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Sarah Taber Profile picture
Sarah Taber
@SarahTaber_bww
Small farmer, ex-farm worker & crop scientist. Here to talk food, agriculture, and money.
31 subscribers
Jul 17 • 20 tweets • 5 min read
Due to tariffs, we're likely to hear a lot about farm mental health as harvest approaches this year.

So let's get it on the record now. The "farmer suicide epidemic" of the last few years has no basis in fact.

It's a lobbying tactic. Up next: a detailed overview of boring stats about something very sad.

I've lost family members to suicide, I've got colleagues in ag who've lost loved ones to suicide.

And we are not gonna fix this problem by making things up!

So let's get our facts straight.
Jul 13 • 21 tweets • 5 min read
Ex-farm worker here.

This whole "But a living wage for farm workers would spike the cost of food!" thing?

Not true AT ALL.

Y'all don't understand how fast experienced farm workers are.

The average tomato picker pulls 650lbs per hour.

At $20/hr, that's $0.03/lb for labor. I know "650 lbs an hour" sounds crazy, because it kinda is.

But that also just means filling one of these buckets every ~3 minutes. That's doable for the average healthy adult.

(Doing it 10hrs/day for weeks in a row is the hard part.) Photo of tomato pickers tossing filled tomato buckets up to a guy on the truck, so he can fill the bins & toss their empty buckets back to them. The buckets are roughly the same dimensions as a 5gal bucket, but tapered so they'll nest into each other in storage.
Jul 8 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
So. I've been on field manual labor crews where most of my coworkers were convicts.

I've also worked with a lot of tech companies on automating farms.

And this press conference is incredible. This woman hasn't the foggiest clue what she's on about. Every farm job that CAN be automated, already is. Let's start there.

She thinks... nobody's ever tried to automate picking fruit? Really?

And then we'll talk about the "tehe we'll just make the Medicaid people work the farms" part.
May 19 • 32 tweets • 9 min read
RAW MILK TIME

I was surprised to find most of the "raw milk cures ___" talking points from the last 20+ years come from one (1) raw milk dairy farmer in California.

Let's get to know him! 🧵 Mark McAfee, 5th generation dairy & almond farmer in CA, complains "the government is out to get him." Just because he's been accused of starting multiple outbreaks!

But he's a good guy! He visits those sick kids in the hospital in his private plane.

motherjones.com/politics/2025/…Excerpt from a Mother Jones article about McAfee. The excerpt describes a mother's experience after her son Chris developed severe E. coli poisoning and hemolytic uremic syndrome after drinking contaminated raw milk from McAfee's farm. It details his hospitalization in intensive care, where he was sedated, ventilated, and unable to eat for months. The same batch of contaminated raw milk also sickened an 11-year-old girl. The mother now advocates about the serious dangers of foodborne illness through the organization Stop Foodborne Illness.
Apr 25 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Having had some experiences with prison labor, I want to talk about what we're seeing here.

(I had multiple manual labor farm jobs where I got to work & found out most of my coworkers were inmates. Long stories for a different day.) Screenshots of an influencer touring a prison garment shop where acres of inmates in yellow t-shirts are sewing. He's walking around talking about how cool it is that they get to work off their sentences. When most people think "prison labor," especially *farm* labor, we tend to think people think Hollywood-style chain gangs. "Ah yes. Hard labor for hardened criminals. Murderers & the like."

Nope!
Mar 28 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
So the $10B farmer bailout.

Is it $ for political support? Yeah. Bold move for an industry that talks so much about hard work & independence!

But it's also worse than that. This is a US food crisis in the making.



Let's talk about the payoff part first?usda.gov/about-usda/new… If you remember 2022 when I kept saying "The global wheat shortage is not real. Stop panic-buying & driving up prices" & I was right? (Foreign Policy does!)

This is me saying "the US farm situation right now is very bad. We SHOULD worry about this."

foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/12/rus…
Mar 4 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Ok we gotta talk about this whole thing.

It looks like "trying to get US farmers to grow food for domestic US market, instead of for export."

