Celebrating the power of possibility.
I'm Senator Frank Nicely and I believe that anything is possible.
This is anything is possible. Thank you for joining me again for this episode.
These are great stories about great people whose lives prove that anything is possible.
My guest Senator Frank Nicely, it is great to have you in studio sir.
Good to be here Hale.
We go way, way, way back. I've interviewed you a ton of times on the radio.
Yeah.
We've had some big times.
We have. It's an honor to have you here.
I have heard so many great things about you and your character.
Well I guess I am a character.
Let me tell you what I've heard.
Some of that stuff is not true.
This is just the good stuff, right?
Yeah, tell the good stuff.
One, your old school where a handshake to you, your word is your bond.
Yep, that's the way I was raised.
If Frank Nicely tells you something, that's what it is.
And you're not going to tell this person one thing and this person one thing.
You're both going to get it straight.
And I wanted to start there with you.
You do what you say you're going to do and you're a man of your word.
I've heard across the board, whether you agree with them or not,
you're going to get it straight and you can count on that and that's what it is.
Is that accurate?
That's so easy to live like that.
That makes life easy.
Walk me through how you got that way.
Well, I'm about as Appalachian as you can get.
In fact, the newspaper in Chattanooga refers to me as the mayor of greater Appalachia.
And in Appalachia, a handshake means something and your word means something.
And you get caught lying, nobody trusts you anymore.
And like we were talking before, I had eight great grandfathers that I know of
that fought in the American Revolution that are buried in here in East Tennessee.
Eight, you can go.
I can eat them.
You can go.
We're the burrys.
And so I'm about as East Tennessee as you can get.
It's kind of funny.
East Tennessee has different humor than West Tennessee or the Yankees.
You know, the Yankees come down here.
They don't have a lot of humor about them.
If they do, we don't understand it.
But they don't understand my humor.
So I say something on the Senate floor, kind of an attempted humor.
And the East Tennessee boys get it.
And the West Tennessee boys, they start to look at you and say, what's funny?
But...
Where are you born?
I was born over here at Fort Sanders Hospital, 1947.
Are you 77 or something?
My mother was a registered nurse.
She graduated in nursing school about 1930.
And she said they used to go out and take people's appendix out on kitchen tables.
Most of them would live.
That was a long time ago.
That's almost a hundred years ago.
Tell me about your mother and your father.
Well, my dad was...
They were East Tennesseeans, of course.
The Nicelys were Swiss.
They came from Switzerland, in with the Amish up there in the Pennsylvania.
And they were antibiotics when they ran them out of Europe.
And Wim Penn brought them in because they were good farmers.
And they were mainly German, Swiss German.
They were Swiss, but they talked German.
My mother's people were over in the coalfields, over in the clarifield and the Egan and Jellico and over in that area.
And they were mainly Welch.
And, you know, the Welch...
There were a lot of Welch in East Tennessee.
I mean, the Welch...
A lot of the elderly country music were Welch.
The Welch always had good voices.
But nobody brags about their brave Welch ancestors.
They always wanted to be Scotcher Irish.
Half the people around here claim it to be Irish, really, Welch.
They just don't want to talk about it.
Would you go to school?
Well, I went two years in Jefferson County and two years to high school and two years in Knox County.
Went to Skagston, a little place called Skagston, out here in East Knox County.
Then I went to UT.
Went one year down to Louisiana to school, down there with the Cajuns.
I had a good time down there, but I came all back to UT and graduated there in 1969.
Met my wife.
Would you study at UT?
Soil science.
They called it agronomy back then.
Why did you study that?
Well, at farming, you know, we had a farm there in Knox County and one old Jefferson County.
And, you know, large farms for this area.
They'd be small farms out in West Tennessee.
In this area, they were pretty good sized farms.
So, you know, I thought I'd just...
My daddy wanted me to be a lawyer.
My mama wanted me to be a doctor.
All I wanted to do was food around on the farm.
And I should listen to them.
I recommend listening to your parents.
Civilization people are far advanced if everybody's just listening to their parents.
Instead, I have to learn everything all over again.
Possibility powered by Covenant Health, Home Federal,
and the Knoxville News Sentinel.
So you wanted to go into farming?
