Why the Generational Bickering in Farming Has to Stop (Ep. 372)

We have to stop calling the boomers greedy and that they’re terrible and that they suck and all these things that I see online. I just don’t understand how that is helping anything. It’s just posing you as the victim, and you’re getting nowhere in life, and that is because of where your attitude is.

The boomers do the same thing to the younger generations. They categorize millennials as lazy. They categorize Gen Z as lazy. And I can tell you, millennials and Gen Z are not lazy. I see the good ones. I have a lot of faith in those generations because they understand what’s happening. But most people aren’t seeing that, and they’re just putting people into categories. So why are we putting anybody into categories?

Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to the podcast. Thank you very much for being here. We’re gonna have some coffee together. As I record this, it is morning. It’s a little bit early for me to get riled up, but I feel like there’s gonna be some German passion today. Probably the last week I’ve had three to four comments on some of my social media stuff that I think we need to address, and that is that boomers suck, boomers are greedy, farmers are greedy. And I know that the internet doesn’t have a thought process because they just scroll, and they just make comments, and they’re the victims.

Okay? The people that are leaving these comments are the victims. Let me be very clear about one thing. These are not my clients. People that would leave a comment like that are not reading my book. They’re not listening to this podcast. I’m kind of preaching to the choir here ’cause everybody that’s listening has two brain cells to rub together to make a thought.

That is not everybody on the internet. However, I want to talk about it because I think that there’s two sides to this equation of the younger generation feeling like the boomers or the old Gen Xers are already leaving, and they’re retiring, and they’re trying to sell or do whatever they’re trying to do.

But I think we need to look at both sides of this, and I find it interesting that people can’t do that. Now, I will run a clip, and I will say something like, “You know, we should owner finance the next generation,” and people will lose their mind because it’s just a clip. It’s just a portion of it. You can’t do everything you need to do in thirty seconds or a minute, right?

We can’t say that. But it’s super interesting to me there’s so many younger people talking about how the boomers are greedy or how the boomers suck and how the older generation is greedy. So let’s just put it into perspective. They did not save for retirement. They didn’t plan for retirement.

If they did plan for retirement, it is their land. So let’s compare it to somebody that lives in town. Let’s compare it to somebody that has a business, anyone that doesn’t have anything to do with agriculture. Let’s just look at it that way. If I have a house in town, am I supposed to sell that house for less money because I feel bad for you that you can’t afford it?

That is not the case. Right? You guys probably listened — some of you don’t know that I have a Without The Bank podcast as well. I have two podcasts. So on the Without The Bank podcast, I believe I talked about this, or maybe it was this podcast, about us selling our last rental property, and how the kids that bought it thought that we should take less money because she wants to be a stay-at-home mom.

Good for you, not my problem. This is the value of what I put in the house, remodeling it. This is how much I want out of it. What’s happening in the agriculture world is the exact same thing. Farmers have land. They bought the land a long time ago. This is now the going price of land, and if there’s an auction, as you guys have heard on last podcast, the auction will determine the price of the land, right?

That is what somebody is willing to pay for it. That now sets the new price. So why do we think that the boomer should sell for less? Now, in this situation, I am talking about maybe a neighbor buying the land, because these people that are commenting are not family members. Okay? So if we are trying to buy the neighbor’s land and he is greedy and wants top dollar, is he wrong for that?

Should he be giving what he worked to maintain, what he’s paid taxes on, should he just be giving that to you because he feels bad for you because you have a victim mentality? I talked to a farmer a couple weeks ago, and apparently the neighbor wants to graze his corn stalks, but wants to do that for free.

No, you can plant the corn, but then I’m gonna graze them for free? If the farmer wants to give you free corn stalks to graze, then great, fantastic, you get them for free. But at least offer something. That’s crazy to think that you should just be able to buy land at a discounted price because you can’t afford it, and these guys are being greedy, when in fact, all they’re doing is saying, “Hey, I want fair market value for my land.”

