In this week's Ag Tribes Report, Vance Crowe is joined by fifth-generation Texas Panhandle farmer Casey Kimbrell for a fast, candid breakdown of three stories rocking agriculture.
They unpack the touted Trump–Xi "soybean breakthrough," asking whether a 25 MMT annual commitment is progress or just a return to pre-trade-war status quo. Then they wade into the renewed push for mandatory country-of-origin labeling in beef, the packer vs. rancher incentives behind the current system, and why transparency matters more than ever. They close the news block with Bill Gates' pivot from climate alarmism toward prioritizing vaccines, and what a shift in climate narratives could mean for farm economics and regulations.
Beyond the headlines, Casey shares his Bitcoin-to-land price snapshot from Colorado, explains why he believes anyone can succeed in agriculture with relentless optimism and grit, and names Donald Trump as his "worthy adversary" amid criticism of recent moves affecting cattle markets. It's a spirited, no-spin conversation about trade, labeling, climate, and the hard realities of building a future in ag—always with room to respectfully disagree.
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The Ag Tribes Report is brought to you by Legacy Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guest Patricia Showalter on the fun she had sharing stories for her grandchildren.
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I really didn't know what to expect. Were you nervous about it before, or how did you feel about it before? I just wondered what the heck was gonna happen. If somebody was on the fence, what would you tell them? Yeah. I'd tell somebody to do it. Just go and have fun. I'll have fun. You're only here for a short time. My grandkids are gonna say, oh, holy cow. Can we believe this stuff?
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Welcome to the AgTribe's report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crow. The report begins in three, two, one. Let's begin.
[00:01:04] Unknown:
Welcome to the Ag Tribes Report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week, I bring on a guest that represents one of the many ag tribes that make up US and Canadian agriculture. This week, we have Casey Kimbrell, a fifth generation Texas Panhandle farmer and CEO of Casey and Annie Kimbrell Farms. He manages thousands of acres of corn, cotton, and cattle debt free near Sunray, Texas, somewhere out in Colorado, and I found out just before showtime. He even farms in Iowa after overcoming a crazy, $100,000 hail loss. You can read all about him. Chris Bennett did a a spectacular spotlight of him, made me really wanna chat with him. So, Casey, welcome to the show.
[00:01:48] Unknown:
Thank you.
[00:01:49] Unknown:
So what have you been paying attention to lately?
[00:01:53] Unknown:
Well, the latest news, you know, everything on Twitter concerning the cattle market and the big crash from last week and a little bit of everything.
[00:02:06] Unknown:
Yeah. I some weeks, you get on here and you gotta scratch away to find new stories you don't know. You maybe put in extra extra stories because the stories aren't very thick or deep. Not this week. This week, we only have three stories because I think from, watching Casey for, I don't know, a couple years on x, I think we're gonna have some pretty good conversation because, this week, what we're gonna cover is, Trump and his summit with, Xi Jinping and, his his, trade deal that he's making over in China and how much soybeans he's convinced the Chinese to buy. We're also gonna talk about the, mandatory origin of labeling and kinda some of the stuff that's going on with that right now as, representative Massey has been bringing that up in, big big national spotlight ways. And finally, we're gonna talk about Bill Gates reversing his position on climate change.
And, even though that isn't directly agriculture, man, climate change has had a big impact both on the demand for things like corn and, on the things that, you have to do to your engines and all the emission standards. So there's a lot going on there. We're also gonna do Casey's Bitcoin land price report. Here is Peter Thiel Paradox and talk about his worthy adversary, and we're gonna try and do that in just thirty minutes. So let's get started. First off, Trump and Xi summit secures massive soybean buy, resets trade levels to prewar levels. President Trump announced a major US China trade deal, today and yesterday, after meeting with China and some of the things that were on the docket, soybeans, sorghum, and other farm products, the agreement sets annual soybean buys at about 25,000,000 metric tons, matching pre 2018 trade war averages with tariff reductions to revive exports that dropped from 27,000,000 tons in '24 2024 to under 6,000,000 by August '25.
Trump then went out on Truth Social and urged farmers to buy more land and bigger tractors, declaring they'll be very happy. But critics like, Ethan and, Casey view it as a, superficial thing, not maybe not as big of a deal as Trump's making it out to be. Casey, what did you see when you heard about this, trade deal?
[00:04:22] Unknown:
Well, I was really excited. I saw it starting to happen before I went to bed last night, and I thought, hey. We're finally gonna get something that's really positive for agriculture, and it's better than a knock on the head for sure. It's better than zero exports just with of soybeans as we've had over the last year almost. But 25,000,000 metric tons of beans per year is what the commitment is for, and our ten year average is over 30. And so we're got a commitment to China to buy almost as much beans as they've been buying already. I don't call that a win.
[00:05:05] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, the you gotta give him, some credit for coming out and celebrating getting back to exactly where they were at before this happened. Now I don't know. Is he gonna get tariff money off of this? Like, what else is going on? He's some they're talking about rare earth metals, which I think very important to The US system, but if if you if this is the way he presents soybeans, how can you imagine he's presenting other things that he's saying he's winning on? Right. And that's that's
[00:05:33] Unknown:
the rub for me.
[00:05:36] Unknown:
Well, what did you what were you expecting? What did you think markets were expecting? Were they expecting a bigger purchase? The they how did they react?
[00:05:44] Unknown:
Well, one would think that when when you're making a settlement to a dispute and the dispute was caused by an injustice in the way things are going, that when you settled the dispute, that it would be better than it was before, not the same or worse.
[00:06:05] Unknown:
Yeah. I saw on, on x today, the soybean prices jumping up and down and up and down. Brian Scott was, was just he just had a a tweet that was just 19 down, nine up, 19 up, 19 down, and it that's how it's gone all day. Is it have you been watching the markets? I haven't. We had cattle out today, so I've been chasing cattle all day. Alright. Moving on to story number two, reviving the beef label wars, ranchers rally for mandatory origin of labeling in a post WTO world. R CALF USA blasted voluntary country of origin labeling for beef, as a failure on on October 29, urging congress to pass s four twenty one and h r five eight one eight to mandate labels tracing cattle from birth to slaughter. The push counters four mega packers can that control the 85% of processing, allowing foreign beef from Uruguay to Australia, now 90%, you know, to to be presented as a product of The USA after even just minimal processing, eroding rancher profits.
Representative Thomas Massey amplified the call on the thirtieth questioning JBS's antitrust issues and inauguration donations amid unlabeled imports flooding shelves. Bipartisan bills introduced earlier in '25, seeked WTO compliant enforcements with penalties, and, really, it's just this is an issue that's coming back up. Some people, RCAF, are calling for mandatory origin country of origin labeling. Where are you at on this issue, Casey?
[00:07:43] Unknown:
Well, I am for the mandatory country of origin labeling. I don't think it's gonna be the panacea that the ranching community thinks it will be, but it's just the right thing to do. It's the truthful thing to do. Now we not only don't have truth and transparency as to where your beef is coming from, but we have lies printed right on the package that'll say that it's a product of USA when it's not.
[00:08:14] Unknown:
And it really needs to change. It's just the way it is now, it's wrong. Yeah. It's wild. For people that haven't been exposed to this, this is like when a cow could be raised entirely in Argentina, or maybe from several different countries, and then they come across the border and and are processed here. Right? Or they had some amount of the amount of ground beef in the in the, package came from USA beef. They're allowed to label it product of USA.
