Intersectional sustainable crop science, and GIFs
December 12, 2018 12:56 PM Subscribe

Dr. Sarah Taber is an aquaponics and agricultural consultant and food safety scientist, Doctor of Plant Medicine, Plant Protection and Integrated Pest Management, and science communicator who's attracted a Twitter following and is writing a book. Following the jump, a collection of links.

Also, Dr. Taber hosts the Farm to Taber podcast (feed) where she and guests discuss "sustainable farm and food strategies, and the humans behind them"; there's been one season of 10 regular episodes and one bonus Patreon-only episode so far. [Farm to Taber swag (Thread Reader)]

Taber explains: "My goal with this account is to beef up the "sustainable ag" info available for consumers w some science & general business mgmt info. The general public is incredibly frustrated with ag's slow rate of change. Someone should talk about the very real reasons change isn't instant....Some of the reasons won't reflect nicely on our ag institutions. Oh well. I'm not gonna tell folks it's all good, because it's not. We need to back up this "no BS" reputation by actually cutting the BS. If you feel weird about someone airing your dirty laundry, wash it." Also: "put info out there, see what kind of feedback it got, & thereby find out where the general knowledge level is at with ag these days". (Thread Reader)

On her past experiences: "here are my official rankings of Shittiest to Cushiest Farms Jobs That I Have Personally Experienced.... when I say 'picking berries in a greenhouse in England isn't hard work,' that's not me being an armchair quarterback." (Thread Reader)

Informative Twitter threads by @SarahTaber_bww, loosely grouped by topic:

On soil and ecologies:

On how Appalachia's a fine region for orchards, but lacks some business infrastructure: "It's hard to get & keep a workforce at all. And unlike California there's not the huge farm service provider network (practically no H2A crews, crop health doctors, food safety trainers, etc) that CA orchards take for granted." (Thread Reader)
Prairie soil and nutrients: "Adding nutrients doesn't help if your soil still has bad texture. Roots are still thirsty and/or can't grow, bc the soil is just sand & can't hold onto water, or is too tight & crusty bc it's clay." (Thread Reader)
Soil degradation: how different societies deal with phosphorus (Thread Reader)
"our food problems are caused by colonial culture. We seized all that land so we could grow fecktons of grain & ship them into a food system that mostly works like a grain disposal. That's still how our whole food supply chain was built."
On paleo, venture capital, Native American versus Anglo land usage, and "bison bars": "Our grain-based culture enabled us to farm like locusts." (Thread Reader)

On specific plants and animals:

corn/maize: "Proving that a plant/plant symbiote is fixing [Nitrogen] is INCREDIBLY DIFFICULT." (Thread Reader) and more on crop research: "that's something that haunts crop scientists every day. we're gonna spend our whole lives fiddling w plants & never get anywhere close to as much action as these GENIUSES in ancient Mexico. and we just have to live with it" (Thread Reader)

draft horses

Thread Reader

rice: "people depending on rice for all their protein are already in trouble bc RICE GOT BARELY ANY PROTEIN ALREADY" (Thread Reader)
wine grapes (Thread Reader) "lots of crops are way more profitable than wine grapes, for example say pears. IDK about you guys but I've never heard anyone contemplate buying a vacation estate in a renowned & prestigious pear region. And that right there's the power of marketing."
suberizing and sweet potatoes (Thread Reader)
rice paddies: "there's a way to automate almost everything. It's just a matter of whether it's seen as a viable place to put R&D money, which has a lot to do with the market aka how people think food is supposed to be grown." (Thread Reader)

On common misunderstandings about food/ag/econ:

