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Welcome to the Heart of Roll America podcast.
I'm your host Amanda Radke, an American cattle rancher and motivational speaker raising my kids
and writing children's books in South Dakota.
There's a David and Goliath story unfolding in agriculture today and I don't know about you,
but my money is on the underdog, the hardworking folks who value faith, family, freedom, and their
farming communities. This show will highlight the untold stories of these resilient and determined
families who I have the great pleasure of meeting in my travels across this nation
and meet
as an agricultural speaker. It is my hope that their stories will remind us to live with great
and meet Therian eggs on the dinner table. Now let's hit the dusty trail together as we uncover the heart of Roll America.
Welcome to the show. It's my mom, Amanda Radke.
Hey everyone, it's Amanda Radke back for another episode of the Heart of Roll America podcast,
the show where we highlight great people doing inspiring things in their communities to make
Roll America and agriculture stronger. We're hitting off 2025 with a bang. I couldn't think of a better guest to kick off the new year to talk about some of the priorities that are happening in Roll America and how we might be positioned going into this new year, a new administration and really fighting for what family farms and ranches need.
And that's the best I have on this morning needs no introduction, but she is Congresswoman Harriet Hageman and she is representing the great state of Wyoming. She grew up on a ranch. She attended Casper College on a livestock judging scholarship and earned both her bachelor's degree and law degree from the University of Wyoming.
She's a litigator for 34 years and she's nationally known for pushing back against federal overreach and talking about what I would deem as just real common sense principles that are grounded in the Constitution. It's a breath of fresh air amidst a sea of really folks that are vested in other self serving interests to have someone that's there fighting on our behalf to say, I'm going to stand up for the little guy.
I'm going to stand up for the land, the livestock and the people. So Congresswoman Hageman, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. You know, there's so many topics I want to ask you about. And I know you've really been a champion for quite some time for our private property rights.
And I guess just to kick off things. What do you see going into this new administration in 2025? What's the makeup of Congress going to look like? And are we better positioned to get some real things done in Congress?
Well, I sure hope so. And in light of the fact that we now have the Senate, the House and the White House, we should be able to move forward with policies that the American people want. I think that on November 5th, there was a message sent loud and clear.
And they want to make sure that we're energy independent. You know, as I've said over and over and over, energy security is national security. They want to make sure that we close the border and that we have common sense immigration. And there's a huge debate going on about all of that right now, even with the president weighing in on other things other than just illegal immigration, which is obviously been at the forefront of everyone's mind for the last several years.
But I also go back to the idea that food security is national security. And that's growing up on a ranch. I'm very well attuned to the challenges that our farmers and ranchers face every single day.
It's why I went into the kind of practice that I did when I was practicing law, which was a water and natural resource attorney representing farmers and ranchers and small business owners.
Trying to push back against the both the federal and the state overreach, making sure that we're protecting those property rights. I have often said that if you can't own property, you are property.
Our forefathers recognize the importance of private property rights and autonomy and how that protects you against government overreach. And I think that we've kind of lost sight of that over the last several decades.
Well, you're speaking my language here in South Dakota. We're embattled in a private property rights. Really, it's been a fight that's been going on for four years as this carbon sequestration pipeline seeks to come through South Dakota.
But there's so many other pieces of this. And I feel like they're all connected. You've been vocal on the NACs on the mandatory EID on the ESGs on DEI.
From a broad view, can you just kind of explain to us all these attacks and all the different tentacles that really, I think, boil down to private property rights?
Well, I think that they do as well. And I think what you really have to go back to is the nonsense surrounding global warming and climate change.
And when you really start digging into the science and the studies and the information behind that, what you really find out is this is one of the largest efforts in world history to transfer funds from the lower and middle class to the upper class.
And that's what you see in tax credits. It's what you see in grants. You look at the information that they have relied upon to claim that we're destroying the planet Earth because of CO2.
And what you find is that they've been cooking the books for years and years and years in order to find some way that they can control us.
And this happens to be the one thing that they have latched upon that they have been quite successful in convincing the UN, well, the UN convincing us and convincing other countries,
that if we don't stop using things like coal and oil and gas, we're going to destroy the planet.
But again, if you go back and you look at the underlying data, you find that much of what they've done is either manipulating the data, they talk about homogenization, they talked about all different kinds of things.
