Chapter 1: What motivated Zach Lahn to run for Governor of Iowa?
Well, I got a little question for you before we get going that doesn't really relate to what we're talking to, but I just want to knock it out. The USDA says the average U.S. farmer is 58.1 years old. And in Iowa, the average producer is 57.6. Vice's tractor hacking coverage on farmers fighting repair restrictions went viral with a related Vice YouTube video surfacing at about 13 million views.
I had no idea people were that concerned about this. This sounds like I had a conversation about this exact thing with Secretary Driscoll about right to repair for our military.
i didn't even know this was going on in the farming communities here's some here's some points producers under 35 nationally 296 480. nine percent of all producers that's not that's not good just context for the audience that's that's the up and coming generation yeah iowa producers under 35 15 782
The FTC sued Deere in 2025 over repair restriction allegations, and Reuters reported a judge let that antitrust suit proceed. Deere has denied any wrongdoing. What do you say to the next generation of farmers watching their parents work 16-hour days to buy farm equipment, and they still feel like they don't control what they actually own? Are you dealing with this on your farm?
You know, we don't use... I use more legacy equipment, older equipment, partially for this exact reason. But what I'd say to producers, especially young ones, is I think what they need to understand is this is being done on purpose. They're doing this on purpose. And what I mean by that is that, you know, my whole life...
Every politician I've ever met has said, we have to support farmers, we have to support farmers. And everything's gotten worse for the actual producer. And so if you actually look at the past 10 years, and what the agribusiness lobby has spent in Washington, D.C. It's about a $1.5 billion in the past 10 years lobbying Congress.
The top five companies during that same time have made about $150 billion in profit in the same time we've lost 100,000 farms.
A hundred thousand farms?
Family farms. So who are they lobbying for? It's not the farmer. It's not the producer. This is something that sometimes is difficult to bring up. Because, you know, right now, Bobby Kennedy is really fighting against, like, big food, for instance. And I've been told by people that taking on the fight that I'm taking on with big agriculture is much more difficult.
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Chapter 2: How does Zach Lahn view the future of family farms in Iowa?
And there's a reason for that. And the reason is big agriculture has created a caricature of farming, and they're pretending to be the people that are defending the heritage of our farmers. But actually, they're the ones extracting every dollar of wealth out of our farms that they possibly can and bragging about farm consolidation.
It's like... What is farm consolidation? You know... Is that buying a bunch of family farms and putting them together at some big conglomerate?
Yeah, it's that, you know, the producers, the farms are getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And so what that actually means, and we've done the opposite on my farm, and I'd love to talk to you about that, but what that actually means is every time one of these farms goes away or disappears, there's life that we lose in our rural communities, right?
And our rural communities in Iowa, in the Midwest, they're on life support. But these companies want to work with bigger and bigger producers. And we know that. We know why they want to do that. It's easier. They have less cost when they're dealing with less customers. They can control people easier.
And so the statistics that you're talking about, about young farmers, you know, the World Economic Forum talked about that. You'll own nothing and you'll be happy. This is a part of it. 25% of Iowa's farmland, at least 25%, is now owned by people who don't live in the state. Out-of-state funds and investors.
A quarter of my state is owned by people who will never go to a Friday night football game in our small town, who aren't shopping on our main streets. Like, this is... in line with Blackstone buying single-family homes, the same thing is happening to our agriculture community.
The thing that's so difficult for what I'm trying to undertake right now is to get to the farmers to help them understand that this is happening on purpose. They don't want more family farms. As a matter of fact, if you go to the WF, they don't want sovereignty for our country. And so what's one of the ways you can strip away sovereignty is to have them have an insecure food base in the state.
You can't feed yourself how you're sovereign. And it's gotten, you know, Sean, it's gotten very bad to this point. You know, I'll be in these debates with people about the use of agrochemicals and things like that. And when I'm in them, they keep talking about this idea that, well, we need this to produce food.
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of corporate control over Iowa farmland?
We need glyphosate, for instance, to produce food. And what they're not discussing is that in my state of Iowa, 0.03% of our acres are used to produce anything that will end up on your plate in its original form. Could you say that again? How much? 0.03% of our acres.
Out of 24 million acres, it's roughly 9,000 acres in Iowa, is used to produce any produce, food, that will end up on your plate in its original form.
