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Celebrating the power of possibility.

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I'm Senator Frank Nicely and I believe that anything is possible.

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This is anything is possible. Thank you for joining me again for this episode.

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These are great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.

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My guest Senator Frank Nicely, it is great to have you in studio sir.

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Good to be here Hale.

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We go way, way, way back. I've interviewed you a ton of times on the radio.

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Yeah.

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We've had some big times.

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We have. It's an honor to have you here.

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I have heard so many great things about you and your character.

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Well I guess I am a character.

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Let me tell you what I've heard.

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Some of that stuff is not true.

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This is just the good stuff, right?

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Yeah, tell the good stuff.

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One, your old school where a handshake to you, your word is your bond.

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Yep, that's the way I was raised.

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If Frank Nicely tells you something, that's what it is.

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And you're not going to tell this person one thing and this person one thing.

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You're both going to get it straight.

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And I wanted to start there with you.

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You do what you say you're going to do and you're a man of your word.

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I've heard across the board, whether you agree with them or not,

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you're going to get it straight and you can count on that and that's what it is.

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Is that accurate?

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That's so easy to live like that.

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That makes life easy.

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Walk me through how you got that way.

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Well, I'm about as Appalachian as you can get.

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In fact, the newspaper in Chattanooga refers to me as the mayor of greater Appalachia.

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And in Appalachia, a handshake means something and your word means something.

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And you get caught lying, nobody trusts you anymore.

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And like we were talking before, I had eight great grandfathers that I know of

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that fought in the American Revolution that are buried in here in East Tennessee.

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Eight, you can go.

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I can eat them.

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You can go.

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We're the burrys.

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And so I'm about as East Tennessee as you can get.

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It's kind of funny.

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East Tennessee has different humor than West Tennessee or the Yankees.

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You know, the Yankees come down here.

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They don't have a lot of humor about them.

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If they do, we don't understand it.

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But they don't understand my humor.

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So I say something on the Senate floor, kind of an attempted humor.

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And the East Tennessee boys get it.

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And the West Tennessee boys, they start to look at you and say, what's funny?

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But...

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Where are you born?

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I was born over here at Fort Sanders Hospital, 1947.

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Are you 77 or something?

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My mother was a registered nurse.

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She graduated in nursing school about 1930.

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And she said they used to go out and take people's appendix out on kitchen tables.

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Most of them would live.

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That was a long time ago.

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That's almost a hundred years ago.

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Tell me about your mother and your father.

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Well, my dad was...

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They were East Tennesseeans, of course.

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The Nicelys were Swiss.

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They came from Switzerland, in with the Amish up there in the Pennsylvania.

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And they were antibiotics when they ran them out of Europe.

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And Wim Penn brought them in because they were good farmers.

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And they were mainly German, Swiss German.

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They were Swiss, but they talked German.

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My mother's people were over in the coalfields, over in the clarifield and the Egan and Jellico and over in that area.

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And they were mainly Welch.

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And, you know, the Welch...

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There were a lot of Welch in East Tennessee.

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I mean, the Welch...

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A lot of the elderly country music were Welch.

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The Welch always had good voices.

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But nobody brags about their brave Welch ancestors.

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They always wanted to be Scotcher Irish.

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Half the people around here claim it to be Irish, really, Welch.

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They just don't want to talk about it.

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Would you go to school?

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Well, I went two years in Jefferson County and two years to high school and two years in Knox County.

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Went to Skagston, a little place called Skagston, out here in East Knox County.

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Then I went to UT.

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Went one year down to Louisiana to school, down there with the Cajuns.

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I had a good time down there, but I came all back to UT and graduated there in 1969.

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Met my wife.

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Would you study at UT?

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Soil science.

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They called it agronomy back then.

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Why did you study that?

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Well, at farming, you know, we had a farm there in Knox County and one old Jefferson County.

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And, you know, large farms for this area.

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They'd be small farms out in West Tennessee.

