farm rescued from Kansas City

We were talking about the farm help with this farm injuries with hardship to the farmers and ranchers in the Midwest with Terry Johnston from Farm Rescue. Terry, how does your organization on helping the farmers and ranchers in the Midwest?

Yeah, so a great question, Cesar. So we help in a lot of different ways for a lot of different reasons. I guess let's talk about the reasons we help farm our families first. First of all, we're a nonprofit organization, so we don't charge anything for what we do, and we work strictly with volunteers, and we have our own equipment. So things that we can do for a family is help them harvest their crop, help them put them in their crop, or help them feed their livestock.

And that can be due to an injury, an illness, a natural disaster, like a blizzard or tornado. And we help folks in nine different states. So we're in North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Montana, and then Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Illinois, and Wisconsin. So we serve families for those reasons in those nine states.

We generally help through like what we would consider a season, you know, a harvest season or a planting season or if it's working with livestock will help for so many weeks. But things like so we can harvest corn, soybeans, we've done field peas, we harvest some sorghum in Kansas this year, wheat, barley, rye,

So basically any grains, oil seeds, small grains, we can help with harvesting that. With planting, very similar, we've got both air cedars and normal row crop corn and soybean planters, so we can do that.

I know Cesar was curious about how we help livestock producers. So that can vary a lot. So first of all, that could be somebody got hurt and they can't physically do the work, right? Going out to feed their cows, maybe they need to feed out in the bong, so they need to take them salt and mineral or hay.

So in the case of an injury or an illness, our volunteers will physically do that for them and maybe their equipment is broke down. So like we've got hay grinders and feeders and we can bring a small loader tractor, for example, to help with hay.

right now there's some there's some wildfires just recently in North Dakota and those folks their pasture and hay stocks were burned up so we're currently finding donated hay and we're hauling it to those folks in the case of a wildfire. A couple years ago there were a lot of snow storms in the northern plains and folks hay and feed stocks were hidden like it was covered with a lot of snow and they could not get to their feed

And so we found, again, we found folks that would donate the hay in southern Iowa and we used our trucks and volunteers to haul the feed to these cattle so they wouldn't starve and freeze in the middle of the winter. So another case in Wisconsin this year, a lady rancher had gone through three years of drought.

And she had exhausted all the hay she had and she had used all the money she had to buy hay for her cattle and her crop hadn't come on yet for this spring and summer. And so we found a gentleman that donated 34 big round bales of hay and we used our trucks and volunteer.

Halder that hay. So she had hay for her cattle until her crop came on. Fortunately, they got rain this summer in that part of Wisconsin. And so she was able to then feed her own hay. But she was at the end of her rope, like no pun intended. She had no more feed for her livestock. So that's just a few ways that we help livestock producers. This is Terry Johnston from Farm Rescue at the NFB Onback Roads of Illinois.