FM Talk 1065 Podcasts
State Sen. Jack Williams - Jeff Poor Show - Thursday 7-11-24
[music] Welcome back to the Jeff Horst Showt of the Talk 106.5. They should stay with us on this Thursday morning. Text line, assuming we have time at the end of the program, 2513430106, feel free to respond to whatever it is that is on your mind or you hear on this program. We do appreciate the feedback. But joining us now, I'm pleased to have my next guest. He is the State Senator from Wilmer, but in this list of the audience, you all know him. State Senator Jack Williams, running for Ak Kunst, who joins us on the line. Senator, good morning. How you been? I am great. I'm great. I started traveling to the state of course, going back and forth, so putting a lot of miles on me. You get a real early start here, talk a little bit about that. How is the campaign going in these early stages? I think it's going great. I think I relate to the farmers being that I was a farmer or still having the kids run everything now. But I think I relate to them in a sense that I'm probably one of the true farmers that's never run for this, for Ag Commissioner. I know we're out there early, opening the ward people off from running where we can run a cheaper campaign. We look to win as a course and we're going to work as hard as any other job we've ever worked. I'm a working person and I believe in getting out there and doing your research and running. Senator, one of your colleagues, David Sessions, and I talked about this, and we had a long conversation there at the State House. That's how hard it is right now for farmers in the State, the input cost, or through the roof. I mean, you really hear this. It seems to be kind of a common theme around the State. But, I mean, is that the sense you get, the Biden administration, everything that's going on there is really taking its toll on Ag in Alabama? Oh, it has, and from a federal level, they're not paying enough on a lot of crops when they pay over. You only get enough back to really pay per year seed and fertilize and stuff, but not enough to make a profit. We've got farmers across our state that have lost 92 years in a row this year if they don't have a good crop. It's going to really hurt them, I mean, they're, they only can survive so long. When you have equipment costing you what it costs over a million dollars a piece for times and stuff, farmers having to share a lot of them get too farmed together. How is that a cattleman's meeting other night and what I do is a lot of cattleman forestry and alpha meetings right now, that's the crowds I'm hitting. But, you know, one of the questions was how do you, how does a young person go into farming? How do we get them into farming? There is really no way unless you give them everything. And once you give them everything, it is still hard for them to make a living. You can give them the equipment, the land and all, but when they put everything into it, they're still making the low minimum wage, the majority of them. I mean, it's just hard for them to make a living. But if we don't do something, we've got to come up with the solution to kind of help because we don't have the product out there right now. Our cattle numbers are down since 1962 to that number because there's a lot of retired farmers going out of business for one thing. If you're 80 years old and you're a farmer, you never have saved money. You've always invested it back in your farm, bought land, done whatever you could to invest in the farm when you've done it. And then when you go to retire, you have your cattle to sell and all that, which cattle being right now at the highest market they've ever been, and they keep going up. But like I say, we don't have the product out there in most general people that list in your show. They can go to the store and they'll know it's not in it. We don't have a solution to make it any better. I mean, you can train all the people in the world, but you've got to have farmers to grow it and train them to grow it and produce it. And it's not just on a whole tree, everything. I mean, I talk to people all over the state and of course, we're all trying to come up with solutions to produce more. You know, I carried a bill last year on a lab-grown meat to keep it out of Alabama to keep our people safe. I've had 17 states come in and copied that bill. So far that we'll have it filed next year, Florida copied it. They passed it a week before we did. We left NASA where they could do research on it, and we really don't have a solution. Well, some of it, is it this? And you look at like what the federal government is doing from a regulatory standpoint. And it's just as you brought up with the lab-grown meat, like they're trying to push us in one direction and make us live these weird lifestyles, the name of worshipping at the altar of environmentalism. But like from a regulatory standpoint, a lot of that's adding into the cost of being a farmer and it's not just economic policy, it's also all these other things that these Democrat administrations have done through the EPA or whatever. Yeah, from water runoff to, well, let me go back to the diesel cost right now. I mean, in the Biden administration, these field has doubled this last time. There is no way, if you're running a big tractor, a really big tractor, you're burning 300 