But CO2 is necessary for plant life. That's the bizarre thing to me. They picked the one thing that is absolutely necessary for life on Earth.
And they keep talking about things like net zero or the governor of Wyoming has actually talked about that we're going to go carbon negative. And it's like, yeah, well, that's not going to work.
Number one, it's not going to work. And number two, we don't want to go there. Not if any of us want to eat. So it's just a bizarre concept. It's a bizarre time that we're in.
And so this whole idea of you have to go back to that to understand what they're doing with the carbon sequestration.
So in Wyoming, again, our governor has talked about the idea of sucking the carbon out of the air. Well, we may produce a lot of coal and oil and gas in Wyoming, but come to Wyoming and you will see that we don't have pollution.
We don't have high CO2 in Wyoming simply because I mean, the whole thing is just utterly bizarre, but people are making massive amounts of money on it.
It's why you see companies like Chevron are now saying that they do not want the president to pull us out of the Paris Climate Accord.
And the reason that they're doing that is because that bars the little people from competing.
The bigger corporations, in fact, many of them like regulations. It's called agency capture. They want these regulations in place.
Talking about the EID is an example. NCBA is the supporter of the mandatory EID ear tags for cattle and bison. The big packers are supporters of mandatory EID because what it's going to do is it's going to put your smaller and medium size and independent producers out of business.
And it's going to further empower the larger corporations and result in further vertical integration of the ag industry.
Absolutely. And I'm glad you brought that up. Talk to me about where we're at with your fight on this mandatory EID. I mean, obviously that rule rolled out in November.
I'm already hearing from folks from veterinarians that are saying they can't get the tags. Like they simply can't even source them from sale barn owners that are saying, man, this is cumbersome to have to run these cattle through another time and put these tags in.
Where are we at in fighting this? What I think is an attack again on our private property rights and our liberty.
So I have been fighting the EID mandate for over five years. I filed my first lawsuit in October of 2019 and was successful in enforcing the USDA to withdraw. At that point, it was just a guidance document.
But at that point, they also said that by January 1, 2023, all of our cattle and bison producers were going to be required at that time to use RFID or radio frequency identification ear tags.
They now refer to it as the ID and I assume that they're doing that so that they can, there's a certain amount of flexibility in the type of tags that they're going to force the cattle producers to use.
But you're absolutely right. The moment that the government steps in and mandates that a private industry use a particular product, there's going to be two things that happen.
One, the price is going to skyrocket because it becomes mandatory. And number two, there's going to be scarcity in the market. And that's what they've built into this.
In fact, the ear tags that they assigned to the state of Wyoming or that they gave to the state of Wyoming for distribution to veterinarians and then ultimately to cattle producers, they ran out of those in August.
So they ran out of the ear tags that they are mandating that our cattle producers of bison producers use three months before the rule even went into effect.
Now, there's supposed to be getting more, but again, it's a matter of supply and demand. It's a matter of human nature. You're going to make the price skyrocket. And you are also going to introduce scarcity into the system.
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All we need to do, there's two countries that have been gung ho. There's more than two countries, but two countries that I'd like to talk about that have imposed RFID or EID mandates.
One was Denmark. Denmark was the first country. This year, earlier this year in 2024, Denmark imposed a $100 a head tax against every head of cattle to combat climate change.
So again, we're coming right back to that control. We're coming right back to the idea of scarcity.
I often say that you can either be the lords of scarcity or the champions of abundance. I believe in being a champion of abundance. These people believe in being lords of scarcity, and that's what they do, whether they're attempting to control how much CO2 goes into the atmosphere, what kind of car we can drive, what we can eat.
In Denmark, again, they have imposed a $100 a head tax against all cattle in that country. Well, you really can't impose that unless you know where all the cattle are and who owns them.
You have to be able to insert, the government has to be able to insert itself in the chain of commerce, and this is the way that they do it. They do it through EID.
That's number one. You can see what's going to happen here. The moment that they impose this, they're going to start taxing our cattle advice and producers for CO2 or methane production.
The other country to look at is Ireland. In Ireland, they adopted an RFID mandate in early 2022. By August of 2023, their government issued an order that they needed to slaughter 41,000 head of cattle, not because of a disease outbreak.