On veganism & climates, biomes, and structuring ag for limited water versus limited land: her "in a minute" thread from June 11th that went pretty viral
On climate change mitigation, pastoralism, and herding: "One mini example of how mobile herding isn't just "not bad" for the environment, it can actually preserve & regenerate it" (Thread Reader) Relatedly: solar panels in arid grasslands help grass grow, and may help sheep
On "food hubs": "(I just. if you're worried about food waste, 'let's add an extra layer of handling under amateur-hour conditions' is literally. the exact opposite of what you'd want to do.)" (Thread Reader)
On local grain and the eye-rolling hype in magazines: "Grain processing at this scale is something 1 person can do in their garage. But it took these guys 2 years, a committee, & a consultant, and it's still the unblended stuff that nobody can use? Yeesh." (Thread Reader) (Also: "In ag it's completely taken for granted that a small operation can't execute."
On wild Spanish hogs in the US South (previously)
On nutrition & variability: "If a plant's healthy enough to grow & produce an edible crop, by definition, it has "enough" nutrients. An actual starving plant won't make anything for a farmer to sell." (Thread Reader)
On carbon sequestration via trees versus other plants:
there's a whole world out there of plants that can sequester carbon: Forests
Grasslands
Wetlands
Seagrass meadows
Kelp forests But when we talk "sequestering C with plants," we always mean trees. Because cultural biases.
Also see more on the relationship among grazing, organic matter, and sequestration, and followups on hayfields, profitability, and "'Blue carbon,' or carbon sequestered in marine environments" (thread with many GIFs)
"Farmer's markets are an exceptionally bad distribution model."
On "pastoral environmentalism": "if y'all wanted a neighborhood park THEN YOU SHOULD HAVE PAID FOR A NEIGHBORHOOD PARK". Also see Taber on indoor ag that started over 100 years ago in a small Pennsylvania town (Thread Reader)
The space industry doesn't seem to be thinking about how to use waste during colonization. "How do I know this? Because of my work (food tech, indoor ag & food safety), I'm constantly on the lookout for research grants that address this area. Public or private, there's nada."
On global trade (Thread Reader) and on how old and entrenched global trade networks are and have been for many centuries: "looots of people had to have the ships/caravans, navigational knowledge, & trade contacts to voyage deliberately from one region or continent to another."
On glycerin and unrealistic marketing of food: "Authenticity, "real"ness, traditional ingredients, and "getting back to roots" is such a huge part of food marketing. Especially for foods marketed as sustainable." (Thread Reader)
On trade and soybeans: "There's not a fixed amount of soy production in the world. If the US fools around with sales, it's not going to force the rest of the world to beat a path to our door & pay us homage until we deign to play ball. They'll just grow it somewhere else." (Thread Reader)
"Baking, cutting, cooking, & yes butchering are traditionally women's work. 'Food comes from farms!' pretends that all just happens by magic."
On agronomic traits: "Ever wonder why Honeycrisp is super expensive? They're really susceptible to scab." (Thread Reader) and Red Delicious: "there's a HUGE spectrum of flavors out there most of us don't ever encounter & we don't know what we don't know." (Thread Reader)
On Lacroix, linalool, and an ingredient controversy (Thread Reader) "the Venn diagram of "folks who want natural sausage with no preservatives, just the natural antifungal effects of salt & spices" and "folks who can be shocked to find out their natural organic sausage has FUNGICIDES in it!?" is a circle"
On finding pesticide on some apples: "periodic reminder that when produce comes from a farmstand, delivery, CSA box, etc, sometimes there's a REASON that food isn't getting sold in a grocery store." (Thread Reader)

On "family farms":

On "family farms" and the bailout (Thread Reader)
On dairies and dairy farms: "The orchard vs dairy beef boils down to 'dairy farms are disgusting.' In the CA desert, the manure crusts up & blows away onto neighboring orchards' fruit." (Thread Reader)
"Gonna call bullshit on the entire institution of family farming, which has never been sustainable in any society that's ever tried it. Wish me luck"
Also: "Time & effort spent on 'saving small family farms' will not pay off in better working conditions, environmental health, food access, or food safety. All it does is entrench a landowner class that doesn't even have the wherewithal to keep their businesses afloat themselves."
On immigration & safety: "IME immigration crackdowns are an effort to keep this exact thing from happening [increased bargaining power]. US farm industry (yes, family farms too) have documented history of going bonkers trying to keep farm workers down every time they start getting a bit of market power." (Thread Reader)
"Good farming is something you DO. It is not something you ARE. There is nothing magical about being family-run that makes a business virtuous or good to its workers." (Thread Reader)
"'Hey let's vote for the guy who says he'll get rid of Mexicans!' 'Ok now I'm gonna get paranoid bc the guvmint's gonna come take all my Mexicans away.' brb eyerolling off a cliff" (Thread Reader)
"A lot of people in farm country KNOW that conservatism is bad for their economic future. And they still vote conservative. Because they're not interested in economic survival. They're interested in social domination." (Thread Reader)

On organizing/politics, and sexism:

