In late January, I took a trip back into one of my past lives, for NASA’s Day of Remembrance. This ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery honored the 17 fine people who lost their lives on NASA’s worst three days: the Apollo 1 test fire (January 27^th, 1967), Space Shuttle Challenger (January 28^th, 1986), and Space Shuttle Columbia (February 1^st, 2003). You will be reading this just after the 59^th anniversary of the Apollo fire, the 40^th anniversary of Challenger’s explosion, and the 23^rd anniversary of Columbia’s re-entry breakup.

The closeness of these anniversaries has often made me wonder if I (and perhaps the entire National Aeronautics and Space Administration) should just spend this week underneath the nearest bed. I was still in the US Air Force when Challenger exploded, but I joined the space program a few months later, where my work included helping return the Space Shuttles to flight. I was a Flight Controller in Mission Control for the 1990 deployment of the Hubble Space Telescope (STS-31). Later, I helped develop a free-flying robotic camera to inspect the Space Shuttle exterior, because we had frequent launch debris damage to the heat-shielding tiles. Unfortunately, I was not able to see it through to routine use on every flight. I was working on Space Shuttle safety upgrades when Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003. Tiles damaged during launch failed to protect the Shuttle from catastrophic re-entry heating.

At the Arlington ceremony this year, our new NASA administrator Jared Isaacson and Dr. June Scobee Rodgers laid wreaths and flowers at the Tomb of the Unknowns, the memorials to the three crews lost, and the graves of those astronauts buried there. Administrator Isaacson was not quite three when Challenger exploded and not quite twenty when Columbia disintegrated. He’s made billions in payment processing and used that fortune to sponsor his own space missions. Dr. June Scobee Rodgers is the widow of Challenger Commander Francis “Dick” Scobee who turned that tragedy into four decades of motivating young people to study science and engineering through the Challenger Centers, which she founded with other Challenger families.

As our new Administrator read condolences to our group, I looked around and saw several prior NASA Administrators including Sean O’Keefe, who headed NASA when Columbia crashed. I suspect I wasn’t the only one praying that the new guard would not repeat the mistakes of the old. You spend the rest of your life asking if you could have done something different to prevent the loss of your colleagues.

For decades as an engineer, I marked these anniversaries with a letter to my engineering teams, perhaps reflections on safety or the responsibilities of engineers or how smart technical people can be blind to a disaster in the making. Because good people can make bad mistakes, and you can die doing this stuff. But this trip also gave me a glimpse of the Earth Information Center display at NASA Headquarters. Our space program has given us amazing earth-monitoring capabilities, and I decided to commemorate these anniversaries with this letter to my farm and food colleagues instead. Earth observation advances have transformed agriculture. Fifteen satellites—many joint projects between NASA, Department of Defense (DoD), and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—and our Space Station are currently monitoring current weather, storms, lightning, precipitation, atmospheric rivers, dust, air quality, fire, soil moisture, ice thickness, land elevation, biomass, radiation, energy reaching crops, vegetation cover, and crop health.

Come to think, our space program has saved thousands of lives and improved the quality of millions of lives. I hope that’s some consolation to those who lost friends and family when we let down our guard on the path to making this vision a reality.

Tragedies can shape organizations’ culture for generations, like the Apollo 1 fire defined NASA’s Mission Control. Leadership—Gene Kranz headed Mission Operations then—pounded the lessons of that tragedy into my generation of Flight Controllers along with those of Challenger. Mission Operations’ “Res Gesta Par Excellentiam” (Achieve Through Excellence) motto was born in the self-reflection in those dark days.

The 1900 Hurricane was such an event for a different U.S. government organization, the U.S. Weather Bureau, now the National Weather Service. That September 1900 hurricane killed at least 8,000 people, possibly as many as 12,000. The “Great Storm of 1900” still tops the list of deadliest US natural disasters. It has no official name—the Weather Bureau didn’t start naming hurricanes until 1950.

Some call that storm the “Great Galveston Hurricane” because most of the fatalities were on Galveston Island. Perhaps a sixth, maybe a fifth, of Galveston’s residents died. No one is sure exactly how many thousands died there because so many people were washed out to sea and presumed dead. After destroying Galveston, the 1900 hurricane killed more on its inland track north, including over 50 people in Canada.

The 1900 storm was what we would now call a Category 4 hurricane, not even the worst storm that nature can produce. But thousands died in just hours. Why?

It wasn’t just that era’s limited weather forecasting capability that failed Galveston residents. Yes, the US Weather Bureau was fairly new in 1900, having just become a civilian organization in the US Department of Agriculture in 1890 with transfers from the Army’s Signal Service. Weather forecasting was still more art than science then, but the new Weather Bureau had a lot of boots-on-the-ground experience. The US meteorologists predicted the large storm would hit Florida and issued evacuation recommendations there. However, Cuban meteorologists reported extensive storm damage in Cuba days before the storm was to make landfall in the US. Days before it hit Galveston, the Cubans told the US Weather Bureau that the storm was strengthening and heading for the Texas coast, not Florida.

In the wake of the Spanish-American War (1898), the US controlled Cuba. But the US Weather Bureau did not pass the Cuban predictions on to Texas residents because of bitter feelings and contempt for the Cubans’ perceived “lack of scientific expertise.” The head of the US Weather Bureau in Washington, Willis Moore, decreed that only he could authorize calling any storm a “hurricane.” In fact, the Cubans had more hurricane expertise than the US Weather Bureau. A US ship captain later reported the storm strengthening in the Gulf of Mexico, confirming the Cuban meteorologists’ projection of a westward path, in plenty of time to evacuate Galveston. But the US Weather Bureau still refused to issue evacuation orders to Galveston residents.

In Galveston, then the third richest city in the US, Dr. Isaac Cline and his brother Joseph staffed the local US Weather Bureau office. Dr. Cline had word of the brewing storm from the central office, but noted that the DC office did not seem too worried about it. He himself had downplayed the danger of hurricanes hitting Galveston for years. In fact, he was on record stating that it was impossible for a hurricane to hit Galveston. Perhaps local business leaders promoting the city and unwilling to pay for a proposed “sea wall” project had pressured him. High tides frequently flooded the streets and little came of that, so a little water in the streets did not alarm city residents. At that time, meteorologists thought the real danger of a hurricane was just the wind, as storm surge wasn’t well understood. Dr. Cline hoisted a single mariners’ warning flag up a flagpole on the tallest building in town the afternoon before the landfall. That flag was red with a black square in the center, the signal that a strong storm was approaching, but not a hurricane. Two such flags were required for a hurricane warning.

Joseph Cline was far more worried. He argued with Isaac for a hurricane warning. Isaac would not go against headquarters. He refused to raise the second flag to warn that the approaching storm was a hurricane. It wasn’t until the next morning that Isaac’s instruments and an unusual tide pattern made him realize that Joseph was right. But then it was too late to raise another flag. As the water rose, Dr. Cline raced his carriage along flooded streets on the seaward side of the island, personally imploring those souls outdoors watching the dramatic surf to shelter in fortified buildings. Dr. Cline’s efforts to warn others cost him dearly. He did not have time to get his family to stronger shelter. The storm surge soon covered the island. His wife was among the casualties when a drifting railroad trestle smashed their home.

Mixing politics and weather forecasting works no better than mixing politics and space exploration….People die when you do that, on the ground and in the sky.

I began writing this post during Winter Storm Fern, all the while marveling at both forecasting and thorough preparation. In rural communities, weather risk is the greatest part of economic risk, so improved weather forecasting is probably the greatest gift of our space program to rural America. Weather forecasters integrate satellite and space station data with info from 122 ground stations, 1,800 daily weather balloons, 245 ocean stations, 1250 ocean buoys, pilot reports, and decades of weather history to get ever-more accurate forecasts. At times, the US Air Force Hurricane Hunters and NASA’s WB-57 flying atmospheric science laboratories join the weather team. One of NASA’s three WB-57s suffered damage last week, landing on its belly after landing gear failed to deploy (BREAKING! NASA WB-57 Emergency Landing Without Wheels). I wonder if the aircraft was collecting data on the massive winter storm on that last flight. First flown in 1949, B-57s have been involved in weather reconnaissance and atmospheric research since 1964, first in the US Air Force and then with NASA. Those NASA B-57s are much older than the pilots who fly them. Here’s hoping NASA can restore this rare bird to flight and weather ops soon.

Virginia’s new governor—like many other governors in the path of this storm—declared a state of emergency days before Winter Storm Fern. The long-range forecast and the emergency declaration gave state agencies and infrastructure providers time to prepare. Many highway department crews sprayed roads with brine while others prepped snowplows. Utility crews spent that lead time clearing remaining branches over powerlines, and staged repair trucks at critical locations. Schools and churches announced closures. Airlines preemptively canceled over 10,000 flights—a very expensive move that suggests a great deal of certainty. But pilots are weather junkies and they have the best.

The rest of us used the time to stock pantries and cook food and test generators and fill fuel tanks and stage buckets of water to flush toilets. We checked on neighbors and hauled firewood for those who heat with wood, to make sure they have enough to get through the predicted extreme cold. We covered winter crops, hoping the cover hoops and fabric would hold up under the snow and ice load—and hoping the fabric would keep the plants alive through the unusual single-digit temperatures predicted. Those with livestock pre-positioned hay and broke ice on troughs and checked the trough heaters. We plugged in tractor block heaters and wedged spray cans of starting ether in cabs. Squirting starting ether into air intakes works a helluva lot better than prayers in getting engines started in single-digit temperatures. That hay won’t move unless that machine moves it. And every farmer who owns a blade mounted it on something that can move snow. Some would pick up extra cash plowing business parking lots.

When the snow and sleet were falling, we could—well, unless we have livestock--hunker down indoors and catch up on our paperwork. Or wax poetic on weather forecasting like yours truly. Weather junkies blessed with internet watched composite satellite and radar displays and infrared maps and precipitation maps—enabled by NASA and NOAA satellites and other NOAA sensors. I am a triple weather junkie, after years of farming, flying, and space-geeking.

We take it for granted now that we’ll have a week to prepare for a major storm, but I can remember when this kind of long-range weather forecasting was a pipedream. When I was in graduate school at Princeton University in the early 1980s, I had friends doing research at the university’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory. They were building weather prediction models and running them on what we thought was one of the world’s fastest supercomputers. “Our models are improving,” ran a typical conversation. “We got pretty close on that cold front last week. Now if only we could get those predictions done before the weather gets here!” We teased our colleagues with “How many days late this time?” and “Only three days late this time?” We had only two decades of satellite pictures of storms, and we had already forgotten that there was a time when we couldn’t see weather in the formation stage. Yet predicting weather more than a day or two in advance was still a meteorologist’s dream.

But meteorologists have a track record of dreaming big. The weather forecasting community started imagining what a view from above the clouds might be worth in World War 2. In 1946, some enterprising soul put a camera on the nose of a V-2 rocket confiscated from Germany to get the first photo of clouds from above. Thanks to the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, now Defense ARPA or DARPA), the US was already designing satellites that could take pictures from orbit when the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957. Seems that the military reconnaissance guys drank a lot of coffee with the meteorological guys, and that work found a big early payday in weather. Our Explorer-VII satellite carried an experimental weather-monitoring payload into space in 1959.

The first US operational weather satellite was the Television Infrared Observation Satellite (TIROS-1) launched in April 1960. It carried only two TV cameras (a wide-angle and a narrow-field) and video recorders, but that crude payload converted meteorology from a localized interpretation of ground instruments into a planetary science. It lasted only 78 days but transmitted over 19,000 pictures of cloud formations and storms (see the first below).

NASA launched TIROS-2 (photo below) in November 1960 to add infrared capability (radiometers), which made frontal boundaries and ice visible (see a sample product below). The satellites were only part of this effort, because NASA had to build receiving stations and data distribution and analysis to make them useful to line meteorologists. The TIROS program lasted decades and pushed our ability to put satellites in polar orbit.

A parallel program, the Nimbus weather satellites, began in 1964 with the purpose of advancing weather instrument technology. Seven Nimbus satellites carried 33 innovative new instruments into polar, sun-synchronous orbits from 1964 to 1978. Nimbus-3 (1969) enabled early storm warnings with its “Sounder” vertical measurements of temperature, moisture, and water vapor across Earth. Previously, that capability required balloons or aircraft—severely limiting coverage over oceans where the largest storms form. TIROS-N (1978) took that capability to space because it was enhanced with microwave sounding, enabling the satellite to see “through” clouds. It also carried payloads that laid the groundwork for satellite navigation systems.

NOAA was formed in 1970. It consolidated the US Weather Bureau (renamed the National Weather Service) with the US Coast and Geodetic Survey (commissioned by President Thomas Jefferson in 1807), the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA, in the Department of Commerce), Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and other fishery programs (in the Department of Interior), Marine Minerals (Interior), and oceanographic and lake groups from the US Navy, US Army, and National Science Foundation. At one point, putting the US Coast Guard in NOAA got serious consideration. But guys on armed boats and scientists struck some as strange bedfellows.

Reorganization Plan No. 4 of 1970 (5 U.S.C. app.) detailed the NOAA and EPA creation. In it, President Nixon provided these reasons for the formation of NOAA:

“Drawing these activities together into a single agency would make possible a balanced Federal program to improve our understanding of the resources of the sea, and permit their development and use while guarding against the sort of thoughtless exploitation that in the past laid waste to so many of our precious natural assets. It would make possible a consolidated program for achieving a more comprehensive understanding of oceanic and atmospheric phenomena, which so greatly affect our lives and activities. It would facilitate the cooperation between public and private interests that can best serve the interests of all.”

Exactly where NOAA would be on the government org chart had just been an epic struggle in the Nixon Administration. Three camps formed to advocate for NOAA as (1) independent agency; (2) part of the Department of the Interior; or (3) part of the Department of Commerce. Congressional overload ruled out making NOAA an independent agency. Creating the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) as an independent agency completely consumed Congress’ capacity for major reorganizations that year. Choosing between Commerce and Interior as NOAA’s home was easier, just a matter of an Executive Order with Congress having a ninety-day veto window.

Initially, it looked like the decision would go in Interior’s favor, and the President’s final decision to put NOAA in Commerce surprised many. Urban legend has it that NOAA was put in Commerce instead of Interior because President Nixon and his Interior Secretary (Walter Hickel) began feuding over the Vietnam War. It seems that Mr. Hickel started listening to the people protesting the Vietnam War as he ran their protest gauntlet to work every day. They eventually won him over. Or perhaps he was just tired of troops stationed in and around his office buildings. He implored the President to “listen to the youth” to defuse the standoffs. Mr. Hinkel’s heartfelt letter to the President was leaked to the press; the bad coverage made a lot of White House people mad. President Nixon was especially mad.

Steven Schanes, Special Assistant to the Secretary of Commerce for Policy Development, had the unenviable job of creating the new agency inside Commerce, despite his personal opinion that it should be an independent agency or perhaps Interior might be a better fit. The scientific community—especially the marine research community—had lobbied hard to put NOAA in Interior, saying that “Commerce’s purpose is to sell fish” while Interior’s purpose is to “protect fish.” In his memoir, Mr. Schanes acknowledged Mr. Hinkel’s letter as a factor in the President’s decision. But he also relates that the President thought (1) Commerce was better managed than Interior and (2) integrating NOAA into Commerce would be the least organizational upheaval because they already had a major piece of the pie. That piece, the Environmental Science Services Administration, would become about 70% of the new NOAA in personnel and budget. Mr. Schane also related that the President quickly accepted Commerce’s choice to lead the new agency (meteorologist Dr. Robert White, then head of the ESSA). Nixon’s staff objected to Dr. White’s promotion because he was a Democrat and his brother Theodore White had written a book very critical of the President. Nixon just asked, “Is he the best one for the job?” and shut down all objections when the Commerce Secretary affirmed that. Seems Mr. Nixon was not all political.

Unfortunately, NOAA has been underfunded since its birth, considering its mission. Partnering with NASA and Department of Defense (DoD) for satellite development helped. After NOAA was formed, the TIROS satellites got a NOAA designation along with their TIROS legacy name. The final TIROS satellite (TIROS-N-Prime or NOAA-19) launched in 2009 and was only decommissioned last August.

The first Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES-1) launched in 1975. The GOES series—joint work of NOAA and NASA—differed from its polar-orbiting TIROS and Nimbus predecessors by spending their entire operational lives over a fixed point on the earth’s surface. The GOES series provides near real-time data critical for weather forecasting and severe hazards including hurricanes. GOES-7 introduced NOAA’s Search and Rescue Satellite-Aided Tracking (SARSAT) to quickly locate distress beacons. If you carry a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) for emergencies, you are relying on GOES-7 and SARSAT to get out of a jam.

Fifty years later, we are up to GOES-19, declared operational in September 2024. The GOES satellites can monitor lightning now. And track wildfire in real time, assisting firefighters and keeping them out of the fires’ path. The next generation of GOES is the Geostationary Extended Observations (GeoXO). These satellites will increase our advance warning for drought and flooding, as well as improve detection of lightning, fire, smoke, dust, and volcanic ash. First launch is planned for 2032, funding permitting. I envision myself in 2040 in my rocking chair, hypnotized by GeoXO satellite feeds and regaling my unlucky nursing home roommate with soil moisture and lightning data.

Incidentally, the GOES satellites also monitor “space weather”—the electromagnetic storms that interfere with space-based electronics, our utility grid, communications systems, and global positioning system (GPS) signals. Not as important as weather and climate prediction, Satellite-based navigation systems have still been changing agriculture. GPS is now the time source that synchronizes critical systems including our power grid. GPS guides tractors to reduce soil compaction from heavy machinery. Farmers also rely on GPS for precision planting systems. Some farmers rely on GPS to steer planters and harvesters 24 hours a day. Those systems operate in the dark to take advantage of short planting and harvesting windows. So, now farmers follow space weather. May 2024’s G5 solar flare gave us auroras across the lower 48—and farmers reported that “the tractors acted like they were demon-possessed.” Crooked rows and even “doughnuts” in the field translated into yield losses with fertilizer and seed mismatches. Then at harvest, machines could not perfectly align with rows planted by those rogue tractors.