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In this area, they were pretty good sized farms.

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So, you know, I thought I'd just...

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My daddy wanted me to be a lawyer.

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My mama wanted me to be a doctor.

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All I wanted to do was food around on the farm.

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And I should listen to them.

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I recommend listening to your parents.

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Civilization people are far advanced if everybody's just listening to their parents.

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Instead, I have to learn everything all over again.

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Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal,

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and the Knoxville News Sentinel.

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So you wanted to go into farming?

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Yeah, that's all we've done.

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We've scratched around on the farm all these years.

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So walk me through kind of your farming career.

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Why did you have that?

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Why do you have that passion and that love?

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I think it's genetic.

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You know, the antibiotics that come in with the Amish labor farmers all down through the years

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and by grandfather.

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Some of them were millers, ran grist mills.

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Several of my old ancestors ran grist mills along the rivers.

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Most of my family lived down the valley of the farm, down the Holston River.

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But just practically all of them down the Holston River.

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And William Penn recruited them because they were good farmers.

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And I honestly believe it's, you know, your genetics are a powerful thing.

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Thomas Sowell, who's my hero, wrote a book called Race and Culture.

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Right.

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And you read that Race and Culture book.

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Have you ever read that?

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I haven't read it.

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Well, I recommend it.

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I've read some of his work, but I haven't read that.

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I recommend you read that Race and Culture.

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And it kind of hints on that, that a lot of what you want to do is you get from your genetics.

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So I don't know.

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I've always enjoyed farming.

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I've never, it doesn't seem like work.

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Working on a farm doesn't seem like work to me.

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So talk about the business of farming.

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Well, it's changed.

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It's changed.

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When did you get started?

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How did you start?

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What did you do?

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Well, we run a dairy at the time and we took a...

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Was this a family dairy?

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Yeah.

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We took over the dairy.

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And we'd dairyed for 15 or 16 years.

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And by 1987 we realized they were beginning to use hormones in the milk.

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And people were drinking less milk.

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And it just, we realized the future wasn't there.

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And we were right.

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You know, the dairymen today are getting roughly the same that we were getting in the mid-80s.

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I don't see how they're instilling business.

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And there's more.

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The milk mafia wrote the laws back in the federal milk order.

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And it's just designed to keep everybody down.

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The interesting thing is I passed the bill 12, 14 years ago to allow you to sell raw milk

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here in Tennessee.

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It was a fight.

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It took me two or three years to get it.

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And now then we have more raw milk dairies than we do commercial dairies.

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They don't milk in many cows, of course, but...

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And the raw milk's bringing $12 to $18 a gallon.

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And the regular milk, these commercial dairies are selling milk to the Mayfields and they

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get about a dollar and a half, $2 a gallon.

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So it's a huge difference.

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And it's like a $5 bottle of wine and $100 bottle of wine.

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It's a big difference of good milk.

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And so that's one of the things.

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Through the years I've tried to pass little things that would help small farmers.

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We've got so many small farmers.

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Food security.

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We don't realize...people in Europe realize that they remember being hungry.

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People in America don't remember being hungry.

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Don't worry about food security.

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You know, if a few bridges on the Mississippi River went out, we'd be short of food in a little while.

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So I've been trying to help Tennessee become a good food state.

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So you're a farmer.

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You start to develop your farm.

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What's the scale of your farm now?

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Well, we've done a little everything through the years.

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We've buried for a long time.

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We've at least landed our tomato growers for a while.

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One year we had 275 acres under plastic-raised tomatoes.

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And of course that cycled out.

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So now that we're primed, we've kind of played defense.

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We've raised cattle.

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We've got sheep.

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And we've got re-raised hogs.

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My daughters furnish high-end hogs for the three-rivers market.

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And fed non-GMO corn and no soybeans.

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And they pay her a good price for them.

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We sell grass, fat, and beef.

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And we have sheep.

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And we train horses.

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And my granddaughters and daughters all ride horses.