[00:08:43] Unknown:
Even if it is grown, fed, slaughtered, cut up, and sent to The United States, if they put a different packaging label on it, they can say it's a product of The USA, and that's wrong.
[00:09:00] Unknown:
I and I I, take RCAF's point. I mean, they're saying, yeah. The of course, the four packers want, this to be voluntary because they don't forward with it. And so if you make it voluntary, they're not gonna use it, but they're the ones that are benefiting from it. They're the ones that are able to say, hey, this beef that you think you're getting from a US rancher raised in this, you know, larger system that has quality standards and, humane standards. Well, you you we're gonna present all of the beef as having these qualities when the reality is it doesn't, and they're able to get those lower prices from other places and sell it as US.
[00:09:36] Unknown:
Yes. I saw a post today from the Mead Institute that was saying that if if, this Prime Act passed that Massey's pushing, that there wouldn't be any inspection on meat, and it'll just be a dangerous thing from now on. And the whole thing was not true. And I'm thinking right now where it is, we don't have USDA inspection when it's when meat's slaughtered in foreign country. And they're for that, but yet they're against local processors being able to process beef and us be able to sell direct to consumer. Sounds to me like something's a little off with that.
[00:10:16] Unknown:
Yeah. It definitely seems like it's slanted towards large corporate interests and, you know, a lot of people right now are complaining that the very organizations that they are paying into, they were, you know, they were told they were cattle producers and, so their large check off, group that they have put together isn't just cattle ranchers, it's also the meat packers. And so these groups that that the farmers are saying, hey. We are mandated to pay into this for marketing, and they are not marketing on behalf of US cattle ranchers. They're marketing on behalf of the larger, beef industry who doesn't really want mandatory, country of origin labeling. Absolutely.
[00:10:55] Unknown:
I I could talk for two hours just on this. Cattle industry pays that beef check off, and to me, it's they're cattle cattle raisers raise cattle. They don't raise beef, most of them. A few of them sell a beef on the side or a few beef, but as a whole, most cattle producers produce cattle, not beef. And the the beef comes out of the backside of the packing plant. And so it it to me, cattle producers having to pay that advertising is no different than US Steelworkers getting money taken out of their check to pay for Chevrolet advertisements. It just doesn't compute with me. And worse yet is so much of that dollar ahead checkoff is used to free up a lobbying effort. And now they they'll tell you, oh, we can't lobby with these dollars. But they do have a lobby group, and their lobby group is the the they they that money's kinda there's it's not very transparent where it's going for one thing. And even if they didn't do any lobbying with the actual checkoff dollars, their lobby group uses checkoff dollars to the point that it appears that the lobby group is on cattle producer's side, and most of the time, that's not true.
[00:12:29] Unknown:
Well, this is one of those interesting quirks about checkoff groups that unless you're engaged in the system, you you would have no way of knowing this. Most groups, and I'll just talk about soy just because it's one that I know. They have a checkoff group that they just do marketing. They're supposed to be like, hey. We are pushing open the markets. We're going to Korea. We're going to Japan. We're trying to find more uses for that. And among our own audiences, we are going to put up billboards. We're gonna try and do things in schools to promote that people like soy. But at the same time, there's another group that looks and sounds, just like the the checkoff group, and it's called, I believe, this so there's one that's the soybean board, and then one is the soybean association.
And one of them is the lobbying arm. So they go to congress, and they take money, from, from their donors and from groups that are not necessarily the check off dollars, but it's all a part of a larger system, and then they go and lobby. So for them to say, hey, these are two totally separate things, they're not together, There's usually a huge amount of board overlap. There's oftentimes the lobbying group is, like you said, carrying the branding, essentially, or the overall commodity feel of that. And so they get to benefit from those checkoff dollars. And in this case, you're saying they're advocating for for things that don't actually benefit the people that are paying in the money. Correct.
[00:13:56] Unknown:
And they're supposed to represent both the packer and the cattle producer. And to me, that's an adversarial relationship. And I realized that we both need each other, but we're not both on the same side when it comes to cattle markets because the packer wants things to be as cheap as they can possibly be because it increases their margin. When they're buying cheap and selling high, they make more money. And the cattle producer needs the live cattle to be as as expensive as they can possibly be. And so it seems to me like it's how do you represent both sides of that when when it's a situation like that?
[00:14:42] Unknown:
Well, absolutely seems like, the people that are engaged in it, believe authentically that, they are representing the larger group, the the overarching, system. And then when you get into x and you talk to individuals, it seems like many individuals don't feel served by that larger system. And there is definitely some mismatch between expectation and delivery.
[00:15:09] Unknown:
Well, just almost always, if you see something that almost all of the cattle lobbies with the exception of of cattlemen's and our calf, when it comes to importing beef, they're they're pushing for it. They're not just neutral on it. They are pushing for imports of beef. And they'll tell you things like, oh, but we we export the really good beef that we can't sell here, and we import the really sorry beef so we can have more hamburger. And that the problem with that was that makes sense right now. But they were telling me that same thing when I was selling cull cows for 50¢ a pound. And it's like, if if they got any cheaper, we just wouldn't cull cattle. We just won't let them die in the pasture.
And and so how can they make that argument at that point? And it hasn't changed.
[00:16:07] Unknown:
It's it's, do you think this m cool thing has got legs, or is this just a sideshow among many, many other larger big picture things?
[00:16:15] Unknown:
I think it could have legs. I'm not sure that it will. People still are fearful of the WTO, and and I think the WTO is the sorriest thing this country has ever joined. I think it's a den of thieves. They are they don't listen to The US' side of a court case. They won't really represent The United States at all, and they're supposed to be a neutral party, but they're not. They're against The United States, and I don't think we should be a part of such an organization.
[00:16:48] Unknown:
Yeah. You know, these trade organizations, like, they only work if, if they are used as a way to cooperate more. But if they're used as a way of creating global law or a different system and, like, we're just giving over our sovereignty to another nation, I am going to wrap up on this story, but I think more to come. I think, though, actually, one one thing I did wanna mention, seems to me the big winner here is Thomas Massey. That guy is coming in saying things. He's even having the vice president of The United States say, like, hey. He's not on our side. He's not voting with us on things. Well, right now, as Trump has not, I think, succeeded in farmers' minds the way that they had hoped he was going to, Thomas Massie, on the other hand, he's got a much bigger audience and is really gaining traction among people saying that that guy gets it.
[00:17:36] Unknown:
Thomas Massey is my favorite congressman. I wish we had 400 more just like him. I won't say that I like everything he does. He's definitely a libertarian leaning congressman, and he you know, libertarians are pro free trade, and they they set aside the fact that there's not really any such thing as free trade. And I'm very pro trade. I'm just not, I don't think we ought to just throw the reins to other countries and say, we're we're just gonna take it on the head all we all we can and let you guys run rough shot over us. Well, the thing I would quibble with you on there is I think,
[00:18:19] Unknown:
Chris Benoit was one of my guests on the podcast a few months ago, pointed out there are a lot of libertarians that believe that you can be a libertarian and have tariffs. And, I I, I think I myself have kind of changed my my, philosophy on this. I don't think I would count my I I would count myself as a libertarian, maybe small l, and, I'm open to tariffs. Well, tell Rand Paul that. Alright. Moving on to story number three. Bill Gates prioritizes child vaccines over climate alarmism. Let's play this, little clip right here by Bill Gates so we can hear it in his own words.