We always say we have to have this traceability for a disease outbreak so that we can know instantly where these cattle are and we can protect our producers because we can immediately swoop in and we can address this because we're going to know exactly where those cattle are.
That's hogwash. It's absolute hogwash, number one. But in Ireland, the slaughter order had nothing to do with a disease outbreak. It had to do with global warming. Again, methane production.
Also, if you go to the website for what would be their USDA, just look at the documents that their cattle producers have to fill out. I mean, you're going to have to hire a full-time compliance officer. Our small and medium-sized ranches, let alone the big ones, they're going to have to hire full-time compliance officers just to comply with the paperwork associated with this.
And there are other aspects of why it is the wrong thing to do. Again, it's a matter of a privacy right, but nobody can tell us who's going to be holding this data. Nobody can tell us how they're going to protect it.
The other thing is that they claim that, so first of all, the new rule that went into effect in November only applies to 11% of the industry. This is called incrementalism. This is what government always does.
They try to minimize what the cost of their regulation is going to be by only applying it to a limited number of people or producers at the beginning, and then they start adding more in, and then that way they can cover up the true cost.
But according to their USDA's estimate, it will cost $26.1 million to cover 11% of the industry. Okay, we'll do the math. Type 10, it's a $250 million rule.
It's a $250 million rule. And guess what? That only covers the ear tags. It doesn't include the ones. It doesn't include software. It doesn't include hardware. It doesn't include retrofitting our sale barns.
It doesn't include handling the cattle. Nothing. It's just the ear tags are going to cost $26 million. But if you don't have the rest of the stuff, it's not a traceability rule.
Right, right. I've noticed, because I speak all across the country at these cattle events and the incrementalism, like it's only 11% and also the fear that they're using to sell this, of like, oh, if there's a disease outbreak, we got to be able to identify it.
And to me, it's like, well, we have global markets. We've got Brazil and Argentina and all these countries that might have foot and mouth disease and other things coming in. And the cattle industry is pretty clear on that. We need to shut that down.
Yeah, stop importing it.
Right, like protect the American ranchers. So it puts all the liability on the cattle man and women and no responsibility on these foreign nations that are bringing in stuff that we don't know what it is or where it comes from or how it was raised.
Well, in addition to which that's why I also have a bill of country of origin labeling, because we should our consumers should know where their meat comes from. Everybody wants to talk about how the consumer wants to know about the traceability. They want to know how the cattle are handled.
No, you want to know what the consumer wants. The consumer wants to know whether the beef that they're eating, whether the steak that they're eating or the roast that they're cooking comes from Wyoming or Brazil.
That's what they want to know, but the government and the big packers, they have fought and fought and fought hard against that. So again, don't don't be bringing in the diseases. But the other thing is, is that we have an incredibly effective traceability system in place right now.
We already have one with brands and tattoos and back tags. We don't have disease outbreaks on the cattle end of the of the commerce chain. You might the meat with packers, but you very seldom ever hear of a situation where there is a disease outbreak among cattle.
But the other thing I'll go back to is even their rule themselves. The USDA has stated that cannot be an effective traceability system unless 70% of the industry complies. So at a minimum, they have to have this a 70% compliance rate where it's not there is no traceability,
because the cattle that are in Kansas or Nebraska or Texas or Iowa or Ohio that never have to cross the state line from birth to slaughter. They're not covered by this rule. It's only when you come from a place like Wyoming where we don't have big packing plants that most of our cattle is going to have to
cross the state line at some point during its life cycle. So it only applies to 11%, even though USDA says it has to apply to 70 to be effective. And yet that's what they're applying the rule to. So they themselves recognize that this is not a traceability rule is for them to get their foot in the door so that they can start
dictating how our ranchers operate and produce cattle and bison. And it's worth noting too and it's the reason I don't work in corporate ag media anymore but the USDA gave Farm Journal $40 million to promote this idea. And it's just asinine to me that this isn't an actual
tax and the small and mid sized family farm and ranch it's absolutely going to lead to increase consolidation in our beef supply. And it's maddening that our government is, you know, funding this propaganda right into cattle country.
But the government and the folks in this administration especially the Biden administration they want to stop us from being able to produce meat and consume meat. That's really what this comes down to again it's about control it's the UN it's the WF.
