Pillar L · Economy
Food, Agriculture, and Rural Community
“American land in American hands.”
Defend family farms and ranches. Direct-to-consumer meat sales. Oppose foreign ownership of South Dakota farmland, especially near military installations. Honest labels protect honest ranchers.
Where I stand
- Direct-to-consumer meat sales for South Dakota producers.
- Ban foreign ownership of South Dakota farmland.
- Honest food labeling: separate real meat from lab-grown.
- Protect rural water and land from speculative capital.
Pushback, answered
The hard questions, answered straight.
These are the real objections this position gets, with the same answers Zac gives in person. No talking points. No dodges.
“Banning foreign buyers tramples property rights.”
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.
“Direct-to-consumer meat will get somebody sick.”
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.
“Labels are nanny-state meddling. Let the market decide.”
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.
“You are a businessman. Now you want to block investment?”
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.