Yeah, that's all we've done.
We've scratched around on the farm all these years.
So walk me through kind of your farming career.
Why did you have that?
Why do you have that passion and that love?
I think it's genetic.
You know, the antibiotics that come in with the Amish labor farmers all down through the years
and by grandfather.
Some of them were millers, ran grist mills.
Several of my old ancestors ran grist mills along the rivers.
Most of my family lived down the valley of the farm, down the Holston River.
But just practically all of them down the Holston River.
And William Penn recruited them because they were good farmers.
And I honestly believe it's, you know, your genetics are a powerful thing.
Thomas Sowell, who's my hero, wrote a book called Race and Culture.
Right.
And you read that Race and Culture book.
Have you ever read that?
I haven't read it.
Well, I recommend it.
I've read some of his work, but I haven't read that.
I recommend you read that Race and Culture.
And it kind of hints on that, that a lot of what you want to do is you get from your genetics.
So I don't know.
I've always enjoyed farming.
I've never, it doesn't seem like work.
Working on a farm doesn't seem like work to me.
So talk about the business of farming.
Well, it's changed.
It's changed.
When did you get started?
How did you start?
What did you do?
Well, we run a dairy at the time and we took a...
Was this a family dairy?
Yeah.
We took over the dairy.
And we'd dairyed for 15 or 16 years.
And by 1987 we realized they were beginning to use hormones in the milk.
And people were drinking less milk.
And it just, we realized the future wasn't there.
And we were right.
You know, the dairymen today are getting roughly the same that we were getting in the mid-80s.
I don't see how they're instilling business.
And there's more.
The milk mafia wrote the laws back in the federal milk order.
And it's just designed to keep everybody down.
The interesting thing is I passed the bill 12, 14 years ago to allow you to sell raw milk
here in Tennessee.
It was a fight.
It took me two or three years to get it.
And now then we have more raw milk dairies than we do commercial dairies.
They don't milk in many cows, of course, but...
And the raw milk's bringing $12 to $18 a gallon.
And the regular milk, these commercial dairies are selling milk to the Mayfields and they
get about a dollar and a half, $2 a gallon.
So it's a huge difference.
And it's like a $5 bottle of wine and $100 bottle of wine.
It's a big difference of good milk.
And so that's one of the things.
Through the years I've tried to pass little things that would help small farmers.
We've got so many small farmers.
Food security.
We don't realize...people in Europe realize that they remember being hungry.
People in America don't remember being hungry.
Don't worry about food security.
You know, if a few bridges on the Mississippi River went out, we'd be short of food in a little while.
So I've been trying to help Tennessee become a good food state.
So you're a farmer.
You start to develop your farm.
What's the scale of your farm now?
Well, we've done a little everything through the years.
We've buried for a long time.
We've at least landed our tomato growers for a while.
One year we had 275 acres under plastic-raised tomatoes.
And of course that cycled out.
So now that we're primed, we've kind of played defense.
We've raised cattle.
We've got sheep.
And we've got re-raised hogs.
My daughters furnish high-end hogs for the three-rivers market.
And fed non-GMO corn and no soybeans.
And they pay her a good price for them.
We sell grass, fat, and beef.
And we have sheep.
And we train horses.
And my granddaughters and daughters all ride horses.
Tell me about your family.
Well, I have three daughters and a son.
And then four granddaughters and a son.
And we like to take her horses and load them in a trailer
and go all the way off and ride her horses.
Last summer we went to Southern Utah.
And we rode her horses around the Grand Canyon
and at Monument Valley.
We rode through Monument Valley where John Wayne had made
the searchers and stagecoach and all those old movies
back in the late 1930s.
And we hired an old Indian woman as old as I am named Effie.
And we paid her good.
And she took us on the trails around through the Monument Valley
and showed us where this movie was made and that movie was made.
And showed us the tree where their mother was born under
and showed us the tree where their mother was buried.
I bet you that was exciting.
It was.
It was a wonderful trip.
At 77, you can still get up on a horse?
Yeah.
At 77 I was old, I thought it was going to be.
I told you that earlier.
So when did you decide that you were going to be involved
in public service?
