We'll hear the story of why 200 books were removed by staff from a prison library in Central Illinois. Plus, when we say American soil, we think that means the farms are owned by Americans, right? It turns out that about 30 million acres of farmland in the US are foreign-owned. And, saving for retirement is a challenge, that’s part of the reason one in five Americans have no retirement savings at all. We’ll hear from one Illinois economist about how to save smarter.

Family structures—and farms themselves—are much more complicated than they used to be. Today, farm transition and land transfer are now among the hardest conversations families face.

As life expectancy increases, farmers are staying in the business, but there’s still a need to plan for what happens when they die. At the same time, young farmers who come from non-farming backgrounds are looking for the space to grow their own careers.

In 2013, the Chinese firm Shuanghui acquired more than 146,000 acres of farmland across the United States, worth more than $500 million, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data. The deal made Shuanghui, now the WH Group Limited, into one of the biggest foreign owners of U.S. agricultural land, according to an analysis of that same data.