Show Notes
In this episode of Nuance, host Case talks with Trent Haggard — a third-generation Missourian row crop farmer — about the deep connection between faith, farming, and community life. They explore the spiritual calling of agriculture, the everyday challenges farmers face, and why stewardship of the land matters more than ever.
From sustainable farming practices and the impact of new technology, to the role churches can play in supporting local farmers, Trent offers unique insights drawn from both his experience in the field and his Christian faith. This conversation sheds light on how agriculture shapes communities, feeds the world, and nurtures the soul.
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website: https://wecolabor.com/
Get to know Case: https://wecolabor.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Case Thorp
Sunrise paints the boot-heel sky peach and gold. Out in the furrows, long before most alarms sound, a diesel engine hums to life. A farmer eases his tractor down the row, seed spilling into earth he’s known since childhood. He bows his head, half prayer, half practice, trusting the Lord of the harvest to do what only grace can do: make life spring from dust. You know, farming is more than an occupation. It’s an act of faith lived in public view. Each season, a farmer wages resources, reputation, and relentless labor on weather he can’t command and markets he can’t control. Yet his work, quiet, steady, often unnoticed, feeds cities, fuels economies, and frames the very debates we hold about land, labor and justice. Well today on Nuance, we’re talking about that essential role. Why society depends on the farmer’s daily courage, how faith shapes decisions in the tractor cab and at the kitchen table and where agriculture meets the public square from water rights and trade policy to food deserts and creation care. Well, our guest today is my dear longtime friend, Trent Haggard, a third generation farmer in the boot heel of Missouri. Right Trent? Did I say that right?
Trent Haggard
Yeah, Missouri, absolutely.
Case Thorp
Missouri. Dude, it’s good to see you.
Trent Haggard
Good to see you, good to be with you.
Case Thorp
We had some good times in Baton Rouge, didn’t we?
Trent Haggard
Yes, and the red stick. Yeah, it’s amazing how our paths crossed so many years ago. We’ve maintained communication since then. I married my wife and now we have three young children. Well, oldest has already reached 14, about to turn.
Case Thorp
Getting less young for sure. Well for our listeners, so when I was an associate pastor for young adults in discipleship, good old Trent Haggard was right there when I showed up and we quickly became friends and he was quite a leader in that group. And I’ll tell you though, Trent I was a little nervous when I started dating Jodi Tomlinson. I was worried you might swoop in there and I would be out of competition.
Trent Haggard
And the Lord had different plans for both of us, I think, in that situation. I obviously loved knowing Jodi and you before you even started dating. And then, of course, you all took the very diplomatic, church-driven, session-driven path to dating and all the rules to, yeah.
Case Thorp
Yeah, yeah. That’s a whole episode in itself, the hurdles we went through to be together.
Trent Haggard
Yes. Yeah, so from us all being part of the young single adults of the First Presbyterian Church of Baton Rouge to now it’s quite a path.
Case Thorp
Old married adults. Well, to our viewers and friends, welcome to Nuance where we seek to be faithful in the public square. I’m Case Thorp, and please like, subscribe, share this episode that others might know we’re out here. Well, Trent Haggard, like I said, is a third generation row crop farmer stewarding 4000 acres located between Kennett and Steele, Missouri, in the heart of the state’s fertile boot heel. Now friends, this is something I’ve learned through my friendship with Trent, but if you imagine the state of Missouri, and down on the right, there’s a little bit of a dip that goes down, and they call it the boot heel. Well, after earning an agricultural degree from Mizzou, University of Missouri, Trent spent 19 years in the corporate world with Case IH, and then seven years with the University of Missouri’s research center. Trent returned home to expand the family operation: rotating cotton, soybeans, corn and rice while adopting precision ag technology and land leveling to improve crop yield. An elder at First Presbyterian Church of Kennett, he is as devoted to cultivating community as he is to cultivating fields. Advocating in the capital, Jefferson City for responsible water use policy and serving on numerous boards such as the Missouri Soybean Merchandise Council, City of Kennett Zoning and Planning and PAC chairman for a local state senator. Trent and his wife Tammy have three beautiful children, Graham, Stella, and Hudson. Dude, quite a bio. What else, what did I miss, you wanna add?