[00:18:56] Unknown:
Climate is a super important problem. There's enough innovation here to avoid super bad outcomes. We won't achieve our best goal, the 1.5 or even the two degrees. And as we go about trying to minimize that, we have to frame it in terms of overall human welfare, not just everything should be, solely for climate.
[00:19:26] Unknown:
When the climate activists who who have been very supportive of what you've done and you've been very supportive of what they've done, read this. And and if Greta if Greta Thunberg is reading this and saying to herself, my goodness, he seems like he is reversing himself. What would you tell her?
[00:19:42] Unknown:
I'd say, wasn't the goal here to improve human lives? And shouldn't we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is to help measure, you know, should we get them a measles vaccine, or should we do some climate, related activity? And if if we could take if we stop funding all vaccines and that, you know, saved you point one degree, would that be a smart trade off? That's the kind of question we have to ask.
[00:20:17] Unknown:
So this is a wild turn of face by Bill Gates who was putting forth all kinds of ideas on why we should be preparing to eat, alternative proteins to, you know, energy reduction. What's your take on this? Bill Gates reversing his position? Is climate change over?
[00:20:36] Unknown:
I doubt it's over. It's a religion for a lot of people, and they're not he's not gonna convert everybody overnight, but it's a step in the right direction.
[00:20:46] Unknown:
So when you think about climate change, you know, there's obviously things that benefit have benefited farmers. I don't know about ranchers, but farmers, for example, like the climate change was a lot of the impetus behind developing, ethanol mandates and, definitely trying to get broader public support for that. It also is carbon pipelines. You wouldn't have any of those and the people that are making money off of that. So ag has benefited from climate alarmism. Do you think if this starts to go away, that's gonna hurt farmers' pocketbooks?
[00:21:16] Unknown:
I don't know. I think ethanol is pretty pretty well here to stay. It it's kinda flying on its own, and so there's there's really no there's really
[00:21:29] Unknown:
not anything that on its own. You mandated in the state of Missouri to put a certain amount of gasoline in their state of Illinois. They say, hey. You you are, by law, required to burn ethanol in your in your car.
[00:21:41] Unknown:
Well, true. But it has become a valuable substitute for MTBE for and I don't think any of these climate ideals are gonna entirely go away, and they shouldn't. I mean, I remember in in the mid seventies, I was about five years old, and we came into Albuquerque, New Mexico. And you drive over the mountain pass, and they're sitting down in a valley where the wind traps all the smog in there. And there were just brown clouds in the sky, and we don't wanna go back to that. And so I I I don't I don't think ethanol is I think it's a I think it's a valuable thing to have, and and and the subsidies are gone. And so it's it's getting more and more worth playing on its own.
And I I could be terribly wrong on that. I hadn't done a whole lot of research on it, but that's that's my take is that I think we'll continue to to wanna have additives in gasoline and prevent pollution and smog and such. So
[00:22:43] Unknown:
Yeah. I I think the point I'm interested in in, trying to figure out is is change for what is climate change and what is it that, they're gonna try and implement is which of those things are gonna raise the bottom line of of, farmers or really even just consumers. Like, right now in my pickup truck, I have a damn switch on it that, will turn my truck off while I'm sitting at the stoplight. And I don't know how many more, times I'm gonna have to go to the shop to get that damn thing fixed, but that climate change stuff is gonna go right back to my bottom line if we take out all that, you know, whatever those automatic
[00:23:21] Unknown:
kill switches are on your trucks. There's so many things like that, but they don't even make sense. My daughter's car has that. And I was driving it one day, and it had 30,000 miles on it, and it has a calculator in there as to how much fuel it had saved. And it was, like, three gallons and 30,000 miles that it calculated that it had saved from shutting off at every stoplight.
[00:23:43] Unknown:
Yeah. And, I mean, they tell me that it doesn't make my engine have trouble starting, but that lies, all of it, climate change lies. Alright. That's gonna do it for our news stories today. If you have news that you think we should cover, you can always send it to me, [email protected] or at vance crow on x. Moving on to the Bitcoin land price report. Woo. Bitcoin has been on sale this week. Just as of press time, one Bitcoin was a $107,300. This is, down 11% from the all time highs at the beginning of the month at $126,000. So now let's compare it to land where, where Casey's at. Now, Casey, I know you got land in Texas. You got it in Colorado and in Iowa. But since you're in Colorado right now, what's an acre of, high quality farmland go for these days?
[00:24:36] Unknown:
Here where we're at for this farm slash ranch land on the river, it's fairly stable, going up a little bit. $1,011,000 dollars an acre, some 12.
[00:24:50] Unknown:
Okay. So if we go with 10,000, that would mean point o $9.03 Bitcoin would buy one acre of land, or in other words, 1 Bitcoin would buy you 10.7 acres of land where you're at in Colorado. How does that sit with you, Casey?
[00:25:09] Unknown:
I like land. I'm not saying Bitcoin is worthless. I think there's a place for it. I wouldn't sink my entire portfolio into land. I wouldn't sink my entire portfolio into Bitcoin, but I think there's a place for both.
[00:25:27] Unknown:
How familiar with, are you with Bitcoin? Have you interacted with it?
[00:25:31] Unknown:
Very little. I'm just now getting to where I understand it, and I'll never invest in anything that I just absolutely don't understand. And I I think it's a hedge against inflation, and I've already have a lot of investments that are hedges against inflation.
[00:25:55] Unknown:
When you're going out and learning about Bitcoin, where where do you explore? What have you found to be valuable for this technology that's pretty pretty, huge to understand?
[00:26:05] Unknown:
Oh, podcasts have been really educational. X, you get both sides there. Some people love it. Some people hate it. It's I don't know. It's one of them things that I'm not in love with, but I don't hate it either one. It's a it's a faith based based currency just like the dollar is, but it has reason to have faith behind it. And the dollar has less and less reason to have faith behind it because congress can't seem to control their spending. And that results in more and more dollars ending up in the circulation. And so I I I trust Bitcoin more than I trust the government.
[00:26:56] Unknown:
Hey. That's what I like to hear. Yeah. I I, we'll just leave it right there. If you are interested in purchasing Bitcoin, one of the affiliate links that I use is river.com. That's where I personally purchase Bitcoin. It's a great interface, and if you buy Bitcoin there, it will, actually support the show. So I'll leave a link in the, show notes. Moving on to Casey's, Peter Thiel paradox. This is where I ask you, Peter, what is one thing that you believe that almost nobody you know agrees with you on?
[00:27:29] Unknown:
I believe that anyone can succeed in agriculture.
[00:27:37] Unknown:
Okay. That is bold, and I, on its face, don't agree with it. So convince me.
[00:27:43] Unknown:
Well, I'm not saying that everyone can can succeed in agriculture. Most people can't, but it doesn't. You don't have to have a certain background. You don't have to be raised in a rich family, and most people I know disagree. They say, oh, the only way that you can farm these days is to have a rich daddy or marry somebody that's rich, and and I'm a testament to that. That's not true. You don't have to have a certain skin color to be a farmer. You don't have to be a certain gender to be a farmer. You you can get into the to the to the agriculture, either farming or ranching or both, no matter what your background is.
I've got some of my renters that weren't even born in The United States, and they are doing very well on their own. And
[00:28:35] Unknown:
And so what's the path? What's the what's the way to think about this? Because on its face, there are a lot of people saying, no. You can't. You can't buy the land. You can't, get the equipment. You need a lot of capital.
