ducks out here in these four shelters.

We like diversity in, in all aspects.

We don't want to just burn ourselves out and do the same thing for eight hours a day every day.

(cow moo) My favorite animals are the cows 'cause they are carbon negative.

I chased this cow around for an hour the night before my wedding, just like out here cussing and screaming.

Everyone was up there watching.

We sell direct to consumer.

It's a little more distribution.

- Mm hmm.

You have to have freezer space.

You have, you know, time marketing but you know what your profit margins are gonna be.

- Instead of saying, I'm going to farm this land with as much cattle as it can carry, to make as much profit as possible you're able to think about it from a wider view.

So while maybe we have the grass to support a herd of 300 cattle and really bring in a lot of money at the stockyard, instead, if you take that capacity down you're building it for a longer sustainability.

- [Shane] No, Greta, you know what you're doing.

Dairy cows are like the most dramatic animals on the farm.

There you go.

(gate latching) Your dinner plate.

Close your eyes and kind of meditate.

Then we show up with hair on our forehead.

We separate ourself from the natural world and we're the only organism on the earth that does that.

- [Jessie] A hundred years ago there weren't these big cities.

Now we've swung into incredible density of people in one small place - [Shane] And I lived in Oklahoma City for three years going to college and just hated every second of living in a big city and was like, man I've gotta get back to a farm somehow.

But I wanted to do it in an economical, viable way.

- [Jessie] We manage the property of somebody else.

So that gives us a great opportunity to learn.

It's hard for young people to get into this industry.

The upfront costs are so high.

- [Roger] The listing price on this farm is 3.2 million.

(mellow guitar strumming) Even on a farm that isn't open for subdivision.

A farm this size, which is 147 acres typically would be 1.2 to 1.9 million in that range.

- [Jessie] The average age of a farmer right now is 65.

They have such large investments that there's no young person who could come in and take that over for them.

- [Roger] It's difficult for a young family to get started in something like that because it's just, it's a pile of money.

- [Michael] The ideal farming set up would be if you could inherit the farm.

That's possible for some people, it's impossible for others.

What me and my dad inherited was 20 acres and that's the home farm.

Other than that, we rented or we had to buy it.

You know, if granddaddy left daddy 200 acres and daddy left that to you, that's great.

That's the easiest way to get into it.

But that's just not possible for some people.

I had a horse fall on me Monday.

- Oh my.

(Michael laughing) - It, it's, yeah.

It has not been the easiest.

Purchase price was a million two.

When you pay 1.2 million dollars for a farm money does play a big role in it and this year especially fertilizer prices have gone up 150%.

The head shoot, the two pieces of alley and the tub I got a set of digital scales for it and delivered, it came in right just a tick over $27,000.

If you go buy a brand new tractor, and I'm not talking anything with bells and whistles, I'm just talking a good working class tractor, 65 to $70,000.

There's nothing in this industry that's chump change.

- [Roger] One guy can do the work of four or five now but he's gotta have the automated equipment to do it and it's not cheap.

- [P.J.]

We go buy a $400 bag of seed corn.

We dump it into a $400,000 tractor and planter configuration.

We spray that with a $400,000 sprayer.

You harvest it with a half million dollar combine and it goes to the elevator and you're selling it for $4 a bushel.

I'm on Zoom calls half the day, sitting in the cab of the tractor.

When my grandfather farmed, he had a tractor with a marker and as he drove down the field he tried to drive a straight line and that marker would put a line on the ground and that'd be his guide so when he drove back down the field.

You know we've got that yellow GPS bubble up on the roof of the tractor and that's our satellite guidance.

- [Michael] When I was a kid, everything that we had on the farm you could work on it with a wrench.

Well, now you gotta have somebody come out with a computer and work on it.

And that kind of factors back into the whole price of everything.

- [John] If you didn't get bigger and buy the newer style equipment that the companies required because it didn't have government price support and I wasn't able to do it at the time so I just increased my grain operation.

I got a few here.

All my tractors are about 25, 30 years old and I do most of the work on them myself.

I learned how to work on all, all of my equipment.

I never enjoyed mechanic work and I still don't but you do what you have to do.

- [Michael] A lady that came in the store up here in New Hope and I can't remember what she paid for a pack of steaks, and she looked at me and said, wow you farmers must be raking it in right now.

If people at home really knew what we had to do for as little money as we make... it would blow their minds.

- [Jessie] Farmers in the Sixties were pushed to buy these massive machines and to be able to afford those massive machines they had to take out large loans and then to make that work on the back end they had to be farming large amounts of land.

- [Shane] Secretary of agriculture Earl Butts, you know he was the one who incentivized the bigger, faster, fatter, cheaper model.

The industrialization of agriculture.

- Fence row to fence row.

- Yeah.

Produce as much as you can.

- He literally said, get big or, get out.

(mellow guitar strumming music) - [P.J.]

The industry really rewards the big corporations.

Wholesalers and the retailers make 80% of the money on farming.

Yet the farmer has a hundred percent of the risk.