All you need to do is look at Michigan. Michigan does have a mandatory EID rule in place. Their loss of small producers which they define up as 500 head or less. And I consider that to be a fairly large operation 500 had a cattle.
But at their their definition of a small operation is 500 head or less. Their rate of losing small operations is double the national average, because of the costs and the compliance requirements associated with this.
A mandatory EID so yeah it's definitely intended to consolidate and vertically integrate.
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my name for a special discount. So I spent a lot of time at cattle auctions and there's a great optimism right now in the countryside that Trump's going to come in and fix a lot of these issues. Do you actually think there's an appetite here to fix the problems that
plague the beef cattle industry I mean if I could have Trump do one thing, wave a magic wand it would be to address the monopolization of our beef supply with 85% of our meat being held captive by four major players two of them that are foreign owned like can we see that.
So there's a couple of things that I think are happening in that space that are very important and I do think that this is an issue that is important to him, and it's one that I will continuously raise with him when I have that opportunity. But what you're seeing is you're seeing small custom type facilities
they obviously are not going to be able to slaughter and produce the same level of meat as the big packers are, but they're making inroads in these communities and what you're finding is that people want to buy their meat from the local rancher. And I think you're going to see more customization
and one of the bills that we have introduced is to make it so that you do not have to have a USDA inspector in all of these facilities you can have state inspectors, the state inspectors are as good they have to meet the same standards, but we're not paying a federal
inspector $120,000 $150,000 a year where there's already a shortage we're going to be able to do more of this at the state level. I think that's going to open up that market I think it's going to make it so it's more accessible for people to actually be able to go to the ranchers in their community
and say, I want to buy a half a beef or whatever it may be. I think that that's going to make a huge difference for some of our ranchers because then they're going to be able to charge more for the product that they're selling and it's not being shipped off to again, Iowa, Kansas or Nebraska and staying within the community.
So I think that's one area where we need to be starting to lift these federal regulations and return this authority and this power to the states.
Well, I thank you for that and it's amazing to me just how disconnected probably on purpose the cattle rancher has gotten from that consumer retail dollar and the meat where that really is where the profitability is and so if we can bring that back to Roll America, I think it could change the trajectory of a lot of families that are struggling to stay in the cattle business
and that's why we're seeing low cattle numbers right now.
Well, and if you say run 500 head and you can custom produce 10 to 15 to 20 for your neighbors or go sell it at the fair or something like that. If you're able to do that, you could get a pretty healthy profit margin by doing that and also then people know exactly where their beef is coming from.
So I think that that's an important innovation that we need to do in this industry.
Absolutely. Well, let's switch gears here. I listened to your speech that you gave at the RCAP convention earlier in 2024 and one of the things you mentioned was a victory that you were able to kind of achieve even during a tough four years with the Biden administration and that's kind of pushing back on that these NACs.
Can you talk a little bit about what that is? What happened there? How we were able to stop that and are they coming back?
Well, this administration has embedded this concept in almost every single agency out there and NAC is a natural asset company and what these radical environmental groups and again the UN, the UN has its figures deep, deep, deep in this because they're the ones that have done the
accounting program to try to evaluate and value what are called the natural assets of a partial property. So if you have a, let's say you have a thousand acre ranch and what they want to do is they want to separate the natural assets and sell them on the New York Stock Exchange.
That's where this started. So in August of 2023, we received notice that the Securities Exchange Commission was adopting a rule to allow companies to sell natural assets on the New York Stock Exchange.
We're like, what in the world is this? What are you even talking about? They only gave 30 days notice and that was all they had for a comment period. So we immediately, my office immediately started looking into this, realized what a disaster this was and what it portended.
And so we immediately started pushing back and demanding more time for comments, as well as rallying the troops in Wyoming and elsewhere saying this is something that everybody needs to understand what they're doing.
But if you go to the draft regulation that they issued in August of 2023, the idea is that a Bill Gates could come in, a Bill Gates, a George Soros, the Chinese Communist Party.
You could be a foreign country and actually own natural assets, the natural assets and buy and sell them on the New York Stock Exchange, the natural assets being both private and public lands.
So let's say that Bill Gates came in and he bought the natural assets of the Shoshone National Forest. Under the regulation, he would be able to dictate in many ways how that forest was managed.