Well, when we got out of the dairy business,
a good friend of mine, Jimmy Kyle Davis,
had run for them.
He had run for the legislature.
And we had killed a steer and made a lot of hamburgers.
We had a picnic for him.
And our first guy involved on mineral rights.
You know, Tennessee has more different mines,
more different kinds of mining operations
than any other state east of Mississippi.
And a lot of these old mineral rights had been sold 100 years ago
and the company had gone out of business
and they were just orphaned mineral rights.
And there was no way to couple them back up with the surface.
So I went with the Farm Bureau.
We went to Nice for a time or two
and worked on legislation to get the mineral rights back
to the ridge owners.
Right.
And that kind of got me interested.
I remember the first time I went to committee down there,
it would have scared me to death to get up
and had to say anything.
But somewhere through the years, I figured out
it was all right to get up and speak.
Nobody's going to kill you.
And through the years, it's amazing
what we've done in the legislature.
Now, I know it's unnatural to brag on a bunch of politicians,
but we've abolished inheritance tax,
abolished the hall of income tax,
abolished the gift tax,
abolished the repressional tax.
We've cut sales tax on everything,
cut franchising and exercise tax on all the small businesses.
I mean, it's amazing.
Every time we cut taxes, we end up with more money.
Art Laffer told us if we do that, he's the one told us to do it.
He says, if you will abolish these taxes,
you'll have more money than you can spend.
Tennessee's the lowest debt state in the nation.
We're lowest taxes in the nation.
We've got 70, close to $70 billion in reserve
to take care of retirees.
We've got about 15 billion for the 401ks.
We just put 200 million in our rainy day funds.
We've got over $2 billion at our rainy day fund,
and our 10-care fund has a billion,
and workers' comp has a billion.
I mean, Tennessee is amazingly good shape.
What's the future of Tennessee's small farmers?
Well, I've, like I say,
I've done a lot of little things to try to help them.
I've done a lot of farming to process,
and now I've taken back over our meat inspection
from the federal government.
Ever stayed around us and inspects their own meat.
That makes it easy for a farmer to process his animals locally
and sell them.
People want local food.
They don't want factory food from out west.
It's been treated with a lot of different ways
that you don't want to talk about right.
There's a huge difference.
If you get local grass-fed, grass-finished beef,
those things are good, and it's nutrient dense.
You don't eat as much, and it keeps that dollar at home.
I passed a bill to let us label our meat Tennessee meat.
You know, the federal government did away with country of origin labeling,
so right now you don't know where your meat's coming from.
Somewhere in the world,
India right now sells more beef than Argentina,
but it's all water buffalo.
Well, you may go to Walmart and one week get water buffalo.
We may want some more, but you don't know because it's not labeled.
I passed a bill where it puts on there, Tennessee beef.
I passed a little bill, Tennessee milk.
If you go to Wiggles, Wiggles buys all of his milk in Tennessee.
There's a little logo down there that says Tennessee milk.
Tennessee meat.
And just little things through the years that we've tried to do
to help the small farmers.
Keep them viable.
Talk a little bit about the values of a farmer.
Well, the farmers are environmentally state,
and they want to take care of the farm,
and they don't want to see their topsoil washed down the river.
They want to protect it.
And through the years we've done a good job protecting it.
Our yields are higher than ever before.
The grain farmers, I mean.
They say farming is the only business where you can lose money every year
instead of business.
But still, there's something about the land and farming.
There's places in the world where they farm the land for thousands of years,
and the land is still producing.
And one of the most interesting things you read about sometime is,
in South America they found land there in a,
called the Black Land of the Indians, Terrapetra of the Indigo.
Now, the Native Americans in South America, hundreds of years ago,
they were making this land, they were adding smoke and tar and wood chips
and potty shards and everything, and it's deep and it's rich
and it's full of micronutrients and it's full of microorganisms
and it's actually grows every year.
And these modern day scientists, they know that the Indians made it,
but they don't know how they made it, and they can't duplicate it.
But it's so rich you don't have to use fertilizers on it.
Google it sometime and read about the Black Land of the Indians,
Terrapetra of the Indigos.
And that's an amazing thing.
The microorganisms in the soil, they're so important.
