When our food systems are impacted and people are getting sick, everyone feels it. Farmers are struggling to cultivate their crops due to climate change, trucks are raising the price of transporting fruits and vegetables due to gas prices, and rural folks must drive hours to receive necessary medical care. What impacts rural America impacts the nation.
This is why Jamie Ager, farmer and business owner, is running to represent North Carolina’s 11th district in the House. Ager and Jen discuss how Western North Carolina is rebuilding post-Hurricane Helene while waiting for their promised FEMA recovery funds. Ager also details his background as a farmer and owner of a sustainable farming system, the seriousness of climate change, advocating for our rural communities, and the harmful tariffs.
Jamie Ager is a fourth-generation farmer and entrepreneur from Fairview, North Carolina running to represent NC’s 11th district. Ager owns Hickory Nut Gap, a sustainable meat company. You can read more about his campaign here.
The following transcript has been edited for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief at The Contrarian. We are thrilled to have Jamie Ager. He is the Democratic nominee for the North Carolina 11th. That is a potential blue to, excuse me, that is a potential red to blue flip, and has just moved in that direction, so if that house is going to change control, this is one of the races you should be looking at. Welcome, Jamie, it’s great to meet you.
Jamie Ager
Thanks for having me, I’m grateful to be on the show.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. So, tell us about your background. You are not a professional politician.
Jamie Ager
No, I didn’t think I was gonna do the political thing. I’m a fourth-generation farmer. My family’s been here in western North Carolina for over 100 years. For the past 25 years, my wife and I, built a little meat company and a farming operation here based on regenerative agriculture, raising grass-fed beef, pasture-raised, hogs. And some poultry, pasture-raised poultry as well. And, and you know, we’ve been sort of on this entrepreneurial journey for the past. 20-some years, and and then, you know, we really do, you know, our farming operation, our brand, Hickory Nut Gap, is really dedicated to kind of the holistic idea that we need farming systems, businesses. that think holistically, right? So, regenerative agriculture, farming that’s good for the land, farming that’s good for livestock, high welfare for animals, and ultimately be a business that… that avoids the temptation of the bad habits of capitalism, I feel like, which is that businesses win whenever they externalize costs onto the land, or externalize costs onto the humans that we do business with, right? And so, like, that’s always kind of been our philosophy, is let’s be a good partner for everybody, and we call that building community through agriculture. And so, for me, Creating farming systems that create hope for future generations is good, noble work, and that’s what we’ve been focused on.
Jen Rubin
It sounds like a great life in a great part of the country. Why would you run for Congress?
Jamie Ager
Because I’m a patriot, and I care about our country, and I… I can see that our political worlds have gotten so divided, and… and the temptation for our political system now is just to sort of have a… a scorched-earth, wind-by-all-costs attitude about things, and I don’t think that’s the best way to run a country, and it doesn’t seem to be working where we… we can’t solve issues that most people generally agree on the pragmatic side, like immigration, or we’ve got to get healthcare fixed for everyday working people. And to me, these are not sort of hyper-partisan issues. These are very much bread and butter working folks issues. that I just think, I find frustrating that we don’t have leaders that want to sort of tackle these problems. If we use all these issues just as political footballs. not as actual, practical, how do we solve problems for everyday people, then people become cynical. And they should be, right? Cynicism’s reasonable whenever the government’s not doing the work for the people. And so, to me, I believe in our democracy, I love our country, and I want our country to be able to solve big, hard problems, and democracy needs to be able to solve big, hard problems. And that’s not happening right now, and folks are frustrated, and me too. And so I said, you know what? I can complain about it, or I can do something about it, so here I go. I’m gonna try.
Jen Rubin
There you go. Rural America has really been strained. Medicaid cuts mean rural hospitals are closing. Tariffs have been tough on farmers. Now, with the war, fertilizer may not be available for farms. Tell us what you’re finding in your own farming, and what you’re finding out from your neighbors and potential constituents about the strains and stresses on rural America.
Jamie Ager
Yeah, I mean, agriculture’s a tough business in any scenario, and then when you layer in, you know, higher costs. lower prices, all these tariffs are definitely hurting the farm economics on a very real level. And so, what I’m finding is that, you know, and no question that, you know, we’ve got folks here in western North Carolina that have to drive hours to go to the doctor. Or to, to, to see, you know, get to the hospital, for sure. And, some of the recent legislation, the big, beautiful bill for billionaires. Was a… you know, put a lot of rural hospitals at risk, at financial risk. It’s already, you know, our healthcare system doesn’t do a great job of economically… making rural hospitals economically strong, and so they’re some of the most vulnerable when we have these big, drastic Medicaid cuts and stuff like that. And so, to me, that’s unacceptable. Rural communities need good healthcare. And access to good healthcare, and so, We need to be bolstering our rural, countryside as opposed to, making it further and further economically distressed.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. One of the things that has impacted farmers, this has been going on for a while, is these extreme weather conditions, which arise from global warming. It seems that, when we talk about green energy, people have in mind, some urban person buying a Tesla, but this seems to be a big issue for farmers as well. Talk to us a little bit about the importance of green energy and the impact that global warming has on farmers, just day-to-day, season to season, year to year.
