Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel/USA Today Network: We feared for dad's life after selling our cows. Finding hope while friends faced loss.
Editor’s Note: The following is adapted from Brian Reisinger’s book “Land Rich, Cash Poor: My Family’s Hope and the Untold History of the Disappearing American Farmer.” Unearthing hidden history from the Great Depression to today and weaving it with the four-generation fight for survival of Reisinger’s family on their farm in southern Wisconsin, “Land Rich, Cash Poor” reveals a crisis of vanishing farms that is affecting every American dinner table — and fueling problems like America’s mental health crisis.
There are more tears on our land than we want to admit.
My dad and I were on sacred ground, back at the small cabin I own on a forty-acre parcel behind the farmhouse where we both grew up. This is land my great-grandpa first fought to get in the Great Depression. Land upon which my grandpa turned out milk cows to graze, and where my dad and I journeyed together. We sat there on the porch with the sun glowing across the honey-brown wood, and the trees whispered of those things we’d lost, and my father quietly broke into tears. …