They say in a plow layer of soil, there's more,
if you had all those little microorganisms out there,
they'd weigh more than a cow.
Wow.
And there's a direct proportion, a correlation,
of the health of these microbes in the soil
and the health of our microbes and our microbiome and our intestines.
And so we have to be careful what's in our soil because it's affecting us.
But little kids playing the dirt, playing the barn,
they're all healthy and they get real resistance.
It's just, farm kids are just, are lucky.
Your kids, did your kids love growing up on the farm?
Oh yeah, they loved it.
My little granddaughter, she's seven this morning,
she jumped up and put her clover on the barn before we had breakfast.
Said, I'm going to go check my kingdom.
Well, I want to say that I appreciate who you are and how you are.
I think that our community and our country is better
because people like you exist.
Somebody that has those rock solid Appalachian values.
It's what this community and what this country was built on.
And I think it's a beautiful thing.
Well, being raised by, when I was growing up,
of course my dad was a little too young for World War I,
he was a little too old for World War II,
but he was drilling with zinc mines the whole time.
They probably wouldn't have taken him anyway.
But everybody was a war veteran.
Everybody was a World War I or a World War II
when I was a kid, it was all war veterans.
I was lucky to be raised by those old timers that raised me.
I can say they had a lot of humor about them.
They had to laugh to keep them crying.
But they were tough.
You didn't push them around.
They just tell you what they were going to do.
That's what they'd do.
I was lucky.
These young kids today, they have a whole different set of role models.
And it's this different.
Maybe it's better, but it's sure enough different.
You know, before you get away,
one of the things that I wanted to ask you to do for me is,
if you were giving me advice, I'm a young person,
I want to build a great life,
what are the things that are the ingredients of the soil of a good life?
Well, don't eat too much.
Don't drink too much.
Life all you want to.
That laughing won't hurt you.
Just tell the truth.
But the main thing I see wrong with these kids these days
is too many sugary soft drinks.
I never saw my dad drink a whole coke cola.
If he was somewhere that's all they had,
he would drink half that pour the other half out.
He'd have sandwiched.
He'd eat a convertible sandwich.
He didn't like sandwiches.
But if he had to eat a sandwich somewhere,
he'd take the top piece of bread, feed it to the dog,
and he'd eat a convertible sandwich.
And he'd let it be 94 and it was as strong at 90 as anybody could.
He could step on his horse at 90 and ride off.
It looked like John Wayne riding off down through the field.
But they didn't get excited.
They didn't back up.
They'd tell you what he's going to do and they'd do it.
I don't know.
I'm just lucky.
I was raised by heroes.
You just threw some great wisdom out in a very compact form.
Don't eat too much.
Everybody's talking about intermittent fasting now
and all that stuff, but that's what that is.
Don't drink too much.
Moderation.
But then there's a proverb that says,
a merry heart do with good like a medicine.
Yeah, life all you want to.
It's pretty easy.
I don't know.
It's like the army say, control you want.
You got to control you want.
And I try to tell my daughter, she says,
Amazon's got something on my front porch every day.
And I'm trying to get her to control her wants.
But I'll tell you a little positive story about Amazon
and buying stuff on the computer.
I represent six rural counties.
Well, severe counties, not too rural anymore.
But the rest of my counties are basically rural counties.
And they'd have to come to the doctor's shop
and the doctor would get their tax dollars
and spend it on their school.
But when you're buying on the computer,
and Amazon brings it to you,
Hancock County, Granger County, Claver County,
they get to sales tax now.
So they're getting money that they weren't expecting.
So they got money for their schools
and everything's kind of working out.
People say, well, that's the...
buying on the internet's hard on these brick and mortar guys.
Well, it is, but it gets our sales tax back where they need to be.
And Hipsville and rural counties have enough money
to do a good job with their kids and schools and everything.
So everything has a way of working out.
America's a great place.
I think everything will work out.
You know, Reagan was optimistic. He was always optimistic.
He was.
You've got to be optimistic.
And we don't know how it's going to work out right now.
It'll work out.
Senator Frank Nassley, thank you for being on the show.
Well, thank you for having me.
I tell you one thing, you're holding up good.
You don't look a bit different the first time we're here.
Thank you for being here.