So it's primarily... Holy shit. It's all chemicals.
It's like, so they have, they're producing ethanol. They're, uh, and, like, we can talk about these things, but they're producing feed that will then be shipped out of state for animals and shipped out of our country for animals. Iowa has the best farmland in the world, I would say, and we import 95% of our food.
There's a big movement of people that want to see, you know, homesteading and smaller farms crop up. But when you have out-of-state investors that are coming in and buying up land and jacking up the price of land, there's not one young person that can afford to get on land. Yeah. And so your statistics, I look at it from even a different perspective.
I look at it from this perspective, that aging population of farmers... They're on break-even margins now because they're being extorted by big agriculture companies that continue to raise their prices even as commodity prices stay the same or drop. Because they form monopolies now. Donald Trump and Brooke Rollins are talking about this. Talking about breaking these monopolies up.
And a few other politicians have talked about it. But there used to be a heritage in my state where, you know, grandpa would run the farm, and then when he got older, he would step away. Often he would move to a different house, and then son would farm and raise the family. That's what happened with my family.
But the idea of supporting two incomes, two families now in Iowa, it's basically gone for the average farmer.
Damn.
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Chapter 4: How does Zach Lahn address the cancer crisis in Iowa?
He participated in Garrison's raid. These were people that were brought in in Iowa's 2nd Calvary to go counter the opposing calvaries that were, you know, wreaking havoc. And he was in a state that wasn't a part of this battle. It was in America, but, you know, it wasn't... What was going on in the country was not happening in Iowa.
At the end of the Civil War, more Iowans fought in the Civil War than any other state per capita.
No kidding.
Yes. And there's deep reasons for that. And it's about where they came from and what they were leaving. And that in Germany, when they came over, they had just, you know, left this feudal system. They were trying to have an uprising. They were defeated. They were exiled. Iowa came online right in 1846. Heavy agrarian culture.
So you have these people that were fleeing a country primarily because they wanted to control their destiny. They wanted to own their land. They wanted to have the ability to build their communities. And then you see what happens with the expansion, the potential expansion of slavery.
And all these very wealthy people on the East Coast that were slave owners wanting to make the Midwest slave states so they could control it. I firmly believe that part of the reason that Iowa stood up in the way that they did was because they fled that situation in their own country and they didn't want it happening where they were. So he came over.
And then about 20 years later, my great-great-grandfather came over on a ship from Hamburg by himself at 14. And he was in the stowage of the ship, and he made his way to Iowa. And then in 1900, they built... He and his uncle built our family homestead in Belle Plaine. And that place... was a place of deep stories for decades and decades.
From the Great Depression, to World War II, to my great-great-uncle fighting in World War I, going overseas, fighting in World War I and coming back to run the local newspaper. While his brother kept everything steady with the farm. And then my grandpa...
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Chapter 5: What are the effects of glyphosate and other agrochemicals on health?
mowing a runway in the bean field and buying a 1942 Taylor craft and learning how to fly and Starting a career in aviation and his brother flew off aircraft carriers in the Pacific in the 40s like these are our stories of Our history and our culture and our people And in 2005 my family farm was sold my great-grandmother passed away and
And my grandma had called me at the time, and I was in college, and asked me if I wanted anything to do with the farm. I didn't know what that would be, but I was out in Colorado at the time. I was like, no, I'm gone. But if you fast forward a number of years, I stopped in just to see the farm where I was going to visit a family over in eastern Iowa.
And I just told them, if you're ever going to sell this place, please let me know. And then they called me a couple years later, and they said, hey, we're gonna sell. Would you like to buy? And before I could even think about it, I said, yes, 100%. I want to buy this. So in 2014, I bought the family farm back.
And then over the past 11 years, I've spent restoring that farm board by board using old pictures that I got from my great-grandmother's photo collection. And during that time, I remember, you know, a story that... People often ask me, why did I do that? And what comes to me is that I really want my children to understand their story. I want them to understand their history.
Like, who built them? And that these generations before them toiled and suffered and jumped in to go to the Civil War when they didn't have to. And like, to protect what we have. And I wanted them to understand that deep story and connect to it. It was never because I wanted to run for office. I actually don't even want to be a politician.