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Tell me about your family.

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Well, I have three daughters and a son.

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And then four granddaughters and a son.

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And we like to take her horses and load them in a trailer

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and go all the way off and ride her horses.

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Last summer we went to Southern Utah.

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And we rode her horses around the Grand Canyon

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and at Monument Valley.

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We rode through Monument Valley where John Wayne had made

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the searchers and stagecoach and all those old movies

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back in the late 1930s.

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And we hired an old Indian woman as old as I am named Effie.

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And we paid her good.

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And she took us on the trails around through the Monument Valley

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and showed us where this movie was made and that movie was made.

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And showed us the tree where their mother was born under

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and showed us the tree where their mother was buried.

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I bet you that was exciting.

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It was.

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It was a wonderful trip.

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At 77, you can still get up on a horse?

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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At 77 I was old, I thought it was going to be.

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I told you that earlier.

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So when did you decide that you were going to be involved

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in public service?

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Well, when we got out of the dairy business,

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a good friend of mine, Jimmy Kyle Davis,

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had run for them.

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He had run for the legislature.

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And we had killed a steer and made a lot of hamburgers.

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We had a picnic for him.

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And our first guy involved on mineral rights.

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You know, Tennessee has more different mines,

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more different kinds of mining operations

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than any other state east of Mississippi.

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And a lot of these old mineral rights had been sold 100 years ago

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and the company had gone out of business

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and they were just orphaned mineral rights.

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And there was no way to couple them back up with the surface.

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So I went with the Farm Bureau.

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We went to Nice for a time or two

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and worked on legislation to get the mineral rights back

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to the ridge owners.

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Right.

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And that kind of got me interested.

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I remember the first time I went to committee down there,

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it would have scared me to death to get up

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and had to say anything.

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But somewhere through the years, I figured out

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it was all right to get up and speak.

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Nobody's going to kill you.

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And through the years, it's amazing

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what we've done in the legislature.

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Now, I know it's unnatural to brag on a bunch of politicians,

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but we've abolished inheritance tax,

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abolished the hall of income tax,

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abolished the gift tax,

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abolished the repressional tax.

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We've cut sales tax on everything,

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cut franchising and exercise tax on all the small businesses.

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I mean, it's amazing.

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Every time we cut taxes, we end up with more money.

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Art Laffer told us if we do that, he's the one told us to do it.

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He says, if you will abolish these taxes,

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you'll have more money than you can spend.

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Tennessee's the lowest debt state in the nation.

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We're lowest taxes in the nation.

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We've got 70, close to $70 billion in reserve

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to take care of retirees.

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We've got about 15 billion for the 401ks.

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We just put 200 million in our rainy day funds.

266
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We've got over $2 billion at our rainy day fund,

267
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and our 10-care fund has a billion,

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and workers' comp has a billion.

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I mean, Tennessee is amazingly good shape.

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What's the future of Tennessee's small farmers?

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Well, I've, like I say,

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I've done a lot of little things to try to help them.

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I've done a lot of farming to process,

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and now I've taken back over our meat inspection

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from the federal government.

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Ever stayed around us and inspects their own meat.

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That makes it easy for a farmer to process his animals locally

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and sell them.

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People want local food.

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They don't want factory food from out west.

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It's been treated with a lot of different ways

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that you don't want to talk about right.

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There's a huge difference.

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If you get local grass-fed, grass-finished beef,

285
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those things are good, and it's nutrient dense.

286
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You don't eat as much, and it keeps that dollar at home.

287
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I passed a bill to let us label our meat Tennessee meat.

288
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You know, the federal government did away with country of origin labeling,

289
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so right now you don't know where your meat's coming from.

290
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Somewhere in the world,

291
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India right now sells more beef than Argentina,

292
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but it's all water buffalo.

293
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Well, you may go to Walmart and one week get water buffalo.

294
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We may want some more, but you don't know because it's not labeled.