All of the data from these satellites is available free of charge to anyone. Our tax dollars put those satellites up there and built the communications links and data centers. We’ve also paid for much data analysis, converting raw data into products that we can use to make decisions ranging from what to wear today to whether to go out at all or run like hell. Aviators, farmers, mariners, military planners, school administrators, emergency response managers, government officials, and the multitudes of our hard-working neighbors now make informed decisions about what they can do next. Emergency response managers use pre-position rescue and recovery teams. If you were also in the path of Winter Storm Fern, you probably saw utility trucks located along power lines before this week’s storm hit. Thirty states and 230 million people took a turn in Fern’s temperature and precipitation extremes and over 50 of them did not live to see the other side. Over a million households lost power and some of them are still in the dark today (February 2nd, 2026).

The ice accumulation here in south central Virginia was closer to the minimum than to the maximum predicted. It was not enough to leave me in the dark. My darkest thoughts were for how it’s still hard to pinpoint what will happen at a specific location near a coast when two very different air masses battle for dominance. In Nashville, TN, ice accumulation forecast was spot-on—unfortunately! My nephew there was without power for a week. The photos he sent of the ice-encrusted tree branches laying in the streets by completely denuded trees left me thinking that pre-positioned equipment and crews shortened that power outage from what it might have been.

While we still have tragic loss of life in major storms, it’s much lower due to this amazing earth data collection infrastructure and dedicated people turning this raw data into information we use daily. The reduction in death toll is all the more impressive considering the nearly five-fold increase in US population since 1900. Our population is even more exposed to hurricane risk, as over half of US residents live within 50 miles of a coastline. A surprising number of people live below sea-level behind levees. Many more live below the level of a storm surge from a direct hit of a category. They need a forecast to inform a decision to evacuate.

Farmers need weather forecasts for more than personal safety. We need weather forecasts to survive economically. We need mid-range forecasts for decisions like “When will the soil be warm enough for seeds to germinate?” We need long-term forecasts to help us with decisions like “Will we get enough rain this season for this seed, or should I try a different variety with better drought tolerance?” and “How many calves can I realistically carry over next winter with this summer’s rainfall?”

The groundhog with the unprintable name—the one who destroyed my butternut squash crop last year—saw his shadow on the frozen snow this sunny morning. But I already knew we will have six more weeks of winter. NOAA told us that we’ll be seeing several more of these cold air masses this month, keeping temperatures below average.

Unfortunately, our current administration has begun eliminating some long-range weather forecast products because “climate” has become a dirty word. NOAA has been accused of being the source of “climate alarmism.” Climate.Gov is gone, but fortunately some of its content has been preserved on lower internet rungs, so we won’t have to rely completely on that #$@%*& groundhog to schedule spring planting. In my next newsletter, I’ll explore what the attack on NOAA means for farmers and everyone else’s dinner plate. And whether weather will continue to be free to the public.

But maybe I’ll let that fuzzy squash-wrecker live a little longer, just in case he becomes my only source for “climate” prediction.

References:

A Timeline of Extreme Storms Throughout U.S. History

The 1900 Storm - Galveston Historical Foundation

1900 Galveston Hurricane Destroys City

How many people die from extreme heat in the US? | USAFacts

Weather Related Fatality and Injury Statistics

Temperature Data:

https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/monitoring/climate-at-a-glance/

Weather Satellite History:

50th Anniversary of the TIROS Satellite - NASA Science

TIROS-2 - Wikipedia (includes Universal Newsreel with launch)

Television Infrared Observation Satellite - Wikipedia

Nimbus Satellites - an overview | ScienceDirect Topics

Celebrating 50 Years of GOES | NESDIS | National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service

GOES-R Spacecraft Overview

The Creation of NOAA:

The Battle for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) | Steven Eli Schanes

REORGANIZATION PLAN NO. 3 OF 1970

Public Weather Sources:

National Hurricane Center: nhc.noaa.gov

Aviation Weather Center

Homepage | NOAA / NWS Space Weather Prediction Center

Category 4 | NHC Storm Surge Risk Maps

Discontinued Public Weather:

Recent Conditions for Crops - Weekly Publication | NOAA Climate.gov

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It’s Thanksgiving and many of us are eating turkey sometime today as part of a gathering of family or friends. I hope that some of my neighbors are NOT going to be cooking a turkey on Thanksgiving Day because they paid their dues in another kitchen this week: preparing the 17^th annual Amelia Community Thanksgiving Dinner. While I don’t yet know the total number of meals served yesterday, in recent past years it’s been over 750.

Noell Berry, one of the members of the Terrapin Neck Grange that I joined this past spring, organizes this. The Grange joins many other organizations across the community to pull this off. It takes place at the local Veterans Center. This was my first time to participate. My “homework assignment” was sugar-free desserts. I inflicted several test recipes on my church friends over the past few weeks. With my allergies, I’ve learned to bake almost anything without one or more major allergens, but no-sugar baking almost defeated me. Fortunately, my church friends were willing to taste test and give me honest feedback. I finally managed to stagger into the Veterans Center on Tuesday with three trays of better-than-just-edible sugar-free brownies. I was soon drafted into a massive cooking and food packaging operation already in progress.

On Wednesday morning, I returned to become a very small part of the relay to get several hundred hot meals assembled with the desserts and rolls packaged the day before (Photo 1). We bagged and loaded the meals into volunteers’ vehicles so they could deliver this bit of holiday to those who could not make it to Veterans Center. It was fun to see how people sorted themselves into various jobs with Noell directing traffic with her multi-colored spreadsheets. Many people also came to enjoy the food in person. Oh, and on the side was another boxing and delivery operation of edible holiday treats going to families whose budgets do not have room for treats.

One of the benefits of having campaigned for office this year—yes, that’s why you haven’t seen a post here since July—is that I now know a lot of the people gluing this community together with events like this. Sadly, I also learned how many neighbors had their only holiday dinner today, delivered from this event. I’ve started compiling that experience for a future post on rural poverty. But today, I want to update you all on the turkey part of our holiday tradition, as it’s been two years since my 2023 series on turkeys.

In my first 2023 post dedicated to turkey—Ghosts of Turkeys Past - by Kristin Farry—I traced the path from the wild turkey domesticated by the Aztecs and Anasazi over two thousand years ago to our modern Thanksgiving Day table bird. It’s a winding journey that runs from what has become Mexico and the Southwest US through Europe and back to the Americas with the first European Settlers at Jamestown. An Aztec Tlatoque (leader) with a time machine (or perhaps one of the divine powers he claimed to have) would not be surprised to see a turkey in the center of our holiday tables in 2025. Turkey was a major staple of the Aztec empire as well as one of the personifications of their Trickster God Tezcatlipoca.

That June 2023 post also reviewed turkey prices through the past century. Adjusted for inflation, turkey has become a bargain. It’s also not just for holidays anymore. Americans’ poultry consumption has exceeded our beef consumption since 1992. Poultry consumption numbers include chicken, duck, goose, and turkey. But it seems that we’ve been replacing some of our turkey in our diets with chicken the last few years. Both our consumption of turkey and US turkey production have declined in the 2020s. This year, the number of turkeys raised on US farms is about 195 million birds. The US turkey population has been declining since its 302.7 million-bird peak in 1996, but the decline accelerated recently. The 2025 bird count is 64% of that 1996 peak.

At the same time, our total consumption has increased. Genetic, feed, and veterinary science improvements have made it possible for us to increase our consumption with fewer birds. That said, our per capita consumption peaked at 18.1 pounds per person in 2008 and has declined to a projected 13.1 pounds per person this year. That’s a modest (4-ounce) serving of turkey per week. With beef prices going up, we’re filling in the gap with poultry, mostly chicken. Maybe we’ll prove the experts wrong on 2025 turkey consumption estimates considering beef prices are not coming down, what with the US brood cow population at the lowest it’s been in 70 years.

I planned to update my 2023 chart of grocery store turkey price corrected for inflation to include 2025, but I got bogged down. Key sources are disagreeing on turkey prices in the past few years, have stopped analyzing turkey prices, or were delayed by the government shutdown. Also, November is the wrong month to analyze the current year’s turkey prices, because there’s a big supply. All the farmers and integrators are aiming for the holidays and grocery stores use the turkey as a loss leader. A sign advertising whole turkey just 39 cents a pound greeted me at my closest grocery store on Tuesday.

To get an idea of just how great a bargain this is, consider that the wholesale price of these turkeys—what the grocery store paid for them—has been running about $1.32 per pound. That was about 40% more than last year, due to the loss of over 3 million birds to avian flu this year. So, my local grocer is losing at least $0.91 per pound on these birds—more if you count the handling and cold storage between delivery and that display.

Just in case you had any doubts about the best time of year to buy turkey, Graph 1 shows the retail price history for whole frozen turkeys for four decades (1980-2020). The notches in that sawtooth? November of every year.

The grocery store is betting that you’ll buy all the sides and trimmings on the way to snare this turkey. The fact that the grocery store calculated that they are likely to make the $12.74 they lost on that turkey back on sides and trimmings tells you something about the holiday markup on those items.

Sorry, Food Lion, I have a garden. Good thing, too, as sweet potato prices are up 37% over last year because the North Carolina sweet potato crop got stomped by Hurricane Chantal. North Carolina is the number one sweet potato producer, growing over twice as much tonnage than number two (California). Because that blank-blank ground hog chewed up everything growing above ground in my garden except the hot peppers, sweet potatoes are the only thing the garden gave me to make pies out of. My friends are getting sweet potato pie instead of pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. And sweet potato casserole. And sweet potato soup. And sweet potato chips. Well, not all at the same meal. I’ll inflict my sweet potato bonanza on my friends at Christmas, too, as I have been canning what I can’t foist on them around Thanksgiving.

I am telling my friends that serving sweet potatoes with turkey is truly an American tradition because sweet potatoes were first domesticated in Central American and northern South America. So the Incas were probably eating sweet potatoes 2000 years ago with the turkeys they got from their Aztec neighbors. And guess who took sweet potatoes to Europe? The Spanish Conquistadores. I’ll let you guess how they got to US territory.

The smart folks just down the road from me at Virginia State University (VSU) have also figured out that sweet potatoes grow well here. They are testing various varieties and growing techniques on their ag research campus, Randolph Farm. Here’s one of their sweet potato research fields, a few months ago (Photo 2):

And no, my sweet potatoes didn’t stay so well organized. The vines ran all over the place, Bambi permitting (the deer love sweet potato vines). Fortunately, there’s some compensation for face-plant when you trip on the sweet potato vines twenty feet from where you planted them: A close-up view of pretty flowers. Sweet potatoes are related to morning glories and they look the part in late summer. One fun thing about VSU is the Ag school teams up with the Hospitality Management program, which puts their students to work figuring out creative ways to cook or ferment what the ag students are growing. More recipes to inflict on my long-suffering friends!

We can’t clearly blame a hurricane for price increases in other vegetables. A labor shortage from the current immigration enforcement policy has reduced domestic vegetable production while tariffs are making imports an expensive way to fill the gap in domestic production. The labor shortage is affecting food processing as well. Wholesale prices for some vegetables increased almost 40% this summer. On the other hand, the trade war has reduced export markets of some major commodities, lowering domestic prices for the feed that your future meal—be it poultry, pork, lamb, or beef—is eating. This combination is making analysis hard. Stay tuned and I will sort this out eventually.

My November 2023 post about turkeys—Happy Turkey Day - by Kristin Farry - Someone Grew That —covered choosing your bird at the grocery store, without paying extra for a story that’s not true. Bottom line: Don’t believe the marketing machine trying to convince you that their birds were raised by “independent family farms.” Sadly, most poultry farmers (called “contract growers”) are still caught in a vise created by poultry processing giants (called “integrators”).

But I’m happy to report a little progress toward restoring poultry farmer independence since I published that article in November 2023. The “Poultry Grower Payment Systems and Capital Improvement Systems” rule-making process that I mentioned in that post has run its course. USDA published three new rules from it under the authority of the Packers and Stockyards Act of 1921 (7 U.S.C. §§ 181-229b; P&S Act). According to Wikipedia, this 1921 Act “regulates meatpacking, livestock dealers, market agencies, live poultry dealers, and swine contractors to prohibit unfair or deceptive practices, giving undue preferences, apportioning supply, manipulating prices, or creating a monopoly.” Well, good to know that these new rules are well within the authority of this landmark law—but inquiring minds are wondering how we got to these regional monopolies (technically monopsonies) in the last 50 years with this law on the books for over a century!

The first rule—Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments—became effective in February 2024. While the contract grower system remains intact, the integrators must now make their contracts much more transparent to growers. The rule requires that integrators tell growers the minimum number of chicks the integrator must provide the grower (the “bird placement”) and how they rank grower performance for determining payment (the “tournament”). The contract clarifications mailed to growers since then have been eye-opening. Or maybe I should say eye-watering. The grower contracts conforming to this transparency rule revealed that integrators are not actually guaranteeing growers enough bird placements to pay off the farmers’ facility investments. Remember that the farmers had to build facilities at their expense to the exact specifications of the particular integrator as a condition of the contract. This generally involves the farmer mortgaging the farm to pay for these up front for contracts averaging ten years. So, the financial security that farmers thought they were getting by giving up their independence to become a contract grower for a large poultry company was an illusion.

The second rule—Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity—went into effect in May 2024. It “prohibits employing false or misleading statements or omissions of material information in contract formation, performance, and termination; and prohibits regulated entities from providing false or misleading representations regarding refusal to contract.” I guess the USDA needed a hammer to drive the basic point of a contract home to integrators, and this is the hammer. Individual court cases were inconsistent in demands, definitions, and results. The lawsuits all have one thing in common, however: big legal bills. It takes a lot of money to sue corporate giants like these integrators.

This second rule also prohibits discrimination or retaliation against growers for exercising rights granted by the Packers and Stockyards Act. These rights include “lawful communications,” exploring contracts with competitors, joining cooperatives, and asking for information about one’s own contracts. The fact that the USDA decided this rule was necessary is pretty scary, actually. I’ve heard some horror stories, but what I’ve heard is apparently only a tiny sample. Now I know why growers submitted so many comments against this rule that were obviously written by their integrator. They felt they could lose their farm and home if they didn’t take their integrator’s side in this argument.

The third rule in the series—Poultry Grower Payment Systems and Capital Improvement Systems—was published on January 16, 2025. It will become effective July 1, 2026. Growers will soon know more about how the poultry integrators are setting their payments and comparing their performance with that of their competitors. Contracts will have to give the grower a clear “base price” that he can use to decide how deep into debt he can go on the facilities investment. High-performing growers can still receive bonuses, but not at the cost of putting their neighbors out of business. Remember that each grower has no control over critical inputs—including the chicks, feed, and medication—and has had no knowledge of the ranking system that the integrator was using prior to the first tournament transparency rule. In light of that, the USDA concluded that growers should not be penalized to the point of bankruptcy for lower performance rankings when they are essentially “flying blind.” Growers have long suspected that their inputs could be manipulated to reduce grower numbers in gluts. Poultry companies will also soon have to make clear justification for facility capital improvements at the growers’ expense—thus eliminating arbitrary “facility improvement” requirements that some integrators may have used as another tool to reduce grower numbers during the market decline.

There was supposed to be a fourth rule this year—Fair and Competitive Livestock and Poultry Markets—to better define “unfair practices” that the 1921 law prohibited. That rule was cancelled. Hmmmm.

Much as I complain about too many regulations, these rules all originate in tragedies and are good-faith attempts to prevent more. USDA won multi-million dollar settlements from large poultry processors in recent years for violations of the 1921 Packers and Stockyards Act. This included imposing huge termination fees on growers who wanted to change integrators (essentially unlawful non-compete clauses). The problems these rules are trying to solve are real. The balance of power is very much in the large integrators’ favor, as the growers’ farm is essentially a hostage he tries to join with other farmers or look for a better customer. But I am left wondering if these rules are just band aids, because better-behaved monopsonies are still monopsonies. In some states, numerical measures of the vertical and horizontal consolidation of the poultry industry exceed the anti-trust enforcement thresholds by a factor of 2 or 3. If you don’t have another buyer for your perishable product, a contract that plainly states how screwed you are may not be enough to unscrew you. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act of 1890 has been successfully used against poultry integrators—why not more and more often?

Fifty of my farm neighbors who got dumped by Tyson recently would like a word with anyone considering poultry grower contracts. They did everything Tyson asked of them and still found themselves with no market for broilers when Tyson closed the regional processing plant. Fortunately, Tyson was forced to buy them out of their contracts so it appears that everyone landed on their feet, on farms they still own, if barely. Most of them are now learning how to produce cage-free eggs. Most of these farmers still have to convert their facilities to egg production, which is expensive. They are among the reasons I ran for State Delegate this year.

Because even with these new rules, the “independent family farmer” claim on the label of something that also has a Tyson, Cargill, Sysco, Hormel, Pilgrim’s is still a lie. Your grocer freezer contents may vary as these companies have divided up the country. One reason that the Packers and Stockyards Act and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act have fallen short of protecting farmers and consumers? Congress has simply refused to fund enforcement of prior rules limiting monopsonies, market manipulation, and market concentration in meat and poultry. And we have to watch every Farm Bill for riders that repeal these rules and permanently ban them. Someone already tried that trick with these new poultry rules. Open Secrets’ profile on the National Turkey Federation (the integrators’ team) found $3.28 million dollars in lobbying expenditures by that organization between 2010 and 2023. That’s in addition to direct donations to political candidates by integrators.

My third turkey post--What are you gobbling for dinner? - by Kristin Farry—delved into what various labels really mean. Not the brand names, but label like Product of USA, USDA Inspected and Wholesome. I also covered use of hormones or steroids by the US poultry industry—NOT! And I touched on antibiotic use.

I am happy to report great news on food label integrity since that December 2023 post. The USDA completed their rule-making process governing the voluntary use of “Product of the USA” and “Made in the USA” labels. As of January 1^st, 2026, these labels—and using the US flag on the label—now actually mean that the animals involved were born, raised, slaughtered, and processed completely in the USA. If it’s an egg, the hens were born, raised, and laid that egg in the USA. So we have another few weeks in the ambiguous zone where a company can still apply that label to any food product where the last step was done in the USA, regardless of where all the rest of that supply line was. But soon, those labels will actually mean what you thought they meant all along. But before you worry about the origin of that turkey already in your oven, remember that the US is a large poultry exporter, so chances are nearly 100% that bird was hatched and raised and processed inside the US.