But I remember after I bought the farm, I was down in the basement. I had signed the papers, came to the farmhouse. I was down in the basement. I was leaning against a wooden post in the basement. This has actually happened. And I just said to myself, what am I doing? This place needs so much work. It's going to take forever.
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Chapter 6: What concerns does Zach Lahn have regarding agricultural practices?
It was a stretch to buy it in the first place to get the loan. And I'm leaning on this post and I turn and the posts are the initials VL is my grandpa. And I just said to myself, this is why I'm doing it. Because these things truly matter. That we don't forget where we came from. And so bringing this into what you just talked about, that's what's at stake. That's what's being taken from us.
And so me deciding to run for governor was a choice of wanting to throw everything I have in to protect the culture that helped build my state, build my people, and say, it's worth preserving. Like, this is worth preserving. It's provided for the greatest alleviation and suffering ever known to mankind our culture has. Great prosperity.
And if you look back at the principles of what they came to do, it wasn't that they came here to get rich. They came here for the basics of freedom. And now much of that is being taken away. And so that's why I'm in this race. I often ask myself, is there room for people in politics who still actually care?
That's the question of the fucking day, man.
It's a question that comes up often. And here's what I love. I'm not out there talking about my opponents in a negative way at all. I won't do it. That's not why I'm here. I'm not out trying to make people afraid that Iowa's going to become the next Minnesota if we don't do X, Y, or Z. I'm here... What's wrong with Minnesota? If you're a daycare provider, nothing. Oh, shit.
You know, I just believe that my job, what God's calling me to do in this time in my life is to tell a better story about what we could be as a state, to bring people together about that. And I will tell you, when I'm out on the campaign trail, and I'm new to all this, like, I don't... I've never done this before. I don't have a script that I'm going off of.
I have a couple key points that I'm really passionate about. But what I try to do is just tell the truth to people and not worry about what these big companies, lobbyists, or special interests are going to think about me.
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Chapter 7: How does Lahn propose to improve Iowa's water quality?
and just believe, like, to the point I mentioned earlier, that God's gonna protect me in this whole endeavor, and that he's got a plan for this.
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I don't know if I could do it any other way. I think everywhere we look, we see the opposite in politics. Like, what's expedient? What will get people to donate to me? You know, I had somebody once mention to me It was that you need to imagine every voter is walking around with little buttons on them.
And your job is to figure out what those buttons are, what they like, and push as many as you can so they'll like you. And I say, guys, this is not at all what people are asking for. They want, I believe, they want people that are willing to take on the big systemic issues that they're facing.
It's getting to the fucking point where I'll just take anybody with a spine. You got a spine, you have a fucking pole. I just feel so lied to. I mean, we talked about it when our mutual friend Rich connected us.
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Chapter 8: What is the significance of community values in Lahn's campaign?
Rich called me about you and I was like, I don't know, man. I don't know if I want to interview another fucking guy running for office. And we chatted a little bit, and I was like, all right, I'll give Zach a call. And we chatted, and I really liked what you had to say. I mean, we talked about it. I was just like, man, I just...
sat in front of i don't know how many politicians now and they just lie lie lie yeah i mean it's so much hope so much hope for this administration and i don't know about everybody else but my hope went right down the shitter in less than a year And I know we're gonna talk about this, but the fucking Maha movement, I was all about that shit. I'm scared to death of cancer.
I just found out about microwaves the other day. Now we're shit canning our fucking microwave out of the house.
My wife threw ours out years ago.
But you know what I mean? I'm all excited like, oh, they're gonna clean up the food. They're gonna get rid of these pesticides. They're gonna get rid of all this shit. What do I see the other day? They fucking ran hard on this stuff, man. Hard on this. All the health influencers and the doctors with big names, they're all fucking rallying around the Maha movement.
Oh, let's throw a big fucking party. Less than a year in. I don't know if anything has changed other than I saw that Trump signed an executive order and fucking RFK backed him. and said, we're gonna give immunity to, was it Bayer? Is it Bayer? Whatever it is.
Producers of glyphosate-based herbicides.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, Trump. Thank you, RFK. Good fucking job. Way to fucking stick to your constituents. You know. Shit gives me chills, man. It's just every fucking thing that came out of these guys' mouth is a fucking lie. It just makes me, it makes me think, What is the fucking point of voting? Is there a point?
I think there are far too many people that are coming to that same conclusion, that are just saying, why am I doing this?
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