295
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I passed a bill where it puts on there, Tennessee beef.

296
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I passed a little bill, Tennessee milk.

297
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If you go to Wiggles, Wiggles buys all of his milk in Tennessee.

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There's a little logo down there that says Tennessee milk.

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Tennessee meat.

300
00:14:34,000 --> 00:14:37,000
And just little things through the years that we've tried to do

301
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to help the small farmers.

302
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Keep them viable.

303
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Talk a little bit about the values of a farmer.

304
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Well, the farmers are environmentally state,

305
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and they want to take care of the farm,

306
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and they don't want to see their topsoil washed down the river.

307
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They want to protect it.

308
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And through the years we've done a good job protecting it.

309
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Our yields are higher than ever before.

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The grain farmers, I mean.

311
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They say farming is the only business where you can lose money every year

312
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instead of business.

313
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But still, there's something about the land and farming.

314
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There's places in the world where they farm the land for thousands of years,

315
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and the land is still producing.

316
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And one of the most interesting things you read about sometime is,

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in South America they found land there in a,

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called the Black Land of the Indians, Terrapetra of the Indigo.

319
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Now, the Native Americans in South America, hundreds of years ago,

320
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they were making this land, they were adding smoke and tar and wood chips

321
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and potty shards and everything, and it's deep and it's rich

322
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and it's full of micronutrients and it's full of microorganisms

323
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and it's actually grows every year.

324
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And these modern day scientists, they know that the Indians made it,

325
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but they don't know how they made it, and they can't duplicate it.

326
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But it's so rich you don't have to use fertilizers on it.

327
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Google it sometime and read about the Black Land of the Indians,

328
00:16:13,000 --> 00:16:15,000
Terrapetra of the Indigos.

329
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And that's an amazing thing.

330
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The microorganisms in the soil, they're so important.

331
00:16:21,000 --> 00:16:24,000
They say in a plow layer of soil, there's more,

332
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if you had all those little microorganisms out there,

333
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they'd weigh more than a cow.

334
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Wow.

335
00:16:29,000 --> 00:16:32,000
And there's a direct proportion, a correlation,

336
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of the health of these microbes in the soil

337
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and the health of our microbes and our microbiome and our intestines.

338
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And so we have to be careful what's in our soil because it's affecting us.

339
00:16:42,000 --> 00:16:45,000
But little kids playing the dirt, playing the barn,

340
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they're all healthy and they get real resistance.

341
00:16:49,000 --> 00:16:54,000
It's just, farm kids are just, are lucky.

342
00:16:54,000 --> 00:16:56,000
Your kids, did your kids love growing up on the farm?

343
00:16:56,000 --> 00:16:57,000
Oh yeah, they loved it.

344
00:16:57,000 --> 00:16:59,000
My little granddaughter, she's seven this morning,

345
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she jumped up and put her clover on the barn before we had breakfast.

346
00:17:03,000 --> 00:17:05,000
Said, I'm going to go check my kingdom.

347
00:17:05,000 --> 00:17:14,000
Well, I want to say that I appreciate who you are and how you are.

348
00:17:14,000 --> 00:17:18,000
I think that our community and our country is better

349
00:17:18,000 --> 00:17:21,000
because people like you exist.

350
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Somebody that has those rock solid Appalachian values.

351
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It's what this community and what this country was built on.

352
00:17:32,000 --> 00:17:34,000
And I think it's a beautiful thing.

353
00:17:34,000 --> 00:17:37,000
Well, being raised by, when I was growing up,

354
00:17:37,000 --> 00:17:40,000
of course my dad was a little too young for World War I,

355
00:17:40,000 --> 00:17:42,000
he was a little too old for World War II,

356
00:17:42,000 --> 00:17:44,000
but he was drilling with zinc mines the whole time.

357
00:17:44,000 --> 00:17:46,000
They probably wouldn't have taken him anyway.

358
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But everybody was a war veteran.