Southern labor history doesn't look like you think it might (Thread Reader); also, "The South's massive lack of education that northern activists think is a hilarious hee-haw funny? It's a deliberate power strategy for capital, by capital." (Thread Reader)
On the New York City Republicans who decided to embrace Trumpism: "Never underestimate the power of shame directed at the upper class. Elites rely on respectability and a sense of superiority. They're used to envy, resentment, and plebes clawing their hems for recognition. They are NOT used to being sneered at or held accountable." (Thread Reader)
On helping women vote when they're victims of domestic oppression (followup to this tip) (Thread Reader); also, "a poll worker offered to put me next to my husband so he could tell me how to vote", but "he immediately insisted he was Haha Just Kidding"
On election outcomes: (Thread Reader) a list of huge gains made by the left in the 2018 midterms
On lobsters & Jordan Peterson: (Thread Reader), also further (Thread Reader)
On culture & protecting kids & media: (Thread Reader)
On bot accounts: (Thread Reader) on anti-immigrant talking points suddenly popping up in bot replies
"Most US settlers just slashed-and-burned a new patch when the old farm wore out. George Washington, other plantation owners had to keep same address to run for office."
In which North Carolina legislators' offices stop answering phones "Senators: the way to spare your staff from having to take heat for your garbage decisions is to not make garbage decisions." (Thread Reader)
On white women (Thread Reader), and further: "By and large, white women sign on with conservatism for two things: respectability & having a man take care of them. Petulant, bitter street thugs run counter to both of those things." (Thread Reader)
"You see a lot of talk about the intensity of black women's work. I don't think it's appropriate to do that w/o also reflecting on why they've had to work so hard on basics like public health, education, wages, etc."
On crossover between the KKK and the Nazis: "The woman of the couple did a lot of the ladies' Nazi auxiliaries: not so much w the street beatings. Lots of running cultural events, teaching women how to be nice supportive wives bc beating riffraff in the streets makes the men tired, etc." (Thread Reader)
"economic anxiety", neighbors, and "purges": "When people are economically anxious for real, they're busy surviving. Ain't got time for genocide." (Thread Reader)
North Carolina legislature: (Thread Reader) "You can't point to a legislative body that made it a criminal act to remove Confederate memorials and say 'you should have worked with them for a solution.'"
Climate change & politics in North Carolina: "My big project for the last year was getting out info about the Atlantic Coast Pipeline." (See other writings below.) (Thread Reader)
A resistance wedding: (Thread Reader) "Anyway, immediately after the wedding we all rolled down to run the county rally against Kavanaugh because it's 2018 and love is real"
Trying to prevent ballot fraud through poll greeting (Thread Reader)
Checking on Bladen County ballot fraud (Thread Reader)

On being an ex-Mormon:

On similarities between food safety and anti-harassment and anti-rape work: "Tl;dr training is useless. Accountability is the only thing that matters."
On You Need A Budget and "Mormon accounting bros"
"I used to be this person in the mormon church back before I left. I spent a lot of time apologizing for other Mormons' bad behavior and explaining that we're not REALLY like that."
On the cluelessness of patriarchal husbands: "A lot of what we work with in lefty LDS circles is permission structures. It's a community with a lot of built-in defenses against a frontal approach, so you just gain a lot more ground by working w the community's preexisting norms."
Her BYU roommate Tara Westover wrote the memoir Educated about being a survivor: "(thnx Tara for writing a bio so I don't have to)"
"There are individuals in the church who want to do better. And they will do better, bc that's what those individuals aspire to do. The church itself? Does NOT want to do better." Content note for "family violence as an Xtreme sport".
On LDS views of marriage and sexual consent: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
"once upon a time I worked at BYU's soil science lab where a lot of the tests we had to run were red/green titrations"
On how LDS "had a fully functioning cooperative economy" yet was still oppressive: "You can have a non-capitalist economy and still have a greedy bastard patriarchal elite. One does not cause the other. I don't know what else to tell y'all."

On food safety, regulations, testing, and management systems:

On outbreak, regulations, testing - "But my feel is that what's happening right now with romaine lettuce is SO MUCH BIGGER than 1 FDA rule getting pegged back." - "Do you think the kind of folks who are down to use threats of violence, sexual assault, & wage theft to keep workers obedient ... are gonna suddenly go "oh but hang on I gotta get my water sample in on time just in case someone comes & asks for it"?" (Thread Reader)
testing: "Lab tests are JUST SPOT CHECKS. They're only tenuously connected with the day-to-day reality of what's happening in a field." (Thread Reader)
"In other words, a complex operation being able to do a full traceback in a max time limit of 2 hours is the industry norm." So: why can't Wal-Mart do that? (Thread Reader)
"These Costco audits are stressful but kind of hilarious in their own way." (Thread Reader)
gar blockchain "With leafy greens, you can use traceability records to find a suspected lot. But you may never be able to test & confirm it.....I'm now a better auditor because of feedback I got from Costco. Because they know their stuff, and they're generous with sharing what they know." (Thread Reader and (Thread Reader)
"blockchain does nothing to improve food safety. It DOES do a lot to promote blockchain bros' careers."
On toilets in fields (Thread Reader)
Wildlife feces and how farms deal with it (Thread Reader)
On records, farm IT, and remote auditing (Thread Reader)
On perishability and Amazon: "Amazon's high self-regard/low actual skillset is spreading through the food startup world like a damn tumor." (Thread Reader)
"having (specialty) paper towels on hand at airport gates is actually very logical." (Thread Reader)
"it's pretty clear Tesla spent years with significantly above-average accident rates for their industry & didn't improve it during that time." (Thread Reader)
"Tesla is a relatable, contemporary, & classic case study of what NOT to do in manufacturing." (Thread Reader)
More on Tesla: "It would take a lot of tweets to do just the parking lot, so we're just gonna do this @mcmansionhell-style." (Thread Reader)
On Typhoid Mary and the "ton of jobs she could have been doing that wouldn't have put people at risk like cooking did" -- except that hiring practices kept her out of them. (Thread Reader)
What she won't eat (sprouts) (Thread Reader)
Food mishandling: "a really common misperception among growers. There's a belief that if a single person gets sick then all the sudden a SWAT team's gonna come storm their farm." (Thread Reader)