Trent Haggard
I just was scratching a few things out. I’m sure I’ve missed things. And to be, my cotton farming neighbors would say, no, you all don’t have cotton anymore. We have historically, but we’re principally all corn and soybeans and rice.
Case Thorp
Okay, what’s, I mean a row crop farmer. I get that it’s rows, right? Why is that different than another kind of farmer?
Trent Haggard
Yeah. Like beef, cattle, yeah, or you know, you could have any kind of tree crops. You could have animal or livestock farming. You could be just an upland wheat person, you know, that’s farming just sown crops, but it’d just the term. I guess a lot times we might have internal terminology that does beg the question, even like our Bible passages. We’re going to have to get into the exegesis here.
Case Thorp
Well, I always joke with people, why do you think there’s two names for most people in most places in the Bible? To give people like me a job, because I gotta explain it. Well, dude, I mean, and I love that we’ve had this conversation over the years. Not only are you a great guy and a good man of God, but I’ve just always been so intrigued by your farmer world. I’ve never known those in the farming community as closely. It’s such a countercultural vocation in many ways, but it’s clearly your passion. So why farming?
Trent Haggard
And see, I don’t ever look at it as counter-cultural. It’s just what I know, right? I’ve grown up with it. I went to college in it. Then I started working in the agricultural corporate sector. Then I was in agricultural research. And now I’m back on the family farm.
Case Thorp
Did you ever think, no I don’t plan to come back to the family farm or was that there from the start?
Trent Haggard
You know there’s times where you’re climbing the corporate ladder that you might ponder you know how long you’re gonna stay in that role and honestly you start to get to an income level and benefits level and things like that that can distract you from the potential of coming home. Then you meet a young lady on the elevator from fourth floor to first floor. She’s not really from an ag background. You know, we were living in the big city of Milwaukee downtown, in a new, gentrified area, old warehouses turned into condos. Yeah. And you know, what a difference to bring her home to a town of under 11,000 people, you know, and she’s used to an urban market.
Case Thorp
When I came to do your sister’s wedding, my wife Jodi, I think we were married. She said, I just could never live here. They don’t have a Starbucks.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, well, hey, things have changed. Now there’s a very large section in Walmart that has all the Starbucks products. So, you know, you can be your own.
Case Thorp
But you know, I mean, for where life is getting today and the crazy world and at this stage of life, I think it might be quite a blessing to be in a place with no Starbucks.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, that we’re not obviously being anti-Starbucks here, but the pace of life I would argue is enhanced. gives you a better ability to try to be what I would call rooted. And I remember actually when Jodi was here, she remembered back to her part of her family being from Iowa and in the Red Wing Blackbirds that we had here. And thinking that was, was that a sign? And I was trying to encourage you guys that that was a sign, but she didn’t think that way.
Case Thorp
Yeah. The part of my story people may not realize is they were wooing us perhaps to come be a pastor in the Grand Metropolis of Kennett.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, and we can’t compete with Orlando, that’s no doubt.
Case Thorp
Well, the Lord did what He was doing. So, I mean, farming is such a major vocation in Scripture, for sure. But like you say, the pace of life and the way it forms you as a human, it’s a real spiritual vocation that I think a little more evident than maybe some other roles that are out there. It’s more than just an economic role. It’s a role that has a spiritual component, but also the way in which you support society and feed the world, how have you looked at what you do from a spiritual perspective?
Trent Haggard
Well, I mean, obviously, we do have to pay attention to the economic side first, right? Or we don’t continue to have this as a profession. You’re right, though, that it isn’t solely for a paycheck, because heck, we don’t get a regular paycheck. You know, it’s at the end of the year. You have to see what you do or don’t have. Up till that point, most of us are working with either what we had from the year before or we’re living with and through the operating loan that we’re using to produce that year’s crop.