359
00:17:48,000 --> 00:17:50,000
Everybody was a World War I or a World War II

360
00:17:50,000 --> 00:17:52,000
when I was a kid, it was all war veterans.

361
00:17:52,000 --> 00:17:59,000
I was lucky to be raised by those old timers that raised me.

362
00:17:59,000 --> 00:18:02,000
I can say they had a lot of humor about them.

363
00:18:02,000 --> 00:18:04,000
They had to laugh to keep them crying.

364
00:18:04,000 --> 00:18:06,000
But they were tough.

365
00:18:06,000 --> 00:18:07,000
You didn't push them around.

366
00:18:07,000 --> 00:18:09,000
They just tell you what they were going to do.

367
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That's what they'd do.

368
00:18:11,000 --> 00:18:13,000
I was lucky.

369
00:18:13,000 --> 00:18:17,000
These young kids today, they have a whole different set of role models.

370
00:18:17,000 --> 00:18:20,000
And it's this different.

371
00:18:20,000 --> 00:18:23,000
Maybe it's better, but it's sure enough different.

372
00:18:23,000 --> 00:18:24,000
You know, before you get away,

373
00:18:24,000 --> 00:18:30,000
one of the things that I wanted to ask you to do for me is,

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00:18:30,000 --> 00:18:34,000
if you were giving me advice, I'm a young person,

375
00:18:34,000 --> 00:18:37,000
I want to build a great life,

376
00:18:37,000 --> 00:18:43,000
what are the things that are the ingredients of the soil of a good life?

377
00:18:43,000 --> 00:18:46,000
Well, don't eat too much.

378
00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:48,000
Don't drink too much.

379
00:18:48,000 --> 00:18:50,000
Life all you want to.

380
00:18:50,000 --> 00:18:52,000
That laughing won't hurt you.

381
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Just tell the truth.

382
00:18:56,000 --> 00:19:00,000
But the main thing I see wrong with these kids these days

383
00:19:00,000 --> 00:19:03,000
is too many sugary soft drinks.

384
00:19:03,000 --> 00:19:06,000
I never saw my dad drink a whole coke cola.

385
00:19:06,000 --> 00:19:08,000
If he was somewhere that's all they had,

386
00:19:08,000 --> 00:19:10,000
he would drink half that pour the other half out.

387
00:19:10,000 --> 00:19:12,000
He'd have sandwiched.

388
00:19:12,000 --> 00:19:13,000
He'd eat a convertible sandwich.

389
00:19:13,000 --> 00:19:14,000
He didn't like sandwiches.

390
00:19:14,000 --> 00:19:16,000
But if he had to eat a sandwich somewhere,

391
00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:18,000
he'd take the top piece of bread, feed it to the dog,

392
00:19:18,000 --> 00:19:20,000
and he'd eat a convertible sandwich.

393
00:19:20,000 --> 00:19:25,000
And he'd let it be 94 and it was as strong at 90 as anybody could.

394
00:19:25,000 --> 00:19:27,000
He could step on his horse at 90 and ride off.

395
00:19:27,000 --> 00:19:32,000
It looked like John Wayne riding off down through the field.

396
00:19:32,000 --> 00:19:34,000
But they didn't get excited.

397
00:19:34,000 --> 00:19:35,000
They didn't back up.

398
00:19:35,000 --> 00:19:39,000
They'd tell you what he's going to do and they'd do it.

399
00:19:39,000 --> 00:19:40,000
I don't know.

400
00:19:40,000 --> 00:19:41,000
I'm just lucky.

401
00:19:41,000 --> 00:19:43,000
I was raised by heroes.

402
00:19:43,000 --> 00:19:49,000
You just threw some great wisdom out in a very compact form.

403
00:19:49,000 --> 00:19:51,000
Don't eat too much.

404
00:19:51,000 --> 00:19:53,000
Everybody's talking about intermittent fasting now

405
00:19:53,000 --> 00:19:56,000
and all that stuff, but that's what that is.

