Where I Stand on Food, Agriculture, and Rural South Dakota

Every winter, ranch country comes to town. The Black Hills Stock Show fills Rapid City with stock trailers, work boots, and families who measure their year in calving seasons. For about a week, nobody asks whether the city and the country are connected. You can see the connection parked on every block downtown.

The other fifty-one weeks, the connection runs through the meat case at the grocery store. It runs through the checkout line in North Rapid, where the total climbs faster than the paycheck does. I am running to represent District 32, downtown and North Rapid City. There is not a section line anywhere in this district. We still eat three times a day. Food policy is city policy.

Here is where I stand.

Four commitments, in plain English

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 taking a detour through a distant packing plant that takes the biggest cut of the price. Shorter path, fairer price, and both ends of the sale live in South Dakota.

Ban foreign ownership of South Dakota farmland. American land in American hands. That goes double for ground near military installations, and Ellsworth sits just up the road from this district. Who owns the land around our defense assets is not a trivia question.

Honest food labeling. Separate real meat from lab-grown. If it came off a pasture, say so. If it was grown in a tank, say that too. Honest labels protect honest ranchers, and they protect the shopper reading the package.

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.

Those four positions draw objections. Good. Objections deserve straight answers, not talking points. Here are the strongest ones I hear, taken seriously.

"You're a downtown candidate. Why is this your fight?"

Fair question. Start with the obvious: Rapid City is the hub city for West River ranch country. Ranch families bank here, buy parts here, see the doctor here, and spend here. When family agriculture gets squeezed, Main Street feels it within the year.

Now the kitchen-table side. Direct-to-consumer meat gives a family in this district another way to fill a freezer at a fair price, from a producer with a name and a phone number. Honest labels protect the person pushing the cart, not just the person raising the cattle. A district of renters, storefronts, and young families still eats. That makes this our fight too.

"Banning foreign buyers tramples property rights."

I sell real estate for a living. I take property rights seriously, and I want South Dakota land trading in an open market. Open to Americans. Nothing in this position stops an American from buying or selling a single acre.

But a foreign government, or a company answering to one, buying ground near our military installations is not a property-rights question. It is a security question. And to the folks who say foreign buyers only hold a small share: the time to lock a door is before something walks out of the house, not after. American land in American hands is not a slogan against markets. It is a boundary around them.

"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. The producer who shakes your hand answers for every pound.

This position is about the path, not the standards. Clear the wall of middlemen out of the space between a South Dakota producer and a South Dakota table. A shorter, more honest path from pasture to plate is not a danger to your family. It is an option for your family.

"Labels are nanny-state meddling. Let the market decide."

I want the market to decide. That is the point. A market can only decide when the label tells the truth. This position 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 telling the truth about itself, fine. That is the market working. If it can only win by borrowing the good name that ranch families spent generations earning, that is not competition. That is counterfeiting.

"You're 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 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 kind of money is not anti-business. It is how the businesses that actually live here survive.

What this comes down to

I am not a rancher, and I will not pretend to be one to win votes. I am a dad who buys groceries in this town. I am a businessman who knows what happens to a community when the money that feeds it gets siphoned somewhere else. And I am a neighbor to the families who raise the food.

Strong families need three things on this front: food they can afford, labels they can trust, and land that answers to people who live on it. That is the whole plank. If District 32 sends me to Pierre, I will fight for every line of it.

The ask

Read the full plank at zac4sd.com. It is letter L on the platform: Food, Agriculture, and Rural Community. If it reads the way your kitchen table sounds, volunteer or chip in while you are there.