gallon a day, which farm diesel is probably right now 320 a gallon. But just add that in, and that's just one piece of equipment running. After investing everything you've got in your farm, to be able to run, you're having to put it up for collateral. And there have been several farms across the state that have lost their farms because of it. The federal regulations are killing us, I mean, like I said, from water runoff, even to the point of what chemicals we can use to spray for bugs and all that they took off the market. I mean, that's where I'm at on that. I don't know what else to say about it, but then until they loosen it up under Trump, we were getting some slack. We were able to do stuff we had not done with EPA stuff down to the point of on our own farm, having to dig our diesel planks up and settle above ground and stuff that have been there for years. I mean, and I can say one of the biggest things is runoff. Well, and I think it's this like when you're the head ag official for a state that like, you got to be, this is sort of it like you got to push back against the federal government, just just like any other executive cabinet level position in the state because a lot of this is just unnecessary, isn't it? It is. It is. And let me go back to the meat, our federal government put over $3 million on research on the meat. I didn't know this even after my bill was passed, but have done research on it. If you go back probably six weeks ago, Fox News uncovered it, that how much they had put in it and that they had, was going to test it on our military. Now here we are, we have the best military anywhere and they're going to test lab-grown meat on our military. So they would be another guinea pig for all the shots we gave them in the past and everything else. On our herd of, they allowed the lobbyists to come up there and fight to pull money out of the farm bill that's supposed to be that we're funding everything else out of anyway, because really it's only a little portion of the farmers get out of a farm bill. They spent over $2 million trying with their lobbyists, trying to get money out of our farm bill to fund a lot of this. I mean, come on, this is our farmers we're talking about. That's what. And then you wonder why they can't be in business, what's put them out of business or why a young person doesn't want to be in the farm and now a farmer do not, I mean, with all the new equipment you can't work on, it's a lot of still running old equipment they can actually work on. But a farmer has to be a mechanic, he has to be a fan, I mean, he has to be everything and you have to love it because you're not going to make no money at it, it's from year to year. It's figuring out how you're going to make it another year. Right. What's that, it's this though, it's like the left is trying to steer the culture away from, you know, the farm lifestyle or whatever, they want us to all live in big cities. They want us to all like work as a collective and I just think like there's a something going on there in modern liberal politics that is staring policy away from farming. And it is actually kind of working, it's making it harder to go into this as an occupation. Well, it's harder to go at it with all the regulations they're putting on everything now, but it's also hard to entertain people to go into it, because like I say, our generation, back to my generation, we were used to working this seven days a week. I mean, we had to get up on Sunday morning and it was going to have to feed hogs or whatever before you could even go to church, you had, you know, unless the auction was in the ditch, you had to work all day if you had eight down or something. But there's just very few people and the generation that's coming on and the generation that came on after me that was to put that kind of time and work in seven days a week. When I talk to farmers all across state right now, their kids have left the farm because they can go to work, make a whole lot more money and work five days a week or less and have a vacation, a farmer can't take a vacation because he's got to have some, I'd take care of livestock and a lot of our farms that passed down that they're losing and stuff today. When we were farming, everybody had hogs, cows, they were diversified. If one thing was down, they could survive on another one maybe, but then in the recent years, our slaughterhouses have closed down away from here and all, but I got two quartership pork away from here and stuff to the slaughterhouses. So in the state of Alabama, you really don't have any commercial hog growers anymore or like that. I mean, it's just a lot of stuff that's been took away from us. Join by state Senator Jack Williams here on the program. He's running for our commissioner in the 2026 cycle, Senator, the other thing, you're talking about this and giving, what is the next generation of farmers look like and you give them the land, the equipment, it's still hard to make a living, but look at education and we talk about trades and workforce development all the time. Do you think the state's doing what it needs to do to kind of teach? But I don't know what you could teach, I know I went to Auburn and they taught a lot of ag there, but like is higher end or even K through 12 doing what it could do in that regard to prepare