One of the things in the rule was it could not be for profit. They could not produce any oil and gas. You could not do any mining and you could not do any cattle or sheep production on any of these lands.
Once the natural assets are severed from the property through this voodoo, which is really what it is. Once the natural assets are severed from the property, then you buy and sell those and whoever owns them gets to dictate how that land is used.
So they're taking air and pollination and wind and sun and rain. And they're saying that's part of the natural asset of this parcel of property, this thousand acres.
We're going to separate that, sell it to Bill Gates, and then Bill Gates can make sure that nothing productive can actually be done on those lands.
They're actually targeting, in the rule, they're targeting farmland. Well, what's interesting is in this country, farmland is primarily owned privately. I'm not even aware of farmland that is owned by the federal government.
The rule itself is targeting private property and buying and selling of these natural assets. Craziest thing you could possibly imagine.
The only way they would value what these assets were worth is through the UN accounting program. They have developed this concept, this accounting program, that values what these natural assets are worth.
And then that's what you buy and sell on the New York Stock Exchange. The entire thing is a house of parts. None of it is real. And they're going to try to buy and sell these assets.
But really what they're doing is they're buying and selling control of the land without the people buying the natural assets actually being able to buy the land.
One of the scary things about it is it appears to me that the USDA and the IRS believes that they could apply this to lands that are covered by conservation easements.
If you own the property and you have a conservation easement on your property, the question is whether the federal government would have the ability to buy and sell the natural assets on that property because you have a conservation easement on it.
This whole thing, it is just yet another attack on private property rights. And the reason that I say that is in property law, we refer to a bundle of sticks. We refer to real property as being a bundle of sticks.
And that means that you have the water rights. That's one stick. You have the right to exclude people. You have the right to put a lock on your gate and say you can't come in here.
You have the right to decide how you're going to use that property, whether you're going to farm it or raise cattle or raise dogs or whatever it might be.
You have the right to make those decisions. If every one of those rights is an independent stick.
You have the natural assets, the amount of sunshine, the rainfall that draws the grass, the wildlife, all of that is part and parcel of those bundle of sticks. You can't start separating them out and saying that the federal government or Bill Gates or the Chinese
Copiness Party can buy and sell portions of that real property without it ultimately undermining and perhaps destroying the ownership of the real property itself.
It seems criminal honestly and I tell producers all the time, be very careful of the devils and the details in these contracts and yet there's kind of this mentality amongst some farmers and then also amongst some Republicans that they're just capitulating to all this.
Well, this is the way it's all going so we got to go along. This is what the market wants and it's like, no, this is what the government is funding and prioritizing. The free market doesn't want any of this stuff and I mean, is it really just a big land grab.
We were successful at blocking it. It was supposed to go into effect this SEC rule was supposed to go into effect in John, I think it was January 17 or 18 of 2024 and two days before effective date they withdrew it.
Why did they withdraw it because we showed a light on it. We got people we got 2500 comments submitted in a matter of I think it was two weeks, and we just absolutely came on blue and we were demanding information left and right we were writing letters.
We were saying this isn't legal you can't be doing this. And what we did is we exposed it. And so when we exposed it they had to withdraw it. Now, does that mean they've stopped. No, not at all. In fact, two years ago in the in the December 2022.
Obtained a spending bill, the $1.8 trillion bill that Nancy Pelosi left us as a gift on her way out the door of being speaker. There's what's called the Sustains Act. And it was passed by Congress, it was there are people who supported it who I don't believe should have supported it because what the
administration and the Democrats did with that is, I think initially the bill was probably okay. But when it went through the meat grinder and the sausage making of lawmaking, they added some information in there about these NACs.
So Congress actually adopted a statue called a bill called the Sustains Act, that again, I think is a very frightening concept where a bill gates could come in and buy the natural assets of a particular parcel of property or give money actually under the
Sustains Act, what a bill gates would do or a George Soros is they'd give a million dollars to the federal government. And then they would be able to say and then for that million dollars for this conservation program, I want to be able to tell Harriet Hegman what she
thought was a very good idea to have a conservation easement. And I think that's what's really important about the Sustains Act, because it's not only about the conservation easement, it's about the conservation easement of a particular property.
Because Harriet's got a conservation easement, actually, I don't have conservation easements. I think conservation easements need to be limited in time. I think that they violate the rule against perpetuities. I think ultimately they're going to be a very destructive mechanism by which these people and the federal
government can give a million dollars to the federal government for a conservation program on this particular property, and then I get benefits from that.