406
00:19:56,000 --> 00:19:57,000
Don't drink too much.

407
00:19:57,000 --> 00:19:59,000
Moderation.

408
00:19:59,000 --> 00:20:02,000
But then there's a proverb that says,

409
00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:06,000
a merry heart do with good like a medicine.

410
00:20:06,000 --> 00:20:08,000
Yeah, life all you want to.

411
00:20:08,000 --> 00:20:11,000
Yeah, life all you want to.

412
00:20:11,000 --> 00:20:13,000
It's pretty easy.

413
00:20:13,000 --> 00:20:14,000
I don't know.

414
00:20:14,000 --> 00:20:17,000
It's like the army say, control you want.

415
00:20:17,000 --> 00:20:19,000
You got to control you want.

416
00:20:19,000 --> 00:20:22,000
And I try to tell my daughter, she says,

417
00:20:22,000 --> 00:20:25,000
Amazon's got something on my front porch every day.

418
00:20:25,000 --> 00:20:27,000
And I'm trying to get her to control her wants.

419
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:30,000
But I'll tell you a little positive story about Amazon

420
00:20:30,000 --> 00:20:34,000
and buying stuff on the computer.

421
00:20:34,000 --> 00:20:36,000
I represent six rural counties.

422
00:20:36,000 --> 00:20:38,000
Well, severe counties, not too rural anymore.

423
00:20:38,000 --> 00:20:41,000
But the rest of my counties are basically rural counties.

424
00:20:41,000 --> 00:20:43,000
And they'd have to come to the doctor's shop

425
00:20:43,000 --> 00:20:45,000
and the doctor would get their tax dollars

426
00:20:45,000 --> 00:20:47,000
and spend it on their school.

427
00:20:47,000 --> 00:20:49,000
But when you're buying on the computer,

428
00:20:49,000 --> 00:20:51,000
and Amazon brings it to you,

429
00:20:51,000 --> 00:20:53,000
Hancock County, Granger County, Claver County,

430
00:20:53,000 --> 00:20:55,000
they get to sales tax now.

431
00:20:55,000 --> 00:20:58,000
So they're getting money that they weren't expecting.

432
00:20:58,000 --> 00:21:00,000
So they got money for their schools

433
00:21:00,000 --> 00:21:03,000
and everything's kind of working out.

434
00:21:03,000 --> 00:21:05,000
People say, well, that's the...

435
00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:07,000
buying on the internet's hard on these brick and mortar guys.

436
00:21:07,000 --> 00:21:11,000
Well, it is, but it gets our sales tax back where they need to be.

437
00:21:11,000 --> 00:21:14,000
And Hipsville and rural counties have enough money

438
00:21:14,000 --> 00:21:18,000
to do a good job with their kids and schools and everything.

439
00:21:18,000 --> 00:21:20,000
So everything has a way of working out.

440
00:21:20,000 --> 00:21:22,000
America's a great place.

441
00:21:22,000 --> 00:21:24,000
I think everything will work out.

442
00:21:24,000 --> 00:21:26,000
You know, Reagan was optimistic. He was always optimistic.

443
00:21:26,000 --> 00:21:27,000
He was.

444
00:21:27,000 --> 00:21:28,000
You've got to be optimistic.

445
00:21:28,000 --> 00:21:31,000
And we don't know how it's going to work out right now.

446
00:21:31,000 --> 00:21:32,000
It'll work out.

447
00:21:32,000 --> 00:21:34,000
Senator Frank Nassley, thank you for being on the show.

448
00:21:34,000 --> 00:21:36,000
Well, thank you for having me.

449
00:21:36,000 --> 00:21:38,000
I tell you one thing, you're holding up good.

450
00:21:38,000 --> 00:21:40,000
You don't look a bit different the first time we're here.

451
00:21:40,000 --> 00:21:42,000
Thank you for being here.

452
00:21:42,000 --> 00:22:07,000
Thank you for being here.