On management skills and the economics of agriculture in the US, and oppressions therein:

On the market and integrity problems when men audit and have their wives type up reports for free (Thread Reader)
"A great example of planning out a farm & work processes to minimize not-work is planting pedestrian orchards. AKA orchards planted on rootstock that dwarfs the trees strong enough that they top out at 6-8', so you don't need a ladder to pick them." (Thread Reader)
local economies and bad advice (Thread Reader) "Listen. If you're gonna give advice on a state's industrial development, you better know some things about its natural resource base. Its supply chain. What resources different industries need. Because then you can actually pursue growth strategies that can, like, y'know, work."
The crop residue market (Thread Reader)
Women farm along men, and failing to recognize that & accord them authority is a problem (Thread Reader)
On pickup trucks in ag (Thread Reader)
On California and agricultural productivity: "people think the weather in CA is the reason for the hardcore farm sector out there. It's ... not the weather, it's the people." (Thread Reader)
A new caviar, and a side of sexism (Thread Reader)
Blessed Concepts in Agriculture: Diversifying Crops For Better Luck With Labor, Grassfed Livestock, and Giving Crop Land A Break By Turning It Into Pasture For A Year Or Two Is Good Science (Thread Reader)
Grocery delivery startups and ethylene: "How you supposed to trust a 'food co' that doesn't even know you can't put melons & lettuce in the same box?" (Thread Reader)
Failures in adapting Lean methodology to ranches, such as "temporal mismatch btwn forage demand & forage availability" (Thread Reader)
On worker organizing and food safety: "I think it's really telling that in a world full of certifications & new hotness traceability tech, the most effective labor protection tool I've ever seen is the Coalition of Immokalee Workers @ciw." (Thread Reader)
Fruit and veggies are harder to grow, harvest, and handle than grains and that's not US government policy, that's just the nature of the beast. (Thread Reader)
The commercial growing and hauling of watermelons: "A popular solution: rip the seats out of an old school bus & turn it into a watermelon truck" (Thread Reader)
Money in student life in ag: "Aaaand then there was the sustainable ag program. That major was like flypaper for rich white kids." (Thread Reader)
As of January 26, 2017: "In total, @realDonaldTrump's presidency has already killed 123,000 rural jobs. http://tinyurl.com/hf8du5v Let that sink in."
Particularly on skill and culture:
- On inequality of savviness among farmers and learning-by-copying: "I'm the mean old inspector who comes along a year or two later to find that the farmers have done absolutely dick with the free trainings & materials that other folks have so generously paid for." (Thread Reader)
- Lots of farmers' problems stem from poor management (Thread Reader)
- Wal-Mart, exploitation, and missed opportunities (Thread Reader)
- On lack of business management skill in general: "It was incredibly destabilizing to realize how clueless most business decisionmakers really are. You want to blame capitalism, the Illuminati, literally anything, because it can't be possible for humans to really be that stupid. It just can't. But it is."
- On white middle class farmers who don't find "treat workers well and they will treat you well" intuitive, and the therapy involved in food safety auditing (Thread Reader)
- "Farms with good labor practices can tell you specifics about what they're doing. 'We give a retention bonus after X weeks.' 'We have a succession of crops so folks have a full season of work instead of 6 weeks here, 6 weeks there.'....Half-baked farmers know our society sees farmers w a certain reverence, & demand to be treated accordingly- or else. THAT's condescending.....There are great, professional, highly-skilled, responsible farmers out there. And it's not fair to them to claim that mantle unless you can back it up with real legwork." (Thread Reader)
- Dutch vs German vs English styles of ag: "Social structure, class, and financial & political practices are way more influential on how agriculture changes or stays the same over the generations, than any kind of mystical ~national character.~" (Thread Reader)
- On skills/jobs and US ag history: "Small-farms-as-an-employment-program doesn't select for business acumen. If anything it selects against it, since we're starting with the chronically unemployed. In the US we're still dealing w consequences of when we did that 100+ years ago. It's bad. It's real bad." (Thread Reader)
- On culture and success (Thread Reader) "farm succession depends on convincing daughters to stick around & live with you as an adult. When they have plenty of other options in life."
- How the "everyone depends on us" belief among farm owners hurts ag and the US. "If the world depends on American farmers, but American farmers depend on someone else? Then American farmers aren't the center of the universe anymore. It's an existential threat to their own feeling of personal validity." Also: "ime 'sense of identity' is the source of most of our problems in ag"
- "It takes a lot of communication & trust to run a business. Especially farms- they're big & have lots of moving parts. Anything that gets in the way of clear communication & lines of responsibility will knock it flat. Anything. Including being real uptight about gender roles." (Thread Reader)