But if you are serving beef labeled Product of the USA for dinner—well, that cow may have spent its entire life in Argentina. A topic for another day. I am taking sweet potato pie and some of the hot peppers that ground hog left me to go with the turkey that friends are frying for Thanksgiving dinner.

References

Cost of Thanksgiving Dinner Declines | News Release | American Farm Bureau Federation

Thanksgiving Turkey Price Drop Comes Despite Increase In Wholesale Cost: What To Know

Average Price: Turkey, Frozen, Whole (Cost per Pound/453.6 Grams) in U.S. City Average (APU0000706311) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Per Capita Meat Consumption:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-meat-type?time=1992

The 10 Largest Poultry Companies In The United States - Zippia

Turkey Production by the Numbers - National Turkey Federation

Transparency: Protect Poultry Transparency [Opinion] | Poultry News | lancasterfarming.com

Packers and Stockyards Act - Wikipedia

Packers and Stockyards Act | Agricultural Marketing Service

New rules:

Transparency in Poultry Grower Contracting and Tournaments | Agricultural Marketing Service

Federal Register :: Poultry Grower Payment Systems and Capital Improvement Systems

Inclusive Competition and Market Integrity under the Packers and Stockyards Act | Agricultural Marketing Service

Poultry Grower Payment Systems and Capital Improvement Systems | Agricultural Marketing Service

Cancelled Rule:

Federal Register :: Fair and Competitive Livestock and Poultry Markets

Lobbying:

National Turkey Federation Lobbying Profile • OpenSecrets

Price Data:

Turkey Sector: Background & Statistics | Economic Research Service

Average Price: Turkey, Frozen, Whole (Cost per Pound/453.6 Grams) in U.S. City Average (APU0000706311) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Product of the USA and related labels:

USDA Finalizes Voluntary “Product of USA” Rule – National Agricultural Law Center

USDA Finalizes Voluntary “Product of USA” Label Claim to Enhance Consumer Protection | USDA

Voluntary Labeling of FSIS-Regulated Products with U.S.-Origin Claims | Food Safety and Inspection Service

Farming is hard work. Farmers often need to hire help with that work. In the US, people willing to do farm work are getting harder and harder to find as the rural population ages and food prices limit what farmers can pay workers. Importing labor to grow food in the US has become controversial and difficult.

I have made seven(!) posts on farm labor—four more than I set out to—so I felt it was time to pause and provide a guide to these posts.

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First, The Handwriting on the Barn Wall (December 2024) provides an overview of the US farm labor crisis and aging rural demographics. It’s come to a point where we are choosing between importing our food and importing labor to grow our food. The US has always imported farm labor, even before the US founders were born. It’s often been unpopular, and often illegal. Now, it’s so unpopular that our current president ran on mass deportation of immigrants—and is making quite a show carrying out what he perceives as a mandate for mass deportation.

My post Who Will Be Deported? (February 2025) is an overview of unauthorized immigration and deportations into the US and the immigrants over the past half-century. This post provides the context of the entire immigration battle, not just farm workers. This post explains the different types of unauthorized immigrants—documented versus undocumented—and who among them is eligible for deportation under US immigration law. This post includes immigration and deportation numbers since 1980. If you only recently tuned into the immigration issue, you will probably be surprised to learn which presidents have done what.

My second immigration post The Unauthorized Immigrants Filling Your Plate (February 2024) homes in on the role of immigration in agriculture since our days as British colonies. I quantified our current dependence on undocumented workers on farms and in food processing plants. I also speculated on how deporting all these people might impact our food supply, based on data from the COVID-19 pandemic.

We actually have real data on what happens when we remove the undocumented immigrants from our agricultural workforce, because three states tried this already. My next post Some Already Tried This at Home summarizes Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama efforts to intimidate undocumented immigrants into leaving their states. This post reveals the architect, organizations, and philosophy underlying the laws passed in these states—important because this philosophy is being scaled up to a national level by the current Trump Administration.

Accompanying this post are three posts detailing what these state-level anti-immigrant laws contain and what has happened to farms and farm Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) in those states after their passage:

Arizona in the Rear View Mirror summarizes Arizona’s 2007 and 2010 laws and their impacts on the state’s farm economy.

Take a Detour around Georgia covers Georgia’s 2011 law and its impact on that state’s farm economy.

Finally, Not-So-Sweet Home Alabama covers Alabama’s 2011 law and its farm economy impact.

Lots of words on the US farm labor situation—domestic and immigrant—because US security requires a secure food supply as well as secure borders. US farms need a reliable labor supply to survive. No US farms, no US-produced food.

I plan one more post at some point in the future, proposing solutions to this tough problem, but can’t promise a date, considering all the critical issues in agriculture.

Note to my readers: This post is a companion to my third post (Some Already Tried This at Home) about the role of immigration in US agriculture, focusing on Alabama, the third state to pass a law based on immigrant “attrition through enforcement.” This 2011 Alabama law went beyond the Arizona and Georgia laws in its provisions designed to keep undocumented immigrants out of the state. In this post, I go into the details of this especially harsh law, its impact on Alabama’s farmers, and how well replacing seasoned farm workers with unemployed city-slickers and prisoners worked.

Alabama began its anti-immigrant experiment in June 2011 with HB 56. This law—later designated Alabama Act 2011-535, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act—was the harshest anti-immigrant bill passed by any state at that time. Kris Kobach, the indefatigable Kansan anti-immigration activist who wrote the anti-immigrant laws for Arizona (HB-2779 in 2007 and SB-1070 in 2010) and Georgia (HB 87 in 2011) also wrote this Alabama law, based on the philosophy of “attrition through enforcement.” Kobach claimed he finalized the text while on a hunting trip, sitting in his Kansas turkey blind. Somehow, shooting turkeys seems like an appropriate analogy for what happened next. Kobach believes that you only have to shoot (hopefully not literally) down a few undocumented immigrants to get the rest to self-deport. Unfortunately, his law shot quite a few Alabama farm balance sheets, leaving them bleeding red ink.

Alabama Act 2011-535 starts with the declaration that “The State of Alabama finds that illegal immigration is causing economic hardship and lawlessness in this state and that illegal immigration is encouraged when public agencies within this state provide public benefits without verifying immigration status.” The two “public benefits” explicitly named are law enforcement and public education.

Alabama Act 2011-535 pulled state and local police into immigration enforcement by requiring them to check citizenship and immigration status during any traffic stop or other encounter. They had to detain anyone who could not show proof of legal residence or citizenship until their status is verified. Local and state law enforcement had to turn any undocumented immigrants they detained in this way over to federal authorities to deport. The law made “unlawful presence” in the US an Alabama state Class C misdemeanor punishable with a fine and jail time (not more than 30 days). Working without work authorization also became a state Class C misdemeanor.

Alabama’s undocumented immigrant population was more settled in the state than that of its neighbor Georgia, which had just begun its own anti-immigration experiment in April 2011. That is, undocumented immigrants working on farms in Alabama usually reside in the state, whereas many of Georgia’s undocumented farm workers live outside the state and work their way across the state, following the harvest northward. Thus, 2011-535 included many provisions to make Alabama residency difficult for undocumented immigrants. Attempting to register a car, get a driver’s license, or maintain their homes’ connection to municipal water supplies without legal residency became a Class C felony. Mobile home registrations couldn’t be renewed without proof of US citizenship. Like Arizona’s 2010 law (SB-1070), the Alabama law makes giving an undocumented immigrant transportation to a job site a Class C misdemeanor punishable with a fine. Knowingly renting accommodations to an unauthorized immigrant and a long list of other “facilitations” including false documents became Class A misdemeanors. If ten or more immigrants are involved, it’s elevated to a Class C felony. The state would confiscate whatever vehicle you used for “facilitation.” Those false documents? $1000 fine for each. Alabama employers had to terminate employment of all undocumented immigrants, relying on E-Verify despite its known high error rate. Alabama employers intentionally employing undocumented immigrants became subject to a variety of state penalties beyond losing licenses and permits, such as fines of 10 times the wages claimed as a business expense and enhanced monitoring of their employment practices.

Any state resident could petition the state Attorney General to bring enforcement action against an employer, even without evidence of violations. If an undocumented immigrant was the victim of a crime, they had to be referred to federal government for deportation at the conclusion of legal proceedings of their case. Alabama courts would no longer enforce the terms of any contract made with an undocumented immigrant other than those made for transportation out of the state.

What happened after this Alabama law went into effect? Portions of the law became effective in the middle of Alabama’s 2011 harvest (September 1^st). But even before it became effective, Latino workers with work authorizations and mixed-status families fled the state along with the undocumented workers explicitly targeted by the new law. Farmers had fewer people to harvest their crops even before the law became effective. Many high touch-labor crops like tomatoes, squash, and blueberries rotted in the field.

Recruiting non-immigrants currently on unemployment from cities like Birmingham to harvest crops did not work. Farmers reported that these recruits “very seldom make a day.” Out of fifty such recruits, just one was still working in the fields after two weeks. It wasn’t just the type of work that caused them to quit, but lack of skill and physical fitness to pick and box enough produce to earn even minimum wage. Note that a lot of produce picking and packing labor is paid on a piece-rate rather than an hourly rate. Federal law requires that the piece-rate be set so that an average skilled worker meets or exceeds the federal minimum wage ($7.25/hour) for a typical eight-hour day.

This is hard work and requires much more skill than those of you getting paid to sit in a conference room expect. Is that tomato ripe enough? How do I remove it from a vine without harming either vine or tomato? How do I get it into a box rapidly without bruising it? How do I move those boxes to a truck safely? An experienced, fit crew of four can pick and box over 250 crates of tomatoes a day, earning $150 each for the day, equivalent to an hourly rate of $18.75 per hour. One 25-person team of people recruited from inner-city unemployment rolls picked and packed 200 crates in a day—and each member of that crew got only $24 for the day at piece-rate, about $3 per hour. Hardly a living wage, and definitely no incentive for someone to go off unemployment compensation, even with transportation to the farm included. How much are you willing to pay for tomatoes at your local grocer?

Alabama also tried a prison work-release program to help harvest crops in 2011-2012. It was no more effective than their program to move people from unemployment into ag jobs. No one was willing to try the Soviet approach of emptying the schools into the fields at harvest time, so farmers lost their crops. Some farmers reported losing hundreds of thousands of dollars of produce. But the Alabama unemployment rate dropped from its summer 2011 high of 9.3% to 8.1% after the law became effective. Some people thought that was evidence that large numbers of unemployed Alabamans were taking jobs that unauthorized immigrants had previously filled. Well, not so fast. There are two ways to decrease the unemployment percentage: (1) create more jobs or (2) reduce the number of people looking for jobs. In Alabama’s case, two-thirds of the decrease in the unemployment rate was due to the workforce shrinking. Only one third of the drop came from the creation of new jobs and that rate was similar to the national trend as the economy recovered slowly from the 2007-2008 recession. Those new jobs were in the automotive sector, not in agriculture.

After losing a fortune on unharvested high-labor crops, Alabama farmers switched to lower-labor and lower-value crops the following year. Farm equipment sales associated with crops like tomatoes went down. Rural economies based on high-touch labor crops suffered. The 2012 loss to the state’s total (all-industry) real gross domestic product commonly attributed to the Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act was $11 billion, about a 6% decline. Tax revenues fell, and not only from unauthorized immigrants, but businesses impacted by their departure. Especially interesting was the violent crime rate: it rose! Law enforcement was overwhelmed with enforcing 2011-535. They could not de-prioritize immigration enforcement to handle violent crime because of the provision that allowed anyone to sue them for not enforcing 2011-535. And, the immigrant crime victims stopped reporting crimes and assisting law enforcement, fearing deportation. So much for protecting Alabama taxpayers and citizens from crime.

Ironically, the law resulted in very bad publicity for the state when an executive of the new, job-creating Mecedes plant was arrested after a traffic stop made because his rental car’s license plate was incorrect. The German citizen was not carrying proof that he was in the US legally when he was stopped. Then a Japanese Honda executive was arrested. Some foreign-owned companies considering locating new facilities in Alabama cancelled these plans. Missouri tried to woo international investors away from Alabama by advertising that the “Show Me” state was safer than the “Show Me Your Papers” state.

Legal Alabama residents were dismayed to discover that every routine interaction with the state and public utilities required citizenship proof from everyone. Time to get a driver’s license renewed or a utility connection went from minutes to hours. Government and utility service administration costs sky rocketed. Citizens were not happy: some of the law’s most ardent supporters lost re-election bids. Mr. Kobach’s offer of a consulting contract to help the state defend the law was rejected.

The original bill required public schools to report each student’s citizenship and immigration status. If the student was the child of an unauthorized immigrant and needed English as a Second Language (ESL) instruction, the school had to report that student even if they were a US citizen. Thousands of children stopped attending public schools in Alabama, and not just undocumented immigrants. Mixed status families left, too. Documented unauthorized immigrant students had to leave Alabama’s public universities. This interrupted education will reduce the earnings potential and future tax revenue from these immigrants, wherever they end up. Fortunately, the law’s requirement for public schools to report undocumented children and US-born children of undocumented immigrants was shortly stopped by the courts. Courts eventually also overturned the requirement to carry documentation at all times, the criminalization of seeking work without authorization, and the ban on legal enforcement of contracts with undocumented immigrants.

So how does this show up in Alabama’s farm Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP)? Chart AL-1 shows that 2011 and 2012 were very bad years for Alabama farmers. But you may note, the state farm RGDP was trending down several years before the 2011 law reduced the farm workforce. There’s a 66% drop in Alabama’s farm RGDP between its 2005 peak and the 2011 trough. The rainfall (Chart AL-2) and drought indices shows that 2006-2011 were rough years, weather-wise. 2007 was the driest year since 1954, the second driest year in the 130 years with good rainfall records. 2006 and 2010 were damn dry, too. Then 2009 was the third wettest year in that 130-year period. Alabama flood damages that year topped $250M. Even the Alabama State House flooded. Year 2011 was a little shy of average rainfall, but 217 tornadoes hit Alabama in 2011, most in the spring. They caused hundreds of deaths and over $4 billion in damage, mainly in cities and towns. Yet 2011 was also a record-breaking year for tornado losses in a dozen other states, and those states’ farm RGDP did not fall. The anti-immigration law’s abrupt reduction of the harvest labor force clobbered Alabama’s farm gross income that year. Alabama’s 2011 farm RGDP was down 46% ($700M) from 2010. The state’s 2012 farm RGDP was only slightly better.

The long-term impact of 2011-535 shows up in other data. The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Census showed a very promising trend beginning in the mid-1990s toward more, smaller farms. Alabama farmers added over 11,000 new farm operations—a nearly 30% increase between 1992 and 2007—with an accompanying increase in vegetable and fruit acreage. This trend reversed sometime between 2007 and 2012, with farm operations re-consolidating to lower numbers and larger average size than the 1992 numbers by 2022. The 2022 vegetable acreage is down 67% from its peak, with 15% fewer farms growing vegetables. Fruit acreage is now only slightly over half what it was 20 years ago. Commodity acreage—cotton, wheat, corn, and soybeans—had declined from 1992 to 2007, but the acreage in these crops increased quickly by 2012. From there, it’s only gone up. It’s now higher than the 1992 numbers. Commodity crops are low labor, but you must have a lot of acres to amortize that half-million dollar combine. Once you make that purchase, you are in it for the long term. Because the overall agriculture-dedicated acreage has increased only 2% since 1992, it appears that many Alabama cattle and hog operations also converted to these commodity crops and meat poultry—just in time to be hammered by tariffs (2018) and avian flu (2021-present).

Unfortunately, the USDA farm census’ five-year interval (2002, 2007, and 2012) leaves me unable to completely separate all the effects of the anti-immigration legislation from the 2008 recession and other factors between 2007 and 2012. As a secondary factor example, over a century of intensive cotton farming badly depleted the soil and that bill is finally coming due as fertilizer costs have climbed dramatically, with one price surge coinciding with this law’s peak effect. Opening the aperture up a bit and comparing Alabama’s all-industry RGDP with that of other states shows that Alabama’s overall economic growth lags the state average significantly from 2005 onward. Its business climate is ranked 45^th out of 50. So, Alabama’s precipitous 2011 farm RGDP decline can’t be blamed entirely on 2011-535, but it was the major cause.

Alabama’s farm RGDP recovered somewhat after 2012 as court cases and legislative actions removed the most draconian of the law’s provisions. But once-burned, twice-shy farmers were not rushing back to high-labor crops despite their higher market value. The huge investment in commodity crop equipment such as planters and combines also prevents a shift back. Alabama farm RGDP has averaged 12.24% lower for 2012-2023 than for 1997-2010. If we include the first (transition) year of the law—2011—in the post-2011-535 Act average (2011-2023), Alabama’s farm RGDP loss averages 15.5%.

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References

From the Center for Immigration Studies: Attrition Through Enforcement

The Turkey Blind Story: Kris Kobach, the Kansas lawyer behind Alabama's immigration law - al.com

The Complete Text of the Law: Act-2011-535.pdf

Description of the Law Alabama HB 56 - Wikipedia

Repercussions of the 2011-535:

Efforts to replace immigrant workers in Alabama fields coming up short - al.com

alabama_immigration_disaster.pdf

How America's harshest immigration law failed

German Mercedes-Benz Executive Arrested Under Alabama’s Immigration Law (Updated) – ThinkProgress

US Farm Real GDP: Real Gross Domestic Product: Farms (111-112) in the United States (USFARMRGSP) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Alabama Farm Real GDP: Real Gross Domestic Product: Farms (111-112) in Alabama (ALFARMRGSP) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Alabama Farm Census Data from USDA NASS:

2012 – Alabama – AgCensus

2012-Alabama-alv1.pdf

Other Relevant Data:

The 2018-2019 dip in Farm Real GDP:

Chart: U.S. Farmers Lost Billions to Trump-Era Retaliatory Tariffs | Statista

Fertilizer Costs:

Producer Price Index by Industry: Nitrogenous Fertilizer Manufacturing (PCU325311325311) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Note to my readers: This post is a companion to my third post (Some Already Tried This At Home) about the role of immigration in US agriculture, focusing on Georgia, the second state to pass a law based on immigrant “attrition through enforcement.” This 2011 Georgia law was designed to keep undocumented immigrants out of the state. In this post, I go into the details of the law, its impact on Georgia’s farmers, and how well replacing seasoned farm workers with unemployed probationers worked.

