LAND EXPO

Yesterday I spoke at the LAND INVESTMENT EXPO in Des Moines, Iowa, a consortium of heavy hitting money managers that invest in farm land and all things big agriculture.  I was the maverick in the speaker lineup but grateful to speak to nearly 2,000 mostly conventional corn and bean farmers in the midwest.

                  The speaker lineup was world class and I want to share a couple of highlights from the day.  I'm a prodigious note taker from my old debate and journalism days so the day gave me lots of tidbits to enjoy. The first one was Peter Zeihan, geopolitical strategist, and here are gleanings from his opening remarks. 

                  Industrialization moved people to cities, and urban living made children a liability instead of an asset. This explains the global drop in birthrates in every industrialized nation on the planet.  The Zoomers have shrunk America's labor force by nearly a million.  Two options:  more babies or more immigrants. 

                  Millenials delayed family development by 7 years.  Now 78 percent of Baby Boomers have retired but they represent $175 trillion in assets.  America's economy is completely structured and dependent on consumer spending.  As people age, they spend less. 

                  China is the fastest aging population in the world.  Some 100-300 million Chinese are missing.  Nobody actually knows their population, which now average 57 years old.  Question:  can the U.S. build out our manufacturing base faster than China fades away?  We have 10 years to do it. 

                  Xi Jinping's dramatic purges in his advisors is due to corrupted data that he's now realizing has made many of their decisions incorrect.  The Chinese spy balloon was the biggest intelligence bonanza in history for the U.S.  President Biden wanted to shoot it down when it was first seen, but the generals and CIA said "no, Mr. President, let us follow it with drones above and below and suck all the data out of it so we know every node in China feeding it, the buildings where they're sending data, etc."   

                  Over the 9 days, that's exacty what the U.S. did, creating the biggest hack in intelligence history.  That's why Xi shut down everything for 4 months after we shot it down because he realized what the U.S. had collected.

                  Agriculture was the last to join globalization and will be the last to exit as we reshore everything.  It looks like we're going to go through a duplication of the 1980s farm crisis. I returned to the farm fulltime Sept. 24, 1982, and that's when we launched Polyface.  I remember the farmer suicide hotlines, but for me, it was a time of exhilaration and launch.   

                  All U.S. military power around the world is being concentrated in the Western Hemisphere as de-globalization develops. "Prepare for a time when South America is cut off from the rest of the world."  U.S. farmers have a good long-term future because unlike South America, we produce our own inputs, from fertilizer to infrastructure.

                  The more complex the supply chain, the more it offshores.  Automobiles, aerospace, and heavy vehicles have complex supply chains.  Plastics, chemicals, and energy have simple supply chains and are reshoring as we speak. 

                  America needs 50 percent more energy just to power up as China falls, and that's not counting data centers.  Globalization was always going to break; President Trump just brought it forward.  As globalization falters, we're on the verge of a mass nuclear arms proliferation.

                  And that was just the first speaker.  More tomorrow. 

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