Can you just talk to me, don't worry about him?
I guess it gives me a summary of the state of,
I mean, how many farmers decide they want to go
into international politics in the same time?
Well, I mean, I do this because I was raised up
on a farm, my dad was very involved in organizations
and advocating for the farmers,
so I watched my dad do that,
and I just said, you know what, I like this,
I enjoy doing this, and someone has to do it,
and on our farm, you know, not every farmer
has the capability to take the time to do it,
because it does take a lot of time,
and here on our farm, I farm with two brothers
and two nephews, so I have that capability
to get away and go talk to legislators,
or go talk to, you know, go out to Washington, D.C.,
and our host tours, we've hosted trade tours here,
we've hosted government officials here and stuff,
and so like I said, I just want to be able to tell our story.
So what is the story that's being told right now?
The story that's being told right now is,
farmers are fearful, you know,
we're just gonna know what's going on,
because there's no certainty in anything.
I mean, we haven't, for our Washington, D.C.,
they haven't finished the farm bill yet,
which is two, three years past,
where it should have been done.
So there are programs through that,
that are going, okay, are we gonna have these,
are we not gonna have them?
And then with everything going on with trade,
especially so being being impacted,
I mean, all agriculture is being impacted on it.
Things be taking the biggest hit,
and so we're watching our markets kind of collapse,
but yet what we're paying for things,
all those prices are increasing, you know,
our fertilizer, all of our inputs for our crops,
our equipment, if we want to put up a new bin,
all those prices are going up,
but we're getting paid less for the,
you know, for the products that we're growing.
So when does that come to a head?
Are people gonna play it less next year?
Farm's gonna go under?
Some farms are going to go under,
there are some farms that, you know,
are not gonna be able to make them,
that's very sad, you know,
no matter what size farm you are,
if you have 160 acres,
or you have 6,000 acres,
every farm is kind of in the same situation,
that, you know, the bigger farm you are,
the more debt you have generally,
and so you're sitting there going,
I got these bills to pay,
I got employees to pay, you know,
the smaller farm are going,
okay, I'm on my own,
and, but I need to, you know,
furnish for my family,
and I can't do this, and yeah,
so there's gonna be some farms going under,
banks going well without some of these guarantees,
without some of these prices,
we're not gonna be able to guarantee you loans,
and that's gonna push them out.
So what is the economy of it right now,
because are most people planting,
already have it sold for the next year already,
are they going a year ahead,
or is it waiting and getting the market price
at the time of harvest?
Well, historically what farmers have done is,
like, okay, right now we're September of 25,
and some farmers will start selling
their 26 crop right now,
and, you know, up to a portion,
but what a lot of farmers do is,
okay, I should get so many bushels,
and so I'll sell 50%,
because you don't want to sell too much,
because if something happens, you don't get a crop,
you don't want to be on the hook for that.
So they're generally looking ahead,
you know, selling ahead a year, year and a half.
And, you know, once we know what we have
for like the 25 year, we start selling more.
Well, with prices, we're not selling,
we're not marketing that right now,
so because we're like,
well, our price is going to go up,
and sadly prices seem to be going down right now,
and so we're just sitting here going,
what do we do?
Well, you know, we've always done kind of,
here's been our marketing plan,
and I mean, every year is a little different,
but you have to have a plan,
and, like I said, with that uncertainty,
all those plans are just kind of getting shy in the air.
So when people drive by and they see the soybeans
in the fields still,
are most of those sold already
to the farmers already have the cash and having...
You don't get cash until they're delivered.
They're sold, the soybeans are corn that's sold.
It's sold on contract,
and once you deliver it to the elevators,
then that's when they pay you once they have that,
you know, you sell it 5,000 bushel contracts
or 10,000 bushel contracts,
and once that contract is full,
then they will give you the money.
So right now it's just sitting here
until we get it delivered.
So, most of it's contracted, though.
But what percentage would you say that's...
