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Sarah Taber Profile picture
Sarah Taber
@SarahTaber_bww
NC's candidate for Commissioner of Agriculture. Crop scientist, ex-farmworker, grower of farms & food systems.
31 subscribers
Nov 3 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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 • 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.
Feb 6 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
A cool thing from the CHORE TOUR: A thread!

Wild things happen when you sit down with farmers & talk about their problems.

Real problems- flooding, the cost of land, access to markets, workforce, etc.

Not fake outrage issues like border standoffs & welfare cheats. Talking with Marty and her husband Wind of Her Heartbeat Farms. We're in a cozy leatherworking studio with hardwood floors. Tools and decorations are hung on the walls. The neat thing about real problems? They have real solutions! They can be solved!

And hearing that is electrifying for farmers.

That's because "Yes, we can fix this" is something farmers almost never hear from lawmakers.
Feb 1 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Time for corn facts! Ok so you probably know about huitlacoche.

There's a fungus that infects corn ears and basically gives them a freaky-looking tumor filled with spores.

This fungus-filled tumor is delicious. Like a sweet corn mushroom.
Photo of an ear of yellow sweet corn. The kernels on the end are swollen, misshapen, and discolored to bluish black. They look like they got infected with a horrible zombie disease. But they taste so good So here's where it gets fun.

Huitlacoche is what we call a smut fungus (smut from the German schmutz for dark stain/dirt). These fungi spew dark spores all over the place. It's what they do to perpetuate the species.
Jan 31 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
Are you guys ready for the buck-wildest agriculture story I've ever heard Let me set the stage: Umnak, the biggest island in the Aleutian chain.

Some guys thought it would be a good idea to ranch cattle there. Screenshot from Google Maps, showing a pinpoint on an island near the end of the Aleutian chain. It might be the biggest island in the chain but it's wayyyy out there in the middle of the North Pacific.
Jan 30 • 17 tweets • 5 min read
In honor of Texas border stunts, let's talk about what happens to agriculture when a state decides to "get tough on immigration."

And it always, always ends badly for farmers. A cartoon of a sign over a border wall that reads "UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: NO ENTRY. NO HAY ENTRADA. PA GEN OKENN ANTRE" Let's start with an easy one: Georgia in 2011!

Georgia's HB 87 required farmers to use E-Verify to screen employees. It gave state police extra powers to enforce immigration law. And it created heavy fines & sentences for fake documents & transporting workers. Farmworkers in the fields carrying heavy boxes of produce on their shoulders. Others are bent over, picking.
Dec 15, 2023 • 16 tweets • 4 min read
If you're seeing dire news about water & alfalfa lately, I have good news for you.

The US's water problems have solutions!

One of the most powerful solutions: give serious attention & investment to agriculture in the southeastern US.

Let's talk about just one way to do that. Photo of a former peanut field, harvested & dotted with big round bales of hay. Big flock of birds is on the ground & descending. In the background are cypress, oak, and other trees with a bit of fall color and a big, round sprawly shape that's very characteristic of the South. There's not enough snow to push the trees into a narrow snow-shedding shape. It's just a very southern-looking landscape. Photo credit G.P. Gillam, from https://www.flickr.com/photos/gin_nay/10677717456 In the South, we make hay that's as good or better than alfalfa... from peanuts.

We just haven't gotten around to exporting it.

That's a pretty simple problem to fix!
Apr 19, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Keeping the North Atlantic right whale from going extinct is important for many environmental & ethical reasons

but hear me out: they like to have group sex parties & if this is what a few hundred get up to, I just wanna find out what the ocean is like with 200,000 of em conservationists: there is a terrible tension between "making wildlife relatable" so people feel invested in their well-being, and anthropomorphizing them past the point of recognizability

me: I can make this problem worse
Apr 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Tricia Cotham news: her main support base, as early as her 2022 primary, was PACs that give mostly to GOP candidates.

You don't wind up having donations arranged for you by the GOP house speaker's bag man by accident 🙃

Apr 10, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
:: Garfield voice:: Mondays breaking update: sunbeam is progressing up the cat, causing him to melt further down towards the floor. will he make it
Mar 2, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
every week a new reporter discovers that rich white people like to play militant land pirate & thinks it's a brand new phenomenon that just got invented

I'm always curious what they think the USA has been about for the last 250+ years

vanityfair.com/news/2023/02/n… "I know exactly who's really getting fucked in the land pirate economy. But I won't quote a single service worker or Latino in this entire article!"

the important thing is to maximize how much time you spend platforming landed gentry with guns
Feb 23, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Is there a way to search for medical practices that take your insurance and not your social security number Hello & welcome to data breach hell