Jamie Ager
Well, I mean, you know, we had Hurricane Helene hit us in September of 2024, so we’re very familiar with big extreme weather events, and that storm devastated so many communities all over western North Carolina. And it was an expensive storm. The close estimates are about $60 billion in costs. And so, you know, we’re still waiting for a lot of money that was promised to us that still hasn’t come through, through Department of Homeland Security, through FEMA, and all that stuff. We’ve still got people, you know, a lot of homes were washed away, a lot of lives lost in our community. It wasn’t just economically devastating, it was, you know. Devastating on a personal level for so many people in these communities. And, and to me, You know, we, we, you know, when it’s personal like that, when this, when the changing… climate is hitting your personal home and your communities like that. It really does change your equation. And from an energy policy standpoint, there’s no question we need an energy policy that encourages renewables. Encourages low-cost renewables, right? Solar’s a terrific, you know, source of energy when we manage it right. And so, to me, We need… we need to figure out how to get climate change under control. It’s a really tough one. I’m sympathetic to the challenge, because it’s… such a macro problem, and to be able to kind of, like, do little things in your community to help with this problem are, you know, it feels daunting and overwhelming, so I’m sympathetic to that… that feeling. You know, we practice at our farm, and we promote regenerative agriculture, soil health, you know, one of the things that we discovered during that storm is we use a lot of perennial pasture. And a lot of our farmland didn’t have any trouble with erosion or anything like that. We didn’t wash too bad in the storm, even though we had all that water come through, mostly because we have deep, healthy soils and healthy plants with deep roots on the plants, and that type of farming promotes organic matter in the soil. And they say every 1% of organic matter that we add to the soil has about 20,000 gallons of water holding capacity in the soil. So, to me, you know, figuring out how we can get agriculture policy so it supports small farms. regenerative farming systems is the work of doing it. And it’s one of the reasons I decided to run for Congress, because I feel like the levers are a little bit bigger up there. Even if you do deal with a lot more headache and challenges and solving problems, I think the nice thing about a business or a farm is I can do whatever I want to do, right? I’m the CEO. And so now… now I gotta go figure out how to work with a bunch of other people to solve hard problems. But, you know, my history and my life has been sort of straddling rural America with farming and agriculture as my roots, and then, you know, my business stuff, but then also selling, you know, grass-fed beef into more urban markets. like New York City, Asheville, places like that. So, I’ve straddled both worlds. I admire our country. I love all parts of our country, and and to me, there’s not a lot of people that have straddled those two worlds as long as I have, and I feel like that… that brings a lot of, I feel like I can… I can help.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. You have stressed, that you really are not a partisan guy, you are gonna look for bipartisan solutions. When you talk to people, in your potential district, Do people ask, are you a Democrat, are you a Republican, or are they asking more, what are you gonna do for us?
Jamie Ager
Yeah, I mean, this is gonna be a campaign really focused on Western North Carolina as the primary focus, that word. The key word is in the job description, right? Representative. And and so we represent Western North Carolina. And something I’ve always described in agriculture is that, you know, when we’re in the grass-fed beef business, so you gotta use label claims like grass-fed, no antibiotics, all that kind of stuff. But something I’ve always described, which I think is 100% true, is that for us to think that a claim like that can accurately describe something as complicated as agriculture or food is just a misunderstanding of reality. And to me, you know, we have political parties in this country, and the Democrat Party, we’ve always been Democrats here, and Democrats, to me, always stood for working people. And that’s the job that the Democratic Party needs to be doing, is playing that role. But to think that a Democrat from Western North Carolina is the same as a Democrat from New York City is absolutely a misunderstanding of reality. And so, to me, you know, there’s the political system, you need some type of organizational system to help people. But at the end of the day, you know, I’m very loyal to Western North Carolina. And what’s good for here… what’s good here for Western North Carolina is how we’re going to run this campaign.
Jen Rubin
I think…
Jamie Ager
Right?
Jen Rubin
There you go, there you go. So if people want to find out more about you, more about your campaign, where do they go? They want a phone bank or knock on doors for you, what should they do?
Jamie Ager
It’s agarforcongress.com, you can just click on that, and and we’re, we’re, you know, just Google it, it’ll be on there somewhere, and there’s some forms, volunteer, click, or donate, we always like people to donate, and that type of thing. So, yeah, agarforcongress.com.
Jen Rubin
Well, thank you, and good luck. Folks, this is one of the few districts in America that has been consistently trending towards Democrats, so this is a potential pickup. The margin of victory was significant last time, but the electorate is changing, and the political winds are changing. So thanks so much, Jamie. Best of luck in November. We’re going to be keeping an eye on this race. other races, very important for the Democratic Party to make inroads in rural America, have people like yourself that have a different perspective, that were raised in places other than the big cities on the big coasts. So, thanks so much. We’ll look forward to talking to you again.
Jamie Ager
Yes, ma’am, thank you so much.