Case Thorp
So a lot of faith, a lot of reliance upon the Lord.
Trent Haggard
Big time, yeah. Some people might, if somebody looked at it, there was strictly a bean counter from an urban background, they’d probably say, we were dumb, but to have that amount of faith, that’s what’s required.
But okay, so let’s go to the spiritual realm or maybe even the biblical realm first. I mean, it is kind of a constant parallel, you know, to have the agricultural faith and the process and the design that isn’t by me. I mean, didn’t create, on this earth created the beginning of that seed. That seed was something that was designed by our creator just like us, right? And all the components and the weather and everything has to come together. It’s all natural. Most things are not in our control. We can shepherd, we can steward, but we can’t control it. We’re in a wet spell right now. We’d love to have, let me think here, at least 400 other acres planted right now that we don’t have planted and haven’t been able to plant by this date on the calendar and this time in the season. And it’s just been one rain after another. Can we control that? No. So yeah, you do have to have the faith.
Case Thorp
Now is there a point at which if the rain continues you’ll realize well I can’t get in a harvest and so therefore we’re not going to plant it.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, there could be a point in which we, you know, we have to take smart investments and invest in what we’d call crop insurance. And that will kind of dovetail into some other conversation here today. But crop insurance is provided through mechanisms in the USDA and the federal government to help in the sense that we could have catastrophic loss. And if you had a catastrophic loss in a large swath of the U.S. then all of a sudden there’s no food from that area. And there’s nobody to put the food back into the ground the next year because they’re all bankrupt. So we buy crop insurance every year. Some of it is partially subsidized, but you know, if we can’t plant some of that, we’re going to have to rely on those acres and an insurance claim and prevent plant. And maybe we take this opportunity to land level some of it. If it’s not in crop, you know, we’ll try to turn lemons into lemonade because normally when I’m leveling ground to make it better and more productive in the future, I’m trying to catch a small weather window of opportunity to level that ground. And what some folks do at times like such, whether it’s a drought that reduced your crop to nothing or if it’s a wet season like this that might never let you sow it. So you definitely can’t reap it. Well, okay. So now could we improve that ground for the next crop year right now while we’ve got time? Cause you know, all the acres we did get planned, we’re going to be spraying them, irrigating them, monitoring them for pest, you know, spraying for pests if we need to, irrigating some more, fertilizing, irrigating some more, you know, and that’s what we would be kind of the stewarding season of when you put the crop in to where you harvest the crop that in between time, you know, you’re just trying to get it to maximum potential.
Case Thorp
So the stewarding part of it, like you’re taking care of life and I think how different that is than those who might be taking care of spreadsheets looking for deals to get done or in the manufacturing arena, those in the medical realm. We’ve all got aspects of our vocation that we are to nurture, but to think that you’re stewarding life, the very thing that God gives this world. It’s very special.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, and you know, it’s not just…people might be listening to this and thinking how interesting it would be to watch a soybean grow for 120 days. Well, I get that, but you know, when I take these seeds that don’t look any different than say some dry beans that you buy in a one pound bag off your grocery store shelf, but there is life in there when I plant that. It’s a seed that has a high germination percentage and it’s got a package and it has been bred with multiple lines of soybeans. Let’s say we’re just gonna stay with soybeans for now. But you’ve bred all these soybeans for this trait and that trait for drought tolerance, flood tolerance, salt tolerance, you know, all these different packages and I’m putting that out in the field, a package that I know will best fit my environment and my soil type. And then I’m watching it crack the ground and Dad and I were looking at some ground with one of our seedsmen yesterday. He came out to see what he recommended where we had some crop damage. But we also looked at where I had planted last. It was last Thursday at one o’clock in the morning, I was trying to race a storm that was coming in and get a last field planted and those seeds are trying to crack the ground. Well, the rain pounded the fool out of that ground after I planted it and it crusted over. So it’s really hard crust over and this bean is pushing that ground up. And now, you know, millions of those beans in that field are pushing that ground up to get out and to start, you know, spreading first to that pod into two leaves and keep on working into hopefully a well-potted, well-seeded, harvested plant later this fall.