[00:28:46] Unknown:
Well, that's the first thing you gotta get rid of is you can't. Because if you got the idea that you can't, you are a 100% right all the time. And so it it takes the most optimistic person that you know to be able to start from scratch in this business, and it can be done. And people are saying, well, it could be done when you did it, but it can't be done right now. And I'm gonna tell you it can be done right now. Know a guy that just bought a bunch of broke mouth cows a year ago, turned around, sold them for more than he paid for them, and has a, basically, a free calf crop out of them because he got enough more out of them to pay for their whole year's feed.
So he he's got a whole herd of calves that that he's got nothing but labor in. And right time, right place, of course. But it can be done. But it can be done if you're not optimistic. It can't be done if you don't have absolute determination because I'm gonna tell you, every time you think you're gonna get ahead in this business, something comes along to knock the slaps out from under you. That's every business. That is every single business. There's always something coming up. That's a fact, and it could be weather. It could it could be a neighbor that's that's trying to rent your ground out from under you.
It it could be the president puts up a truth social post and and knocks $500 ahead off your calves that you have to come to market with this week. I mean, it can be anything, and you just gotta be ready and willing to get gut punch after gut punch. But if you are, it can be done. Now that's not to say that everyone that has determination can be successful at it. I'm gonna say most people that try to get in this business that start from scratch and don't have a a big financial backing behind them are gonna fail, but some are gonna make it.
[00:30:53] Unknown:
You know, I think this was a, a good one. I I really like this. You you set it up so that I automatically disagreed with it, and over time, as I'm hearing your case, like, I I can I can solidly get behind it? I'm gonna give you a, rock solid eight on that one. Okay. Moving on to the final section. This is worthy adversaries. This is where we talk about who is somebody that you respect but you strongly disagree with.
[00:31:20] Unknown:
Well, I'm sorry to say, but as of late, it's president Trump.
[00:31:27] Unknown:
Okay. And, and you feel like this makes you a little different? You think most people are in agreement with him?
[00:31:35] Unknown:
I think most people are afraid to say it if they're Trump supporters. And most people, if they're not Trump supporters, couldn't say that they respected him. And I both respect him and disagree with him. I think he stabbed cattle producers in the back last week, and I don't care if the market recovers a 100%. It doesn't change the fact that he stabbed cattle producers in the back. And he didn't say anything negative against beef producers, packing plants, and that part of the chain that has far more influence over the price of of beef in the store than a cattle producer does. We we're market takers. We're not market makers. And that was a real bothersome thing. These trade deals, we keep hearing Japan, China, South Korea, all these things. Oh, we've got such a huge victory here, and they're not victories at all. They're not even what we were already doing before he got into all of this.
And so I I disagree with him. I respectfully disagree with him. I appreciate what he's doing. And for the for the Liberals that are saying, oh, yeah. You're coming back over to our side. That's not true either because I think we would have been worse off with the president Harris. That would he I think she would have just let China run rough shot over us, and we would have been ended up entirely dependent on China. And when you get it entirely dependent upon an adversary, you you you end up in prison camps where it ends up in the long term. And so I'm I'm not saying that I wish I'd have voted a different way or whatever. I voted for Trump. I'll be transparent. And I'm I'm an independent. I voted for both Republicans and Democrats in my lifetime, and I'm not sure if I ever had a president that I voted for that I wasn't disappointed with.
But the the president Trump is is another one of those that I'm I'm really disappointed with. And it's because he's not doing enough, not because he's doing too much like some of the the liberals seem to think. I I don't think we need to be fighting so hard for a deal with China that we backed up so far that we didn't gain anything. This was too much sacrifice not to have gained anything.
[00:34:03] Unknown:
And so, anyway, that's that's where I stand with that. Yeah. I I think you're saying something unique here. I've I was in a group of farmers just last week, and they were right when the Trump, post came out. And, you know, they were like, I wish you didn't do that, but they were unwilling to be very strong about that. Right? People don't want to be seen as going counter to him, and that's what's given him a lot of power, probably a lot of flexibility in negotiations because he does have this loyalty. But you're right. If he's if he stabs you in the back, you gotta call that out because, otherwise, you're you're, in tyrannical situation, but just from a different pole.
[00:34:40] Unknown:
Right. And I'm not looking for a cabinet position, so there's no reason that I can't call a space to space.
[00:34:47] Unknown:
Well, this has been a lot of fun, Casey. If, people wanted to interact with you, engage with you, I know you're on x. Tell me a little bit about how you think about what you post there.
[00:34:59] Unknown:
I say what I wanna say. I don't care if it makes anybody mad or not. So I'm I'm not there for the followers. I don't make any money off of it. I'm only there because I like the ag interaction, and I like the political interaction when it's not just crazy like it was for a little while before the election. And so, like I say, I'm I'm just there for entertainment. That's what I do when I'm waiting on a livestock tank to fill or whatever.
[00:35:28] Unknown:
Thoughts on his tanks, Phil. I think there are a lot of people that write posts that way.
[00:35:33] Unknown:
Well, by the way, I'm not debt free anymore. I borrowed money to buy some lands.
[00:35:38] Unknown:
Well, I'll be interested to get your long form story and you and I to sit down and chat some other time. I'm so glad you were willing to do this, Casey. Thank you for taking time and, and coming on here. Sounds good. Appreciate it, and thanks for hosting. Alright. That's gonna do it for this week's show. If you are interested in purchasing Bitcoin, then I recommend using river.com. I will include the, link, just below down here. And, if you use that and you purchase Bitcoin, it will support the show, and we love seeing that. In fact, in the last, two weeks, people have been buying the dip. And, man, I I I get a little, notice when that happens, and people are making some pretty big purchases out here on this audience. I could tell you that, and it's heartwarming to see. Alright.
Also, if you have been thinking about having me record a stories the stories that your loved ones have that they wanna pass down, consider going to legacyinterviews.com. Just today, I had a great conversation with a guy who said, I wanna get this. I'm thinking about it. I think I have stories, but who's gonna listen to those stories? I don't know. Are my grandkids really gonna find this interesting? And that led us into a great conversation where I told him, I get emails, letters, phone calls from people that I've never met before that didn't buy the interview they their parents did or their sibling did, and they tell me, I'm so fortunate that I now have these stories. I heard things I didn't know, or I heard about people that I'd heard of but didn't really know who they were or what context they had. And so I reassured him as I'm assuring you, there are people that wanna hear your story. And if you've been thinking about doing a legacy interview, go to legacyinterviews.com, fill out the contact form, and, let's have a conversation about what you wanna capture.
Alright. That's gonna do it for this week's show. We'll be back next week. But as always, feel free to disagree. So the conference organizer has a terrible challenge. The audience can pull out their phone and pull up anyone talking about anything. How do you find somebody that is both going to reach every single person in that audience and yet still have that spike of energy where people are electrified because they're hearing about things that they aren't used to or that make them think about things in a different way? The most important question that I ask a conference organizer is, what is it that you want people to feel? What emotion do you want them to have when we leave this talk? What's their disposition? How are they gonna interact with one another? What does this prompt in the people that are there?
It's not just the information. What you're giving them is energy, a reason to be there in that moment. Now they take that energy and they share it amongst each other. For me, the best speech is when people walk away being like, I now have a tangible skill, but they didn't necessarily readily accept it and they had to grapple with it. They set their phone down. They leaned forward. They said, how do I feel about this? And through that, an energy is created that is not about the speaker, it's about the person listening to the speech. It's far beyond motivation. It's actually giving people skills.