Far removed from the southern US border, Georgia joined Arizona in the anti-immigrant frenzy by passing an attrition through enforcement immigration law in April 2011. Unlike in Arizona, anti-immigrant sentiments in Georgia could not be blamed on a surge of illegal crossings and violence spilling over the international border from Mexican drug cartels. Still, Georgia’s new governor—Nathan Deal—had won election by whipping up latent anti-immigrant sentiments in his 2010 campaign. Governor Deal was not a newcomer to exploiting fear of immigration. As a US Congressman, he introduced legislation into the US House in 2005 to cancel the birthright citizenship clause of the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution. Obviously, that did not pass, but in retrospect, it was a harbinger of things to come when he went home to Georgia in 2010.

Georgia’s HB 87, Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011 was based on Arizona’s SB-1070. Our friend Kris Kobach—author of the Arizona law—helped Georgia legislators write it. He slightly modified the Arizona language being challenged in court at that time. For example, instead of requiring that law officers verify legal residency, the Georgia version authorizes them to do so. It also limits requirements for employers to use E-Verify to those involved in state contracts. Georgia greatly increased penalties for undocumented immigrants using false papers to get a job. The Arizona penalty is 3 years, 9 months in prison, while the Georgia penalty became up to 15 years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines.

A large portion of the Georgia harvest workforce doesn’t live in Georgia. Rather, many workers are migratory contract labor, following harvest labor needs north from Florida through Georgia and then farther north every year. It was easy for those workers to skip their usual Georgia work stops. Even immigrants with work authorizations felt unwelcome and detoured around Georgia. Thus, this law cost Georgia about 50% of its agricultural workforce almost overnight.

Governor Deal set up a program to help farmers employ convicted criminals in probationary status. These probationers—numbering about 100,000 in 2011—had an unemployment rate around 25%. Turns out that harvesting watermelons requires a lot of skill as well as physical fitness. You must be able to quickly identify a ripe melon, separate it from the vine without damaging the vine or melon, and throw the ripe melon to a co-worker on a wagon moving through the field. The worker catching it on the wagon decides which bin the melon belongs in and gently puts it there. No one gets paid for smashing melons! Once the wagon is full, the melons must be sorted again while moving on a conveyor. Then they must be boxed, and the boxes must be loaded on trucks. The probationary felons didn’t last an entire day. At least they left with a new appreciation for farm workers! Maybe the politicians who voted for HB 87 should have tried a few days in the field—they might have left with more respect for farm workers, too.

The Georgia Agribusiness Council estimated produce crop losses starting at $140 million in the first year to $1 billion per year after that. Blueberries, blackberries, peaches, onions, cucumbers, and watermelons were abandoned in the fields. As Megan McArdle put it so well in 2011 (The Atlantic): “If workers are needed to run a farm, then zero workers is the same as zero crops, and zero farm. Some labor may be replaced with capital, but in other cases the farms might just shut down.” She’s not exactly a bleeding-heart liberal.

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Farm Census for Georgia—done at five-year intervals including 2007 and 2012—supports Ms. McArdle’s point about farms just shutting down. A quarter of the Georgia farms growing vegetables in 2007 had stopped by 2012. The 2012 vegetable acreage was the lowest in 20 years. The decline in high-labor crops continued after 2012. A third of the 2012 vegetable operations were gone by 2017. Total Georgia farm acreage declined, too.

Chart GA-1 shows Georgia’s farm Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP, or GDP adjusted for inflation). Georgia’s farm RGDP exceeded that of the US average for all states, even in the extreme drought years of 2006 and 2008, until 2010. A check of Georgia’s all-industry RGDP shows that the Great Recession began early in Georgia and ran deep, but Georgia farmers still out-performed the US state average through that general economic downturn.

Now take a look at Chart GA-2—rainfall and farm RGDP—to make sense of Georgia farmers’ extreme challenges during this period. The years 2006-2007 brought the worst drought in fifty years. Irrigated acres increased significantly during this period, reducing the impact of rainfall on crop production. Then 2009 was the wettest year in nearly 50 years, claiming 10 lives with material destruction around $500M. The low 2010 farm RGDP was at least partially due to the flood recovery. The 2010-2012 seasons were not quite as dry as the record drought in 2006-2007, but they were really dry in Georga. Yet the farm RGDP in 2011—when HB 87 became effective—was lower than in the drier years of 2006-2007. The HB 87 labor shock in 2011 appears to have been a killing blow for many farms with a large investment in high-labor crops. The USDA Agriculture Census shows that hired farm labor costs increased about 24% between the 2007 and 2012 censuses. Contract farm labor costs (including temporary harvest help) increased about 44% in the same period.

In 2012, the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS) case Arizona v United States blocked many provisions of the Georgia law—including the provision that allowed police to investigate the immigration status of people who have not been arrested. Georgia vegetable acreage has rebounded since 2012, but total farm acreage did not. Some farmers just gave up completely, while others switched to lower-labor crops. The RGDP recovery in 2015 followed by the dive after 2018 shows that many Georgia farmers switched to commodity crops in the period after HB 87 became effective. Georgia commodity crops include peanuts and cotton as well as corn and beans. Peanut product exports fell by a factor of 15 after the 2018 tariff imposition.

Today’s surviving Georgia vegetable farmers (46% of the 2007 peak) now each farm more acreage, probably after investing more in machinery and joining the H-2A visa program. Machinery can cut labor costs on produce headed for processing (think tomato sauce, some bruised fruit is okay), but vegetables destined for the “fresh” market remain labor-intensive (think sliced tomatoes on your sandwich, bruises yuck). Today, the US issues over three times the number of H-2A visas as in 2010. Georgia now ranks third in the number of H-2A visas issued each year. About 67% of these seasonal guest workers work on vegetable, melon, and tree nut farms. As you will recall from an earlier post, costs of H-2A participation and compliance are considerable, favoring large operations with seasonal labor demands. I applaud Georgia farmers for employing people legally; however, the H-2A visa program has become one more force driving consolidation of farms.

Even with many provisions blocked in 2012 and the increase in H-2A visa participation, Georgia’s agriculture economy has not recovered to its prior levels. It fell from its ranking as Georgia’s number one industry prior to HB 87. The average farm RGDP for the 12 years prior to HB 87 was about $222 million dollars greater per year than the average 12 years since. Georgia’s farm RGDP has averaged 7.7% lower for 2012-2023 than for 1997-2010—despite the 1997-2010 period including five awful droughts compared to only two drought years in the 2012-2023 span.

If we include the first year of the law—2011—in the post-HB 87 average, Georgia’s farm RGDP loss is 9.4%. I had mixed feelings about including the transition year, so I’m leaving you with both calculations.

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References

From the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS): Attrition Through Enforcement

Governor Deal’s Bill to Eliminate Birthright Citizens: https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/698/

Georgia 2011 HB-56 Text: C:\pdf\116631.wpd

Georgia House Bill 87 - Wikipedia

Georgia's Harsh Immigration Law Costs Millions in Unharvested Crops - The Atlantic

The Nation: The High Cost Of Anti-Immigrant Laws : NPR

Georgia Farm RGDP: Real Gross Domestic Product: Farms (111-112) in Georgia (GAFARMRGSP) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

US Farm Real GDP: Real Gross Domestic Product: Farms (111-112) in the United States (USFARMRGSP) | FRED | St. Louis Fed

Prison Probationers Fail as Farmworkers: Ga. sends criminals to replace undocumented immigrants - POLITICO

Ga. immigrant crackdown backfires - POLITICO

Georgia Farm Census Data from USDA NASS: st13_1_001_001.pdf

Weather Impacts: Average Precipitation in Georgia by Year and https://www.drought.gov

Explaining the 2018-2019 dip in Farm Real GDP:

Chart: U.S. Farmers Lost Billions to Trump-Era Retaliatory Tariffs | Statista

Frustrated with the 2006 failure of immigration reform in Congress, Arizona decided to try state laws based on the “attrition through enforcement” philosophy to reduce their undocumented immigrant population. Recall that Kansas attorney Kris Kobach was heavily promoting this philosophy under the banner of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), a group that says it is pro-immigrant while spear-heading opposition to any immigration law reforms. Arizona state legislators passed Kobach-authored immigration laws in 2007 and 2010. This is interesting because CIS had been a key part of a successful campaign to defeat the 2006 reform attempt. But at that time, over half of all US federal immigration enforcement arrests were taking place in Arizona, so I can understand their “Do something about illegal immigration! Anything!” mindset. Drug-related violence, including kidnapping, was rising there. Arizonans had valid concerns about the Mexican drug cartels invading their state.

The 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (HB-2779), also known as the Employer Sanctions Law, was the first anti-immigration law not vetoed by Arizona’s governor. The original law (now Section 23 in the Arizona code) made it illegal for an employer to “knowingly or intentionally” hire a non-citizen employee or contractor who did not have a federal work authorization. Well, it makes sense to cut off the money flow at its source.

The 2007 Arizona law required employers to verify the legal status of workers with E-Verify, a tool developed by the federal government whose use is mostly optional at the federal level. Federal law already requires employers to verify workers’ work authorization status, but federal enforcement was rare, so Arizona decided to make using E-Verify a state requirement so the state could enforce work authorization. Under this law, employer failure to verify workers’ status resulted in state-issued business license suspension (first offense) or permanent loss (second offense). This penalty is NOT merely a fine that could be factored into the cost of doing business. More than one violation leads to an end to your business, period. Arizona’s definition of a business license includes state incorporation and partnership papers. Unfortunately, E-Verify was immature at the time. It typically identified 10% of documented immigrants and naturalized US citizens as unauthorized. Oops.

Challenges to this 2007 law went all the way to the Supreme Court of the US (SCOTUS). In Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, SCOTUS upheld the law as a “licensing” law instead of an immigration law that would infringe on the federal government’s authority in immigration enforcement. Apparently, Arizona did not aggressively enforce this 2007 law against farms after it went into effect January 1^st, 2008. None of the recorded enforcement cases are against farms; however, about 92,000 unauthorized (both documented and undocumented) immigrants left the state between its enactment and 2011. This 92,000-worker loss is only the portion of the labor force that cannot be attributed directly to the Great Recession. Some speculate that the self-deportation was driven by employers discriminating against Hispanic workers, legally working and otherwise, out of worry about losing their business licenses, rather than by state enforcement. Most undocumented immigrants who remained in Arizona became self-employed in the underground labor market.

Arizona’s 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB-1070) and its amendment to address concerns about racial profiling (HB-2162) was the next Arizona experiment in attrition through enforcement. Actually, it was the next experiment not vetoed by the governor, because Governor Napolitano vetoed two prior versions before she became Secretary of Homeland Security in 2008. Her successor, Governor Jan Brewer, allowed SB-1070 and HB-2162 to become law. SB-1070’s first paragraph states that “the intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona”—just in case anyone was wondering who started this.

Arizona SB-1070 was the first state-level attempt to criminalize an undocumented immigrants’ mere presence. SB-1070 brought state and local police into federal immigration enforcement by requiring them to check citizenship and immigration status during traffic stops or other actions. US federal law requires that non-citizens over the age of 14 in the US for more than 30 days to register with the federal government. Non-citizens must always carry the registration evidence. SB-1070 makes presence in Arizona without carrying that registration—or any government-issued documentation requiring proof of legal presence in the US as a requirement for issuance—a state misdemeanor with fines and jail time. Law enforcement officers must detain anyone who cannot show proof of legal residence or citizenship until their status is verified. The original law authorized warrantless arrests of people suspected of being undocumented immigrants. The law obligates local and state law enforcement to turn any unauthorized immigrants they detained for any reason over to federal authorities to deport. It prohibits any interference with the enforcement of federal immigration laws. Any legal Arizona resident can sue any government entity that they suspect of shirking federal immigration law enforcement. Furthermore, any Arizona agency granting licenses, services, or “any public benefit” can share an applicant’s immigration status with any other agency. This provision is especially interesting in light of the new hard-fought arrangement for the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to share taxpayer data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In its original form, SB-1070 also criminalized seeking or performing work without a work authorization. And it criminalized assisting undocumented workers. Giving an undocumented immigrant transportation to a job site became a misdemeanor punishable with a fine. If you give ten or more immigrants a ride to a job, it’s a Class 6 felony. Stopping on a public road to pick up an undocumented worker is also a crime—a provision to stop day-laborer pick-ups. Oh, and the state confiscates whatever vehicle you used for the pickup. Employers must terminate employment of all undocumented immigrants, relying on E-Verify. Employers knowingly employing undocumented immigrants are subject to a variety of penalties including losing licenses and permits and monitoring of their employment practices. Any state resident can petition the state Attorney General to bring enforcement action against an employer—even without evidence of violations—encouraging vigilante action. Fortunately, the petitioner can be punished for knowingly false or frivolous accusations. If an undocumented immigrant is the victim of a crime, they will be referred to federal government for deportation at the conclusion of legal proceedings of their case. This provision has the effect of leaving undocumented immigrants without protection from criminals.

Chart AZ-1 compares the Arizona farm Real Gross Domestic Product (RGDP) with the average US state’s farm RGDP for 1997-2023. RGDP is GDP corrected for inflation. The average US state’s farm RGDP bobbed a bit but trended upward during the Great Recession in 2008 while Arizona’s fell 30% from its 2007 value.

Because Arizona’s climate is so different from that in midwest and eastern states, we should also check Arizona Farm RGDP against an average of its neighbors (California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Utah). Chart AZ-2 shows that comparison. Arizona’s farm RGDP falls below its neighbors’ farm RGDP beginning with 2008. I flagged the tariff imposition later in the decade on these charts because low-labor commodity crop exports got hammered by retaliatory tariffs, driving domestic prices down. The fact that Arizona’s Farm RGDP fell then is a symptom of farmers shifting from domestically consumed high-labor produce to low-labor commodities with large export shares.

The Supreme Court (in Arizona v. United States, 567 US 387) struck down SB-1070 provisions where federal law preempts state law in 2012. This ruling prevents states from punishing the employee for working without work authorization. It does not allow states to criminalize non-citizens’ seeking or performing work without authorization. The SCOTUS ruling also prevents states from making an unauthorized immigrant a criminal for just being in the state, which is the intent of state laws requiring every non-citizen to carry immigration registration documents. Remember that federal law makes failure to carry registration documents a federal misdemeanor. This federal misdemeanor does not make an unauthorized immigrant a criminal; it only makes the immigrant subject to deportation. The Supreme Court case also stopped state law enforcement officers from making warrantless arrests of any immigrant (authorized as well as unauthorized) on mere suspicion of committing a deportable offense.

Even with the Supreme Court striking down these key provisions in 2012, the 2010 law kept life difficult for undocumented immigrants in Arizona. We don’t see a drop in RGDP in 2010 because the farm workforce was already decimated. These two laws affected more than the undocumented workforce that were their intended targets. Many legal immigrants and Hispanic US citizens were concerned about or impacted by racial profiling. Many left the state. The cumulative effect was a long-term loss of about 15% of the agricultural workforce. Impacts went beyond the year-round workforce. Before these laws, Arizona farmers typically hired about 50,000 temporary workers during the winter harvest. After these laws, many workers who follow the harvest from state-to-state skipped Arizona. Farmers can’t survive very many harvests rotting in the field.

Labor costs increased. This was good news for the remaining workers; however, net farm income dropped about 20% between 2007 and 2012. Sadly, a trend toward more and smaller farms in the 2007-2012 time has reversed. Total farm acreage hasn’t changed much, but the farms have gotten larger and fewer as smaller operators could not survive the changes. Arizona farmers switched to lower-labor commodity crops. These crops don’t make farmers as much money per acre, but the large machinery investment required prevents a quick pivot back. You can see this in Arizona’s farm RGDP (Chart AZ-1). It stagnated while the US state average farm RGDP increased. And you can see the switch in the RGDP drop after the 2018 trade war began, as commodity crops are more likely to be exported than fresh produce.

The long-term impact of these laws and the restructuring in the state’s agriculture? Arizona farm RGDP for 2008-2023 averaged nearly 14% lower than it averaged for 1997-2007. If we include the first (transition) year of the law—2011—in the post-2011-535 average, Alabama’s farm RGDP loss is 15.5%. Yikes!

References

From the Center for Immigration Studies: Center for Immigration Studies; Attrition Through Enforcement

Failed 2006 Attempt at Federal Immigration Reform: Immigration Bill Dies in Senate

FAIR: Federation for American Immigration Reform - Wikipedia

Kris Kobach - Wikipedia

Arizona “anti-immigrant” laws and their effects:

David S. Broder - Arizona's Border Burden

Text of 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act: HB<b><b><b>2779</b> </b> </b> - 481R - C Ver

2007 Law Summary: ILW.COM - immigration news: Arizona Adopts Nation's Strictest Workplace Law To Assure Employees Are Authorized To Work

Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting: Article: Supreme Court Upholds Legal Arizona Worke.. | migrationpolicy.org

Lessons from the 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act - Public Policy Institute of California

Text of 2010 SB-1070: Microsoft Word - SB1070 as amended by HB2162.doc

Microsoft Word - The Impact of the Arizona Senate Bill 1070 on Local Business.doc

Supreme Court Cases: Arizona v. United States - Wikipedia

Arizona Farm Census Data from USDA NASS:

USDA - National Agricultural Statistics Service - Census of Agriculture

2012-Arizona-st04_1_001_001.pdf

Note to my readers: This is my third post on unauthorized immigration in agriculture. The first post covers the big picture of unauthorized immigration. The second post zooms in on the farm and food contributions of these workers. You don’t need to read the first two posts to understand this one, but I encourage you to read at least the summaries of the first two.