It's worth noting that the House Representative Committee Egg Chairman, G.T. Thompson, was the sponsor of that. Also involved in that was Representative Dusty Johnson from South Dakota, which is just unbelievably disappointing that he would go along with this.
What can producers do to fight back against some of these public-private partnerships?
Well, again, what I think happened there is I think that as that went through the process, there were things that were added to it that neither G.T. nor Dusty were aware. And maybe I'm wrong on that, but again, I don't want to, I'm not trying to attack any one person.
I'm just saying that there's often, the law of unintended consequences is real. And I think that this is one of those bills that there are a lot of unintended consequences that we're going to find over time.
But again, I'm constantly looking for ways to protect private property rights from the government, not expand government authority and power.
And so when you have the Sustains Act or you have the NACs or you have mandatory EID or you have the BQAs, the BQALty Assurances, the 58 point checklist, that I know that the USDA is going to use the EID mandate to try to force producers to then become BQA compliant.
This is just, again, the incrementalism. This is one more step in the federal government trying to dictate on land uses and management and operations.
One of the things is that our producers need to stay very, very involved and formed. They need to be getting a hold of their representatives when they hear about these things and say, we don't want this.
This is not what we want. And I think that you made probably one of the better points today because of the way that you put it.
We have so many people who say, well, this is just a sign of the times. This is the future. This is what we have to do.
And your response was, no, this is an agenda item by the federal government to further control you. It isn't what the producers want. It isn't what the consumers want.
And it has nothing to do with the quality of our livestock or really the quality of our meat because once it's slaughtered, you're talking about a completely different agency involved at that point and a completely different procedure that's involved, not the USDA.
So I think that it's very important for people to understand that when the federal government or the state governments or these private organizations or NGOs are coming to you and saying, I'm going to help you to pay off that 40 acres that you have down by the river.
I'm going to make it so you can get a new $100,000 tractor this year. I'm going to make it so that you can be debt free in the next six months.
Just keep in mind that nothing is free. And most likely there are going to be such incredible strings attached that ultimately, if not for you, at least for your family and future generations, you're going to regret that you got involved with these people.
I do not believe, for example, with the perpetual conservation easements, ultimately, those are a way that the federal government is going to control more and more and more and more real property without even having to buy it.
Absolutely. Congresswoman, we only have a few minutes left of the show and I guess, can you leave us with some parting words of what are you optimistic about heading into this new administration and.
These are the kinds of things that we're going to be able to bring to President Trump and I think he's going to understand them.
I will be the chairman of the article one task force for what's called the Republican Study Committee. And the very purpose of that is to try to address the over regulation that we are seeing in this country and have for the last several decades.
So I have been fighting against the federal government against EPA, USDA, Fish and Wildlife Service, Forest Service. I mean, I can go on and on and on about the various agencies that I battled with as a private attorney trying to protect our producers, our oil and gas producers, our cattle producers, our gravel producers,
the people who actually produce things that we need. And what I'm hoping to do with this task force is not only expose what these agencies have done, but to unwind and abolish and repeal a lot of these regulations that are designed to take away private
property rights. We have people that 20 years ago if I had come to Congress and I had talked about what these agencies were doing. I don't think I would have had nearly the reception that I do now. I don't think that people truly understood what these agencies were doing and how they've expanded.
Where it really started is obviously FDR, but there were still somewhat of a laissez faire private property, keep the federal government out of it. Bill Clinton actually was the one that just this kind of nonsense absolutely exploded.
It was worse under Obama and then under Biden, it has been Katie Barthador. And even under George W. Bush, I don't think he fully understood the significance of what all these agencies did and why we needed to be rolling back that power. So I do think that we have someone as the president and people in the
House and the Senate who have a much better understanding of the downside of this incredible over regulation in this country.
Well, Congresswoman, I just appreciate your time today. You're a wealth of wisdom and on behalf of so many independent family farms and ranchers. I just want to thank you. Keep up the fight. Thank you for all that you do. And God bless you as you head back to Washington.
Thank you very much.
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Until the next time we meet on the Dusty Trail, I'm Amanda Radke and this is The Heart of Roll America.