BARN TALK
The Unfiltered Voice of Rural America
Issue #020 · August 12, 2026
|
|
|
Hey folks, the Senate Ag Committee spent last Thursday arguing about food stamps and, almost by accident, did the one thing cattle producers have asked for since 2015. Down in Louisiana, a parish talked itself out of a 175 million dollar project because fake accounts convinced people solar panels cause cancer and tornadoes. Both are about who decides what happens on your ground.
In this issue
| Beef labeling is back in the farm bill on a 17 to 6 vote, and the packer-state senators voted no |
| The bill itself died by a single vote over an argument that had nothing to do with farming |
| A fake grassroots campaign run out of Bangladesh helped kill a project in Cajun country |
| Crude gave back $6.49 in a week and the WASDE lands the day this hits your inbox |
| Tork at 26 had $180,000 of debt, three credit cards and no clue what 1998 was about to do |
|
This Week's Episode
Watch on YouTube · Listen on Spotify · or keep scrolling to read it.
|
|
|
|
Live Event Countdown
We're at 3,108 of 10,000 subscribers. Help us get there.
Hit 10,000 and we throw a live event at the barn. Subscribers get first crack at tickets.
|
|
THE BEEF LABEL WON 17 TO 6. THE FARM BILL STILL DIED.
Congress repealed mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef in 2015, after Canada and Mexico won about $1.01 billion a year in retaliatory tariffs.
On Thursday, August 6, the Senate Agriculture Committee took up the Agricultural Act of 2026 and voted 17 to 6 to put mandatory country-of-origin labeling for beef back into federal law. It was the only bipartisan thing that happened all day. All eleven Democrats backed it and six Republicans crossed over. If it survives, the package at the grocery store has to tell you where that animal was born, raised and harvested, the information the label carried until 2015.
Look at who voted no
The amendment carried the text of the American Beef Labeling Act, and Majority Leader John Thune ran it. Five Republicans went with him. The six no votes were Chairman Boozman of Arkansas, Marshall and Moran of Kansas, McConnell of Kentucky, Tuberville of Alabama and Justice of West Virginia. Look at a map of where the big packing plants sit, then read that list again. There is a reason your senator's position on a label lines up with the return address on the checks in his state.
Then the bill died over food stamps
The motion to send the package to the Senate floor came up one vote short, and not over reference prices or crop insurance. It was about how long states get before they pick up a share of SNAP costs tied to their payment error rates. Democrats wanted two years, Republicans offered one, and the bill fell over a twelve-month difference on a program that has nothing to do with a feedlot. Boozman recessed instead of adjourning, so the beef label stays in the text. The committee comes back in September, and the House version has no labeling language at all, so even a clean Senate vote sets up a conference fight.
|
From the Barn
Eleven years we have been told a label is too complicated. It is a sticker. Every bag of dog food in the country manages to say where it came from. What the packers object to is that once a label exists you can choose, and the whole business model runs on you not being able to tell an animal that grew up two counties over from one that got off a truck. The committee got this right, then dropped the bill arguing about something else. Call your senator in September.
|
|
|
SOMEBODY OVERSEAS IS WORKING YOUR COUNTY MEETING
Reporting this month by The Lens and the Daily Yonder walks through how a 175 million dollar project on 1,000 acres in Iberia Parish, Louisiana, went from proposed to dead. Neighbors were told solar panels leach chemicals that cause cancer, poison soil, wreck water and stir up tornadoes. None of it holds up. The parish council passed a setback rule anyway, and the project has not moved since.
The part worth your attention, however you feel about solar: a local Facebook group of 1,200 people did the organizing, its posts cross-fed from an 11,000-member national group. The threat intelligence firm Alethea traced a chunk of the material to accounts run out of Bangladesh, pumping out AI-generated graphics with the same slogan swapped state by state for Louisiana, Texas, Iowa, Nebraska and Tennessee. Their phrase for it was manufacturing the appearance of grassroots consensus. Somebody who has never smelled a hog barn wrote the argument that carried the room.
By the numbers
| Eight times. The half-mile setback the parish adopted is roughly eight times Louisiana's 300-foot standard, enough to make most sites impossible. |
| $9.7 million. What a comparable project one parish over should put into local tax rolls in three years. |
| Forty times. Studies in the reporting put local property tax off a solar facility at forty times what the same acres make in row crop. |
This is not really about panels
There are good arguments for keeping industrial anything off productive ground, and a landowner who wants nothing to do with a lease owes nobody an explanation. The problem is that a parish that badly needs the revenue made a permanent decision on claims manufactured somewhere else on purpose. That playbook has run in five states we know of, and the next version will be aimed at whatever gets proposed near you.
|
From the Barn
Rural people get called gullible by folks who never made a decision that cost them anything, so understand this is the opposite point. You are targeted precisely because your local government is small enough to move and your neighbors still trust each other. That trust is the most valuable thing a small county owns, and there are outfits overseas getting paid to spend it. Vote your own opinion. Just make sure it is yours, and go to the meeting.
|
|
|
|
Partner With Us
Want to reach rural America?
Barn Talk goes out to farmers, ranchers, and working folks who actually buy things. If that sounds like your customer, let's talk.