The Ag Tribes Report is brought to you by Legacy Interviews, a video service that captures people as they really are so the future knows who they really were. Here's Legacy Interviews guest Patricia Showalter on the fun she had sharing stories for her grandchildren.
[00:00:16] Unknown:
I really didn't know what to expect. Were you nervous about it before, or how did you feel about it before? I just wondered what the heck was gonna happen. If somebody was on the fence, what would you tell them? Yeah. I'd tell somebody to do it. Just go and have fun. I'll have fun. You're only here for a short time. My grandkids are gonna say, oh, holy cow. Can we believe this stuff?
[00:00:47] Unknown:
Welcome to the AgTribe's report, a breakdown of the top stories affecting the culture of agriculture with your host, Vance Crow. The report begins in three, two, one. Let's begin.
[00:01:04] Unknown:
Welcome to the Ag Tribes Report. I'm your host, Vance Crowe. Each week, I bring on a guest that represents one of the many ag tribes that make up US and Canadian agriculture. This week, we have Casey Kimbrell, a fifth generation Texas Panhandle farmer and CEO of Casey and Annie Kimbrell Farms. He manages thousands of acres of corn, cotton, and cattle debt free near Sunray, Texas, somewhere out in Colorado, and I found out just before showtime. He even farms in Iowa after overcoming a crazy, $100,000 hail loss. You can read all about him. Chris Bennett did a a spectacular spotlight of him, made me really wanna chat with him. So, Casey, welcome to the show.
[00:01:48] Unknown:
Thank you.
[00:01:49] Unknown:
So what have you been paying attention to lately?
[00:01:53] Unknown:
Well, the latest news, you know, everything on Twitter concerning the cattle market and the big crash from last week and a little bit of everything.
[00:02:06] Unknown:
Yeah. I some weeks, you get on here and you gotta scratch away to find new stories you don't know. You maybe put in extra extra stories because the stories aren't very thick or deep. Not this week. This week, we only have three stories because I think from, watching Casey for, I don't know, a couple years on x, I think we're gonna have some pretty good conversation because, this week, what we're gonna cover is, Trump and his summit with, Xi Jinping and, his his, trade deal that he's making over in China and how much soybeans he's convinced the Chinese to buy. We're also gonna talk about the, mandatory origin of labeling and kinda some of the stuff that's going on with that right now as, representative Massey has been bringing that up in, big big national spotlight ways. And finally, we're gonna talk about Bill Gates reversing his position on climate change.
And, even though that isn't directly agriculture, man, climate change has had a big impact both on the demand for things like corn and, on the things that, you have to do to your engines and all the emission standards. So there's a lot going on there. We're also gonna do Casey's Bitcoin land price report. Here is Peter Thiel Paradox and talk about his worthy adversary, and we're gonna try and do that in just thirty minutes. So let's get started. First off, Trump and Xi summit secures massive soybean buy, resets trade levels to prewar levels. President Trump announced a major US China trade deal, today and yesterday, after meeting with China and some of the things that were on the docket, soybeans, sorghum, and other farm products, the agreement sets annual soybean buys at about 25,000,000 metric tons, matching pre 2018 trade war averages with tariff reductions to revive exports that dropped from 27,000,000 tons in '24 2024 to under 6,000,000 by August '25.
Trump then went out on Truth Social and urged farmers to buy more land and bigger tractors, declaring they'll be very happy. But critics like, Ethan and, Casey view it as a, superficial thing, not maybe not as big of a deal as Trump's making it out to be. Casey, what did you see when you heard about this, trade deal?
[00:04:22] Unknown:
Well, I was really excited. I saw it starting to happen before I went to bed last night, and I thought, hey. We're finally gonna get something that's really positive for agriculture, and it's better than a knock on the head for sure. It's better than zero exports just with of soybeans as we've had over the last year almost. But 25,000,000 metric tons of beans per year is what the commitment is for, and our ten year average is over 30. And so we're got a commitment to China to buy almost as much beans as they've been buying already. I don't call that a win.
[00:05:05] Unknown:
Yeah. I mean, the you gotta give him, some credit for coming out and celebrating getting back to exactly where they were at before this happened. Now I don't know. Is he gonna get tariff money off of this? Like, what else is going on? He's some they're talking about rare earth metals, which I think very important to The US system, but if if you if this is the way he presents soybeans, how can you imagine he's presenting other things that he's saying he's winning on? Right. And that's that's
[00:05:33] Unknown:
the rub for me.
[00:05:36] Unknown:
Well, what did you what were you expecting? What did you think markets were expecting? Were they expecting a bigger purchase? The they how did they react?
[00:05:44] Unknown:
Well, one would think that when when you're making a settlement to a dispute and the dispute was caused by an injustice in the way things are going, that when you settled the dispute, that it would be better than it was before, not the same or worse.
[00:06:05] Unknown:
Yeah. I saw on, on x today, the soybean prices jumping up and down and up and down. Brian Scott was, was just he just had a a tweet that was just 19 down, nine up, 19 up, 19 down, and it that's how it's gone all day. Is it have you been watching the markets? I haven't. We had cattle out today, so I've been chasing cattle all day. Alright. Moving on to story number two, reviving the beef label wars, ranchers rally for mandatory origin of labeling in a post WTO world. R CALF USA blasted voluntary country of origin labeling for beef, as a failure on on October 29, urging congress to pass s four twenty one and h r five eight one eight to mandate labels tracing cattle from birth to slaughter. The push counters four mega packers can that control the 85% of processing, allowing foreign beef from Uruguay to Australia, now 90%, you know, to to be presented as a product of The USA after even just minimal processing, eroding rancher profits.
Representative Thomas Massey amplified the call on the thirtieth questioning JBS's antitrust issues and inauguration donations amid unlabeled imports flooding shelves. Bipartisan bills introduced earlier in '25, seeked WTO compliant enforcements with penalties, and, really, it's just this is an issue that's coming back up. Some people, RCAF, are calling for mandatory origin country of origin labeling. Where are you at on this issue, Casey?
[00:07:43] Unknown:
Well, I am for the mandatory country of origin labeling. I don't think it's gonna be the panacea that the ranching community thinks it will be, but it's just the right thing to do. It's the truthful thing to do. Now we not only don't have truth and transparency as to where your beef is coming from, but we have lies printed right on the package that'll say that it's a product of USA when it's not.
[00:08:14] Unknown:
And it really needs to change. It's just the way it is now, it's wrong. Yeah. It's wild. For people that haven't been exposed to this, this is like when a cow could be raised entirely in Argentina, or maybe from several different countries, and then they come across the border and and are processed here. Right? Or they had some amount of the amount of ground beef in the in the, package came from USA beef. They're allowed to label it product of USA.
[00:08:43] Unknown:
Even if it is grown, fed, slaughtered, cut up, and sent to The United States, if they put a different packaging label on it, they can say it's a product of The USA, and that's wrong.
[00:09:00] Unknown:
I and I I, take RCAF's point. I mean, they're saying, yeah. The of course, the four packers want, this to be voluntary because they don't forward with it. And so if you make it voluntary, they're not gonna use it, but they're the ones that are benefiting from it. They're the ones that are able to say, hey, this beef that you think you're getting from a US rancher raised in this, you know, larger system that has quality standards and, humane standards. Well, you you we're gonna present all of the beef as having these qualities when the reality is it doesn't, and they're able to get those lower prices from other places and sell it as US.