On a typical year, at this point,
I would say usually about 70, 75%
that is gonna be hauled to the elevator is sold.
Now, some farmers have storage,
like here on our farm,
we have about 260,000 bushel of storage
that we store corn in,
and that will have a little bit of that sold,
but that we can hold throughout this next year
and sell at different points when, you know,
right now prices are generally lower
because all this corn or soybeans are coming into market.
So, okay, we'll wait till next spring or summer
when there isn't the supply
and a little bit more demand prices are generally higher.
So, the corn that people don't have storage for,
they have usually about 75% of it's sold or contracted.
And this year, I mean, I haven't talked to other farmers,
we're way below that because the prices
that were being offered right now
aren't covering the cost that it costs us
to put it in the ground.
So, what do you, what will you do with the harvest
that you're not contacted for?
Well, I mean, we still have to haul it to the elevators
because, you know, like I said,
we can only store so much here,
but once we haul it to the elevators,
then on top of not having a good price,
we have to pay them to store it for us.
And so, that costs so much every elevator is different,
but so we're already down below our input costs
and now we're paying more to,
or you just sell it and say,
okay, I'm gonna take a loss on this.
So, yeah, your choice is at that point,
you can't hold it yourself,
you're basically rent space or pay them to hold it for you
and hope that the price goes up
or you sell it at a loss.
Right, and I mean, there's not a lot of stuff
because it's not something that, you know,
you can just say, I'll just put it in a pile out back
and wait and see what happens.
You know, you can't do that with these products.
So, what are we dealing with with China?
Because China's typically the largest market for soybeans.
They've said they're not buying anything right now,
because they're in a trade dispute over tariffs.
Is there hope that that's gonna be resolved in a few months?
There's always hope.
I mean, as farmers, we have to have hope
that something's gonna happen.
With China, historically, China has bought more soybeans
from the U.S. than the rest of the world combined.
And so, when China doesn't buy from us,
that's a huge impact to us.
And so, yes, they have not bought any soybeans from us
here in September.
And people are going, oh, they'll run out of them.
Oh, no, they're getting them from South America right now.
So, they've got, you know, you build up these relationships
and you build up, you know, the transportation
and, you know, all that infrastructure.
And so, okay, we've lost a lot of that now
to South America, Argentina and Brazil.
And they're growing more and more soybeans every year.
They're clearing rainforest.
And they're able to provide that to China.
So, even, in my opinion, right now,
if all of a sudden said, okay, you know,
we're no tariffs and, you know, we can do this,
where's the incentive for China to say,
oh, yeah, we'll switch from South America
and we'll come back to you.
So, it's going to, I think it's something
that can get built back up,
but it's gonna take 20, 30, 40 years
to build that back up once.
And, you know, you never know what's gonna happen
in the meantime with that.
So, you're not looking at this as like a short-term disruption.
No.
Like, they're not a jilted lover who's seeing something.
They're gone.
Yep, they're right now, they're gone.
I mean, they'll buy some from us here and there,
but not the quantities that they have in the past.
And so, right now is, you know, okay,
I'm president of Wisconsin Soybean Association.
You know, I'm going out to Washington, D.C.,
talking to legislators.
And even up in Madison, talking to legislators,
we're going, okay, yeah, we still need to work on trade.
We need to work on other countries.
And, but that's not going to fill that market
that we're losing from China.
It'd be great to build that back up from China,
but like I said, that's a long ways down the road.
So, then another thing we have to do
is what can we do with these soybeans domestically?
You know, biodiesel is getting crushed plants,
getting that oil and soybeans are in so many products.
And what can we do here domestically
to help relieve what we've lost internationally?
So, yeah, you mentioned the crusher
and obviously there's the facility in Evansville
that's been talked about.
What's the latest on what you know about that?
See, just that proposing building this,
I mean, they own the land
and I've had conversations with them.
They want to get it built,
but they're waiting on different things
from the federal government, different programs,
different regulations.
One that they're waiting on is the renewable fuel obligation.