Case Thorp
So what do you do? How do you get the crust off the top so it can emerge?
Trent Haggard
Well, most of the time it’s got to do its own thing. And so there again, trust in your faith and the design that God’s given us for, you know, this, all the different kinds of plants that we’re growing.
Case Thorp
Faith. Faith. Stewardship. Created design. Talk to me about Sabbath. I understand you have to rotate your fields and let them rest, just like God asks of us as humans. How does that rhythm work into your work?
Trent Haggard
Pretty amazing when you look at that, you know?
Trent Haggard
So if I use Sabbath in the term, in the sense of crop rotation, I have to like, let’s take my rice and soybean rotation versus my corn and soybean rotation. That’s what I do on the farm every year: it’s a cornfield beginning in 2025 will become a soybean field in 2026 and back to a cornfield if the corn prices are good in the following year. If I have a rice field this year, then it becomes a soybean field next year and then back to rice. Why? I mean, some guys and gals, if they’re listening, this might think, wow, I’ve seen rice in, you know, say Southern Louisiana or somewhere raised constantly in the same. We used to do that too, but you know, things caught up with us. We, as life continues to go, we’re using things to kill weeds, herbicides. And when we use those herbicides and we use them repetitively or continually, eventually, guess what happens? Those weeds start to find, there starts to be some of those weeds that become, have the ability to metabolize that herbicide and become resistant to it. So now we got to change the game. There’s constantly a change. I got to change the beans. I got to change how I treat the weeds. And so now I have to rotate a rice, which might, you know, is monocot, okay? And a soybean, which is a dicot. And what happens is I can spray different herbicides over that next year soybean crop that cleans up the resistant weeds that had existed from the prior year from the rice crop.
Case Thorp
Amazing.
Trent Haggard
Okay, and then vice versa, I can take care of weeds that were in my bean crop while I’m spraying different herbicides on my rice crop.
Case Thorp
So I think about the brokenness of this world, the sin that’s there that just keeps these weeds coming at you and coming at you.
Trent Haggard
Well, yeah, and then there are some things that we laugh about where one of our biggest challenges right now is herbicide resistant pigweed. Well, mean, it sounds bad when you call it pigweed, but if you call it a palm or amaranth, then you’re like, wait a minute, haven’t I seen that? hadn’t I maybe seen amaranth somewhere biblically?
Case Thorp
I know, pigweed, I hate pigweed.
Trent Haggard
Anyway, there are some things that create grains that are producing certain crops and become a weed. You know, a weed is anything you don’t want while you’re having production agriculture. It’s going to steal. It’s going to steal resources. You know, it’s going steal sunlight. It’s going to shade out the crop you’re trying to produce. It’s going to take the water out of the soil that needs to go to your soybean or your corn or your rice. It’s going to take the nutrients just like we would think biblically where a sinner’s… Well, you could take it from the sinner analogy or a diabolical analogy. Once the shade or the lack of light taking over the light or light overcomes the darkness.
Case Thorp
Well, so a mutual friend of ours, Ms. Jolie Berry, you remember Ms. Jolie, so for the listeners, she was a Southern belle, a beautiful, beautiful woman in Baton Rouge. She was the chair of my search committee. And they had their city home. She owned a plantation with a full working ranch of Longhorn and her home was just always beautiful and she was a larger than life sort of character. Well, I moved to Baton Rouge and you remember my first house, Trent, that great little bungalow. And I’ve got this yard to take care of, my first time to have to take care of a yard and I had her over to help me you know, okay, what do I pull out and what do I leave? And she’s walking around and goes, oh, that’s so and so and so and so, so you wanna keep that. Oh, over here, that’s a weed, take that out. Well, now this is ivy and you wanna keep that, but this over there. And in frustration, I finally said, Jolie, what’s the definition of a weed? Like, how do you know it’s worth keeping or not? And she stopped and thought to herself and said, a weed’s anything you don’t want.