farmers? Yeah. We could do more and actually commissioner Pat and I flew to the junior tech and looked at a program they had not long ago, that was a two year program that took out a lot of math and science, but they could go two years. We are actually working, or I am working with Auburn now to see if we can get the two year college system to have a program there because Auburn is not going to have it for the four year program. But they have everything set up their part to be able to do it, so we're trying to work with the two year system to come in and let them have it at Auburn and they would be going through a two year system instead of that. That does them a lot of it, I mean does everything a farmer needs to know, he don't have to go go all this four year stuff that a lot of it the first two years is not even going to pertain with farming, just trying to get math and science and stuff yet. But yes, one of my things is, and I'm working with some people now, I will work on workforce, development, farmers and log in there, every industry that I consider under ag to train people and maybe get them into it somewhere, at least be able to hire people, like I said, you can't even hire somebody to work on the farm, why would you want to? You can't pay them enough, excuse me, you cannot pay them what he can go to a chemical plant or in our area, he can start out at 20 dollars an hour or more in a chemical plant of kids. We have training right at six mil high school, where they leave there the week after they get out of school and go to work making 80,000 dollars a year, there is no way a farmer can attract anybody to do that kind of stuff. The only way we can do it is to start training them where we can get the pay still up to have qualified work that you can actually put a kid on the tractor or something that has not been on it all the time. You mentioned logging, talk about forestry if you would, when I was in school there was a lot of people, that was a sought after occupation, understanding the science of that and the logistics of that, are we in a good place there because so much of that is why it really drives some of the, the, the, I get the black belt, right? Yes, if we could get the pricing up on logs, I mean, the pricing on footwood and all of them. We have enough wood to, I think we have like an Adam's got how many years, but if we started cutting a day in 20 years, we wouldn't have what's cutting, we're still planting back and you get so much keep back with now and logging, like the footwood is $2 a ton today. So that means if you sold a truckload, when they hold a truckload out of wood, the actual person that's thin and timber and getting down home is getting about $50 a load coming out of wood. There is no way you can afford to grow timber on that land, I mean, it's just not, unless you've got land, it's just sitting there and you leave it alone, but down home even thin and trees are 15 years before you thin trees and down home, we do a lot of long leaf which takes longer. I'm logging, waiting for them to start logging out, they may start it today, I had 160 acres we did they was going to cut and then I have a, I'm not going to call the timber people but that's on the other end that we have to cross one piece to get out of, they send them in open day that you got, they wanted $8,000 put up across one bridge and this is the same people that cross my stuff all the time coming out with timber, unheard of, you know, everybody's out to get what they can get, but our wood prices are so low right now, it's unreal, I mean, it's just, nobody's cutting unless they have to and you do have to rotate your timber and cut, but it's stuff and it's one for migrant workers coming in running the equipment right there, nobody would be able to operate in that business, oh, and it is a lot of H2A they use on that also, just like the nursery's and all, you know, right now, like I said, you cannot attract people to go to work on the nursery or anything else and you know, our nursery we, I mean, we take people high wages, but when you're bringing H2A in in almost 20 hours to pay them, it's even hard to make it in that, any of them, I mean, and that's what the federal government has said on it, everybody thinks migrant worker labor is cheap, it's not, and if we could hire all Americans or whatever to work, everybody would love to, but like I said, the generation that's come home, they don't want to get out in the heat, the sun, and they up to them, they're back like we grew up to it, you know. I told them I was the other day, I went accountable to me, and I said, why, why would you want to run back to me? I said, well, why can you get back? I said, but when I ran for a senate, I had a lot of them tell me, but that's the only horse job you ever had, I said, no, no, apparently you haven't grown 100 acres of watermelons and men on a watermelon field all day for several weeks, and so, no, this was easy, y'all, I get to do stuff for people that hopefully bring stuff back to them. Senator, we got to leave it there, we're out of time, but we appreciate your time this morning and let's talk again soon. I look forward to it, thank you very much. They say that Jack Williams, they're running for Ag Commissioner, we'll be right back, this is the Jeff Ford Show, and I've been talking about 065. [MUSIC]