This post examines what happened to farmers when three states decided to reduce their undocumented immigrant population. It also covers the origin of these laws, as that’s important to understand what’s happening today across the US. I went beyond the anecdotes—of which there are many!—and dug into data over the decades including these laws. So this post is accompanied by three additional posts that dive into the laws and the conditions in Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama.

People are speculating about what will happen to the US farm economy if all unauthorized immigrant farm workers are deported. But we don’t need to speculate. Three states conducted experiments in removing undocumented workers and their families beginning in 2007: Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia. We now have over a decade of data on what happens to farm real gross domestic product (RGDP) after you scare off the majority of your farm workers. No mystery, no speculation. This post is a summary of these state experiments in removing undocumented immigrants, their motivating philosophy, and the implications for the national experiment unfolding as you read this. I have published a detailed analysis for each of these states—Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama—into the laws and their impact on farmers there for those who want to dig deeper into this particular manure pile.

First, a quick terminology review: undocumented immigrants are a subset of unauthorized immigrants. Unauthorized immigrants are non-citizens who don’t have permanent residency status (aka “green cards”). They often have documentation including social security numbers, work authorizations, temporary protected status (TPS), pending asylum cases, and even pending residency. Undocumented immigrants are the subset of unauthorized immigrants who don’t have any documentation—for example, no work authorization and no social security numbers. The state laws analyzed here target only the completely undocumented portion of the unauthorized immigrant population, so I use the term undocumented immigrant most frequently in this and the state-specific posts. At the beginning of this year, about 30% of the unauthorized immigrant population was documented; however, the Trump Administration has been systematically stripping the documentation away from many unauthorized immigrants by revoking TPS and ignoring asylum laws.

So why was 2007 a pivotal year in immigration enforcement? Remember from my February post (Chart 4) that more people were crossing US borders illegally in 2006 than at the peak of the early 2020’s surge! Unauthorized immigration in 2006 was—both by numbers and percentage of our population—a BIGGER problem than it is in 2025. Unlike the 2024 failure of bipartisan immigration reform which failed in the US Senate, the 2006 reform attempt actually passed the US Senate. The US House defeated it by simply refusing to bring the bill to a vote. Senator John McCain (a co-sponsor of the bill) predicted a surge of state-level anti-immigrant activism after the failure of President Bush’s and the Senate’s bipartisan 2006 attempt at federal immigration reform.

Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is the mastermind of this state and local anti-immigration activist legislation. He has led a 20-plus year campaign to make being an unauthorized and completely undocumented immigrant a state-level crime. He was looking for an opening to pounce in 2006. Mr. Kobach was only a law school professor when he started this campaign. He has been counsel for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group which campaigned hard and successfully against the failed 2006 bipartisan immigration reform. FAIR has some problematic ties to white supremacy groups and somewhat more acceptable involvement in the US English language movement of the 1980s (which has made a comeback with President Trump’s Executive Order 14224, 3/1/2025).

Attorney General Kobach ascribes to a philosophy called attrition through enforcement which crystalized around 2006. He may be the original architect of this policy—his resume suggests that he’s one very smart guy. Harvard, Oxford, and Yale degrees smart. Attrition through enforcement is promoted as a cost-effective alternative to mass deportation. It’s closer to what the Trump Administration is doing than the much-advertised mass deportation. Why? Because no one actually wants to pay hundreds of billions of dollars to deport people who are working hard and paying taxes and obeying all the laws other than visa laws. That’s not my opinion: Americans tell pollsters this all the time.

The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) appears to be the source of the term attrition through enforcement. According to its own website, CIS is “an independent, non-partisan, non-profit research organization. It’s the nation's only think tank devoted exclusively to research and policy analysis of the economic, social, demographic, fiscal, and other impacts of immigration on the United States” that is “low immigration but pro-immigrant.” Mr. Kobach does not hold a formal position in CIS, but a search of their website with name gets over a thousand hits. He’s the featured guest on a recent CIS podcast, too.

The CIS has been around since 1985, formed just before unauthorized immigration hit its all-time high in 1986. The founder of FAIR—Dr. John Tantor, a Michigan opthamologist—also founded CIS. He was also involved in founding a third anti-immigration organization called NumbersUSA in the 1990s. Apparently, CIS formed in opposition to President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty, which they considered a motivator for future unauthorized immigration. Well, common sense suggests that forgiving certain behavior would encourage more of the forgiven behavior. The data doesn’t confirm that here, however. I can’t explain why unauthorized immigration decreased after the 1986 amnesty, except to note that the following administrations were quite aggressive at deporting people (Who Will Be Deported? - by Kristin Farry, Chart 5). FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA were the major forces behind the 2006 immigration reform failure, branding it as “an amnesty bill.”

CIS says that securing the border and deporting unauthorized immigrants using due process under US law is not going to eliminate our unauthorized immigrant problem. This is especially true if the deportation effort prioritizes immigrants who have committed crimes under our current laws—probably because these immigrants are less likely to commit crimes as US citizens are. CIS’ webpage states: “The data collected by the Center during the past quarter-century has led many of our researchers to conclude that current, high levels of immigration are making it harder to achieve such important national objectives as better public schools, a cleaner environment, homeland security, and a living wage for every native-born and immigrant worker. These data may support criticism of US immigration policies, but they do not justify ill feelings toward our immigrant community.” Unfortunately, someone has felt it necessary to create ill feelings toward “our immigrant community” in the past few years to gain the mandate for complete elimination of our immigrant community.

The elements of the attrition through enforcement strategy include: “mandatory workplace verification of immigration status; measures to curb misuse of Social Security and IRS identification numbers; partnerships with state and local law enforcement officials; expanded entry-exit recording under US-VISIT [a biometrics identity-confirmation system]; increased non-criminal removals; and state and local laws to discourage illegal settlement.”

Remember that being an unauthorized immigrant without any documentation is not a federal crime. It’s a federal civil offense. Attrition through enforcement consists of first making everything an unauthorized immigrant has to do to survive here a crime instead of just a civil offense. This includes working for anyone without work authorization. Federal law imposes civil and criminal penalties on employers for employing workers without work authorization (aka “undocumented”); however, federal law does not outlaw an undocumented immigrant from seeking work or working. Attrition through enforcement (1) criminalizes working without work authorization and (2) criminalizes any actions by anyone in a community that might help undocumented workers get to work or survive. After you criminalize just being an undocumented immigrant, you rev up enforcement of the new crimes, with great fanfare. And incidentally, now every undocumented immigrant has a criminal record and can be “prioritized” for deportation. If an immigrant has a pending asylum application, a state or local criminal conviction under these new laws can jeopardize that—only “serious” crimes are supposed to be disqualifying, but there’s some gray area on what this is.

Creating state laws and local ordinances like this deputizes state and local law enforcement—without any federal help or reimbursement—to make the daily lives of undocumented immigrants impossible. The goal is to get immigrants to leave (“self-deport”) rather than get arrested for just surviving. This, CIS argues, is much cheaper on a per-immigrant basis than arresting each immigrant and giving them the due process prescribed by current US federal law.

So how did this work for farmers in the states that have tried this?

Arizona

Arizona stepped up to be the first state test case, passing Kobach-authored immigration laws in 2007 and 2010. The 2007 Legal Arizona Workers Act (HB-2779) became effective January 1^st, 2008. Arizona’s 2010 Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (SB-1070) and its amendment to address concerns about racial profiling (HB-2162) was the next Arizona experiment in attrition through enforcement. They went into effect July 1^st, 2010. While much of Arizona’s 2010 law was overturned by SCOTUS in 2012, Arizona agriculture never recovered to its pre-2008 level. For 2009-2023, Arizona farm RGDP averaged nearly 14% lower than it averaged for 1997-2007.

Georgia

Despite being far removed from the southern US border, Georgia joined passed an immigration law in April 2011. Georgia’s law (HB 87, Illegal Immigration Reform and Enforcement Act of 2011) was closely based on Arizona’s SB-1070. Our friend Kris Kobach also helped Georgia legislators write it, modifying SB-1070 language being challenged in court.

The average farm RGDP for the 12 years prior to the 2011 law was about $222 million dollars greater per year than the average 12 years since. Georgia’s farm RGDP has averaged 7.7% lower for 2012-2023 than for 1997-2010. If we include the first (transition) year of the law—2011—in the post-HB 87 average, Georgia’s farm RGDP loss is 9.4%.

Alabama

Alabama began its anti-immigration experiment in June 2011 with HB 56, considered the harshest anti-immigrant bill ever. Mr. Kobach said he finished is while sitting in his Kansas turkey blind during a hunting trip. This 2011 bill—Alabama Act 2011-535, the Beason-Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act)—was the harshest of the three. It made all the things a person must to do to live somewhere (get a driver’s license, rent a home, connect utilities to a home) a state crime.

Alabama farm RGDP has been 12.24% lower for (2012- 2023) than for 1997-2010. If we include the first (transition) year of the law—2011—in the post-2011-535 average, Alabama’s farm RGDP loss is 15.5%.

Fast Forward to 2025

The US state average for farm RGDP—which includes farm RGDP for Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama—for 2012-2023 was 67.4% higher than it was for 1997-2010. In contrast to this growing US farm real GDP, all three states we’re examining show significant drops (7.7% to 15.5%) and eventual stagnation in their farm RGDP after these laws. Their farm economies never recovered to the levels prior to these laws. Take a look at Chart 1 comparing the average farm RGDP of these three states with the US state average:

I haven’t yet studied the food processing industry in those three states during this period, but the Obama administration’s deportation success can give us a clue of what we might find. President Obama’s Secure Communities program demonstrated that removing 500,000 non-criminal unauthorized immigrants from the labor pool eliminates employment for about 44,000 US-born workers. How does unemployment propagate out from removing farm workers? Undocumented immigrant farmworkers (usually unintentionally hired) enable their farmer-employers to purchase more seed, fertilizer, equipment, and barns. These workers need homes and clothes and food and education. Their colleagues in food processing keep meatpacking, dairy-processing, bakeries, and beverage facilities churning out value-added products. These plants employ sales, marketing, accounting, and organizing staff. They need buildings and equipment. Unauthorized immigrants often staff restaurant kitchens that keep US-born waiters and restaurant hosts employed. And of course, all of us living in the US benefit from inexpensive, safe domestically-grown food. Many US citizens have been net winners due to a cheap labor pool that doesn’t complain about working conditions or wages.

These “wins” do NOT make unauthorized-undocumented immigration an ethical or economically-sustainable solution to our farm labor scarcity. Some US citizens have been losers in this long-running dodge of federal laws by employers and immigrants without work authorizations. The undocumented workforce loads community infrastructure. Both immigrants and citizens need housing, in short supply in rural communities. Housing costs in the US have risen much faster than food costs. High-cost housing in a rural economy where most jobs are low wage means your grown children won’t stay to raise your grandchildren near you—hence the empty elementary and middle school classrooms and increased gentrification in rural communities like mine. Long-term residents are lining up at local food pantries as housing costs eat up funds once spent on groceries.

If an unscrupulous employer dumps an injured undocumented farm worker in the emergency room of a struggling rural hospital, everyone in that community pays, either in higher bills for their own medical care or in higher taxes. Unauthorized immigrants may be less likely to commit crimes than US citizens, but if they bring young families, their children may need extra public education resources like English as a Second Language (ESL). Public schools are the biggest budget item in most rural communities. Empty classrooms are cheaper than full classrooms.

In my opinion, the biggest problem unauthorized (documented and undocumented) immigrants create is housing—both cost and availability. Ironically, home construction in Virginia relies heavily on unauthorized immigrant labor. In my area, unauthorized immigrants are more likely to be building or repairing houses than feeding chickens or picking produce. My neighbors in the building trades complain that unauthorized immigrants reduce their income by undercutting their rates. That’s the “economic hardship” mentioned in the Alabama law. Sometimes undocumented immigrants get the work done for less by short-cutting building codes, not pulling permits, and dodging inspections. Yet, anyone who has called a plumber or electrician lately has also complained of long waiting times. Which industry’s disruption from mass will have the greatest impact on US citizens?

In my experience, problems don’t get solved until all the stakeholders have a vested interest in solving them. Or at least, until the stakeholders stop profiting from the problem’s existence. Employers have used undocumented immigrants as a short-term solution to the problem of our changing US demographics. Undocumented immigrants are not only cheaper to employ but employing them intentionally requires a lot less paperwork than employing US citizens or immigrants with work permits. At least, there is less paperwork until you get caught. But are you seeing any videos of ICE agents arresting employers? On paper, federal penalties for employers of undocumented immigrants are more severe than federal penalties for being an undocumented worker. Yet, President Trump has pardoned some high-profile employers convicted for intentionally hiring undocumented workers. What is the message that employers are taking away from this? Lax enforcement of federal employer sanctions motivated the first Arizona law (HB-2779 in 2007), which revoked state business licenses of those hiring undocumented workers.

The US appetite for undocumented immigrants’ labor has also allowed foreign governments to fail to keep their citizens safe, free, and prosperous. Those governments in effect export large numbers of workers and their political foes to the US, thus creating a huge revenue stream called “remittances.” Immigrants in the US sent over $200 billion to relatives abroad in 2023 alone. The One Big Beautiful Bill—now US Public Law No: 119-21— taxes those remittances. Income already subject to taxes will be taxed again when sent abroad. I wonder if this double-taxation will become a counterincentive to deporting the immigrants generating those remittances.

Our friend Kris Kobach and CIS say that their advocacy of attrition through enforcement is actually a campaign for “a living wage” for everyone. Mr. Kobach has personally made millions off of anti-immigrant laws. First, he charged legislatures fees for drafting them via the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a conservation collaboration organization with large corporate sponsors including the major players in the private prison industry. Mr. Kobach’s efforts went beyond state governments. He convinced nearly a hundred localities to pass these laws. Then, he got legal fees for defending these localities and states—mostly unsuccessfully—in court. Hazelton, PA, ended up paying $1.4M in legal fees of those challenging the anti-immigrant ordinance, on top of the years of legal fees it paid trying to defend the ordinance. Farmers Branch, TX, spent over $6M defending its ordinance prohibiting rentals to undocumented immigrants—and that ordinance never actually went into effect. Some localities even went bankrupt in court fights over unconstitutional anti-immigrant ordinances. Finally, Mr. Kobach rode the anti-immigrant sentiments whipped up by blaming immigrants for all our problems all the way to Attorney General of Kansas. Anti-immigrant legislation appears to be quite profitable for a select few people. Yet wage increases for most US citizens continue to lag cost of living increases.

This week, we saw platoons of armed and armored immigration enforcement troops—including National Guard members—throwing tear gas and smoke bombs and shooting supposedly non-lethal bullets at farms. ICE arrested over 300 farmworkers at two California-licensed cannabis nurseries. One panicked farm worker climbed up onto the roof of a greenhouse and then fell 30 feet. He later died of his injuries. US citizens were among the farm workers arrested. You likely care more about your food than cannabis, but this theater is coming for your food supply. Consider this show of force along with the new immigration enforcement funds in the OBBB (Public Law No: 119-21). The Trump Administration is apparently scaling attrition through enforcement up to a national level. This large ICE budget increase—$75B over four years for deportation alone—is not enough to find, detain, process, and deport every undocumented immigrant according to US immigration law. Remember from one of my prior posts that it might take about $216B to deport all unauthorized immigrants in compliance Title 8 laws? But not to worry, the administration is not complying Title 8 and provide due process to immigrants.

The displays of force and suspension of due process are intended to encourage self-deportation. Remember the Biden administration’s CDP One app enhancement to facilitate political asylum claims? The Trump administration not only cancelled that and all the claims made through it—it released a revamped version called CBP Home to facilitate (and track) self-deportations. Scaring someone out of the country is a lot cheaper than deporting them per Title 8, even if you buy them a plane ticket and pay them $1000 each. Can this work? Put yourself in the immigrant’s shoes: If you hiked thousands of miles to escape a country where armed masked men shoved people into unmarked vans without warrants and locked up people whose only crime was trying to survive into prisons without due process—well, it might not take many displays of that by the US government to scare you into self-deporting. Too bad you don’t have a safe place to self-deport to.

Given the results of state experiments with attrition through enforcement, and the massive scaling-up we are witnessing across our nation, I suspect that concerns about our food supply will soon dilute our gratitude for our newly-secured US borders. That Big Beautiful Border Wall will not fill our grocery stores. It also won’t filter contaminants or infectious agents out of the food we will have to import. If all we get from “secure borders” is a labor shortage that requires us to import all our food, we may actually end up less secure—foreign governments could decide any day to stop exporting food to us because they are upset about, say, tariffs or some other foreign policy choice.

Some worries about our food supply have gotten to the top. President Trump hinted in June that perhaps his administration might trust farmers not to hire murderers and asked ICE to stop raiding farms (and the hospitality industry, where he has large investments). “In the case of good reputable farmers, they can take responsibility for the people that they hire and let them have responsibility because we can’t put the farms out of business and at the same time we don’t want to hurt people that aren’t criminals,” he said at a June press conference. He also hinted about a path toward legalizing the “good” undocumented workers.

That pause lasted only a few days. Since then, USDA Secretary Brooke Rollins has been busy reassuring us that there will be NO amnesty or grace period for undocumented farm workers. She also promised that there would be NO interruption in our domestic food supply. Rollins said that Trump “has always been of the mindset that at the end of the day, the promise to America to ensure that we have a 100 percent American workforce stands, but we must be strategic [in] how we are implementing the mass deportation so as not to compromise our food supply.”

Ms. Rollins proposes automation and the new Medicaid work requirement as solutions to the farm labor shortage. I have been both a farmer and an automation engineer and I am skeptical of both proposals. Automation usually changes the work, rather than eliminating all work required. Machinery costs a lot, driving more consolidation and industrialization of food production. We also import a lot of our farm machinery. The administration’s reduction in research and development investments will slow automation advances. The Medicaid work requirement? It doesn’t kick in until December 2026, nearly a year and a half and two harvest cycles from now. So, when Rollins says “be more strategic in implementing mass deportation” of farm workers, does she mean that the administration will delay immigration enforcement on farms until after December 2026? Or wait until we have much better farm automation? Perhaps that’s why this week’s deportation theater targeted a cannabis farm instead of, say, another vegetable farm or dairy farm.