Remains to be seen what "tariffs on external product" means or if they'll even happen. This admin likes to tweet first, retract later. Screenshot of a post from Trump on Truth Social, March 3 2025. "To the Great Farmers of the United States: Get ready to start making a lot of agricultural product to be sold INSIDE of the United States. Tariffs will go on external product on April 2nd. Have fun!" Anyway, this would roughly boil down to "lots of farms switching from grain & livestock to fruits & veggies."

Funny enough, when I suggested some farms may wanna move acreage from grain & livestock to veggies, parts of the farm lobby got REAL mad.

This will be fun to watch! 🤠
Feb 4 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
Ok I know everything's been wild the last ::checks notes:: 96 hours but the farm news is buggin right now.

Preamble: Yes this is all part of the "let's move fast & shock them into submission" program.

Take a deep breath. FARMERS are pissed. This is just info on where we're at! The Farm Bureau is yelling at Trump about the tariffs. In public!

The tariff'd countries buy $85B worth of goods from US farmers every year.

And 80% of our potassium fertilizer comes from Canada.

...

But wait! There's more!fb.org/news-release
Nov 7, 2024 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
THANK YOU to everyone who’s supported my run in ways large and small. To all our many volunteers, our donors, and everyone who helped spread our message. What we’ve accomplished is a testament to you. Image of Sarah Taber with the words "Thank you, from Sarah Taber for Agriculture" Nobody runs for office alone. I could not have done this without you. And I have to thank you for putting your trust in me to work for you. Even- and especially- when it’s hard.

I congratulate Mr. Troxler on his sixth victory and wish him well.
Nov 4, 2024 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
North Carolina, I ask for your vote.

We've come a long way in the past year. From being the "biggest underdog" to putting this race within the margin of error, this wouldn’t have been possible without you. Graphic with a picture of Sarah Taber and the words "It's time for Taber. Sarah Taber for Commissioner of Agriculture. For Our Farms - For Our Future." Thank you to everyone for your support. In the past year, I've traveled over 25,000 miles, speaking with voters from the Outer Banks to the Tennessee border. I'm humbled to have received donations from folks in 73 counties.
Nov 3, 2024 • 42 tweets • 9 min read
Just for fun, let's do some blueberry facts! 🫐 Ever notice how blueberries can be a soft baby blue, or a dark purple?

They've got a "bloom," or a layer of soft powdery wax when they grow on the bush. It helps repel water.

When you touch them, the bloom rubs right off. Pic of a cluster of blueberries on the bush. They're a soft, powdery baby blue.
Oct 19, 2024 • 23 tweets • 6 min read
It's time for BEE FACTS

For every donation to this link, I will post one (1) fact about bees!

secure.actblue.com/donate/taberso… To kick us off: if you need to find the queen in a honeybee hive, there's usually a ring of bees standing around her in a circle.

Sounds weird but the ring of bees is usually easier to find than looking for the queen herself.
Sep 20, 2024 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
New in the @newsobserver: I lay out my experience and priorities and my approach on farmland loss, water quality, and business development. I would honored to serve as North Carolina's next Commissioner of Agriculture.

#ncpol #Agriculture #TimeForTaber

newsobserver.com/news/politics-… Here's a quick look at the experience and education that prepared me—everything from working in the fields to making sure the FDA didn't ban a promising new sector. Image
Sep 6, 2024 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
Let’s talk US food supply. Right now, a quarter of our nation’s food comes from California, which is running out of both land and water. 🌵🧵

ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/centr…
Map of the California Central Valley's four major regions; from north to south: Sacramento Valley, Delta & Eastside Streams, San Joaquin Basin, and Tulare Basin. Map also highlights the California Aqueduct, the Delta-Mendota Canal, as well as showing the Carquinez Strait and the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. A perennial proposal to solve this problem? Piping water from the Great Lakes to California. In theory, this would solve the thorny issues around western water politics. But it’s also so foolhardy that even the New York Times can tell.

nytimes.com/2024/08/05/opi…
Screenshot from New York Times piece reading as follows: It’s not just the political climate that makes tapping water resources in the East such an undesirable prospect. We’ve built systems of canals to move water around California and the Colorado River basin, but constructing a transcontinental pipeline or river diversion, at the scale required to sustain U.S. agriculture, would be staggeringly more complex, expensive and environmentally disruptive. They would require significant landscape changes and human displacement. And because water is so heavy, it is extremely expensive to transpo...
Aug 31, 2024 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Agriculture matters so much. That's why it's important to have our facts straight!

