This is an IHeart podcast.

Welcome to the Tudor Dixon podcast.

As you've likely heard, the federal government is shut down.

And what you may not know is that that affects many people's lives.

Obviously, we know it affects everybody who's working in Washington, D.C. and at our airports,

but it also affects our farmers. So we have Brian

Risinger here with us today to share the behind the scenes to get us a little bit smarter about

what the shutdown does and who's actually responsible. Brian, you may remember he's a journalist,

a farmer, and an author. And we talked to him a little while back about his book, Land, Rich, Cash, Poor. Brian,

welcome back to the podcast. Hey, it's good to be with you. Thanks so much for having me.

Absolutely. So you have some insight into what this is doing to our farmers. I know there's

like some question about farm aid. I think a lot of people in America have heard about this shutdown,

but they don't exactly know how it affects all these different industries. So share a little bit about what's going on with our farmers right now. Yeah, well, here's how the congressional squabbling affects farmers. For the most part, farmers like a lot of hardworking families in America, you know, don't have a whole lot of use for government every single day. They're not, you know, in a lot of ways they are just trying to grow something to be able to sell it to people and make

a dollar to keep their farm going. It's as simple as that. However, agriculture and government

are very wound up together, whether we like it or not. And what has happened is the government

shutdown has placed all kinds of limitations and problems on farmers.

There's things like local county offices where they need to go register their crops and things

that they're required to do that they're not able to do.

And that's kind of a frustration.

But the big thing is the way the congressional squabbling has stalled talks around President

Trump's tariff package or any kind of a solution around

tariff issues. So we're getting tough with other countries. We're negotiating. We're using tariffs

...