Most of the country did not suffer from the 2007-2011 Arizona, Georgia, and Alabama attempts to eliminate their undocumented immigrant workforce. Our grocery stores could still easily stock our favorite veggies from neighboring US states where those displaced farm workers moved to continue working. The current nationwide effort to remove all unauthorized immigrants (not just the undocumented ones) will impact all US citizens in the form of higher prices and shortages for domestic foods.

Simultaneously, the trade war will make imported food more expensive (but that’s a future post). Perhaps the food prices and shortages will painful enough to remind us that unauthorized immigrants are NOT the cause of all our problems. Remember President Reagan’s Farewell Address? Attitudes have changed a lot in a few decades, haven’t they? Many of us are descendants of imported farm workers. Maybe we will soon remember immigrants can be part of the solution to many current problems—housing and childcare and eldercare shortages as well as growing food—within a reformed immigration system. I suspect that immigration reform will not succeed until we figure out how to shift the costs of immigration from away from the low-income people who have been bearing the brunt of these costs to those who have benefited the most from cheap immigrant labor. In other words, reclaim the American Dream for everyone.

But this post is already running long, so I will tackle reform details in some future posts. In the meantime, keep an eye on the Dignity Act of 2025, the latest immigration reform legislation to be introduced in the US House of Representatives.

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References

From the Center for Immigration Studies: Attrition Through Enforcement

Failed 2007 Attempt at Federal Immigration Reform: Immigration Bill Dies in Senate

FAIR: Federation for American Immigration Reform - Wikipedia

Kris Kobach - Wikipedia

Effects of Secure Communities Deportation (2008-2013): The Labor Market Effects of Immigration Enforcement | Journal of Labor Economics: Vol 41, No 4

Brookings Institution: The labor market impact of deportations

The 2018-2019 dip in Farm Real GDP:

Chart: U.S. Farmers Lost Billions to Trump-Era Retaliatory Tariffs | Statista

Detailed State Analysis:

Someone Grew That post on Arizona immigration laws

Someone Grew That post on Georgia immigration laws

Someone Grew That post on Alabama immigration laws

Trump: Farmers To Take Responsibility Rooting Out Murderers

Rollins (USDA Secretary): Medicaid recipients, automation can replace deported farmworkers

Executive Order on Secure Borders: President Trump is Securing Our Homeland – The White House

The Cost of Attrition through Enforcement Laws:

Article: Hazleton Immigration Ordinance That Began.. | migrationpolicy.org

The High Costs of Immigration Enforcement - Center for American Progress

Prince William County, Virginia: BrgksSurveyPrWillm.indd

Latest Immigration Reform Legislation in the US House:

Summary: The Dignity Act of 2025: Bill Summary - National Immigration Forum

Dignity Act Text: the_dignity_act_of_2025_section_by_section.pdf

Note to my readers: This is the second of three posts on unauthorized immigration and its impact on agriculture. It may end up being four, because this is a very complex subject. The first post covers the big picture of unauthorized immigration. This post zooms in on the farm and food contributions of these workers. You don’t need to read the first one to understand this one, but I encourage you to read at least the summary of the first post.

Key points of this post:

• The current on-farm hired workforce numbers about 1.17 million. The farmworker’s average wage is only 60% of the average nonfarm worker’s wage.

• Our food system is among the top three employers of unauthorized immigrants, with and without work authorizations. The construction industry and the hospitality industry are the other two of the top three.

• The US has never met its agriculture labor force requirements without importing labor, including during our colonial days. We have imported farm labor via indentured servitude, chattel slavery, the Bracero program, and H-2/H-2A visa programs.

• The last two presidential administrations have greatly expanded the H-2A Visa program for seasonal agricultural workers; however, the program is difficult to use and the seasonal restrictions make it unusable for most livestock farmers.

• About half of US farmworkers may be unauthorized immigrants—about 600,000 people—including Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA), Temporary Protected Status (TPS), political asylum applicants, and humanitarian visa applicants. About a quarter of US farmworkers—about 283,000—are undocumented (with no legal status and no work authorizations).

• US farms producing food crops including vegetables, fruit, and nuts are employing three unauthorized immigrants for every two US citizens. Only one of those three immigrants has a work authorization.

• The US dairy farm workforce may be 70% unauthorized. Losing that workforce could bankrupt over 3500 dairy farms.

• Rural communities and farm-supporting industries will suffer from mass deportation, losing two to three off-farm jobs for every unfilled on-farm job.

• The entire food-handling and processing chain employs hundreds of thousands of unauthorized workers—including milk-truck drivers, produce packers, meat processors, dairy processing workers, and food distribution workers. Loss of these workers would cause loss of perishable crops that do get harvested.

• Loss of unauthorized immigrant farm and food workers would impact all links in our food supply chains. Food systems can adapt only at the speed of the growth of plants, trees, and livestock. Imports cannot fill the gaps instantly without creating shortages somewhere else in the world, so shortages and high prices could last months to years, depending on the product.

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US farmers—with the help of a lot of scientists and engineers—have steadily increased productivity since World War 2, but we can’t automate our way to zero farm labor. Let’s start this dive into the immigration status of US farm workers with the labor line on this productivity plot (Chart 1) from the USDA Economic Research Service:

Total “factor productivity” incorporates all consistently-measurable farm inputs like labor, land, chemicals, equipment, fuel, and input contract services. It’s not corrected for inconsistent and localized things like rainfall and temperatures. The outputs are all farm crops including livestock, food, fiber, and farm-provided output services. You can see the labor line’s been pretty level for decades, even while US farm productivity and output continues to increase. US farmers are producing more and more food for the same inputs, but we still need some people to make it happen. Incidentally, the links to the detailed report behind this plot were broken by some Executive Order or another on January 22, 2025, so I had to dig around quite a bit to find the full report (see references at the end).

My December 2024 post laid out the worsening US agricultural labor shortage as the US population ages. Guess what: cellphones, the internet, and artificial intelligence haven’t figured out how to pick produce or pull lambs. I can tell you from personal experience that draping a cellphone with ovine afterbirth is fatal to the cellphone. A cellphone lost in the back forty during a roundup may have survived longer. Hopefully, the sheep found that one and called the horses to help chase the coyotes away before the battery—or some lambs—died. Those coyotes are not afraid of a cellphone, regardless of the data plan.

Seriously, we are in the realm of diminishing returns on farm automation. Speaking as an engineer as well as a farmer, the large capital investment required to make more labor-saving automation will drive more consolidation of smaller farms into larger ones, because that’s been the trend for decades now. The independent farm model I believe we need for resilient food production must still employ people to grow our food safely. Currently, that’s about 3 full-time workers per farm. Typically, those three are two family members and one hired farm worker.

In 2023, USDA says that US farmers hired 1.17 million workers. Yet Americans demand food that is low cost as well as safe. That has led to laws and policies that have kept farm wages low compared to other industries because that’s the only way US-produced food stays competitive with imports in grocery stores. And surprise: Cornell University’s Farmworker Center says that over half of all US farmworkers are unauthorized immigrants. That’s nearly 600,000 people. Other sources (Center for Immigration Studies) suggest a lower percentage, perhaps only 25% (about 283,000)—but their definition covers only those unauthorized immigrants without work authorizations, e.g. undocumented. (My last post covers these terminology nuances.) You can find some sources saying that a million US farmworkers are undocumented, but I can’t make that math correlate with USDA farm census and labor numbers, so let’s stay with the 600,000 unauthorized and 283,000 of those undocumented for now. That’s roughly 50% unauthorized and 25% undocumented across the US agriculture sector.

That’s still a LOT of people. Here are the horns of a dilemma: Do we import food or import labor to grow our food here?

This dilemma is not as new for our country as it feels. Turns out that America has been importing farm labor for a long, long time. Labor shortages limited the growth of the New World economy from the beginning of European settlement. Our agricultural system began in the 17^th century with imported labor. Our colonial ancestors were not turning away people desperate to enter the colonies. Quite the opposite. In the 17^th and 18^th centuries, 80% of Europeans came to the New World as indentured servants, bound to work years without pay (usually four to seven) for the person who paid their Old Country debts as well as their passage to the New World. Some were children kidnapped and sold into indenture—what today we might call “trafficked” children. Others were convicts or political prisoners. Others were (horrors!) excommunicated religious zealots. Correspondence preserved from the 1770s includes diatribes against the despicable subhuman riff-raff being allowed into the colonies under indenture contracts. After all, these criminals, indigents, and zealots would be turned loose at the end of their contract to ravage civilized society!

Most indentured servants served their contracts in agriculture-related jobs. The field hands worked hard in difficult conditions, but they may have been the lucky ones. Indentured women and girls often got assigned “extra duties” at the farmhouse—and getting pregnant extended a woman’s indenture by two years. Their masters had no incentive to preserve the health of these indentured workers for their lives after the indenture period. Still, indentured servants had some legal rights. Colonial records contain cases of indentured servants winning suits against their masters for exploitation and abuse. If you survived your indenture contract, colonial life offered opportunity. In 1665, more than half of the Virginia’s House of Burgesses were former indentured servants. Hmmmm. I’m rather proud of my ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. Looking at the percentage of people who came here as indentured servants, it seems likely that some (most?) of my ancestors left gaps in their origin stories. The heroic escape stories from Old World oppression may have more carefully-chosen words in them than I realized!

The contract indenture system was eventually replaced by “permanent indenture”— enslavement—of Africans in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The Africans did not have any legal rights and couldn’t sue their masters. Rather convenient for the masters, that lack of personhood in the law. The law also enslaved the children born to these Africans, so the slave system was self-propagating even after the US made slave import illegal with 1800 and 1808 federal laws. By 1860, the US Census counted nearly 4 million permanently-enslaved Africans in the US. That was about 12.6% of the US population, down from a high of 18%. Slaves comprised nearly half of the population in some states. Mississippi led with 55% of its 1860 population being enslaved. Most worked in agricultural commodity production including food, tobacco, and fiber (especially cotton after the invention of the cotton gin). With the conclusion of the Civil War, these formerly-enslaved people who stayed in the South remained a critical part of the agricultural workforce for decades. Many became share-croppers. We can’t ignore the connection between the need for cheap labor to denying upward mobility to a large portion of our population.

In the 20^th century, the world wars reduced our agricultural workforce to crisis levels. In World War 1, colleges and non-profits formed the Women’s Land Army of America (WLAA) modeled on the United Kingdom’s Land Army. The WLAA sent 20,000 women volunteers out to help farmers who had lost workers to WW1 military service.

Between 1940 and 1945, six million male farmworkers volunteered or were drafted to serve their country. Plenty of young women left their unpaid farm roles to enlist or work in the new factories arming the Allies, too. The women staying on the farms finally became visible to the rest of the country. Those war years saw a 12-fold increase in women officially earning a paycheck for farmwork instead of being unpaid labor alongside husbands and fathers. The US Women’s Land Army became a US government program in 1942, sending 1.5 million women volunteers to help on farms by 1945. Many WLA volunteers held down non-farm jobs but volunteered on farms during weekends and vacations.

But farms were still desperately short of labor in WW2. In 1942, the US and Mexican governments collaborated to backfill the agricultural workforce. This collaboration— emphasis on collaboration—created the Bracero program. This program formally recognized and regulated an ebb-and-flow of seasonal ag workers that had been part of US and Mexican life for generations. We tend to forget that the US Southwest was part of Mexico until 1848, and redrawing the border didn’t change the rhythms of life there overnight. The Bracero program did not end when World War 2 ended, because many farm-boys-turned-soldiers didn’t rush back to the grinding poverty they knew on the farm during the Great Depression. Even dodging bullets did not lessen the attraction of three meals a day and a regular paycheck in the military. Many had developed a taste of the wider world and wanted more of that. At the US government’s urging, newly-built US factories laid women off to hire male combat veterans in their transition to manufacturing consumer goods. The GI Bill opened up opportunities beyond the farm, especially in education. Even the women returning to the farm had educational opportunities that changed their farm and community roles.

Consequently, the Bracero program lasted until 1964. An average of 200,000 Mexican farm workers legally came to work in the US each year. Interestingly, when the program came up for renewal after WW2, the Mexican government expressed concerned about labor shortages in Mexico and tried to get the US to include penalties on US employers for hiring immigrant labor outside the Bracero program. My research reveals another possible motivation for the Mexican government: The Bracero program included mandatory wage garnishments sent to the Mexican government. These remittances were supposedly “banked” in Mexico by the Mexican government, to be paid to the workers on their return to Mexico. Unfortunately, the Braceros seldom got that money on return to Mexico. Money wasn’t everything, however. Mexico did prohibit Texas employers from participating for a time due to abuses of the program there and Texas lynchings of some Bracero employees.

The H-2 visa program for temporary and seasonal agricultural workers replaced the Bracero program in 1964. It limited admission to fewer workers than the Bracero program until the 21^st Century. Some attribute the rapid increase in mechanization of American agriculture in the late 1960s to the cancellation of the Bracero program and the slow start of the H-2 program. I think that’s an over-simplification, but it was a factor. The H-2 visa program still exists today. In 1986, it split into H-2A visas serving agricultural needs and H-2B visas addressing other seasonal worker shortages such as staffing golf resorts. The H-2A program has greatly increased in size in recent years. The Trump Administration expanded the number of visas by 41% (from about 218,000 in 2017 to almost 308,000 in 2020). Growth continued in the Biden administration, with 370,000 H-2A visas issued in 2022—another 20% increase (Chart 2):

The H-2A visa program has a lot of restrictions. The program allows part-year “seasonal” visas—up to 10 months out of the year—for three years in a row before visa-holders have to return to their home country for a period and reapply. The program also allows some “temporary” work visas lasting up to one year. This means the employers must continuously train new participants. Employer participation is costly in other ways, too. The employer must get “certified” to participate. Once in, the employer must reimburse any employed worker’s visa application fee ($190), guarantee transportation to and from the worker’s country of origin, guarantee a minimum number of hours, and pay the worker’s food and housing. Neither the employer nor the H-2A employee pays payroll taxes (Social Security and Medicare), however. The H-2A employee must pay all applicable income taxes. If the employer follows all the rules, an H-2A worker costs an employer thousands more dollars per employee than hiring a US citizen at the prevailing farm wage. Of course, the program is designed to ensure that it doesn’t take jobs from US citizens and permanent residents. It’s no accident that hiring US citizens and work-authorized permanent residents is easier and cheaper. Unfortunately, the program also makes hiring immigrants without work authorization easier and cheaper.

One specialty which is both seasonal and hard to find US workers willing to do it is tending sheep on remote ranges. This work involves sending a shepherd out with a large flock of sheep and guard dogs to graze during the summer months into remote grasslands. The shepherd lives in a “sheep wagon” (a camper nowadays) wherever the grazing is. It’s a 24/7 on-call job—the guard dogs do the calling when predators come—and you move flock and wagon to fresh grazing every few days. Except for the rancher making rounds to check on you and bring supplies every week, you are on your own for the entire grazing season, usually well outside of cellphone range. Nowadays, you likely have a solar-powered satellite phone and video player for company. Many western sheep ranchers with remote grazing leases have long-running arrangements with South American shepherds who are happy to get two summers a year, one in North America and one in South America. The Department of Labor has a special H-2A waiver—appropriately called the Herder Rule—for this kind of 24/7 work. This is an application where the program seems to work well for both ranchers and shepherds.

The H-2A program does not work for farmers needing highly-skilled employees full-time all year, unfortunately. This is the situation for eastern sheep farmers like my family, who must graze the same pastures all year round. H-2A doesn’t work for my few remaining dairy farmer neighbors either. Unfortunately, the H-2A program was designed by non-farmers, and perhaps by people who don’t actually want to reduce incentives for employing unauthorized immigrants. US farmworker advocates say it depresses farmworker wages. Migrant farmworker advocates say H-2A employers abuse visa holders. Politicians say both employers and visa holders game the system. All parties can point to some specific true abuses. The only thing that’s clear is expanding the H-2A program won’t solve the US farm labor shortage without major changes.

So, our domestic food production depends on unauthorized immigrants that 55% of us want to throw out of the country. We are also complaining about food prices in the grocery store. Even though US food prices are not rising as fast as (on average) US wages, grocery price inflation loomed especially large in the 2024 US election. Somehow, the price of eggs has become a proxy for the Loss of the American Dream, even though housing inflation is the real wage thief (a future post). When we aren’t complaining about food prices, we are complaining about too much of our food being imported, most from countries that do not have the same safety standards as that US does. Meanwhile, agricultural employers are complaining about unfilled jobs. And paying rising wages.

Unauthorized immigrants are helping us serve ourselves dinner by solving these problems, sort of. They take many US farm jobs that might otherwise be unfilled. They have reduced the cost of groceries and slowed the growth in our reliance on food imports. I believe they depress US farm laborers’ wages, but they have kept many farms in business. US citizens are not currently paying enough for US-produced food to cover farmworker wages high enough to compete with off-farm jobs. Here’s a comparison of real, inflation-corrected wages in agriculture with wages everywhere else (Chart 3):

Today, the average US farmworker makes only 60% what the average US nonfarm worker makes. That’s an improvement over 1990 when the average non-farm worker made twice as much as the average farm worker. A high-school drop-out can make more per hour moving boxes at Walmart or Amazon than he can working on a farm. So, there’s actually a third horn on our import-food-or-import-farm-labor dilemma: Pay enough for our food and natural fiber to enable farmers to pay wages competitive with nonfarm employers. Are you willing to pay, say, a 25% premium for US-grown food and fiber? Turns out that many of you are willing to pay more for US-grown food, which is why the fight over restricting the “Product of the USA” label to products actually 100% produced in the USA was so hot (December 2023 post). The good news: Product of the USA on meat and poultry means 100% born, raised, and processed in the USA as of March 11, 2024. It’s too soon to tell if that will raise livestock workers’ wages.

While an immigrant with a work authorization can work her way into those better-paying nonfarm jobs, the undocumented immigrant has few alternatives to farm labor. Undocumented immigrants work on farms at rates below the average farm worker wage—anywhere from 2% to 24% below the prevailing farm wage. Unauthorized immigrants keeping US farms surviving are—indirectly or directly—also keeping the neighborhood rural farm-support businesses alive. The feed and seed supply, the farm equipment dealer, grain elevators, slaughterhouses, commodity brokers, produce-packing houses, food-processing businesses, railroads, truckers, machinery mechanics, and barn builders, to name a few. So why have these immigrants have been cast as villains in the national story lately, not heroes?

