Farmer Stories is a weekly series pulling the best conversations from the Regenaissance podcast archive.

These aren't new episodes — just the best stories from American farmers on their experience of the farming landscape, giving incredible insight into it's systems, polocies, economics, bad actors, good actors, and rural communities.

This series aims to encourage thinking bigger picture: Americas productive capacity, middle class revival, & real food as the foundation of it all.

Joel Hollingsworth runs Smoke River Ranch in northeast Oklahoma. This conversation talks about why Joel believes we need to keep manufcaturing in America & why Oklahoma's culture of self-governance is a cultural model the country can build around.

Timestamps

• 0:00 — Why build in America, not abroad
• 1:30 — The federalist structure and America's creation story
• 4:00 — Oklahoma's culture of self-governance
• 6:30 — Regen ag as a churn factory
• 7:30 — Triffin dilemma and hollowing out of domestic production
• 9:00 — How crop insurance locks out new farmers
• 11:00 — Foreign cattle and the 30% currency gap
• 12:30 — Land as money, not farmland
• 14:00 — Farm credit weaponized (Dustin Kittle story)
• 15:30 — Average rancher age 58.5
• 17:00 — What rural collapse looks like
• 18:30 — Sovereign debt and centralizing risk

Links:

Full podcast episode:
- YouTube
- Spotify
- Apple

Connect with Joel:
- Smoke River Ranch Website
- X