It's my job to get that calf to cow, that seed to stalk seed planting, spraying fertilizer, weather, harvesting and then I only get 18 cents outta every dollar spent on that.

That's not right.

(mellow guitar strumming music) I just looked at my phone and the markets are getting hammered.

For every tractor-trailer load of soybeans that's 500 bucks.

Okay, bye.

From when we talked earlier, beans were down 60 cent they were down 72 when I last checked.

So the market is just dropping like a rocket, I've never really seen a limit drop like that.

Weather and price.

The two components that we need for our survival, but we can't control (mellow guitar strumming music) - [John] I'll be top dressing the winter wheat out here in the coming weeks.

Land has been in my family for over a hundred years.

Right across the river is where my parents were born at.

The body of water where my grandparents traveled by canoe you know, to court and go to church or whatever, you know.

This is my favorite part of the farm, almost feels like you can just walk right out on the water, you know.

Pick up trucks and cars and all these things get old but the land never gets old because generational wealth to your children, you can pass it on.

- [P.J.]

Typically farmers and farm families they build their wealth upon the land.

However, if your grandfather didn't have access to buy land to buy equipment, you know that's something that you are deprived of today.

In 1920 there were a million Black farmers in the country.

(descending whistling sound) - [John] Today we're down to 50,000 black farmers and we're facing extinction.

- [P.J.]

There are more bald eagles in the lower 48 states than they are Black row crop producers.

It's not like it rained on the white farmer side of the road and didn't rain on the Black farmer's side of the road.

You have to look back at the inequities of the past to understand the disparities present day.

Farmers go in in the spring to get their loans approved and they they plant in the spring and they harvest in the fall.

The USDA reports showed on average it took 30 days to approve a white farmer's loan and 120 days to approve a Black farmer's loan.

And that that farmer that planted his corn in April that was during the optimal planting window he had increased yields by planting on time.

The farmer that his loan was delayed that still went out to plant late.

His crop didn't make, and he wasn't able to pay his loan back.

And it just didn't happen to one.

It was a domino effect across the country.

- [John] My dad always says, stay away from the government.

Government and Black don't go together.

That was, that's a old myth in the South.

I think, I think it panned out to be true.

Truthful.

You know?

- The government, the US Department of Agriculture they have a presence in every county throughout every state in the country.

Local farmers go to those county offices to report their acres of corn, soybeans.

Their head of cattle.

That county office reports to the state office.

That state office has a tally for Virginia and they report to the national office.

In the Seventies and Eighties, these offices were the real, the guillotine for Black farmers and access to capital.

- [John] I walked into the Farmer's Home Administration door pleading with him for a $5,000 farm operating loan.

That's what I needed to plant my tobacco crop.

When this farmer came in named Earl.

He asked 'em about their wives and they were gonna have dinner at a local steakhouse.

He granted him a loan for $157,000 and I'm - he had already told me he wasn't lending me the five.

I'm sitting there trying to talk to him like, you know I desperately need this five grand here.

And farmer Earl turns around, walks out the door and Mr. Gunner says, Hey Earl, I need you to come back in here next week now and fill out that paperwork now.

- [P.J.]

So the handful, you know of Black farmers that are out there, the government says that we'll offer some debt relief and then white farmers file 13 lawsuits around the country saying, that's not fair.

Well, you know, if you look on the wall and say, okay well how do we go from this many Black farmers in 1920 to today?

That really wasn't fair.

- [John] My grandfather said, every good thing comes from the farm.

Cotton for clothes, timber to build houses.

Everything good comes from the land.

We choose to be good stewards of the land or bad stewards of the land.

- [Shane] We have this herd above ground and people take good care of the herd above ground, but you have a herd below ground that you have to manage as well.

The American Serengeti, the Great Plains of North America used to be the most fertile land in North America.

We rotationally graze, that mimics these natural systems.

The bison in North America moving, the wolves are pushing them, so they don't stay in one spot for very long.

They come down, they hit it hard, they graze it down and then they move off of it.

Hundreds of millions of years, that's how ruminants and ungulates have lived and, and adapted.

All grasses grow in an S-curve.

It's like a teenager, you know, a teenager goes through a rapid growth phase and that's what we always want to maintain on our farm.

Those roots require energy to stay alive.

So what it does is it, it sheds off a bunch of that root mass.

Then that decaying root mass is what feeds your soil ecology.

We want to come through and graze it right at that point so that restarts the entire system again.

- [Jessie] That growth stage is so much faster for grassland than it is for forests that it's exponentially more effective at sequestering carbon.

- [Shane] So we're in their paddock right now that we're about to move them out of.

- [Jessie] The moms are like old hands.

They know where to go.

The babies are like... (Old folksong music) (Old folksong music continues) (Old folksong music continues) (engine revving) (gate clanking) - [Shane] So the idea is we're gonna go over the road here into that pasture just across the road with those giant oak trees.

We're managing this farm for the landlord.

In a perfect world, I would set up my farm where it was adjacent paddock to adjacent paddock and it was a more efficient use of time.

(squeaking sound) (Old folksong music continues) You know, moving cattle, a lot of farmers think you have to have three people and three four-wheelers, a couple of dogs.

