From the campaign
Where I Stand on Food, Agriculture, and Rural South Dakota
There is not a section line anywhere in District 32. We still eat three times a day, which makes food policy city policy.
Every winter ranch country comes to town. The Black Hills Stock Show fills Rapid City with stock trailers, work boots, and families who measure a year in calving seasons, and for about a week nobody has to argue that the city and the country are connected. You can see it parked on every block downtown.
The other fifty-one weeks that connection runs through the meat case, and through the checkout line in North Rapid where the total climbs faster than the paycheck does.
There is not a section line anywhere in District 32. We still eat three times a day. Food policy is city policy, so here is where I stand.
Direct-to-consumer meat sales for South Dakota producers. A ranch family should be able to sell beef to a Rapid City family without the product detouring through a distant packing plant that takes the largest cut of the price. Shorter path, fairer price, both ends of the sale living in South Dakota.
Ban foreign ownership of South Dakota farmland. American land in American hands, and that goes double for ground near military installations. Ellsworth sits just up the road from this district, and who owns the land around our defense assets is not a trivia question.
Honest food labeling that separates real meat from lab-grown. Off a pasture, say so. Grown in a tank, say that too.
Protect rural water and land from speculative capital. In West River country water is not a number on a trading screen. It is the difference between a working ranch and an empty one.
Why a downtown candidate takes this on
It is a fair question and it comes up a lot, so I will answer it rather than dodge it.
Start with the obvious part. Rapid City is the hub for West River ranch country. Ranch families bank here, buy parts here, see the doctor here, and spend here, and when family agriculture gets squeezed Main Street feels it inside a year.
Then the kitchen table part. Direct-to-consumer meat gives a family in this district another way to fill a freezer at a fair price, from a producer who has a name and a phone number. Honest labels protect the person pushing the cart, not only the person raising the cattle. A district of renters, storefronts, and young families still eats.
Where I am careful
I am not a rancher and I am not going to pretend to be one to win votes. I am a dad who buys groceries in this town, a businessman who knows what happens to a community when the money that feeds it gets siphoned somewhere else, and a neighbor to the families who raise the food.
I also sell real estate for a living, which is why I want to be precise about the farmland position. I take property rights seriously and I want South Dakota land trading in an open market, open to Americans. Nothing in this plank stops an American from buying or selling a single acre. A foreign government, or a company answering to one, buying ground next to our military installations is a security question rather than a property question, and the time to lock a door is before something walks out of the house.
Strong families need three things here. Food they can afford, labels they can trust, and land that answers to the people living on it. That is the whole plank, and the objections I hear most often are answered below.
This is letter L on the platform, Food, Agriculture, and Rural Community, and you can read it in full at zac4sd.com.
Strong Families. Strong South Dakota.
Anticipated pushbacks · prepared responses
Common questions on this issue
These are the questions and concerns that come up most often. The responses below are my honest answers, not talking points.
- Q. Banning foreign buyers tramples property rights.
- A. I sell real estate for a living and I take property rights seriously. Nothing in this position stops an American from buying or selling a single acre. A foreign government, or a company answering to one, buying ground near our military installations is a security question rather than a property question. And to the folks who point out that foreign buyers hold only a small share today: the time to lock a door is before something walks out of the house.
- Q. Direct-to-consumer meat will get somebody sick.
- A. Nobody serious wants dirty meat, least of all the rancher whose family name is on the package. South Dakota families already buy beef by the quarter and the half from producers they know, and they trust that food for a reason, because the producer who shakes your hand answers for every pound. This position is about the path rather than the standards. Clearing a wall of middlemen out of the space between a South Dakota producer and a South Dakota table is an option for your family, not a danger to it.
- Q. Labels are nanny-state meddling. Let the market decide.
- A. I want the market to decide, and a market can only decide when the label tells the truth. This is not a ban on lab-grown products, it is one true sentence on a package: grown in a tank, not raised on a ranch. If that product can win shoppers while being honest about itself, that is the market working. If it can only win by borrowing a good name that ranch families spent generations earning, that is counterfeiting.
- Q. You are a businessman. Now you want to block investment?
- A. There is a difference between investment and extraction. A family buying a house, a business buying a storefront, a rancher borrowing to expand: that money builds something and it stays. Speculative capital that corners rural water and land builds nothing. It bets on scarcity, and the family at the end of the line pays off the bet. Protecting rural water and land from that money is how the businesses that actually live here survive.