#290 Zach Lahn - Inside America’s Cancer-Causing Chemical Problem

**SPEAKER_1** (0:02)
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**Shawn Ryan** (0:36)
Well, I got a little question for you before we get going that doesn't really relate to what we're talking to, but I just want to knock it out. The USDA says the average US farmer is 58.1 years old. And in Iowa, the average producer is 57.6. VICE's tractor hacking coverage on farmers fighting repair restrictions went viral with a related VICE YouTube video servicing at about 13 million views. I had no idea people were that concerned about this. This sounds like I had a conversation about this exact thing with Secretary Driscoll about right to repair for our military. I didn't even know this was going on in the farming communities. Here's some points. Producers under 35 nationally, 296,480.
Nine percent of all producers. That's not good. Just context for the audience. That's the up and coming generation. Iowa producers under 35, 15,782.
The FTC sued Deere in 2025 over repair restriction allegations, and Reuters reported a judge let that antitrust suit proceed. Deere has denied any wrongdoing. What do you say to the next generation of farmers watching their parents work 16-hour days to buy farm equipment, and they still feel like they don't control what they actually own? Are you dealing with this on your farm?

**Zach Lahn** (2:07)
You know, we don't use, but I use more legacy equipment, older equipment, partially for this exact reason. But what I'd say to producers, especially young ones, is I think what they need to understand is, this is being done on purpose. They're doing this on purpose. And what I mean by that is that, you know, my whole life, every politician I've ever met has said, we have to support farmers, we have to support farmers. And everything's gotten worse for the actual producer. And so if you actually look at the past 10 years and what the agribusiness lobby has spent in Washington, DC., it's about a one and a half billion dollars in the past 10 years lobbying Congress. The top five companies during that same time have made about a hundred and fifty billion dollars in profit. In the same time, we've lost a hundred thousand farms.

**Shawn Ryan** (3:03)
A hundred thousand farms?

**Zach Lahn** (3:06)
Family farms. So who are they lobbying for? It's not the farmer. It's not the producer. This is something that sometimes is difficult to bring up. Because, you know, right now Bobby Kennedy is really fighting against like big food, for instance. And I've been told by people that taking on the fight that I'm taking on with big agriculture is much more difficult. And there's a reason for that. And the reason is, big agriculture has created a caricature of farming, and they're pretending to be the people that are defending the heritage of our farmers.
But actually, they're the ones extracting every dollar of wealth out of our farms that they possibly can, and bragging about farm consolidation. It's like...

**Shawn Ryan** (3:55)
What is farm consolidation?

**Zach Lahn** (3:57)
You know...

**Shawn Ryan** (3:57)
Is that buying a bunch of family farms and putting them together at some big conglomerate?

**Zach Lahn** (4:02)
Yeah, it's that, you know, the producers, the farms are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so what that actually means, and we've done the opposite on my farm, and I'd love to talk to you about that, but what that actually means is every time one of these farms goes away or disappears, there's life that we lose in our rural communities. And our rural communities in Iowa, in the Midwest, they're on life support. But these companies want to work with bigger and bigger producers. And we know that, we know why they want to do that. It's easier, they have less cost when they're dealing with less customers. They can control people easier.
And so, the statistics that you're talking about, about young farmers, you know, the World Economic Forum talked about that. You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy. This is a part of it. You know, 25% of Iowa's farmland, at least 25%, is now owned by people who don't live in the state, out of state funds and investors. A quarter of my state is owned by people who will never go to a Friday night football game in our small town, who aren't shopping on our main streets, like, this is in line with Blackstone buying single family homes, the same thing is happening to our agriculture community. The thing that's so difficult for what I'm trying to undertake right now is to get to the farmers to help them understand that this is happening on purpose. They don't want more family farms. And matter of fact, if you go to the WF, they don't want sovereignty for our country. And so one of the ways you can strip away sovereignty is to have them have an insecure food base in the state. You can't feed yourself how you're sovereign. And it's gotten, Shawn, it's gotten very bad to this point. I'll be in these debates with people about the use of agrochemicals and things like that. And when I'm in them, they keep talking about this idea that, well, we need this to produce food. We need glyphosate, for instance, to produce food. And what they're not discussing is that in my state of Iowa, .03% of our acres are used to produce anything that will end up on your plate in its original form.