Trent Haggard
Yep. Absolutely. Well, yeah. I mean, I remember, I remember your yard. I remember your house. Yeah. And she did have a wonderful working ranch and true South Louisiana, old, old school home. But she also, she understood, she and her husband both understood the essences of things and the root of things.
Case Thorp
You just alluded to that too.
Trent Haggard
How many times is a fisherman or a farming analogy used scripturally? I mean, it’s there because it is so much the root and essence of life. I mean, these are basic foundational things that are easy to look at and understand how what was said was meant differently, but it was a very colloquial, normal phrase for that time, you know, and it still is, but, but so many people don’t understand the essences of it today because you know, we we’ve gone from a population that was 40% agricultural to a population that’s less than, well, it’s, it’s really between 1 and 2% is involved in agricultural or any part of the system that’s putting food either on an animal’s plate or on a person’s plate.
Case Thorp
Trent, so you mentioned a phrase a minute ago about how the weeds, they evolved with the herbicides and they caught up with us. So I mean, how are farmers adapting to the increasing frequency of extreme weather or the role that technology plays today? I mean, it seems like it’s evolving in ways that your dad and grandfather didn’t farm.
Trent Haggard
And I guess I admit, don’t kind of, I look at it differently. I look at life as, I guess I’m older now, I’m looking at things in different lens, and I look at things that are cyclical. I mean, I’m a farmer, so I’m seeing cycles every year. I see cycles every day. I see cycles every week, you know? And I look at weather. And in our planet is on a cycle too, you know, and a lot of times you got short cycles. Like I can look at a potted plant we have on the back patio the other day and it had the little, you know, floral buds. I was like, I wonder how long till it opens to flower. It was the next day. That’s a very short, that’s an example of a very short cycle. But if I look at the comparative cycle of like, I, if I take something my daughter brought from school, they gave them trees to plant and they were tiny little trees and you know, really inexpensive and so we brought those home and we plant those. Well, what’s the cycle for that thing to be a say 100 year old or not 100 year old even, 100 foot tall grown mature oak tree? That’s a totally different cycle, right? And I think we have to quit stressing each other out or trying to stress each other out talking about what cycle we’re in and that we have La Nina we have El Nino those are more scientific equatorial flow things that we see that come with the water bodies and the temperature of the water and dictate weather patterns and then we got case we got 24-7 news all the time so we get to see any flood anybody that crossed a creek with their vehicle when it was too deep in the water, you know, we didn’t…
Case Thorp
And every instance is blamed on global warming.
Trent Haggard
Well, yeah, well, it was global cooling, and then it was global warming, and then, okay, we had the tendency to not be able to constantly make our argument there, so we’re just going to call it climate change. I got news as a farmer, I see climate change every day, in every day, and my dad did, and my granddad did, and my predecessors that weren’t even from this nation did, you know, all the way back in time. Every day has got weather patterns. But I will come full circle to your question in that we have really cool new things in technological advances where instead of just looking at the rain gauge and how much rain it got in the morning, we can see weather patterns evolving. We can look at what precipitation we’re going to get by the hour. We look at what the wind direction or wind speeds are going to be, and then every morning that dictates more than anything, how I’m going to instruct the folks here on the farm to do their daily chores. You know, we’re going to get the chance to do this. We’re not going to get a chance to do that because this is going to happen this afternoon. This is going to happen this morning. So I have forecasting abilities and all that. And then I have the monitoring, like we’re blessed with available water to irrigate with, right? To irrigate our crops with. And as such, now I can have sensors in my bean, corn, or rice crop that would tell me exactly what the soil moisture is at the depth that research has already told us is the primary driving depth for the best productivity of each crop. And then I can actually have things that tell the irrigation whether to turn off. Like the soil moisture has gone up to the level we want and we’re gonna not be able to, well, we don’t need to irrigate anymore because we’ve reached what we want. Sorry, had a couple of folks come in the door.