[00:09:36] Unknown:
Yes. I saw a post today from the Mead Institute that was saying that if if, this Prime Act passed that Massey's pushing, that there wouldn't be any inspection on meat, and it'll just be a dangerous thing from now on. And the whole thing was not true. And I'm thinking right now where it is, we don't have USDA inspection when it's when meat's slaughtered in foreign country. And they're for that, but yet they're against local processors being able to process beef and us be able to sell direct to consumer. Sounds to me like something's a little off with that.
[00:10:16] Unknown:
Yeah. It definitely seems like it's slanted towards large corporate interests and, you know, a lot of people right now are complaining that the very organizations that they are paying into, they were, you know, they were told they were cattle producers and, so their large check off, group that they have put together isn't just cattle ranchers, it's also the meat packers. And so these groups that that the farmers are saying, hey. We are mandated to pay into this for marketing, and they are not marketing on behalf of US cattle ranchers. They're marketing on behalf of the larger, beef industry who doesn't really want mandatory, country of origin labeling. Absolutely.
[00:10:55] Unknown:
I I could talk for two hours just on this. Cattle industry pays that beef check off, and to me, it's they're cattle cattle raisers raise cattle. They don't raise beef, most of them. A few of them sell a beef on the side or a few beef, but as a whole, most cattle producers produce cattle, not beef. And the the beef comes out of the backside of the packing plant. And so it it to me, cattle producers having to pay that advertising is no different than US Steelworkers getting money taken out of their check to pay for Chevrolet advertisements. It just doesn't compute with me. And worse yet is so much of that dollar ahead checkoff is used to free up a lobbying effort. And now they they'll tell you, oh, we can't lobby with these dollars. But they do have a lobby group, and their lobby group is the the they they that money's kinda there's it's not very transparent where it's going for one thing. And even if they didn't do any lobbying with the actual checkoff dollars, their lobby group uses checkoff dollars to the point that it appears that the lobby group is on cattle producer's side, and most of the time, that's not true.
[00:12:29] Unknown:
Well, this is one of those interesting quirks about checkoff groups that unless you're engaged in the system, you you would have no way of knowing this. Most groups, and I'll just talk about soy just because it's one that I know. They have a checkoff group that they just do marketing. They're supposed to be like, hey. We are pushing open the markets. We're going to Korea. We're going to Japan. We're trying to find more uses for that. And among our own audiences, we are going to put up billboards. We're gonna try and do things in schools to promote that people like soy. But at the same time, there's another group that looks and sounds, just like the the checkoff group, and it's called, I believe, this so there's one that's the soybean board, and then one is the soybean association.
And one of them is the lobbying arm. So they go to congress, and they take money, from, from their donors and from groups that are not necessarily the check off dollars, but it's all a part of a larger system, and then they go and lobby. So for them to say, hey, these are two totally separate things, they're not together, There's usually a huge amount of board overlap. There's oftentimes the lobbying group is, like you said, carrying the branding, essentially, or the overall commodity feel of that. And so they get to benefit from those checkoff dollars. And in this case, you're saying they're advocating for for things that don't actually benefit the people that are paying in the money. Correct.
[00:13:56] Unknown:
And they're supposed to represent both the packer and the cattle producer. And to me, that's an adversarial relationship. And I realized that we both need each other, but we're not both on the same side when it comes to cattle markets because the packer wants things to be as cheap as they can possibly be because it increases their margin. When they're buying cheap and selling high, they make more money. And the cattle producer needs the live cattle to be as as expensive as they can possibly be. And so it seems to me like it's how do you represent both sides of that when when it's a situation like that?
[00:14:42] Unknown:
Well, absolutely seems like, the people that are engaged in it, believe authentically that, they are representing the larger group, the the overarching, system. And then when you get into x and you talk to individuals, it seems like many individuals don't feel served by that larger system. And there is definitely some mismatch between expectation and delivery.
[00:15:09] Unknown:
Well, just almost always, if you see something that almost all of the cattle lobbies with the exception of of cattlemen's and our calf, when it comes to importing beef, they're they're pushing for it. They're not just neutral on it. They are pushing for imports of beef. And they'll tell you things like, oh, but we we export the really good beef that we can't sell here, and we import the really sorry beef so we can have more hamburger. And that the problem with that was that makes sense right now. But they were telling me that same thing when I was selling cull cows for 50¢ a pound. And it's like, if if they got any cheaper, we just wouldn't cull cattle. We just won't let them die in the pasture.
And and so how can they make that argument at that point? And it hasn't changed.
[00:16:07] Unknown:
It's it's, do you think this m cool thing has got legs, or is this just a sideshow among many, many other larger big picture things?
[00:16:15] Unknown:
I think it could have legs. I'm not sure that it will. People still are fearful of the WTO, and and I think the WTO is the sorriest thing this country has ever joined. I think it's a den of thieves. They are they don't listen to The US' side of a court case. They won't really represent The United States at all, and they're supposed to be a neutral party, but they're not. They're against The United States, and I don't think we should be a part of such an organization.
[00:16:48] Unknown:
Yeah. You know, these trade organizations, like, they only work if, if they are used as a way to cooperate more. But if they're used as a way of creating global law or a different system and, like, we're just giving over our sovereignty to another nation, I am going to wrap up on this story, but I think more to come. I think, though, actually, one one thing I did wanna mention, seems to me the big winner here is Thomas Massey. That guy is coming in saying things. He's even having the vice president of The United States say, like, hey. He's not on our side. He's not voting with us on things. Well, right now, as Trump has not, I think, succeeded in farmers' minds the way that they had hoped he was going to, Thomas Massie, on the other hand, he's got a much bigger audience and is really gaining traction among people saying that that guy gets it.
[00:17:36] Unknown:
Thomas Massey is my favorite congressman. I wish we had 400 more just like him. I won't say that I like everything he does. He's definitely a libertarian leaning congressman, and he you know, libertarians are pro free trade, and they they set aside the fact that there's not really any such thing as free trade. And I'm very pro trade. I'm just not, I don't think we ought to just throw the reins to other countries and say, we're we're just gonna take it on the head all we all we can and let you guys run rough shot over us. Well, the thing I would quibble with you on there is I think,
[00:18:19] Unknown:
Chris Benoit was one of my guests on the podcast a few months ago, pointed out there are a lot of libertarians that believe that you can be a libertarian and have tariffs. And, I I, I think I myself have kind of changed my my, philosophy on this. I don't think I would count my I I would count myself as a libertarian, maybe small l, and, I'm open to tariffs. Well, tell Rand Paul that. Alright. Moving on to story number three. Bill Gates prioritizes child vaccines over climate alarmism. Let's play this, little clip right here by Bill Gates so we can hear it in his own words.
[00:18:56] Unknown:
Climate is a super important problem. There's enough innovation here to avoid super bad outcomes. We won't achieve our best goal, the 1.5 or even the two degrees. And as we go about trying to minimize that, we have to frame it in terms of overall human welfare, not just everything should be, solely for climate.
[00:19:26] Unknown:
When the climate activists who who have been very supportive of what you've done and you've been very supportive of what they've done, read this. And and if Greta if Greta Thunberg is reading this and saying to herself, my goodness, he seems like he is reversing himself. What would you tell her?
[00:19:42] Unknown:
I'd say, wasn't the goal here to improve human lives? And shouldn't we, in our awareness of how little generosity there is to help measure, you know, should we get them a measles vaccine, or should we do some climate, related activity? And if if we could take if we stop funding all vaccines and that, you know, saved you point one degree, would that be a smart trade off? That's the kind of question we have to ask.