Now, are there farmers out there that maybe want over fair market value? Yes. They want over fair market value. That doesn’t mean they’re getting over fair market value. That’s like saying, “Well, somebody’s got their land listed for twenty-five thousand an acre.” That doesn’t mean he’s gonna get twenty-five thousand an acre. You don’t know what the sale of that is.

Just like somebody has a house in town listed for a million dollars, that doesn’t mean they’re gonna get a million dollars for that house. The longer it sits on the market, the longer it shows to you or proves to you that it’s not worth that price they’re asking, so they’re not going to get that.

But it’s their retirement. It’s something that they own. Why do we think we should go in and tell them, “you’re greedy”? That’s absolutely crazy to me. My question is, why are you such a victim? Why do you have the victim mentality? Why can’t you go and figure out how to buy it at whatever the going price is?

Or maybe you just gotta wait for the deal. I don’t like having to overpay for things either, and therefore I don’t. But I don’t call them greedy. I might say, “Hmm, they’re out of touch with reality for what the going price is right now”, but I’m not gonna call them greedy. If they can get that, kudos to them.

They’re the landowner. They have every right to ask whatever they want for it. Just because we want to get into farming does not mean that somebody else should give us that for free. It’s called capitalism, my friends. If I own something, I have the right to sell something. This is like this epidemic online and this narrative within the agriculture world that we deserve this at a lesser amount because there’s not as much money.

You can’t make money farming. It is the most negative, outdated narrative, because guess what? Out of the thousands of farmers that I have as clients and the thousands of farmers that I talk to, they make money. My farmers are making money because they understand how to run the business. So to say, “Well, we can’t make any money doing this,” is a false narrative.

That is just repeating something that has been said for years, but the person saying it probably doesn’t even know how to do their books. They probably don’t know really what their tax return says. They’re just doing an act of farming, but they’re not actually ever looking at it as a business, and that’s how it’s been done forever.

That’s why we have the narrative that even exists, because we never ran it like a business, which then what? Causes us to be losing farms, causes us to not make money, and it’s not big farmers. Here’s the thing that most people think is, “Oh, Mary Jo, you’re dealing with big farmers.” No, I’m not. Very surprising to all of you listening, the majority of my operations are small to maybe medium-sized.

It is rare for me to have somebody with ten thousand, fifteen thousand acres. Very, very rare. I have maybe, maybe a handful of those guys. Probably not even a handful. Because they can’t see the opportunity that the infinite banking concept gives them because they need money so quickly, and they’re borrowing so much money that they don’t get it.

However, the small to medium guy is making money. So the small guy is saying, “Hey, that old guy is being greedy. I can’t make any money.” But the small guy that’s making money most likely has an off the farm job so that he can get going inside of agriculture. He can buy his tractors. He can do all this stuff to supplement the farm, and yes, the farm is going to be supplemented, much like my business was supplemented with another out of my business job, or I had another business that I was running at the time. I was doing all sorts of things to supplement this business as I was getting started, and most people do.

Have you heard of side gigs? That’s why they’re called side gigs, to supplement. People are doing two things. Why in the agriculture world do we believe that you should not have another opportunity helping finance that to get started?

Everybody else is doing it, but we’re not supposed to? There are people out in the big bad world who think they shouldn’t have a side gig, that their job should pay enough for everything, and that’s great. Maybe you will have that opportunity. But if you don’t, fill it in with a side gig. Quit being lazy. I’m not making friends and influencing people here today.

Like, I get that. I’m gonna have a lot of pissed off people in comments. But at the end of the day, somebody has got to talk about the truth of what’s happening, and we have got to stop beating up on boomers. Okay, let’s look at it this way, too. If you were raised by a boomer, you guaranteed, you got your butt chewed more than once, right?

They were not, they did not parent with a soft hand. They parented with very direct commentary. They parented — you probably got spanked. You may have got the belt, it was very harsh because that’s how they were raised. That’s what they knew. And so in today’s world, you want them to what?