And specifically on capitalism and land prices:
- "hard to buy capitalism as the root of all evil when you work in agriculture. Agriculture's been built on treating workers like shit for at least 5,000 years."
- Why the problem isn't just "late-stage capitalism": "From someone who works in agriculture: stop flippantly blaming stuff you don't like on 'late-stage capitalism.' ... landlords ground peasants into early deaths for thousands of years before that...."
- "If we were really all that capitalist, we'd do the math, realize what this culture cost us, & fix it. We're not going that. This is a problem much deeper-seated than capitalism."
- On land prices, speculation, tax rates, and hay (Thread Reader)
- Recommending Henry George on whether land should be considered capital.

On slavery, white supremacy, and ag history in the US:

"Japanese internment was a land grab by white farmers. Full stop." (Thread Reader)
"Jim Crow-style nouveau white supremacy .... had to be socially engineered into existence." Draws from Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South by Keri Leigh Merritt: "Here's one Leonidas W. Spratt complaining to a friend in 1861 about how "poor white people voting" was an existential threat to slavery." (Thread Reader)
"in spite of everything, empathy keeps finding a way to crack the armor. Stark visual differences & abuse will get you a long way, but what you really need to keep slaves down is laws. And for laws, you need some kind of solid-sounding justification. So they made some." (Thread Reader)
On having been an overseer of convict laborers (Thread Reader)
"And oh yes the Farmers' Alliance and general free soil/populist movements are very much part of the conversation."
"colonialism & colonist human capital should be considered when writing ag econ history" (Thread Reader)
Slave plantation records are very similar to farm records today (Thread Reader)
On the history of Georgia, which shifted from penal colony to slave state (Thread Reader)
More on the history of slavery's start in Georgia: "It was really hard to tell the colony's trustees in England that white ppl can't work outside in GA, when there's a colony full of Germans doing it all day every day....Pro-slavery started canceling their poor white debtors' debts in exchange for signing petitions stating that slavery was necessary." (Thread Reader)
More on immigration: "if it weren't for threat of deportation, farmworkers would actually be able to fight for higher pay....Ag is a giant sector of our economy that's a hall of mirrors. Most of what you see is distorted." (Thread Reader)
"Spent large chunk of today creating solutions for farm clients. The inventors I'm drawing from? Nearly all #Immigrants"
"It just really worked out for white landowners for there to be as many black folks & as few natives as possible. So that's how they wrote the laws." (Thread Reader)
"US ag business models *depend* on creating a legal underclass to do farm labor." (Thread Reader)
Farm owners feel genuine bonds with and respect for their workers -- but is it mutual?
On how mill owners left during the Civil War but expected their employees to keep working (Thread Reader)
Mill owners were confused that their workers were less deferential to them than slaves were (Thread Reader)
Slavers lied about biological differences that supposedly made whites unsuitable for plantation work (Thread Reader)
"Carolina rice was built on stolen engineers." (Thread Reader)
And: immigration in Europe and ag labor: "how farmers in UK can't get workers bc of Brexit" (Thread Reader)

And, finally, on fireworks and PTSD: the sound profile of household fireworks differs significantly from the sound of artillery training. (Thread Reader)

Additional recordings and articles:

Gastro Obscura talks with her about blueberries.
"Clients from Hell" interviews her about consulting on their podcast: "freelancing means paying attention to your clients and working with their emotional investments".
The podcast "Serious Inquiries Only" interviews her on sustainable ag, including: "What does a parking lot layout tell you about food safety?"
Article by Taber on the sterility of hydroponics.
"Aquaponics & Food Safety: A Conversation with Dr. Sarah Taber"
"Pipeline? No, renewables will do it better", plus her in-depth report on the Atlantic Coast Pipeline.
Quoted in Sierra Club protest against Bank of America financing fossil fuels
"Foliar-Applied Micronutrients in Aquaponics: A Guide to Use and Sourcing"

("intersectional sustainable crop science" in post title taken from her Patreon)

posted by brainwane (21 comments total) 97 users marked this as a favorite

jumpin jeebus on a hatstand this'll keep me busy past the new year and I haven't even finished the marvelous mrs. maisel yet
posted by conscious matter at 1:07 PM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh god this is magnificent so much to read!
posted by Homo neanderthalensis at 1:51 PM on December 12, 2018

Well done. I regularly track her threaded stories on Twitter, and was coming in to mention the recent NC election kerfluffle, only to find you covered it. A lot more here to catch up on!
posted by SoundInhabitant at 1:59 PM on December 12, 2018

Having followed Dr. Taber for awhile, I can say that she (A) really seems to know her shit, and (B) does not take any, from anyone. I have learned a ton from her posts.
posted by gwint at 2:05 PM on December 12, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thanks for this amazing compilation. I just discovered her last week on Twitter and am really interested in her perspective. I work in academia amidst a group of sustainable ag specialists, but as I'm a generalist I always want to be learning more about the food system.
posted by Numenius at 2:11 PM on December 12, 2018

Glad it's useful! When I want to read someone's old threads, I find it so difficult to dig through old tweets through the Twitter interface, so I thought this might be a useful resource to make and share.

