The Problem…

In January of 2020, the United States Treasury owned roughly 16 trillion dollars. By July 2025, at the time of this writing, the U.S. Treasury currently owns roughly 21 trillion dollars. By all accounts, the Federal Reserve looks primed to print trillions more in the coming years. What this means is that 30-40% of all of the dollars in existence were created in the last 5 years, particularly over a period of 22 months during the federal government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 

In 2018 my family purchased Virginia Mountain Vineyards, a 100 acre farm and commercial winery, nestled in the mountains overlooking Fincastle, Virginia and the Roanoke Valley. The idea was hatched at my college graduation party and I told my family at the time that if they decided to go forward with purchasing the vineyard, I would come down and help them run the farm. 

The rest of 2018-19 was spent renovating the existing tasting room and farm facilities and spinning up the new business. I spent that time working as an audiovisual technician in the Washington D.C. area. 

In 2020, I had finally saved up enough money to move down to the Fincastle area and start taking over vineyard management operations. Those first years learning to manage the vineyard were a thrilling challenge and an invaluable experience. After having spent the last decade of my life studying music, learning new things had become my specialty. Winemaking, and particularly winegrowing, is not a procedural practice. There is no perfect recipe that you can repeat year after year and continue to yield the same results. In the same way that a musician builds a repertoire over time so that he can have a variety of tools available, the winegrower must hold onto the lessons he learns, and tactfully deploy them only when they are appropriate. 

Music is a complicated system, but in most every case, the trained composer knows what the implications of his edits will be before he makes them. He understands that adding a certain tone to a tone cluster will alter its character, and that every time he adds that particular tone to that particular tonal cluster, the character of the resulting chord will be altered in the same way. In this way, a trained musician can create a C major chord by playing the pitches C, E and G in any order and in any octave. If he then chooses to add the pitch B flat to his tone cluster, he will be playing a C7 chord, regardless of the order and octave in which he plays those pitches. While one can create infinitely complicated pieces of music, they can all be perfectly deconstructed into their component parts and rebuilt in a different way. This is the genesis of the classical form called Theme and Variation. This allows the composer to travel both forward and backwards in time, addressing mistakes that he made in the past, and correcting them later leaving his audience none the wiser. 

Winegrowing is a complex system. In a vineyard, there is life to contend with and variables outside of your control at all times that hold a far greater influence on your resulting wine than you the winegrower can ever hope to have. Weather, labor, insects, fungal infections, and Time. Navigating the former would be relatively straightforward if it weren’t for the latter. Timing is everything, and in winegrowing and winemaking, it only moves in one direction and at one speed. In fact, in my very own field of grapes, my preferences as a winemaker are totally subservient to almost every other influence in the vineyard. The wildlife have one plan, and I have another. The weather has one plan, and I have another. My growing schedule predicts one thing, and reality depicts another. 

Complicated vs. complex. A complicated system can have many intricate parts, but the system can be understood in principle and manipulated to create a predictable outcome. A complex system is a system that reacts to an input in unpredictable and unexpected ways. Music is complicated. Winegrowing is complex. 

Now, recall that during this period between 2020 and 2022, the Federal Reserve went on a money printing spree in response to the covid-19 pandemic. This shut most businesses down, but we only had outdoor seating for guests which allowed us to remain open in essentially full operational capacity. People felt safe and normal up at our farm and our traffic and sales grew more than ever in the Springtime of 2021. 

The rapid influx of dollars into the financial system also drove up prices. Agricultural production is already a low margin business, but year over year, all of our input expenses were rising. Farming chemicals, fertilizers, bottles, corks, labels, gasoline, diesel, labor, equipment and maintenance, you name it. Our increased sales were no match for the increase in our cost to produce. So we raised our prices and set out slashing the expense side of our balance sheet. We cut down on staff hours, sourced cheaper bottling materials and fertilizers, learned to do all of our own equipment maintenance and repair, slashed consulting fees and relied increasingly on volunteer labour and overtime hours from our full-time staff. This process was an astounding success. We are not a large operation, but over the course of two years we were able to cut over $200,000 dollars from our operating expenses and decrease our full time staff by 25 percent.  

Prices continued to rise. Lines of credit were extended. We launched a wholesale initiative and brought on over 40 wholesale customers. Then we launched a wine club, and recruited roughly 100 members in the two years since its launch. We continued to book more weddings and events, and ask more from our staff and volunteers. Our wine festival seasons were totally booked, but the public was feeling the squeeze as well and no matter how many festivals we made an effort to attend, overall attendance and purchasing trended lower and lower. The wineries were struggling to make ends meet and many consumers felt that increased bottle prices were a result of businesses taking advantage of an already difficult economic environment. We all needed help. 

Nobody came to help. Year over year, our operation got more efficient and more capable. Year over year our revenue grew. Year over year our expenses skyrocketed and our incomes stagnated. Year over year, we have been forced to reward our most loyal customers with increased prices, when we would much rather reward them with discounts and membership benefits. 

This story is all too common among American small business owners. Shackling oneself to growth in order to keep pace with monetary inflation has become the name of the game in America in 2025. In the time since 2020, every dollar you’ve earned has lost almost 25 cents of its purchasing power. 

When dollars are printed, asset prices go up as well. As asset prices increase, the value of the farmers' land increases. That is the carrot. All the while, the farmer's property taxes and cost to produce continues to increase and eat up more and more of his operating cash flow. The farmer is left with two options: grow at a rate that can outpace his increasing costs or sell the farm and realize the increase in the value of their land. That is the stick. This is one way that many family farms across the country end up closing up shop and selling their acreage to large agricultural conglomerates that can shoulder the burden of monetary inflation. 

Take it from a grape farmer.