Just give it over to you? You don’t think that they deserve that? You think they should just treat you with kind hands? That’s not who they are. But while they were yelling at you, you didn’t like that. While they were calling you names, you didn’t like that.

But guess what? Ooh, all of a sudden, you have the opportunity to call them names, and you think they’re gonna like that? You think by calling the neighbor greedy and all these other things you guys call them, you think that is going to make them want to sell you their land?

You’re not winning friends and influencing people. Think about that. How you are treating somebody else is going to affect how they treat you. It’s not that hard. Now, there are people that deserve — I am not a person to just, like, roll over, as you guys know. I will match your energy. If you’re going to come at me with aggressive energy, I’m gonna match that energy back to you.

I’m not gonna start that way, but I sure the heck am gonna match your energy, and it’s gonna be like that. I’m not gonna waste two seconds to try to do it. But that is not the case in most of these situations. We have a lot of boomers that are being told by auctioneers, by realtors, “This is what your land is worth.”

So that’s what they’re doing. They haven’t bought land in forty years. They maybe aren’t even paying attention to what land is worth. I know people that don’t have a clue what land is worth, and they own land because they’re not paying attention. They’re not in the market to buy. Now you’re telling them that they’re greedy, but they’re just doing exactly what they’re told.

We have to think about the other shoe. We have to put ourselves in their shoes. They have retirement. If they’re quitting at eighty, they have nursing home costs. They probably don’t have long-term care. Look at the big picture of what their expenses are gonna be. You not understanding that is as ignorant as them not understanding what their land value is.

We have to stop calling the boomers greedy and that they’re terrible and that they suck and all these things that I see online. I just don’t understand how that is helping anything. It’s just posing you as the victim, and you’re getting nowhere in life, and that is because of where your attitude is.

At the end of the day, folks, let’s try to do better. Let’s try to have a conversation with them. Are we gonna win with them all? No. But because we didn’t win with them all does not mean that we have to categorize them all. The boomers do the same thing to the younger generations. They categorize millennials as lazy.

They categorize Gen Z as lazy. And I can tell you, millennials and Gen Z are not lazy. I see the good ones. I have a lot of faith in those generations because they understand what’s happening. But most people aren’t seeing that, and they’re just putting people into categories. So why are we putting anybody into categories?

I feel like Gen X is probably the least criticized generation out there. I’m a Gen X-er. I just feel like that’s — like, I don’t really hear anything bad about us yet. But will there be? Yes, there will be. If you wanna pick on Gen X, we weren’t the best parents because we parented with an ultra-soft hand, right?

We didn’t yell and scream, and we let our kids get by with more stuff. And now we have kind parenting. I don’t know how that’s going, y’all. But I always try to put myself in somebody else’s shoes, or not always, but I try very hard to not just look through the lens of one lens, and I try to look at what other people are doing before I make a comment.

I just don’t know how we think we’re gonna win when we continually bash the people that have what we want. Who’s winning in that situation? The people that are buying land and able to buy land off the market is because they’ve built relationships with that older generation, and they have not done it out of absolute greed to say, “I’m just gonna be kind until I get this land.”

No, that’s not what they’ve done. They’ve done it to build true relationships. Because as much as we think the boomers maybe don’t have anything left to teach us, they have a lot left to teach us, and we have to look at that. Okay, I didn’t get as German passion as I thought I was gonna get. So look at me, I’m getting all calm in my old age.

If you guys have comments, I’m sure you’ll let me know, all right? And I’m happy to hear them. But in the meantime, we have to figure out how we’re going to build a system so we can buy these farms from Gen X, from boomers, from the silent generation, whoever still owns it, because there are some people in the silent generation that still own land.

So we have to figure out how we’re going to do that. And guess what? That’s all done with Farming Without the Bank. So go grab your book, go to farmingwithoutthebank.com, grab your book, schedule your appointment. You can schedule with John or I, and you know, we’re absolutely happy to help. If you need to email me, maryjo@withoutthebank.com.

I look forward to talking to you. Enjoy your read. You have a fantastic rest of your day.