It's been interesting seeing her gain more and more of a platform. I think her writing and speaking appeals to several audiences, such as:

people in the large worlds of ag and food -- workers, suppliers, consultants, researchers, regulators, distributors, sellers, some kinds of growers, etc. -- who don't often hear their viewpoint represented in coverage of "agriculture"
Southerners and people in rural areas, and other ex-Mormons, who, similarly, enjoy the representation
systems nerds, especially those who never thought to look at ag as a system to nerd out about
leftist folks who enjoy seeing a white Southern woman slam patriarchy, colonialism, and bougie myths about what sustainable foods look like (but nearly never ask her followers, at least followers who aren't farmers, to do anything in particular)
competence porn-seekers in general, especially thanks to "storytime from the farms I have audited" threads
to some extent, Just World Fallacy holders, since she frequently discusses how many problems in the sacred Small Family Farm (in the US) are the fault of entitled, complacent white gentry farmers
tech industry workers who enjoy a bit of tsundere from a witty person with blue-collar cred
feminists who enjoy seeing a confident woman speaking in public while performing dominance, and never performing that "show vulnerability, be apologetic" kind of femininity
environmentally concerned folks who are grateful to hear someone credibly say: you are not on the hook to help solve large ecological problems through ethical consumption choices

posted by brainwane at 2:19 PM on December 12, 2018 [11 favorites]

(I should unpack that Just World Fallacy thing a bit more -- I do not mean to accuse Taber of indulging in the Just World Fallacy, or to say that the problems in question aren't the fault of those white gentry farmers. I mean that the Just World Fallacy makes "these people caused their own suffering" stories more appealing to certain readers, whether those stories are true or not.)
posted by brainwane at 2:24 PM on December 12, 2018

This is fascinating. I feel like I should know her already. Thanks, brainwane.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:55 PM on December 12, 2018 [1 favorite]

I don't know how I could possibly overstate how amazing this woman's thinking is -- four threads and I can feel the whole way I look at farming, farm animals and food plants shifting.

This may be too exciting for me to read much of at once. I am not joking; the thread on corn and nitrogen fixation is just stunning, not to mention the wonderfully illustrated discussion of horses, donkeys and mules as draft animals among other things:

One time we had to move cattle pen panels around in a paddock that contained both rodeo cutting horses & draft mules.

The horses bolted to the other end of the paddock & stared.
The draft mules watched us for a moment. Then they figured out "ok, we're moving panels," walked over, & started nudging the panels around with their noses.

We didn't ask them to do it. They just saw a thing happening & wanted to get in on it. ...

posted by jamjam at 8:15 PM on December 12, 2018 [3 favorites]

Her wisdom, experience, and wit are off the charts. Outstanding post, brainwane!
posted by whuppy at 6:02 AM on December 13, 2018

(In retrospect I'd go back and revise another line of that comment, take out tsundere and replace it with "heckling"/"incisive criticism". Well, also I'd go fix a few little formatting issues in the post itself. But I was like "I've spent so long on this, I just want to post it now and be done!")

If you enjoy this post, I do suggest you check out her podcast -- "Grappling With Our Ghosts: The American Farm Legacy" in particular is quite relentless in trying to dispel myths about the history of "small family farms" in the US, and "The Thirteenth Amendment" is part memoir, part policy analysis regarding the use of convict labor and an agribusiness/carceral/immigrant-exploitation dynamic she observes.

Summing up a bunch of her POV: in response to "Why didn’t the Europeans bother to adapt?": "why bother when you have guns & a massive superiority complex"
posted by brainwane at 7:42 AM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

I mean that the Just World Fallacy makes "these people caused their own suffering" stories more appealing to certain readers,

I would say her viewpoint is considerably more nuanced than "These people caused their own suffering". A lot of what she dealing with as she says is long-term and widespread cultural issues. After all, the "family farm" myth has a huge amount of cultural inertia, farm postcodes are passed down vegetative, and the crappy worker wage situation of farming is a direct legacy of slavery.

She does have a take-no-prisoners attitude both toward greed and stupidity, abs her perspective stems from practicality, rather than ideology.