Every year the federal government sets
how many billions of gallons of renewable fuel,
you know, to be used here in the US.
And this year they came out with a high number for us
and we're very happy with the number that they came out with
because it was higher than what we expected.
And right now they're going through hearings
and, you know, going through the process
and on October 31 they're supposed to come out with,
okay, here is the numbers.
And so it's things like that that CHS is waiting for going,
okay, because they built this plant.
This plant is going to cost roughly 800 million dollars
to build.
They want to be able to,
or they want to make sure that,
okay, we invest all this money into it.
We're going to be able to sell our products
and you'll be able to make money to pay this off.
So in the alternative,
so I guess the place, the crusher in the sense of,
like we have soybeans,
you don't have a place to put them,
what would it mean if that facility was open already?
Like how much would that change the current situation?
It would increase our prices here
because right now all of our soybeans,
I mean, like in Wisconsin right now,
two thirds of the soybeans grown in Wisconsin are exported.
And so if we had a facility like that
that would crush 70 million bushel a year
and the state of Wisconsin last year
grew 110 million bushel.
So this facility,
I mean, they'd be bringing it from all over the Midwest.
It wouldn't just be Wisconsin soybeans.
But by having a facility like this,
we, it would save us money
because the transportation costs right now,
it's costing us money,
be, you know, we're getting lower price
because it's costing the companies
that are buying the soybeans.
It's costing them money to ship it,
you know, get it on the river and send it down to New Orleans
or, you know, on trucks or trains
to get it to places with the markets.
So where if we had this market right here,
that would help our, you know, our prices
because we don't, all those shipping or, you know,
transportation costs are, well,
a lot of them would be eliminated.
It'd be a lot easier to send it 10 miles down the road
than down the river.
Exactly.
And so right there is where, you know,
it would really help us by having that right here.
And, you know, it's just one more place
to sell in the area, too.
So I remember back in like the 2006 or 2005, 2007 budget,
Governor Doyle put money in for a crush facility.
Whatever happened with that?
That one fell through.
They were, you know, local investors
and different markets and stuff.
And so that one fell through at the time.
And, you know, just-
Obviously the states know that this is a necessary thing
for a long time.
Wisconsin does not have a crush facility
in the state of Wisconsin right now.
There's a couple of different places
that are building maybe smaller ones for, you know,
for their co-op, just for, you know,
the soybean meal, for the feedstock
to go back out to cattle and stuff,
where this one's main goal would be crushing for the oil
to, you know, sell the oil,
whether it's for fuel or cooking oil
or, you know, all the, you know,
food products and stuff like that.
So there is not one of those plants here in Wisconsin.
And so like I said, that would be huge for us.
So is there a federal money that they're hoping to get
or just federal number guarantees to the market?
Guarantees for the markets is what they're looking for.
They're not, I mean, I'm not on CHS board, you know,
where they're getting their money that I'm not a part of.
But it's the federal markets that, you know,
to sell their product, the federal and world markets
to sell their products to, you know,
you get the feedstock, you know,
after you're crushing, you get the oil out,
you have that feedstock and, you know,
that can be sold here in Wisconsin
to our animal agriculture, whether it's, you know,
the dairy, beef, chickens, or we also have
the Delong Port in Milwaukee now
that just opened up a couple of years ago
where it would be easy access to take it from there,
take it to Delong's and put it, you know, again,
you know, world markets and ship it out to other countries.
Okay.
So in terms, so looking at the politics of this all,
the farmers overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump.
And Donald Trump is the one that created the tariff
in the trade wars that disrupted all of this.
Are farmers blaming him?
When you talk to other farmers, are they connecting
those dots or are they keeping those separate?
You know, just like anything, you go talk to farmers,
there are some farmers that love him,
some farmers that hate him,
some farmers that are a little less optimistic now.
So I mean, that is such a wide ranging thing, you know,
it'd be hard to say, yes, farmers are for this
or farmers are against this.
So right now, you know, it'd be hard to say anything on this.