My last post explored the legitimate concern US citizens have about having neighbors who were willing to break US law or civil regulations to get into the US. I want to re-emphasize my view: a nation must have control of its borders. However, I caution everyone to remember that nearly a third of unauthorized immigrants have some legal status (DACA, political asylum review in progress, Temporary Protected Status, or a humanitarian visa). Perhaps I should say one-third had some legal status before January 20, 2025, when the interpretation of US immigration law went into flux. In agriculture, a third have government-issued work authorization based on this legal status which is now in question. I am not a fan of deporting people who have been trying to do immigration right.

Remember from a prior newsletter that fresh fruit, nuts, and vegetables are the most labor-intensive food crops? The US Department of Labor conducts an extensive face-to-face survey of these food-crop workers and their employers every year called the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS). Here (Chart 4) are their estimates on the composition of this workforce for the past thirty years based on this annual survey:

The reports on the NAWS survey links on the Department of Labor (DoL) website were disabled late in January, but I found a backdoor link (below) to the 2020 survey if you want to learn a lot about our fresh food crop workforce. This survey estimates that 42.1% of current US crop farm workers are “unauthorized.” Careful reading of the labor survey suggests that DoL’s “Foreign born: unauthorized” category is defined differently from ICE’s unauthorized immigrants (the definition I pounded into your head on the last post). It may include some people with refugee status, working their way to US citizenship, but refugees admitted to the US are far more likely to be in the nonfarm workforce, drawn by higher wages. The “unauthorized” category of the NAWS appears to be all the non-citizens without a valid work authorization—what many people call “undocumented.” So, for example, the NAWS puts a DACA immigrant with a work authorization in “Foreign born: authorized.” Thus, the actual percentage of unauthorized immigrants working on US farms is up to 62.3%. Folks, this means that US farms producing these food crops could be employing three unauthorized immigrants for every two US citizens. Only one of those three immigrants has any documents, e.g., a work authorization.

This NAWS estimate of 42.1% without work authorization is down from nearly 55% in the years 2000-2001. In those years, the percentage of all unauthorized immigrants (with and without work authorization) in this ag sector was around 80%. Turns out that NAWS has been counting some of the same unauthorized workers for many years: The average time that these workers have been in the US is 21 years in 2022. In fact, the most recent report features charts on the “aging” of the unauthorized component of this food crop workforce, not just the authorized portion.

California, Washington, Florida, Texas, and Oregon are the top states for employing unauthorized immigrants. They are also among the top US producers of fresh produce. California tops both lists. These two statistics are correlated. Somewhere around a million unauthorized immigrants are on farms, mostly planting and harvesting produce. So why aren’t their employers in trouble with the law? Aren’t they using E-Verify? A typical scenario for seasonal work: a farmer contracts with a harvesting service, which in turn employs the workers on a short-term contract. The tomatoes, grapes, or squash are on trucks before the farmer or harvesting contractor can learn if any of the social security numbers provided by the workers belong to those workers. Check your own social security statement carefully: you may have been credited with payroll tax payments from work some unauthorized immigrant did. The good news: you will wind up getting the related Social Security benefits, not that undocumented immigrant.

What would the deportation of all unauthorized immigrant farm workers and their colleagues in other food crops look like in your local grocery store? For starters, If 61.3% of food crop workers were gone, 61.3% of fresh US produce would never get into our food distribution and processing system. Some of what did get to the packing facility would rot waiting for the packers that got deported (remember those Haitians in Springfield, Ohio?). How long would it take for grocers to find suppliers outside the US to replace, say, three quarters of US-grown produce? Considering how much imported produce we eat, that’s about three-eighths of all produce in our grocery stores. It would probably take at least a growing season if not a full year to replace it, as other countries’ food export plantings are sized by the prior year’s demand. In the case of a trade war with our largest foreign fresh-produce supplier (Mexico), the produce that replaces the unharvested US produce would be more expensive due to tariffs.

The impact on US poultry and meat deliveries at the farm level would presumably be lower because they are less reliant on labor than produce. However, they are more reliant on labor after they leave the farm. Once your prospective dinner leaves its farm of origin, it winds its way through a slaughterhouse, processing, and packaging. The USDA says that the total US food and beverage workforce is about 1.7 million. Over 500,000 of these are in meat and poultry processing, the largest subgroup. About 200,000 (two-fifths) of those are unauthorized immigrants. I’ve known some immigrants who paid tuition for their engineering degrees working in poultry processing. It was brutal work as well as motivating—in a negative way. One of them said to me, “You get to where you are seriously considering ending your misery by laying yourself down on that conveyor belt with the dead chickens.” I think I would rather pick strawberries, even though the pay is lower. And I am allergic to strawberries too!

In the food and beverage processing world, the two biggest sectors are Meat Processing (26%) and Dairy Processing (13%). These are also the sectors requiring a complex “cold chain” to ensure their product are safe all the way out the door of the grocery store. All of our food chains are fragile, but cold chains are ever so much more so.

The current labor shortage has led to wage increases for those workers in the meat and dairy chain, from leaving the farm to arriving at the grocery store. From 2019 to 2022, wages in dairy and meat processing increased 33.7% (from an average of $14.95/hour to $20.00/hour). Those involved in transporting these highly perishable foods saw a 40% wage increase. Compare this with the overall wage increases: US workers averaged $20.11/hour in 2019 and $21.51/hour in 2022, a 7.4% increase. The good news for the average grocery shopper is that the prices of these products in the grocery store increased by only 4 to 7%, less than the average US hourly wage increased. “Average increases” may not mean much in your particular pocketbook, of course. But if the US government worsened the labor shortage in the food chain, that would likely lead to even greater wage increases.

How much worse would the labor shortage in food processing become? According to the American Immigration Council, immigrants comprise 51.2% of dairy-processing workers, 45.4% of meat-packing workers, 20% of livestock handlers, and 26% of meat transportation workers. Not all of these immigrants are unauthorized; however, some reliable estimates suggest that half are completely undocumented. Recall that the H-2A program can’t be used to fill year-round jobs and is restricted to on-farm work—no off-farm processing. Dairy and meat industry work is year-round.

If dairy farmers lost all their immigrant workers, the American Immigration Council says that retail milk prices would double. Worse, the loss of licensed dairy herds would accelerate—perhaps 3,500 dairy farms would fold immediately due to loss of their labor force. We already lost over 40% of all US dairy herds between 2011 and 2021 alone, on top of large losses through the prior four decades—and labor has always been a major driver of consolidation. Check out this post. Robotic milkers are expensive and do only the final stage of the overall work of producing milk and cream. The National Milk Producers Federation says that the US economy would lose $32 billion overall if just the dairy industry lost its immigrant work force.

But some of these immigrants working on dairy farms are naturalized US citizens. So, how many of these immigrants are unauthorized and deportable? The unauthorized portion of immigrants working on dairy farms may be as high as 70%. Some sources say that’s just the percentage of immigrants without work authorizations (undocumented). If all unauthorized immigrants were all sent home tomorrow, there would be a lot of very uncomfortable cows, some soon-bankrupt farmers, and unhappy grocery shoppers. Based on a 2018 enforcement case, bankruptcy may be the least of these farmers’ problems. Dairy farmer Michael Millenkamp served prison time and paid $250,000 in fines and forfeitures for violating federal law in hiring undocumented workers. A condition of his three years’ probation after prison was speaking at farmer conferences to warn farmers about what can happen if you knowingly employ undocumented immigrants.

But let’s stick with the impact of labor losses on our food supply here. Consider how these labor losses might stack up as the remaining milk production moves into processing. Remember that cold chain: dairies need special trucks and trained drivers making daily visits to farms, 365 days a year. Raw milk is extremely perishable! If unauthorized immigrant milk truck drivers (13% of that workforce) disappeared, there would be more milk dumped, bankrupting more farmers, even if they had robotic milkers and no unauthorized immigrant employees. Or perhaps especially if they had invested in robotic milkers—they have a huge bank payment due every month on that machine!

Moving further along that chain, if a quarter of dairy product-processing workers disappeared, there would be more milk wasted—at least until the processing plants reneged on contracts with farmers to buy milk and put more dairy farms out of business. Some of those plants might soon close as the corporations consolidated processing facilities that they couldn’t staff or keep supplied with a cost-effective level of milk supply. Non-immigrant workers would be laid off, and more farmers would go bankrupt as they lost buyers in their region for the milk they could still produce with a smaller labor force. Remember that word “monopsony” we learned exploring the poultry industry? Limited buyers are a plague in other types of farming. There would be more unhappy grocery shoppers as yogurt and ice cream and butter disappeared from the grocery store or became far more expensive. Or not: our top three international customers for US dairy exports are Mexico ($2.47 Billion/year), Canada ($1.14 billion/year), and China ($584 million/year). A trade war with Mexico, Canada, and China that would stop the US export of over $4 billion in dairy products per year and put them on US grocery store shelves would soften this blow to US consumers, even while many US dairy farms and processors disappear. Is there a strategic plan linking mass deportations with tariffs?

Have you been reading your food ingredient labels lately? If not, ask someone allergic to dairy what foods contain dairy products. You will be surprised. A large percentage of processed foods contain whey or “non-fat dairy solids.” These include processed meats, like deli turkey! The dairy section of the grocery would not be the only place with empty shelves. Oh, oops, those processed-food industries might be a lot more worried about the fact that a quarter of their workers didn’t show up for work this morning than about finding a replacement for the dairy-derived ingredients. Anyone in the meat business will have the same problems as the dairy business with a breakdown of their cold chain as many skilled workers are deported. This would be likely to keep them from being happy about the huge surge in demand for hamburger processing as those bankrupt dairies sent their cows to slaughter. Retired dairy cows don’t get to loll about in green pastures. Early retirement for a dairy cow means becoming hamburger younger. Extra lean—have you ever seen a fat dairy cow? But at least that cow will be eligible for a “Product of the USA” label at the grocery store, if there’s still a US meat-processing plant open.

Rural community suffering would be compounded by the loss of some beef, pork, and poultry farms. Not good news for my area, where Tyson’s closed a broiler chicken plant last year and left its contract poultry farmers with neither birds nor a buyer. The local cattle business is already struggling with loss of low-cost labor where housing costs have sky-rocketed. The farm next to mine has “Black Angus” in its name, a ghost of its history as a cattle farm. All but a few acres were planted with pine trees in the mid-2000s. Zero cows. Zero labor and zero inputs required for twenty to thirty years after planting the trees. That farm’s only contribution to the local economy for two to three decades is property taxes. I’m seeing more and more of these “pine-tations.” Maybe I have stumbled on the reason soft wood has become a popular crop. I wonder if their return on pine tree investment will suffer with a “mass deportation” because construction is also one of the top-three industries employing unauthorized immigrants. Around here, I think more unauthorized immigrants work in construction than on farms.

A slow wave of rural economic destruction would propagate away from failing dairy and livestock operations. Farmers who supply feed for livestock and farmers who supply seed to those farmers would soon feel the pain. Other industries would suffer, including those supplying machinery and fertilizer, chemicals to clean dairies, medicines to treat livestock, building materials and labor for barns, and so on. The National Immigration Forum says that every farmworker in livestock or produce creates two to three off-farm jobs. Those off-farm jobs are split between output (food) processing, input preparation, and farm support.

I wondered if the COVID-19 pandemic food disruptions could give us a clue about the food system disruptions that we might see with mass deportations. About one in ten meat-processing workers got COVID-19 during the first year of the pandemic. Rural counties with meat-processing plants had twelve times the rate of COVID infections of rural counties without. People working on farms are outdoors a lot and did not have the same infection rate. So only one link of the meat supply chain was disrupted, not every link. In Virginia, rural counties with meat-processing plants had the highest pandemic death rates, as close working conditions collided with limited healthcare. The meat-processing industry rebounded quickly in 2020 by installing plexiglass shields between workstations and requiring workers to wear masks. Those measures soon reduced the infection rates in their neighborhoods to national rural county averages.

The other thing that limits utility of the pandemic in helping us understand mass deportation impacts is that many grocery-store shortages were caused by major changes in where the demand was located instead of a shortage at the farm. People started cooking at home and buying groceries instead of eating in restaurants. Absent a pandemic, the average US resident spends almost half of his or her food dollar in restaurants. The pandemic caused a supply-chain scramble to shift resources from supplying commercial food services in large volume to grocery stores serving customers shopping for smaller-volume packages. For example, the supply chain for “table eggs” (what we buy at the grocery store) is completely separate from that for “breaker eggs” (what a baking company or restaurant buys in large containers already cracked and pasteurized). Those two types of eggs even come from different farms and are governed by different regulations.

So, you thought the pandemic supply chain disruptions were bad? Domestic food shortages then were mostly due to breaks in single links. Pandemic shortages may not be a good indicator of losing a much larger workforce fraction in many links of our food chain caused by a “mass deportation.” Every link will have breakage!

Don’t assume you can just go eat at a restaurant if the grocery store shelves empty due to a mass deportation—the hospitality industry is also a top-three industry employer of unauthorized immigrants. Restaurants may be curtailing hours or closing due to short staffing—assuming they can get food to cook.

Where do we turn for real-world lessons on the impact of mass deportations of our farm-to-fork supply chains? Could I be overestimating the impact of losing so many farm and food chain workers? Turns out that three states (Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia) made themselves mini-laboratories for immigrant deportation experiments in the past two decades. What happened there? Stay tuned for my next newsletter.

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References and Resources

Unauthorized Immigrant Employment:

The U.S. Industries That Rely Most on Illegal Immigration

The Economic Impact of Undocumented Farmworkers - National Immigration Forum

Indentured servitude in America:

Indentured Servitude in Colonial America | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History

Indentured "White Slaves" in the Colonies (1770, by William Eddis) | Encyclopedia.com

Census Counts of Slaves in the US:

Visual: radicalcartography

1860 United States census - Wikipedia

Woman's Land Army of America:

WLAA

The Bracero Program: Bracero Program - Wikipedia

Analysis of the Farm Workforce:

USDA ERS: Farm Labor | Economic Research Service

A Look at Agricultural Productivity Growth in the United States, 1948-2017 | Home

Technical Bulletin, Measurement of Output, Inputs, and Total Factor Productivity in U.S. Agricultural Productivity Accounts

Where unauthorized immigrants are employed:

https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2016/11/03/industries-of-unauthorized-immigrant-workers/

tending_to_americas_food_supply_meat_dairy_industries.pdf

Produce production in the US: U.S. Fruits & Vegetables Market Size & Share Report, 2030

Dairy Exports:

Dairy Data | Economic Research Service

Dairy Products | USDA Foreign Agricultural Service

Legal Agriculture Employment of Foreign Citizens: H2A Visa Program for Seasonal and Temporary Workers:

https://www.farmers.gov/working-with-us/h2a-visa-program

https://www.ers.usda.gov/webdocs/charts/86864/AEWR2023.png

H-2A Herder Final Rule | U.S. Department of Labor

Data on Legal Permanent Residents:

Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820-Present | migrationpolicy.org

Reports on immigrant Farm Labor:

Farm Labor | Economic Research Service

A Profile of Undocumented Agricultural Workers in the United States - The Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS)

Feeding America: How Immigrants Sustain US Agriculture | Baker Institute

Department of Labor National Agricultural Workers Survey:

NAWS data fact sheet fixed.docx

Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2019–2020

National Agricultural Workers Survey | U.S. Department of Labor

Impact of COVID on food supply:

At least 59,000 meat workers caught COVID and 269 died, report says - CBS News

Econometric assessment of the effects of COVID-19 outbreaks on U.S. meat production and plant utilization with plant-level data

Unscrambling U.S. egg supply chains amid COVID-19 - PMC

Anecdotal stories about dairy farm dependency on unauthorized immigrants:

Northern District of Iowa | Delaware County Dairy Cattle Farmer Sentenced for Illegal Alien Harboring | United States Department of Justice

Devin Nunes's Family Farm Moved to Iowa, Employs Undocumented Workers

Truth Social CEO loses court fight over claims his family hired undocumented workers

“Product of the USA” label victory:

USDA Finalizes Voluntary “Product of USA” Label Claim

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Note to readers: This post covers the “big picture” of unauthorized immigration, providing the context for the next two posts on how unauthorized immigration affects US agriculture and our food. I’ve been shocked at how different the story is from the actual data, and so I went back to the raw data to make sure, building my own spreadsheets. I hope you will read this post to share my journey to the facts—and justify my weeks(!) of research. But if you are short on time, here are the key points to carry with you into the next two agriculture posts:

• The recent surge (2019-2024) of immigration attempts was actually smaller than past surges. Immigration attempts in 19 years before 2019 exceeded the peak year in this recent surge. Legal technicalities (Title 42 vs Title 8), much-improved border patrol interception, and election-year hype made this surge seem bigger than it was.

• The people targeted for mass deportation are correctly called “unauthorized immigrants,” not illegal, not criminal, and not undocumented. This group includes anyone without Permanent Resident (aka “Green Card”) or official Refugee status.

• Many unauthorized immigrants—30% of the 11 million total from 2022 often cited—have documentation in the form of DACA status, a pending asylum application, temporary protected status, and/or work authorization. This documentation would have protected them from deportation in the past, but the second Trump administration is attempting to strip these protections with Executive Orders.

• The first Trump administration deported the fewest unauthorized immigrants of any administration in the past 4-1/2 decades. It was also the only recent administration that did NOT prioritize deporting immigrants with criminal convictions.

• The number of unauthorized immigrants in the US right now is about 11.7 million—more than the 2022 11 million estimates—but still less than the 12.2 million peak in 2006.

• It could cost over $216 billion to deport all unauthorized immigrants, based on cost per deportation in the past five years. Increased use of expensive military transport and expanding detention will drive that cost up.

• These unauthorized immigrants pay almost $100 billion in taxes each year. In 2022, they paid almost $34 billion in Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment taxes. That was about 2.5% of our Social Security payout in 2022. They can’t collect benefits from these programs.