Case Thorp
That’s okay. Now, like we just had that conversation about the environment, talk to me about Christian farmers. You have a place in the public debates, such as land use and food justice. How do you see that playing out both in your Christian circles, but also your farming circles and where they may overlap?
Trent Haggard
Honestly, with the patience and the manner at which a farmer exists today, I find that most of my, the majority of my farming community are Christians. Okay. And I’m, you know, I’ve got Catholics and Presbyterians and Baptists and Church of Christ and everything in there, right?
Sometimes we need to squabble less about those little differences because we’re talking about the same Creator and the same Jesus. That said, I find that there’s a salt of the earth kind of a…kind of normal that, that I see in a lot of the ag community that they, they, they understand nature and they understand that the amazing parts of nature that we deal with every day have to come from some intelligent design have to come from a creator. And you have to see that being that you’re dependent on understanding it every day, you know, to make this work. Anyway, so as I’ve been involved in more and more organizations, I find that the leaders that are taking me under their wing as I come into a new organization, most of them are very humble Christian servants. We’re looking at their role on a board in the same manner as they would be in elders or session members or deacons or in their church. You know, they look at it as the same thing. It’s a servitude role and we’re gonna go to my capital here, Jefferson City, or our capital Washington, D.C. as a nation to converse or to lobby in a very smart, firm, pointed manner, but I think we’re always going to be coming at it from a very holistic basis. I hadn’t met anybody yet that doesn’t need to eat. So really we got to, so few of us actually involved in this anymore, but so many of us are very used to the fact all we’re doing is doling out money either through cash or through our cards at a grocery store to take food home and eat it and then we empty it out and we go back and we do it all over again. Nobody’s involved or very few people are involved today. How the egg came from chicken that was fed and grown and maintained well and laid an egg and now I’ve got a dozen of those eggs and now I’m making an omelet.
Case Thorp
Yeah. Well, you educated me long ago about the national security needs of food production. And if you outsource too much of it, then you find yourself at war or some other disaster and you can’t feed your own folks, that farming becomes a national security issue.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, absolutely. And but today I, you know, we’re the wealthiest nation probably in the history of the earth, right? And we have so much food, we waste so much food, actually. You know, we all have our moms that told us to eat everything on our plate at some point because somebody’s starving in some far off place, right? And that’s still valid. And we have people starving among us. There’s no doubt. But overall, on average, we’re a fat population because we have so much food, you know, but we must maintain our food supply or everything’s out the window. And I would make a personal argument too at this moment. I’m not gonna…I’m not doing an entire endorsement of MAHA, but I would say that we do need to make our food healthier again. And what am I saying there? Well, I had the awesome blessing of being able to study for six months in Costa Rica as a college student. Everything. My host mom, she would go out in the backyard every day for breakfast and pick a couple of fruits and make a juice out…Okay, juice was never the same ever, you know, because it’s always a different quantity of this fruit versus that fruit. But it was awesome. It was fresh. There was no preservatives, you know. We have mountains of things we can’t understand unless we’re a food chemist on the back of our contents of things we eat, you know. And we really need to be a lot more diligent about being just the main commodities, you know? Take those and cook them and cook them right and you’ll be a healthier people versus all these preservatives.
Case Thorp
Well, I do think the MAHA element of Trump’s agenda is one area where there’s lots of political overlap because it’s kind of hard to argue against healthiness. I know there’s disagreements on how to get there, but on the food direction, I think that’s got a lot of momentum behind it. Talk to me about tariffs. Talk to me about economic policies right now. And how are tariffs going to impact, for good or worse, our farming situation?