So there's not like a, the feeling isn't becoming, you know,
hegemonic, there's not one sense going through
of like, this is why this has happened.
No, I mean, yeah, farmers were not happy with the tariffs,
but you talk to some other farmers and they're going,
this is a small thing in the end, you know,
in the long run, this'll be good.
So there's all different opinions on this.
Okay, so it really isn't impacting the political sphere
of how that's playing.
Well, anything that happens is going to impact
the political sphere of what's going on.
So like I said, you know, whether, you know,
Donald Trump would be losing support, gaining support,
that's politics in general.
No matter who's in, no matter what's going on,
there's gonna be people happy with things,
there's gonna be people unhappy with things.
One of the other things that's been talked about
is whether there could be federal bailouts
for farmers that are impacted by this.
I'm assuming that would have more support universally.
That would have support.
Like I said, the farmers that are in trouble right now,
yeah, they're looking for something going,
hey, we're losing these markets,
so we're not making this money.
But in general, we're going, no, we want trade deals.
We want, you know, the domestic infrastructure set up
so we can sell our products and make that money.
We don't wanna rely on government bailouts
and stuff like that.
We wanna be able to make our own money
and sell our products at a price that we can make money.
So I know that there's ethanol subsidies for corn.
Are there similar subsidies that exist in the soybean market?
There are really aren't.
It's just, you know, when markets get bad enough,
the government's going, okay, here we'll,
you know, give a program here or there.
And so I mean, there are no real set programs for any of that.
So as we're looking forward,
anytime we see these massive farm losses,
whether it's the 80s or the early 2000s
or Donald Trump's first term,
it's typically the small guys go under
and then some of the big guys take it.
Like the fields still get planted the next year.
The fields will be planted and it's not, you know,
some of the smaller guys sometimes are better set
because they're smaller and their farms are paid off.
They don't have that debt.
So it's not, you know, a big farm versus small farm thing.
It's where your farm is, how your farm is set up, you know,
you may be a big farm and, you know,
not have a lot of debt.
Luckily you were able to, you know,
through the generations pay off that debt.
You may be a small farm, same thing,
or either one going, hey, I got, you know,
I'm a beginning farmer, I got high debt.
And so it's not a big farm versus small farm.
But yeah, when any size farm goes out,
yeah, that land's not gonna sit empty.
The farmers that are making it, you know, philosophy is,
hey, maybe if I grow more,
I can either spread out that loss a little bit more,
or I can, hey, if I farm more,
prices are better next year, I can make up for that loss.
So give me a little bit of your family's background.
How long has your dad that started this?
And, you know, how many acres do you have now?
How's it?
This farm here, my mom and dad bought it in 1963,
shortly after they got married.
They both grew up farming, grew up neighbors.
So I've, many generations of farming in my family,
but this farm here, I'm a second generation farmer.
Mom and dad started it with 40 cows and 240 acres.
And like I said, that was in 1963.
Now my dad's passed away.
My mom's still around, but she's not a partner in the farm,
but she's the mom, she still runs the farm.
But now it's me and two brothers,
our partners of the farm.
And then we have two of my nephews,
each of my brothers have a son that are on the farm
that are going to be the next generation
taken over the farm.
And we've grown from that 40 cows, 240 acres.
We sold our dairy back in 2020.
We got out of the dairy business.
We're doing heifer raising for a local farm.
So we have about 500 heifers here on our farm.
We raised some steers.
And then right now we're farm about 4,200 acres
of mostly corn and soybeans.
So could you see a formula where you increase corn next year
or is the corn market impacting a similar way to soybeans?
The corn, that math feature.
The corn market is impacted some,
not as much as the soybean market.
There might be little changes,
but on our farm here,
we've got a rotation where we usually do two years of corn
and one year of soybeans.
And so that's our rotation and it's always worked
and that's how we're set up.
So I don't see a big plan and a big plan to switch.