[00:20:17] Unknown:
So this is a wild turn of face by Bill Gates who was putting forth all kinds of ideas on why we should be preparing to eat, alternative proteins to, you know, energy reduction. What's your take on this? Bill Gates reversing his position? Is climate change over?
[00:20:36] Unknown:
I doubt it's over. It's a religion for a lot of people, and they're not he's not gonna convert everybody overnight, but it's a step in the right direction.
[00:20:46] Unknown:
So when you think about climate change, you know, there's obviously things that benefit have benefited farmers. I don't know about ranchers, but farmers, for example, like the climate change was a lot of the impetus behind developing, ethanol mandates and, definitely trying to get broader public support for that. It also is carbon pipelines. You wouldn't have any of those and the people that are making money off of that. So ag has benefited from climate alarmism. Do you think if this starts to go away, that's gonna hurt farmers' pocketbooks?
[00:21:16] Unknown:
I don't know. I think ethanol is pretty pretty well here to stay. It it's kinda flying on its own, and so there's there's really no there's really
[00:21:29] Unknown:
not anything that on its own. You mandated in the state of Missouri to put a certain amount of gasoline in their state of Illinois. They say, hey. You you are, by law, required to burn ethanol in your in your car.
[00:21:41] Unknown:
Well, true. But it has become a valuable substitute for MTBE for and I don't think any of these climate ideals are gonna entirely go away, and they shouldn't. I mean, I remember in in the mid seventies, I was about five years old, and we came into Albuquerque, New Mexico. And you drive over the mountain pass, and they're sitting down in a valley where the wind traps all the smog in there. And there were just brown clouds in the sky, and we don't wanna go back to that. And so I I I don't I don't think ethanol is I think it's a I think it's a valuable thing to have, and and and the subsidies are gone. And so it's it's getting more and more worth playing on its own.
And I I could be terribly wrong on that. I hadn't done a whole lot of research on it, but that's that's my take is that I think we'll continue to to wanna have additives in gasoline and prevent pollution and smog and such. So
[00:22:43] Unknown:
Yeah. I I think the point I'm interested in in, trying to figure out is is change for what is climate change and what is it that, they're gonna try and implement is which of those things are gonna raise the bottom line of of, farmers or really even just consumers. Like, right now in my pickup truck, I have a damn switch on it that, will turn my truck off while I'm sitting at the stoplight. And I don't know how many more, times I'm gonna have to go to the shop to get that damn thing fixed, but that climate change stuff is gonna go right back to my bottom line if we take out all that, you know, whatever those automatic
[00:23:21] Unknown:
kill switches are on your trucks. There's so many things like that, but they don't even make sense. My daughter's car has that. And I was driving it one day, and it had 30,000 miles on it, and it has a calculator in there as to how much fuel it had saved. And it was, like, three gallons and 30,000 miles that it calculated that it had saved from shutting off at every stoplight.
[00:23:43] Unknown:
Yeah. And, I mean, they tell me that it doesn't make my engine have trouble starting, but that lies, all of it, climate change lies. Alright. That's gonna do it for our news stories today. If you have news that you think we should cover, you can always send it to me, [email protected] or at vance crow on x. Moving on to the Bitcoin land price report. Woo. Bitcoin has been on sale this week. Just as of press time, one Bitcoin was a $107,300. This is, down 11% from the all time highs at the beginning of the month at $126,000. So now let's compare it to land where, where Casey's at. Now, Casey, I know you got land in Texas. You got it in Colorado and in Iowa. But since you're in Colorado right now, what's an acre of, high quality farmland go for these days?
[00:24:36] Unknown:
Here where we're at for this farm slash ranch land on the river, it's fairly stable, going up a little bit. $1,011,000 dollars an acre, some 12.
[00:24:50] Unknown:
Okay. So if we go with 10,000, that would mean point o $9.03 Bitcoin would buy one acre of land, or in other words, 1 Bitcoin would buy you 10.7 acres of land where you're at in Colorado. How does that sit with you, Casey?
[00:25:09] Unknown:
I like land. I'm not saying Bitcoin is worthless. I think there's a place for it. I wouldn't sink my entire portfolio into land. I wouldn't sink my entire portfolio into Bitcoin, but I think there's a place for both.
[00:25:27] Unknown:
How familiar with, are you with Bitcoin? Have you interacted with it?
[00:25:31] Unknown:
Very little. I'm just now getting to where I understand it, and I'll never invest in anything that I just absolutely don't understand. And I I think it's a hedge against inflation, and I've already have a lot of investments that are hedges against inflation.
[00:25:55] Unknown:
When you're going out and learning about Bitcoin, where where do you explore? What have you found to be valuable for this technology that's pretty pretty, huge to understand?
[00:26:05] Unknown:
Oh, podcasts have been really educational. X, you get both sides there. Some people love it. Some people hate it. It's I don't know. It's one of them things that I'm not in love with, but I don't hate it either one. It's a it's a faith based based currency just like the dollar is, but it has reason to have faith behind it. And the dollar has less and less reason to have faith behind it because congress can't seem to control their spending. And that results in more and more dollars ending up in the circulation. And so I I I trust Bitcoin more than I trust the government.
[00:26:56] Unknown:
Hey. That's what I like to hear. Yeah. I I, we'll just leave it right there. If you are interested in purchasing Bitcoin, one of the affiliate links that I use is river.com. That's where I personally purchase Bitcoin. It's a great interface, and if you buy Bitcoin there, it will, actually support the show. So I'll leave a link in the, show notes. Moving on to Casey's, Peter Thiel paradox. This is where I ask you, Peter, what is one thing that you believe that almost nobody you know agrees with you on?
[00:27:29] Unknown:
I believe that anyone can succeed in agriculture.
[00:27:37] Unknown:
Okay. That is bold, and I, on its face, don't agree with it. So convince me.
[00:27:43] Unknown:
Well, I'm not saying that everyone can can succeed in agriculture. Most people can't, but it doesn't. You don't have to have a certain background. You don't have to be raised in a rich family, and most people I know disagree. They say, oh, the only way that you can farm these days is to have a rich daddy or marry somebody that's rich, and and I'm a testament to that. That's not true. You don't have to have a certain skin color to be a farmer. You don't have to be a certain gender to be a farmer. You you can get into the to the to the agriculture, either farming or ranching or both, no matter what your background is.
I've got some of my renters that weren't even born in The United States, and they are doing very well on their own. And
[00:28:35] Unknown:
And so what's the path? What's the what's the way to think about this? Because on its face, there are a lot of people saying, no. You can't. You can't buy the land. You can't, get the equipment. You need a lot of capital.
[00:28:46] Unknown:
Well, that's the first thing you gotta get rid of is you can't. Because if you got the idea that you can't, you are a 100% right all the time. And so it it takes the most optimistic person that you know to be able to start from scratch in this business, and it can be done. And people are saying, well, it could be done when you did it, but it can't be done right now. And I'm gonna tell you it can be done right now. Know a guy that just bought a bunch of broke mouth cows a year ago, turned around, sold them for more than he paid for them, and has a, basically, a free calf crop out of them because he got enough more out of them to pay for their whole year's feed.
So he he's got a whole herd of calves that that he's got nothing but labor in. And right time, right place, of course. But it can be done. But it can be done if you're not optimistic. It can't be done if you don't have absolute determination because I'm gonna tell you, every time you think you're gonna get ahead in this business, something comes along to knock the slaps out from under you. That's every business. That is every single business. There's always something coming up. That's a fact, and it could be weather. It could it could be a neighbor that's that's trying to rent your ground out from under you.