Trent Haggard
Well, I would say again, most farmers were Trump supporters this time around. Obviously not everybody in any discipline is all anything, but it wasn’t to, for some racial reason, wasn’t, that’s ridiculous. It was in our farming, rationality was we got to bring costs down. I mean, we’re barely pulling it together right now. I think I’ll probably have several farmers that are around me that will have to hang up, you know, hang up farming into this year that really might should have hung it up last year. But they penciled it out to get that next, that 2025 operating loan. I don’t know if they’ll be able to make it. I may not be able to make it to 2026 operating loan. If crop prices and revenue aren’t, you know, better than they were last year. What I’m saying is post-COVID costs went through or during COVID, post-COVID never came back down after COVID. Prices for all my parts and my seed and my chemical, all my inputs, everything goes into farming annual cycle have all gone up. Have my prices gone up? Have my yields gone up? The answer to those two questions, no. So what can Trump do? Well, if I look at what he did as president 45, you know, we wound up playing some hard ball with the Chinese and the Chinese started buying a lot more beans. In the last few years since then, we’ve seen the Chinese strategically go and try to buy much more from Brazil than the US. Why is that? Are you or the listeners familiar with BRICS?
Case Thorp
Yeah, Brazil, India, South Africa, R is Russia. Yeah, the non-aligned countries.
Trent Haggard
Yeah. These are the countries that want to also break the dollar as the currency of the world, right? They want to bring our economy down. They want to increase their own at our behest and then therefore they’re buying a little bit more from each other than they are from us. How much do we buy from China? We buy tons from China. Look at our pharmacy, our techs, our cheap stuff like, you know, really basic toys or something like that. Look at my agricultural chemicals. Where are they produced? Or at least the pieces, the big components that go into agricultural herbicides. What about the big components that go into human and animal health items, pills, pharmacy group goods? Let’s say China just cut us off. We’re going to have a lot of crazy people that arms all of a sudden are not on their meds because we’ve, we’ve, could argue have gotten too many people on meds too, but that’s another discussion. But China’s made it where most of our meds that we’re dependent on as Americans are coming from them. I need them to buy. If we’re going to be buying so much from them, then they need to buy more from us. It can’t be this big, huge trade disparity between them or any other country that’s basically saying, hey, Case you make something for $10, you’re trying to sell it in the United States for, I don’t know, say you want 25% margin. You’re putting that on it, you’re pricing it, and you’re selling it here and you’re trying to ship it across the ocean. And, depending on how far that is, you got an extra cost of that freight. And then you’re trying to say, maybe you just get the same margin over there. Then they’re saying, no, no, because that’s coming from over there, we’re going to throw a 25% tariff on that before you can sell it in our market. Well, now what do you got to ask for it? Well, now it’s not competitive. So you, so you’re not exporting that, because you’re not going to take a loss, right?
Case Thorp
Mm-hmm. It’s complicated. I mean, this whole conversation has helped to show me the complexities of agriculture in farming from the seed to the annual budget to the rotation to the economic element. So that brings me to my last question. Now you live in a very tight and a smaller community where your church has been at the center and helped to shape you and your family so much. How can the church better support those in the agricultural business? What do we miss sometimes by not fully paying attention to your world?