And it's one of those that,
okay, it said instead of 2,600 acres of corn
and 1,300 acres of soybeans,
next year we're only gonna grow 600 acres of soybeans
and make it 3,600 acres of or 3,500 acres of corn.
Well, if everyone does that,
well then you're gonna really flood the market in corn
and those prices are just gonna plummet.
So I mean, you gotta kinda figure out,
every farm's gotta figure out what to do.
Now like here in Wisconsin, this year alone,
there was 250,000 less soybean acres planted
this year compared to 2024.
So there are a lot of farmers that saw the impacts
that was happening and did make that change,
but that's a decision that every farm has to make
for what's best for them.
So how are you looking?
I mean, are you guys gonna be okay?
Are you one of the big farmers that are gonna be impacted?
We're impacted, yes.
We're set so we can ride the storm out for a while,
but I mean, every farm is the same.
You can only ride it out for so long.
You can only borrow so much money,
but we're set right now where we can ride out the storm
and because with farming, the way we look at it,
you're gonna, in a 10 year span,
you're gonna have two, maybe three really good years.
You're gonna have three really bad years
and then those other four years are kind of there.
So when you have those good years, you invest back
into your farm, whether it's equipment or buildings
or whatever you need on those good years, you do that.
So those bad years, you go, okay, we don't have the money.
We're not gonna spend anything.
We're just gonna sit back and wait till next year
and see what happens.
And when we talk about these prices,
we sit here and we go, okay, yes, it's impacting us,
but it's not just impacting us.
It's impacting our local communities
because like I said, when we have those bad years
and we're not spending that money,
the local businesses aren't getting the money.
They're getting impacted too
because they say every dollar that's made on a farm
it gets turned around seven times in the local economy.
So when we get hit, the local economy gets hit.
Yeah, you don't have to go too far in Wisconsin
to see small communities that still centralize
around the farm.
Right, and people go all farmers,
make up less than 2% of America's population,
but we have a huge impact on everything
that goes on around here, to me,
I mean, as a farmer and everything,
I'm a little biased, but basically,
American economy still runs off of agriculture.
If agriculture is doing good,
the U.S. economy generally does good.
If agriculture is doing bad,
U.S. economy is generally going down.
Is that make it all the more frustrating
that this feels like a self-inflicted wound?
Like there are times where just the weather's bad
or just there are crop issues or,
but this was something that the United States did on its own.
Like tariffs and severing these trade relationships.
That was a choice.
You know, we do sit here and go,
why are we stuck in the middle?
And it's, you know, when the federal government goes
and says, you know, does whatever,
whether it's tariffs or, you know,
every year can be something different right now.
Yes, it's tariffs that we're looking at.
And the other countries,
when they want to retaliate,
they know the best way to retaliate
is against U.S. agriculture.
And so, yeah, we sit here and we're like,
why are we stuck in the middle?
But that also shows the importance of what we're doing
that we are stuck in the middle
because the other countries see
the importance of agriculture.
All right, give me a little summary of the soybean,
is it soybean council, your answer?
The Wisconsin Soybean Association.
We're a member organization that we go out
and we advocate for the farmers.
You know, we do lobbying.
We go out to, I generally go out to Washington, DC
three times a year to talk to federal legislators.
I'm, you know, going up to Madison, testifying on bills.
And we're working on different rules, laws,
funding, anything that can impact us.
We're out there advocating for the farmers.
Because like I said, I mean, we have 14,000 soybean growers
in the state of Wisconsin.
And there aren't many of them that are, you know,
a lot of them can't go out.
You know, they're not able to get off the farm.
A lot of them don't want to.
They don't like talking publicly.
So our association is there to advocate
for all these other farmers
and try and get the best possible products
and results that we can.
Can I get you to say and spell your name
and give your title to soy on the crop?
Okay.
Doug Reebout, D-O-U-G-R-E-B-O-U-T.
And I am president of the Wisconsin Soybean Association.
All right.
Thank you very much.
I'm going to keep the mic on for a little bit if you want.