Also, she is a national treasure.
posted by happyroach at 10:35 AM on December 13, 2018 [1 favorite]

Thank you for this post. I had no awareness of her, and I am now planning time to dig in all of this
posted by motdiem2 at 10:51 PM on December 13, 2018

happyroach, I agree that it is not fair to boil her perspective down to only blaming the people suffering from the problems. However, I would say that sometimes she does blame those people for a big portion of their problems, e.g., "...rural areas' agency and role in their own economic problems. I saw the same every day in my work with farms, most of my colleagues still don't, I thought I was going crazy." So I feel like it's fair to note the temptation of the Just World Fallacy in learning about this dynamic. But yes, absolutely, she's big on pointing out systemic historical causes. Which is part of how, as I read it, she divides up her educator role (using Twitter and the podcast to dispel myths about food and ag) and her activist role (lots of local organizing/voter registration/similar work in North Carolina, and advising candidates on ag/energy policy -- in-person or in private, rather than publicly on social media).

I should have included a few more old threads in the lists above -- I'm not gonna keep adding updates for her new tweets, but these are fun or fascinating.

On "#locavore & foodie-ism as Trojan horses for bougie respectability politics" including an anecdote from working registration at an organic farming conference.

On how anti-Semitism harmed Germany's efforts during World War II: "Theoretical physics wasn't "real." To German scientists, knowledge came from experiments. Generally a solid approach. Except in modern physics, where we didn't have the tools to DO the experiments yet. So it was 100% math. Just pages and pages of equations. The German tech establishment went NOPE. They just... straight-up didn't have the math skills to read it. But they couldn't admit that. So instead of cope with their knowledge having limits, they just concluded that this stuff they couldn't understand was BS."

On the human trafficking history of orphan trains in the USA: 1, 2 (side note: I learned about orphan trains, and the history of legalized child abduction in the US, by reading The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction by Linda Gordon).

On queer identity and trans inclusion in Tahiti.

And here's her incomplete list of reasons less competent farm owners can hold on, in the US.
posted by brainwane at 9:05 AM on December 14, 2018 [1 favorite]

I am a huge Sarah Taber fan and have learned so much from her. This post is amazing!

One area where I differ from her is her cynicism toward people who attend farmers markets and the "food movement" in general. She really tends to take the view that people who attend farmers markets and use other smaller food providers are doing it for status or with a misunderstanding of how safe the food in a regular grocery store is.

I think a lot of people buy from those sources (and similarly, people who buy exclusively organic) are doing it because there is very little mechanism to understand farm practices. When I go to Cub Foods, I have no way to find out which brand of potatoes is raised more sustainably than another. At the farmers market I could at least ask the farmer for more information. If you want to try to buy food that was raised responsibly, until recently there have been few resources to get that information. Now there are many more certifications to look for, but even that is pretty confusing.

So I guess I give consumers a certain amount of credit - I think they're going, "well I don't want to buy meat that came from an abused animal - how can I find out if that happened?" and then they buy something that says grassfed because that seems better than the alternative.

And I realize this part is a systems issue, but for me personally, I shop at a more expensive co-op rather than standard super market because I can actually get local food that way. It is ridiculous for me to buy beets from California in November, when I am in Minnesota.

I guess I am saying that I think in the absence of a food system people feel they can trust to behave responsibly, we tend to feel around for something that makes more sense than "buy whatever is cheapest and hope the farmers solve it".

Of course maybe I would feel differently if I had Sarah's background.
posted by Emmy Rae at 4:24 PM on December 18, 2018 [3 favorites]

Emmy Rae, of course I can't speak for Taber, but I am inferring (especially from her answers to Alex Tepperman's questions in the "Refugees, farms, & bad decisions" episode of "Farm to Taber") that her response would be: if you are trying to shop in such a way as to put your consumer dollar towards more sustainable and responsible farming practices, then in general you should try to buy and eat a lot of vegetables, but even that is not going to move the needle in any particular way.

This is where I do find myself running up against an interesting sort of theory-of-change frustration. I often expect that a public intellectual who educates us about a problem is also going to advocate for mass action and particular policy changes, and if they're telling me that tactic x isn't going to work, then I expect they'll advise me that tactic y is better and I should do that. Taber is definitely in favor of specific policies and talks about them and works on them, e.g., preventing certain new frack gas pipelines, asking people to call their Senators about Kavanaugh and family separation at the border. But I think her theory of change regarding food sustainability does not include "I tell retail customers via Twitter/podcast what purchase/consumption choices would be optimal". I don't know who a good source for that kind of guidance would be, and I suspect Taber would advise me that it would be more productive to just buy USDA-regulated stuff at a supermarket channel that worrying energy into work that will make a political difference, whatever suits my particular abilities.