Trent Haggard
Honestly, I think I kind of touched on it earlier. If we could get back to some of our most important and yet simple verses in the Bible that really have an agricultural example, go out and understand that. Our current generations, I mean, how many people are going to Publix and getting all their goods from the grocery store, but would not have a clue the size of a mustard seed? When we talk about the mustard seed on good soil and rocky soil and how much it can become from this tiny little bitty seed if it’s in good soil. And obviously we’re talking about spirit, our Christian life and our churches and…You know, that’s really what it’s trying to say, but it’s saying it from a very basic understanding from 2000 plus years ago. Some of us don’t understand the basics of that saying to be able to really understand the magnificence of the parallel in my thinking today. You know, so I think that’s one thing, Case. Otherwise, I would say the people that choose, I say choose. I mean, it’s hard for anybody to get into farming that doesn’t either have a family background that lets them have that opportunity because it’s so expensive. Everything’s so nuts to be able to have ground that’s now, you know, we’re building on more and more good agricultural ground and building anything from urban sprawl to…nowadays, it’s kind of nuts to me while we’re really, really productive agricultural soil and putting solar panels on all of it. I’m not anti-solar. I’m not anti-green energy. Okay, I am really concerned when you got a food population growing and you got richer and richer countries that, you know, want to have a better diet, you know, and they’re going to consume different food, right? Then they might have 10, 1500 years ago in that country. The last thing we need is taking so much real good agricultural ground out of production to put solar panels on it. Put the darn solar panels where somebody has some rocky ground that isn’t gonna produce 65 bushel of soybeans that’s gonna feed a cow, that’s gonna make a steak, you know, that’s gonna feed however many people if they’re eating hamburgers, whatever.
Case Thorp
Well, I drive up 75 to Atlanta, and so much of what used to be cotton fields are now covered with solar panels. Now, maybe the economy in Georgia worked that cotton was no longer viable, but it’s farmland covered in solar panels.
Trent Haggard
Yeah, I mean, I have some folks that I know they were approached by it and it was a financial win for them. The length of the lease, the cost of the annual payments, or not the cost, but the yield of the annual payments versus what they could make per acre per year with a crop. But that stuff’s…I mean, it’s gonna be almost unretrievable to come back into being productive ground anymore. Anyway, so I’d say, hey, try to do things on ground that isn’t so agriculturally productive or we’re gonna have food problem down the line is one thing that people more from an urban mindset might wanna know about or think about.
The other piece that I would think, Case, is that we love what we do. We choose what we do because, I mean, I guess I’ve said many things today that hopefully let people see that this is a labor of love, okay? And we’re doing this, you said Sabbath. Sometimes our Sabbath isn’t like, it’s a different concept of Sabbath. Our Sabbath is maybe more winter, you know? Whereas Sabbath was, in the Jewish sense, a day. Right? Starting from a time to a time in a week. But we, when we’re in season, we don’t really have Sabbath like that. We have to go and we have to go like seven days a week, you know? And so just, I guess rather than think of us as having straw in our teeth and a pitchfork and in that one old, you know, picture that people might have of a farmer being kind of a hick or whatever. Man, if you know a farmer today that’s in business, they have to be savvy business people. They have to be understanding science. They have to be so many different things in one. And the biggest thing is, I’m not trying to say this on my own behalf, but you won’t find harder working people. I mean, they’re entrepreneurial, but I mean, we miss, we miss probably more ball games than most dads do, you know, we, we might miss recitals or stuff like that. Now I try to do it differently than my dad did. He missed all those things. I’m trying to make those things. And then I come right back to work, you know, but I would say as a church, you know, try to see and come visit, come see the farms. Come, go, ask a farmer that you know, can I come out and see what you do? Can I shadow you for a couple hours? Can I shadow you for a day? I think people would be richer for the experience.
Case Thorp
Well, that’s a great note to end upon and I need to come up and see you and smell the soil of the boot hill for sure. Trent, thank you. I really appreciate you being with me. It’s good to connect. Well, friends, thank you for joining us. Please like, share, leave a comment. It helps us to get the word out. You can visit us at wecolabor.com. Wecolabor.com for all sorts of content. Drop your email on our webpage and I’ll send you a 31-day Faith and Work prompt journal. You can also find us across the social media platforms. Don’t forget our other podcast, Formed for Faithfulness, a weekly 10-minute devotional for the working Christian that follows the liturgical calendar. I want to thank our sponsor for this episode, the V3 Family Foundation. I’m Case Thorp, and God’s blessings on you.