It it could be the president puts up a truth social post and and knocks $500 ahead off your calves that you have to come to market with this week. I mean, it can be anything, and you just gotta be ready and willing to get gut punch after gut punch. But if you are, it can be done. Now that's not to say that everyone that has determination can be successful at it. I'm gonna say most people that try to get in this business that start from scratch and don't have a a big financial backing behind them are gonna fail, but some are gonna make it.
[00:30:53] Unknown:
You know, I think this was a, a good one. I I really like this. You you set it up so that I automatically disagreed with it, and over time, as I'm hearing your case, like, I I can I can solidly get behind it? I'm gonna give you a, rock solid eight on that one. Okay. Moving on to the final section. This is worthy adversaries. This is where we talk about who is somebody that you respect but you strongly disagree with.
[00:31:20] Unknown:
Well, I'm sorry to say, but as of late, it's president Trump.
[00:31:27] Unknown:
Okay. And, and you feel like this makes you a little different? You think most people are in agreement with him?
[00:31:35] Unknown:
I think most people are afraid to say it if they're Trump supporters. And most people, if they're not Trump supporters, couldn't say that they respected him. And I both respect him and disagree with him. I think he stabbed cattle producers in the back last week, and I don't care if the market recovers a 100%. It doesn't change the fact that he stabbed cattle producers in the back. And he didn't say anything negative against beef producers, packing plants, and that part of the chain that has far more influence over the price of of beef in the store than a cattle producer does. We we're market takers. We're not market makers. And that was a real bothersome thing. These trade deals, we keep hearing Japan, China, South Korea, all these things. Oh, we've got such a huge victory here, and they're not victories at all. They're not even what we were already doing before he got into all of this.
And so I I disagree with him. I respectfully disagree with him. I appreciate what he's doing. And for the for the Liberals that are saying, oh, yeah. You're coming back over to our side. That's not true either because I think we would have been worse off with the president Harris. That would he I think she would have just let China run rough shot over us, and we would have been ended up entirely dependent on China. And when you get it entirely dependent upon an adversary, you you you end up in prison camps where it ends up in the long term. And so I'm I'm not saying that I wish I'd have voted a different way or whatever. I voted for Trump. I'll be transparent. And I'm I'm an independent. I voted for both Republicans and Democrats in my lifetime, and I'm not sure if I ever had a president that I voted for that I wasn't disappointed with.
But the the president Trump is is another one of those that I'm I'm really disappointed with. And it's because he's not doing enough, not because he's doing too much like some of the the liberals seem to think. I I don't think we need to be fighting so hard for a deal with China that we backed up so far that we didn't gain anything. This was too much sacrifice not to have gained anything.
[00:34:03] Unknown:
And so, anyway, that's that's where I stand with that. Yeah. I I think you're saying something unique here. I've I was in a group of farmers just last week, and they were right when the Trump, post came out. And, you know, they were like, I wish you didn't do that, but they were unwilling to be very strong about that. Right? People don't want to be seen as going counter to him, and that's what's given him a lot of power, probably a lot of flexibility in negotiations because he does have this loyalty. But you're right. If he's if he stabs you in the back, you gotta call that out because, otherwise, you're you're, in tyrannical situation, but just from a different pole.
[00:34:40] Unknown:
Right. And I'm not looking for a cabinet position, so there's no reason that I can't call a space to space.
[00:34:47] Unknown:
Well, this has been a lot of fun, Casey. If, people wanted to interact with you, engage with you, I know you're on x. Tell me a little bit about how you think about what you post there.
[00:34:59] Unknown:
I say what I wanna say. I don't care if it makes anybody mad or not. So I'm I'm not there for the followers. I don't make any money off of it. I'm only there because I like the ag interaction, and I like the political interaction when it's not just crazy like it was for a little while before the election. And so, like I say, I'm I'm just there for entertainment. That's what I do when I'm waiting on a livestock tank to fill or whatever.
[00:35:28] Unknown:
Thoughts on his tanks, Phil. I think there are a lot of people that write posts that way.
[00:35:33] Unknown:
Well, by the way, I'm not debt free anymore. I borrowed money to buy some lands.
[00:35:38] Unknown:
Well, I'll be interested to get your long form story and you and I to sit down and chat some other time. I'm so glad you were willing to do this, Casey. Thank you for taking time and, and coming on here. Sounds good. Appreciate it, and thanks for hosting. Alright. That's gonna do it for this week's show. If you are interested in purchasing Bitcoin, then I recommend using river.com. I will include the, link, just below down here. And, if you use that and you purchase Bitcoin, it will support the show, and we love seeing that. In fact, in the last, two weeks, people have been buying the dip. And, man, I I I get a little, notice when that happens, and people are making some pretty big purchases out here on this audience. I could tell you that, and it's heartwarming to see. Alright.
Also, if you have been thinking about having me record a stories the stories that your loved ones have that they wanna pass down, consider going to legacyinterviews.com. Just today, I had a great conversation with a guy who said, I wanna get this. I'm thinking about it. I think I have stories, but who's gonna listen to those stories? I don't know. Are my grandkids really gonna find this interesting? And that led us into a great conversation where I told him, I get emails, letters, phone calls from people that I've never met before that didn't buy the interview they their parents did or their sibling did, and they tell me, I'm so fortunate that I now have these stories. I heard things I didn't know, or I heard about people that I'd heard of but didn't really know who they were or what context they had. And so I reassured him as I'm assuring you, there are people that wanna hear your story. And if you've been thinking about doing a legacy interview, go to legacyinterviews.com, fill out the contact form, and, let's have a conversation about what you wanna capture.
Alright. That's gonna do it for this week's show. We'll be back next week. But as always, feel free to disagree. So the conference organizer has a terrible challenge. The audience can pull out their phone and pull up anyone talking about anything. How do you find somebody that is both going to reach every single person in that audience and yet still have that spike of energy where people are electrified because they're hearing about things that they aren't used to or that make them think about things in a different way? The most important question that I ask a conference organizer is, what is it that you want people to feel? What emotion do you want them to have when we leave this talk? What's their disposition? How are they gonna interact with one another? What does this prompt in the people that are there?
It's not just the information. What you're giving them is energy, a reason to be there in that moment. Now they take that energy and they share it amongst each other. For me, the best speech is when people walk away being like, I now have a tangible skill, but they didn't necessarily readily accept it and they had to grapple with it. They set their phone down. They leaned forward. They said, how do I feel about this? And through that, an energy is created that is not about the speaker, it's about the person listening to the speech. It's far beyond motivation. It's actually giving people skills.
Welcome, format, and guest introduction: Casey Kimbrell
Story 1: Trump–Xi summit and the soybean purchase details
Market reaction, expectations, and early takeaways
Story 2: Country-of-origin labeling debate reignites
Checkoff programs, packer influence, and lobbying concerns
Does MCOOL have legs? WTO skepticism and trade philosophy
Story 3: Bill Gates pivots—vaccines over climate alarmism
Ethanol, emissions, and real-world costs of climate policies
Bitcoin Land Price Report: BTC vs. Colorado acreage
Learning Bitcoin: hedges, trust, and inflation worries
Peter Thiel Paradox: "Anyone can succeed in agriculture"
Worthy Adversary: Respecting but challenging President Trump
How Casey uses X and life updates
Closing, calls to action, and conference-speaking coda