A few more threads from the past several months that I think are worth unearthing and that I ought to have caught in my original post:

On how "corporate farm" versus "family farm" is a perceptual category distinction that doesn't help people understand what kinds of farms are actually doing good work (and, relatedly, on California vegetable and fruit farming versus the rest of the US): "most of these well-run farms are 'corporate farms.' Some of them are literally just companies that farm, some of them are family farms that figured out nepotism kills profits and started acting professional. But overall, what I've seen tells me that farming is only successful when it works like a job." And: "Haha I hate it so much when ppl say 'corporate' as if it means anything. #1, if we're gonna accomplish anything in life, we gotta work together with other people, the lone wolf thing is a pipe dream. #2 a lot of ppl's hate on 'corps' comes from ... they require discipline [emoji of woman shrugging]" (the following conversation is interesting too.)

A single tweet, on colonization and "saving farms," that I found thought-provoking.

On "how to grow crops in a greenhouse/artificial lighting at epic scale... with special reference to leafy greens, culinary herbs, and that one other plant". Sample: "cognitive biases. We think 'Light from the sun is free!' & forget how much energy it takes to deal w the heat from that 'free' sun."

And: On staffing needs, how software/tech folks are misunderstanding "logistics and all the unsexy crap that makes good accessible food actually work." There's a bunch of different points here that tie together some of Taber's frequent peeves and talking points (including farmer's markets), so I'm quoting several excerpts:

tech co's still do dumb shit like putting out job ads for "expert grower/fix-it handyman/engineer/QA person/crew foreman/software coder," offer $50K/yr for a high-cost urban area, and then complain about how you can't find good help these days....

Harvest labor is the single biggest cost in farming- even high-tech operations!

Meanwhile most of the money in the food business is from postharvest handling- cooling, washing, packaging, distribution.

Yet these two areas are treated as afterthoughts.

Logistics rule: think in verbs, not nouns. Design buildings with TASKS in mind, not OBJECTS.

Corollary: learn to love negative space. Added value comes from workers & equipment doing tasks, not from filling up your floor space......

The sustainable food industry (yes. it's an industry) has the artisanal thing down cold. We're really, really good at making delicious sustainable niche treats for rich people.....

There's nothing inherently evil about large scale. It means you can get more people involved, which means more knowledge and care. Honestly I think that's kind of beautiful.

And I think just about everything that can be done by one lone person, farm & foodwise, has basically been done already. So if we want to move forward & keep growing, we have to figure out working in teams. And teams of teams.

posted by brainwane at 5:12 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

Emmy Rae, thanks for your reply, and sorry for not replying to the heart of the matter in my earlier comment and instead straying onto a side point. I get what you're saying.
posted by brainwane at 8:13 AM on December 24, 2018 [1 favorite]

I think the problem as she would see it is the idea that there IS a simple easy way to behave responsibly. That putting the onus on the consumer does any damn good at all besides making the consumer feel good about themselves. It's like you're asking " what gas station should I go to to make myself feel like I'm doing my part?"

I think this is an example of how entrenched libertarianism is in our society- boiling down the idea of change and action to individual commercial choices. When the truth is that individual action, as Emmy Rae acknowledged, is generally ineffective except for one thing: making the individual consumer feel better about themselves. And are individuals who feel good about themselves really going to cause change?

You know what causes change? Legislation. Changes in laws. And what causes legislation? Lobbying, publicity and massive visible public action. You know what doesn't? Individuals deciding to shop at a given place. The politics of personal righteousness dont do much good, because they're ultimately selfish.

So yeah, I'm pretty sure she's not going to give mefite shoppers any sort of answer they want, because her concerns are orthogonal to what they want. As for my, my attitude is if you seriously, seriously want to make things better, go ahead and shop at Wallmart or wherever. Feel massively guilty about it. Then channel that guilt into phone calls to legislators, research into who's doing good political work, and send money accordingly.
posted by happyroach at 1:56 AM on December 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

One reason I buy local produce is that ours is mostly grown by locally settled refugees and I want to help them out and we live in a climate that supports year round produce production, both by temperature and water supply.

More fundamentally, I am less of a techno-optimist (or any other kind of optimist) than she is. I buy local produce because I am worried about general societal collapse and would like there to be some possibility of food still if that happens for whoever of my neighbors manages to survive.
posted by hydropsyche at 11:37 AM on December 25, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think this is an example of how entrenched libertarianism is in our society- boiling down the idea of change and action to individual commercial choices. When the truth is that individual action, as Emmy Rae acknowledged, is generally ineffective except for one thing: making the individual consumer feel better about themselves. And are individuals who feel good about themselves really going to cause change?

I think we can give people credit for trying to make the best choice available to them in a system over which they have very little control.

I mean, I've been politically active around farm policy for my whole adult life, and change is painfully slow. Meanwhile, because of widespread consumer choice AND systemic support, there is more seasonally/regionally appropriate food available to people in my city than there was 5 years ago. That change has happened much, much faster.
posted by Emmy Rae at 11:16 AM on December 26, 2018 [4 favorites]

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