You can train them.

I mean, they follow you.

(cows mooing) Come on.

(gate clanking) (cows mooing) - [Jessie] They come to a specific very silly Swiss alpine call.

- (Shane calls out) Hooo-wee.

Come on.

- [Jessie] Ch ch ch.

Come on momma.

(cows mooing) Ch ch ch.

And since you're interacting with them daily they're comfortable around people.

They're not aggressive.

(Old folksong music) (Jessie yells) Come on now.

(Old folksong music continues) (Walkie talkie chatter) Hey Jessie.

What do ya see up there?

Any stragglers?

- I'm gonna take the Gator back down and help Jessie get that last calf.

(Shane clicking tongue) Come on.

Come on.

Come on.

(Old folksong music continues) (Cows mooing) - Hey baby hey!

Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey!

There's one way to do it.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

That's a lot of work.

- Sure.

There was three moms all over there.

- Yeah.

I was like, oh man I bet there are more, more calves over there.

- [Jessie] There were like four calves.

- [Shane] It was weird that there were, - [Jessie] So far.

- [Shane] Yeah.

(Old folksong music) (engine running) - [Shane] Agricultural communities used to be based on communal prosperity.

You would go off of your farm for a full day and go help build a a barn.

That's been dissolved.

And there's no other industry with suicide rates as high as farming.

Farmers deserve to do well.

They don't deserve to be in these crippling contracts that, you know, they just feel like the world is closing in around them because they're in so much debt and under so many restrictions they can't do what they want to do.

There's no community anymore - And that's what the big corporations want because if you start relying on your neighbors you start talking.

And if you start talking then you realize what a bad deal you're getting.

- [Michael] Last year when we were struggling to get $1,400 a head for the live animal, slaughterhouses were getting $1,800 just for the carcass.

It was kind of hard to choke that one down for a while but there wasn't much you could do about it.

You couldn't get three Cattleman's organizations to agree that the sky was blue.

If we could get every Cattleman's association throughout the country to agree on stuff we might have this thing licked.

But until then, we're at the mercy of everybody above us.

- They're keeping the prices low for large scale incubators and processors.

We're keeping grain down so that they can feed it to chickens and hogs and stuff like that.

Pay me for what my crop is worth.

- [Shane] I go home to Oklahoma every year and I always drive past these gigantic grain elevators that hold millions and millions of bushels.

All they, they dump the grain just in a huge mound.

The demand is so low, but the supply just keeps increasing.

- We act like we're in a capitalistic society but that's just not capitalism.

- Yeah.

- That, that market would fail if it was left to its own devices, but it's being propped up by subsidies.

So much of like our industries are false capitalist industries.

- I always say you have a dentist, you have a mechanic you should have a farmer too.

- [John] A small scale farm could be five acres in Louisa County.

Enough to ride a four-wheeler around and raise some hemp and some smaller scale diversified type operation.

We have to make that model fit in rural America.

- [Jessie] You can't intimately know a thousand acres.

We intimately know the land that we work on.

It's much better for us to be focused on a small amount of land and doing that well, than being forced by agricultural legislation and the economy to grow as much land as possible.

- [Michael] These cattle right here, they can't tell you if they're feeling sick.

They can't tell you if they feel bad.

You gotta go out here and spend time with them.

It's a challenge.

I got a little one coming, me and my wife are expecting in July.

It's a little boy and I hope that he wants to farm but if he doesn't, I can completely understand that (Old folksong music) - [John] This is new ground.

It's been timbered, so I bought it and joined my farm.

My original property line is there and my ultimate goal is to have all my crop land here and then have my hay and beef cattle at the other farms.

We can do a lot better than we've done on the issue of Black farmers in this country.

And I say that when redemption and forgiveness and love.

Now people, we can do better.

If you want to see rural America thrive again and take the paste boards off these boarded up townships you have to invest in small scale farms and rural America.

If you invest in rural America and small scale farms our country will quickly turn around.

We have to live up to what we are known for.

The greatest country in the world.

- [Jessie] If we reinvested in farming as a system we would create so many jobs.

- [P.J.]

We're at a historic place in agriculture right now.

We're optimistic.

We're looking forward to making a change.

- [Shane] There's always a way to evolve and adapt.

Every year we try something new out.

We test the water and see: Is it profitable and how much do we enjoy doing it?

And that's what determines our scalability.

- [John] If you got a chance to make a difference people, go out and make that difference.

You know, the arc of justice has a lot of tension on the end, but if you keep pulling it down it eventually bend down to the ground.

You got you gotta hold on till the, till the end.

That's it.

(Old folksong music fades) - Production funding for this program is made possible by... ♪ Who Belongs by Zach Laliberte ♪ ♪ Who belongs ♪ ♪ Is there room enough for all ♪ ♪ Who belongs ♪ ♪ do we stand or do we fall ♪ ♪ And is there room ♪ ♪ in our hearts for this whole land ♪ ♪ Is there room ♪ ♪ For us in the heart of the land ♪ (jingle)