[email protected] →
|
|
This week's numbers
|
Corn (Sep '26)
$4.39 /bu
▼ $0.01 3/4 on the week
|
|
Soybeans (Aug '26)
$11.56 1/2 /bu
▼ $0.15 1/2 on the week
|
|
|
Chicago Wheat (Sep '26)
$6.39 3/4 /bu
Flat on the week
|
|
Live Cattle (Aug '26)
$231.70 /cwt
▼ $0.05 on the week
|
|
|
Lean Hogs (Aug '26)
$95.50 /cwt
▼ $3.35 on the week
|
|
Crude Oil (Sep '26)
$78.18 /bbl
▼ $6.49 on the week
|
Tork's Picks
|
Bitcoin
$64,940 USD
▲ $1,065 on the week
|
|
Deere (DE)
$620.83 /share
▲ $28.16 on the week
|
This isn't financial advice. I'm just a farmer with an opinion.
|
Tork's Take
Grains did almost nothing all week and beans bled off fifteen cents, which tells you the trade is waiting on the August crop report that lands today. Everything I see driving around says this corn crop is better than the government has it, and if the survey agrees with my windshield, do not be surprised by a number that takes the wind out of December. Get something priced ahead of it, not after. The one I keep staring at is Deere at $620 and change, up twenty-eight bucks in a week while tractor sales are down double digits for the year. Wall Street is buying that company and farmers are not buying its equipment. Both cannot stay true forever.
|
|
|
|
Dad and I sat down in the barn and put our lives side by side at the same age. He was 26 in 1997. I am 26 now. Same farm, same last name, almost nothing else in common.
At 26 he had a wife, a two-year-old, and a 120-sow farrow-to-finish operation he borrowed roughly $180,000 to buy on a $210,000 place. The operating note was maxed. No 401k, no IRA, no investments, no budget, and three credit cards. Hogs were $94 in August of 1997 and he felt good about it. Nobody had told him anything about money, and the only market education he could find came on cassette tapes that showed up with a newspaper subscription.
“We did not know in 1997 that we were standing at the abyss of what 1998 was going to be.” |
By the summer of 1998 hogs were under $15. He sold that farm at a loss, went to work construction, and farmed nights and weekends. He says 1998 through 2001 was the hardest stretch of his life and nearly cost him his marriage. That is the part people leave out about the good old days, and why he still runs every number twice.
My version looks organized on paper and has plenty of scar tissue too. He took me to a financial advisor at sixteen and we opened a Roth. My brother pulled me into a real estate deal. Then I cashed all of it out, Roth and brokerage both, to start a business I shut down at the end of 2025. I am carrying debt on the hog barn. Dad built the buildings that made a spot for me here, and without those there is no version where I come home. Both of us bet everything at 26. He lost his and got up. I lost mine and got up. The information is better now and the arithmetic has not changed.
If you were 26 once and it about broke you, hit reply and tell me what year it was. I read every one.
|
|
Four things that caught our eye
| 01 |
You just got 60 more days on your crop insurance premiumSecretary Rollins announced at Minnesota Farmfest on August 4 that the Risk Management Agency is letting providers give producers up to 60 extra days on premiums, fees and written payment agreements billed between July 1 and September 30, interest optionally waived. Prevented planting coverage came back in the same package. It is a cash flow break, not money, so read your paperwork and do not assume your provider opted in. |
|
| 02 |
Rural Development has a boss again after nineteen monthsThe Senate confirmed Glen R. Smith of Atlantic, Iowa as USDA Under Secretary for Rural Development on August 7. The chair had been empty since January 2025, a long time for the office that runs rural water, housing, electric and broadband lending. Smith comes off the Farm Credit Administration board and told his hearing he will go through the rural broadband programs. Somebody should. |
|
| 03 |
West Texas is seeing the doctor inside a shipping containerThe Texas Tribune reported on August 6 that rural clinics are building telehealth setups in renovated shipping containers because patients cannot get a good enough connection at home. The Davis Mountain Clinic runs one, a head nurse putting people in front of doctors on a screen. As of 2024, 143 Texas counties had no practicing pediatrician. |
|
| 04 |
China finally showed up for beans, three days runningPrivate exporters reported 488,000 tonnes of soybeans sold to China on August 3 and another 122,000 on August 6, and Bloomberg reported state buyers booked thirteen more cargoes on August 7, putting them near a quarter of what they committed to under the trade deal. |
|
|
|
Barn Talk Trivia
Think you know your stuff?
A union electrical apprentice working the inside wireman program has to log 8,000 hours on the job plus classroom time before testing for journeyman. How long does that normally take?
| A. Two years |
|
B. Three years |
|
| C. Five years |
|
D. Eight years |
|
|
Did You Know?
Factory work matters more out here than in the city. Manufacturing is roughly 14 percent of private nonfarm jobs and 21 percent of all earnings in rural counties, against about 7 and 11 percent in metro areas, and one in four rural counties is manufacturing dependent. When a plant closes in a town of 3,000, it is not just the plant.
|
|
Word of the Week
| PIECEWORK |
Getting paid by the unit instead of the hour. A head, a hide, a bushel, a bin, a linear foot of fence. Packing floors, harvest crews and plenty of construction outfits still run on it. Done honestly it pays the fast hand what he is worth. Done the other way it moves all the risk off the company and onto the person holding the knife. |
|
|
|
|
Two stories this week came down to the same question, whether the people who live somewhere get to decide what happens there. A label lets you choose at the meat case. A county meeting lets you choose on the ground. Both only work if you show up, and both have somebody well funded hoping you will not.
We'll see you in the barn.
Sawyer & Tork
Hosts, Barn Talk · joinbarntalk.com
|
|
Know someone who needs this?
Help us reach 10,000 and earn your spot at the live event.
Read online · © 2026 Barn Talk · joinbarntalk.com
|
|
