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

Gunthorp Farms is a 3rd generation pork and poultry operation in northern Indiana with on-farm USDA-inspected processing. This tour covers the full farm from farrowing paddocks to kill floor, smokehouse, and wastewater treatment. Watch alongside the full podcast episode for the full story.

Key Topics

• Adaptive multi-paddock grazing in practice
• 50-paddock farrowing system and piglet management
• Building and running a USDA-inspected on-farm processing facility
• USDA enforcement: how small and large plants are treated differently
• Constructed wetland wastewater treatment

What You'll Learn

• How paddock size and recovery time shift by season
• What to ask when you visit a pig farm
• What it costs to build on-farm processing and where permitting breaks down
• How HACCP regulation actually gives small plants flexibility if you understand it
• Why scale changes food safety risk in ways inspection policy doesn't reflect

Connect w Greg & Gunthorp Farms

Website
X
Instagram
Linkedin

Full podcast interview
Follow the tour on YouTube

Timestamps

00:00:00 Adaptive multi-paddock grazing explained
00:03:00 Pig health, thermoregulation, and antibiotic-free management
00:05:00 What consumers should ask when visiting a pig farm
00:15:00 Energy-free waterers and farrowing paddock design
00:27:00 Kill floor overview and processing plant history
00:36:00 Permitting, wastewater, and navigating USDA regulation
00:45:00 Food safety: small vs large plant accountability
00:51:00 USDA enforcement disparities and advocacy
01:02:00 Packaging equipment walkthrough
01:13:00 Smokehouse construction and constructed wetland wastewater system

Charles and Heather Maude are 5th generation ranchers in South Dakota running a direct-to-consumer beef and pork operation built on land their family has worked for over 115 years.

This tour covers the full operation - cattle, hogs, grain storage, equipment, and the irrigated river bottom at the center of a federal land dispute that drew national attention.

Watch this alongside the full-length podcast episode for the complete story behind what you're seeing on the ground.

Key Topics

• Direct-to-consumer beef and pork - how it actually works
• Cattle finishing and feeder calf production
• Farrowing crates - the honest case for and against
• Why feed quality determines meat quality in hogs
• Grain storage, forage systems, and matching stocking rate to grass
• The disputed river bottom and the federal land dispute

What You'll Learn

• How a small ranch runs multiple livestock enterprises on limited acres
• Why weaning date is a range management decision, not just an animal one
• What farrowing crates are actually for and why a skeptic changed her mind
• How monogastric and ruminant digestion produce fundamentally different meat
• What 115 years of private land management looks like - and what happens when it's challenged
• Why boundary disputes in the rural West are common, and criminal indictments are not

Connect with Charles & Heather

Website
Instagram
Facebook

Timestamps

00:00:00 — Introduction and context
00:02:00 — Cattle paddock: finished beef and this year's steer calves
00:04:00 — Weaning early — a drought and range management decision
00:06:00 — Grain bins: what they store and how they work
00:08:00 — Farrowing facility: why the crates exist
00:13:00 — Hog nutrition: simple stomach vs. ruminant digestion
00:15:00 — Pasture-raised pork: why quality and finish time differ
00:18:00 — Legacy equipment: grandfather's tractors and the 1948 truck
00:24:00 — The fence line: terrain, flooding, and where fences actually go
00:25:00 — The Forest Service dispute begins
00:27:00 — No written violation, no due process, criminal charges
00:28:00 — Working toward resolution: the Small Tracks Act
00:30:00 — Secretary Rollins, the temporary use agreement, and what changed
00:33:00 — The survey stakes, the crop damage, and the escalation
00:37:00 — What the land trade proposal was and why it was rejected
00:39:00 — What this case means for ranchers and private landowners
00:41:00 — Final reflections