Let's start with geography. The top US states for fruit & vegetables are

1. California
2. Washington
3. Arizona
4. Florida
5. Wisconsin.

Georgia's not even in the top 5! Screenshot of a reply tweet: "One thing you fail to mention is that those states like California and Georgia that produce the majority of fruits and vegetables, also rank 1 & 2 for the highest farm bankruptcy filings. Increasing fruits and vegetables will rapidly kill of family farms in NC" He's half-right, though. Georgia's been a leading state for US farm bankruptcies for several years now.

(California actually had a record low farm bankruptcy rate in the year covered here- 2019.)

ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/20…Image
Aug 13, 2024 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Ok, I watched AppHarvest’s rise & fall closely. At the time, I was coaching new greenhouse companies like AppHarvest through their build & first harvests.

All my clients are still in business! And Vance’s one attempt isn’t. There’s a lot to say about why. 🧵#ncpol It’s not enough to talk about how you “understand the challenges” of rural America.

If you want to lead? You’d better be ready to do the work to address them. AppHarvest is what happens when you’re not.

cnn.com/2024/08/13/pol…
Jul 17, 2024 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
You know how people are worried about foreign investors buying up US farmland?

There's a company that helps them do that! It's like Uber for buying US farmland.

And who's one of its key investors, profiting off of every sale?

J.D. Vance.

businesswire.com/news/home/2022…

Photo of a farmer standing in his field near a tractor, looking down and looking sad.
Photo of JD Vance looking very happy. His investment firm, Narya Capital, still owns a significant stake in this company.

It says here that Vance stepped back from running Narya Capital. But there's no sign that he's sold his stake or handed over control of his ownership.

techcrunch.com/2024/07/15/tru…
May 23, 2024 • 9 tweets • 5 min read
Fun fact: for every cow there's an equal & opposite bean.
Photo of a "panda cow" (black cow with a white face, and big black spots over its eyes)
Photo of a bowl of black-eyed peas Milking shorthorn & Jacob's cattle beans
Photo of a dairy cow that's a mix of red and white dapples
Close-up photo of beans on a wood table. They're about half red, half white, and a lot of mottling of red on the white parts
May 10, 2024 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
We should talk about brain worms, I guess? I regret to inform you that they are real.

It's not super common, especially where there's clean water and basic sanitation. But it's also not unheard of. Black & white radiology scan of someone's brain, showing little dime-sized dark lesions where tapeworm cysts have set up shop. On the rare occasions when people get a parasitic worm infection in the brain, it's usually the pork tapeworm (Taenia solium).

There's a whole Wikipedia entry on it if anybody's interested

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurocyst…
May 8, 2024 • 18 tweets • 5 min read
There's 2 things to know about US agriculture.

1. It’s very hard to make a living as a new farmer.

2. About half our farmland is owned by wealthy families, investment funds, & others who buy it up as an asset- but don’t farm themselves.

There IS a fix to both problems! It's called "landowners can pay people to farm their land."

It’s incredibly successful where it’s used. And it’s a big part of my own family story.
Mar 17, 2024 • 30 tweets • 8 min read
Y'all know what day it is🍀

In the US, St. Patrick's Day is strongly tied to the event that led so many Irish people to emigrate here: the famine of 1847.

Food systems & supply chains make history. I'm working to build a better food system here in the southern US. Both regions share rich land that can grow plenty of good food- and a history of deep rural poverty, thanks to what could generously be described as "poor leadership."

There's also a lot of ingenuity in both.