• Over nine out of ten unauthorized immigrants have been here longer than five years. More than three out of four have been in the US longer than 15 years. One in eight is a spouse or stepchild of a US citizen.

• Unauthorized immigrants are less than half as likely to commit crimes as US citizens are.

• About 8.5 million unauthorized immigrants are working. Over a third are working legally—they have US government-issued work authorizations. In other words, they have some documentation.

• Our current unemployment rate is 4.1%, or about 6.6 million people, so deporting all 8.5 million unauthorized immigrant workers would leave almost 2 million current jobs empty.

• The typical immigrant arriving at age 25 contributes more to our economy over their lifetime than a US-born citizen of equivalent education—even when you factor in public resources to raise their children.

• Unauthorized immigrants may be contributing as much as 8% to the US GDP.

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The 2024 election campaign featured much hype about an “invasion” of “illegal criminal immigrants.” The 2020 election campaign also featured a lot of this talk, but the tone became more alarmist this time around.

On Facebook, I saw a meme that claimed this invasion of illegal immigrants was morally equivalent to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. At church on Sunday, a neighbor told me how worried she is about the “100 million illegal immigrants just let into our country.” Wow. That would make one out of four people in our local grocery store an “illegal immigrant.” My neighbor hasn’t actually met any illegal immigrants, but we Americans have a tendency to overestimate the percentages of “others” in the population. Then we construe the lack of these “others” in our own communities as “evidence” that there are hordes of these “others” just outside our community, waiting to overrun us. Recent surveys show that the percentage of US citizens who are very worried about immigration has doubled to 55% in the past few years.

What’s feeding our paranoia about “illegal immigrants?” Our media has been bombarding us with pictures of huge crowds of ragged, scruffy people trying to cross our southern border. And in the last six years, huge crowds of people have been trying to cross our southern border. After hiking up to two thousand miles trying to escape war and oppression and starvation in their countries of origin, they look like hell, probably because they’ve been through hell. Makes me wonder what these people left behind that would convince them that working at our most menial jobs is worth this dangerous trip—especially with a very uncertain outcome at the end. These people aren’t showing up in tanks or blowing our power plants and electrical grid to smithereens with missiles like the Russians invading Ukraine are. Guns are actually flowing the other direction across our borders (about 200,000 firearms illegally exported per year) so let’s skip the “moral equivalency” talk and get to the data.

Our new-old President promised a “mass deportation of 11 million illegal criminal immigrants on Day One!” Where did that number—and other numbers he sometimes mentions—come from? Who are these people? Because US agriculture is the number one employer of “illegal”—the more accurate term is “unauthorized”—immigrants, I decided that this merited a deep dive into what will deporting them do to our farms and food systems.

One thing I learned in this deep dive is how different the actual data is from talk, beginning with the start of the current “invasion.” The most recent surge in attempted migration began in 2019, not 2021. The general strangulation of international travel during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 interrupted this surge briefly, but it resumed in 2021. While this surge has been smaller than the 1980-2007 surge, its last month – December 2023 – set a single-month record at almost 250,000 migrant encounters at the US-Mexico Border. 2024 saw a major drop in foreigners attempting entry into the US, ending with migration attempts lower than 2019 numbers, but that December 2023 video was on an endless loop during the 2024 campaign. It’s permanently engraved in our crocodile brains and collective fears.

This 2019-2024 migration surge followed ten years (2008-2018) of relatively low border encounters. Take a look at this plot of US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) “encounters” over the past 45 fiscal years:

The above chart (Chart 1) covers all land, sea, and air encounters. I am emphasizing the word “encounters”—these are NOT net immigrations! An encounter is CBP dealing with one individual trying to enter the US on a given day, regardless of the outcome (expulsion, deportation, or asylum claim recognition). The current surge—starting in 2019—has numbered about 8.9 million total encounters so far. The rate of encounters continues to drop in 2025, but we won’t be able to do a year-over-year comparison until the fiscal year 2025 wraps up. Remember that FY2025 is October 1^st, 2024, through September 30^th, 2025.

Unfortunately, the immigration data for the past five years is complicated by the fact that two different systems—Title 8 and Title 42—governed deportations for over three of the five years. The usual laws governing immigration and asylum-seekers are in a section of the US code called “Title 8.” You’ve probably heard more about “Title 42” since the first Trump Administration imposed it in March 2020. Title 42 is actually a World War 2 (1944) “Emergency Health Authority” that allows the US to suspend Title 8 rights when spread of communicable diseases are a concern. The Trump Administration used the COVID-19 pandemic as justification to suspend Title 8. The Biden Administration kept this policy in place until court decisions allowed its end in May 2023. The important differences between Title 42 and Title 8? Title 42 suspended the immigrants’ right to request political asylum before deportation. Title 42 allowed immediate “expulsion” of immigrants—also known as “expedited deportation”—back to those countries that would take them. These expulsions are shown in orange on the above bar chart. Not all countries would take back their fleeing citizens, which is why CBP could not immediately expel 100% of the people trying to enter the US. If you’ve protested against a dictator usurping power, that dictator doesn’t want you dumped back in his lap. CBP still had to treat many under Title 8 (shown in dark blue on the chart).

Title 42 also levies no punishment on an individual for trying to re-enter the US after an expulsion. A would-be immigrant can just keep trying to re-enter the US illegally until they don’t get caught. Mexico agreed to take Title 42 expulsions from some central American countries in addition to their own, so many immigrants were not “expulsed” all the way back to their country of origin. Those expedited deportees could try again almost daily. Some did. Some eventually got across the border without getting caught. Consequently, it’s impossible to tell if any particular encounter-deportation under Title 42 is a repeat offender or a new arrival. So, did we have nine million different people trying to enter the US, or three million people each trying three times? Contrast this with Title 8: If you have grounds for asylum, the point is to get “encountered” after you cross the border. With Title 8 enforcement, many successful border-crossers immediately seek out CBP officials and surrender, because then they can file a claim for political asylum and stay while their claim works its way through the system. Many political asylum seekers expelled without screening under Title 42 tried again under Title 8 after May 2023.

Pew Research Center (a non-partisan data analysis group and self-described “fact tank”) has a plot (Chart 2) to help visualize the number of people who have tried to cross the US-Mexico border since 2000, where those scary photos were taken in December 2023:

This is the border people usually mean when they say “Build the Wall” or “Secure Our Borders.” These encounter numbers call the Border Wall’s effectiveness into question. Recall that US-Mexico border barrier construction began in 2006, and the border encounters began dropping in 2007-2008, so you might at first glance think that more fence is better. Maybe “good fences make good [international] neighbors”—but the Great Recession (2007-2008) drying up US jobs was probably the real cause of the illegal border crossing attempts. By 2016, about 649 miles (about a third of the 1,954 border) was fenced at $3.5 million per mile. Since 2016, only 60 miles have been added to that Obama Administration total: 40 by the Trump Administration and 20 by the Biden Administration. Turns out that all but 700 miles of the US-Mexico border is water—the Rio Grande—and fencing that is a bit tricky. Most of the border wall work since 2016 has been upgrading 395 miles of old border fencing. Unfortunately, the fence’s recent upgrade and extension did not prevent the surge beginning in 2019. The main impact of the Border Wall may be just moving the surge to other border locations. At $33 million per mile ($15 billion covering 455 miles), that’s not a good ROI.

This border wall drama reminds me of how my brother does livestock fencing. Now, my brother builds the best fence in the US—but he does only a section at a time and then he waits until the sheep and cows find they can walk around the end before he starts the next section. The trail built alongside the new fence needed to build it makes this discovery process easier for the animals. And by the time he gets the fence built all the way around a pasture, the first section he built needs replacing. Sure enough, the US-Mexico border now has great roads along the wall sections built, and most of the money during the Trump Administration was on replacement fence. Meanwhile, the cartels have built tunnels under the fence while migrant smugglers routinely cut the barrier, using those roads to transport power tools. Farmers must be thanking their patron Saint Isadore that cows and sheep haven’t figured out how to use wire cutters, grinders, or tunnel-boring machines! (I’m not so sure about goats and pigs.)

On Main Street USA, we tend to forget that the US-Mexico border is not our longest land border. Our northern border with Canada is 5,525 miles long, 2.83 times the length of our southern land border. People also attempt to immigrate via ports and airports. And some come in on boats and rafts. Remember the “wet feet, dry feet” scandal of Cuban immigration? That is why total national US CBP encounters are higher than those at the US-Mexico border. Hiking across the southwest desert looks easier than swimming the ocean. I suspect that this is why Florida Governor DeSantis had to borrow recent immigrants from Texas’ Governor Abbot to send to Martha’s Vineyard.

Let’s return to that word “encounters” and see how an encounter might translate into an immigration. An encounter is apprehension of a person crossing the border without authorization. That border crossing apprehension may result in immediate deportation as “inadmissible” or it may result in detention. The US Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) doesn’t let most of these “encountered” people into the US. If the border-crosser is eligible to apply for political asylum or another kind of humanitarian visa and doesn’t have a criminal record anywhere, they should in theory be kept in US detention until their asylum claim is completely evaluated. In practice, the US has never had enough immigrant detention space to detain all asylum and visa applicants while awaiting the processing of their claims. US law also limits length of detention for some groups. So, immigrants claiming asylum are usually allowed to stay in the US without detention as “unauthorized immigrants” while their claim is adjudicated. This is the source of that “catch and release” expression: It’s the only way CBP can follow all the US laws.

To those worrying that the asylum system may be “gamed” or abused, consider that almost half (46%) of asylum applicants admitted to the US are eventually granted asylum. The US does not grant political asylum for economic hardship. You must prove safety, political, ethnic, or religious persecution in your home country. Returning to your home country during that time will automatically disqualify your political asylum case, because the underlying assumption of your asylum claim is that you are not safe in your home country. So, these schemes to make people wait outside the US while their claim is evaluated are pipe dreams at best and an intentional denial of US legal counsel and safety at worst. In the 1990s, I helped a family with a strong case through the political asylum process. It was an intense effort requiring hundreds of pages of documentation. It took about 7 months from application to decision. Now, it takes years. A typical asylum applicant will be stuck in quasi-legal “unauthorized immigrant” twilight zone for years. Too few immigration judges, too little funding to support the process. The recent increase in border encounters has also pulled resources away from immigration law enforcement in our county’s interior. Unfortunately, the most recent attempt (February 2024) to increase funding for CBP—including immigration case handling and courts—was defeated in the US Senate.

Let’s not forget that CBP also manages the official points of entry on land borders, ports, and airports! The agency supports our food system by preventing the import of agricultural pests, diseases, invasive plants, and illegal animal products. In FY2024 alone, they issued nearly 79,000 Agricultural Emergency Action Notifications, a fancy name for significant violations of the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) regulations. CBP also intercepted over 1.3 million Quarantined Materials in FY2024. That required many more millions of inspections than interceptions because most people aren’t trying to smuggle anything into the US. And illegal drugs? 90% come through legal entry points with US citizens. So, these 58,000 CBP employees are very busy. Here’s how much their total enforcement actions including migration cases have grown (Chart 3):

CBP had about 55 enforcement actions per employee in FY2023. That’s more than one per week per employee. Perhaps we should remember that the next time someone is bashing government employees as lazy or incompetent.

But, but, you ask: How many people evade the Border Patrol on their way into the US? In the last decade, the Border Patrol has gotten much better at apprehending border crossers. That’s how we got those scary videos. Before 2012, they were not even catching 50%! Before 2000, the percentage of apprehensions of border crossers was about 35%. This means the actual illegal immigration in the 1980-2010 era was as great as what we have seen in the past five years. Or worse: five of those years (1986, 1996, and 1998-2000) saw over a million encounters each year, and at 50% apprehension, that means over two million illegal immigration attempts each of those years – with over a million of those evading our Border Patrol in each year. Since 2012, Border Patrol has typically caught over 70% of the people attempting to cross outside of official entry points. In many recent years, they’ve caught almost 90%. Technology, not a wall, has made a huge difference.

I located statistics of “the ones that got away” and added them to the above enforcement chart in blue to get a picture of the total number of attempts to enter the US—both successes and failures—by non-citizens (Chart 4):

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Compared with the decades before 2010, the current surge doesn’t look so big and long, does it? A little math says that there have been over 112 million attempts to enter the US since 1980. About 8.9 million attempts occurred in this current surge (2019-2024). The peak year was 2022. At least nineteen years in the 1980-2007 migration surge exceeded the 2022 total! The number of border-crossers eluding the Border Patrol was much, much higher in that surge—about 64 million. About 2.3 million people managed to elude the Border Patrol during the current surge. Yes, some of those folks are still inside the US. There’s another group of federal employees (Enforcement and Removal Operations) who have been very busy finding people eligible for deportation and making that happen. Here’s how busy, shown by presidential administration:

President Clinton was the grand champion of deportation—by millions—in the past 40-plus years. All of these presidents exceeded the famous “Operation Wetback” of the Eisenhower years (which involved deportation of somewhere between 300,000 and 1.3 million immigrants, including some US citizens). This chart shows how far apart rhetoric and action can be. The president who talks the toughest on deportation did the least deporting during his first administration–and blocked funding to do more deporting while out of office. That president may have been worried about the economic impacts of mass deportation during a time of low unemployment—some of his senior aides routinely told industry leaders that the US needed more immigration to keep the economy going.

Note that I’m saying “illegal immigration attempts,” rather than “illegal immigrants.” Entering the US without undergoing an inspection at an official entry point is a federal crime; however, just being in the US without a visa or permanent residence approval (aka “green card”) is not a federal crime—it’s only a civil offense. So, while their method of initial entry may be illegal, the people who have entered are not “illegal.” Furthermore, many immigrants enter the US legally with a visa and then they “overstay” that visa, that is, they don’t leave the US before their visa expires. Overstaying your visa is a civil offense, but it’s not actually illegal or “criminal.” You will still get deported if caught inside the US, but you can’t be put in jail. Many people who enter the US on a visa apply for political asylum as soon as they arrive, hoping that the US will grant asylum before their visa expires, which almost never happens in the current funding climate. ICE’s backlog includes 2013 applications!

Suppose a visitor has a current visa but is not complying with its restrictions? We’ve been hearing about one prominent case: Elon Musk came to the US on a student visa which does not authorize paying work outside the immediate academic community. Thus, when Elon started his first company instead of going to school, he was in violation of the terms of that student visa. He couldn’t be called an “undocumented immigrant,” because he had documentation—a visa—but he was abusing his visa. Turns out that “student visa abuser” is a technical term in immigration law enforcement and can carry criminal as well as civil penalties along with deportation. In agriculture, however, visa abuse tends to be quite different: human trafficking, employee exploitation, and fraud by “employers” are more common than, say, an H-2A visa recipient working in construction instead of agriculture. Most employers of H-2A visa holders try to follow the difficult rules—but more on H-2A in the next post.

So, what do we call non-citizens who are in the US without official residency (a green card) or without a valid visa or who are not abusing the terms of their visa? The official term is unauthorized immigrants. This term includes those allowed to stay legally in the US after apprehension and those who are not apprehended on their way into the US. It does not include immigrants granted refugee status by the United Nations’ High Commissioner of Refugees. Refugee status comes with a path to citizenship and immediate work authorization. President Trump just suspended US participation in international refugee resettlement programs, so people don’t have that legal alternative to entering the US for now.

So which unauthorized immigrants have some legal basis for staying in the US? Those who have applied for political asylum in compliance with US law and are waiting for a final decision. Other unauthorized immigrants have a pending humanitarian visa application, including special categories T and U for human trafficking victims. Some are US Military combat veterans who have not completed residency applications, as military service can result in a path to citizenship. Others are married to US citizens and are somewhere in the process to get permanent residency (a “green card”). Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA)—immigrants brought to the US while children but whose parents failed to initiate US residency applications when their own were approved—are also categorized as “unauthorized.” Another large subset of “unauthorized” immigrants was given official Temporary Protected Status (TPS) because conditions in their home country make their return impossible or unsafe. The latter category includes people from Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Ukraine. And yes, these include the Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, who have been legally employed packing farm produce while NOT eating pets or geese.

A friend of mine asked a reasonable question: Why don’t these people apply for legal immigration? Most of the “legal” opportunities are very limited and take years. Most are not available to people without higher education or a stable home in their country of origin. During the latter half of the Biden Administration, there was a legal alternative. People could schedule an asylum-screening appointment using the CBP One App. Yep, there’s an app for that! Or rather, there was. Daily appointments were limited, but it was an alternative to illegal crossing for those with strong political asylum cases. November 2024 was a milestone month: More people used the CBP One App to meet CBP personnel at official points of entry that month than tried to cross illegally.

President Trump just kept a campaign promise to end CBP One’s use for asylum claims. People turning up at border checkpoints to keep their CBP One asylum interview appointments on Inauguration Day found that their appointments (made over six months ago) no longer existed. That’s 30,000 people who “got in line” and ended up with nothing but a broken promise to show for it. Without the CBP One application for political asylum, people seeking asylum will have to return to attempting illegal entry as the first step to applying. Oh, oops, President Trump’s “Day One” executive orders have also suspended all political asylum applications from anyone entering outside of legal entry points. But another of his executive orders designates the narco cartels in Mexico and other American countries south of us as “Terrorist Organizations.” He’s also gotten Canada to do likewise. An overdue designation in my opinion—but apparently someone in the White House forgot that declaration triggers US statutory obligations to grant political asylum to victims of terrorist organizations. Millions of people are victims of those narco cartels—including those immigrants who follow Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, waiting in Mexico until their US Immigration Court date.

The demise of the CBP One App is only one new restriction on legal immigration. The second Trump administration has restarted its aggressive efforts—begun during the first administration—to reduce all legal immigration. This includes a reduction in the number of green cards available, an end to the diversity lottery, limits on various visas, moratorium on political asylum applications from outside the US, limits on immigration by relatives of US citizens, and reductions in refugee admissions. So getting into the US legally (and not just overstaying a tourist visa) may not be an option if staying in your home country will result in your arrest, execution, or starvation. But oops, the Trump administration has introduced a policy of revoking green cards and even naturalized citizenship if the individual has violated any US laws or policies in obtaining those. (Elon, call your office….)

I totally get the concern about a loss of control of our national border – a nation can’t function without control of its borders. But why the recent increase in concern, given the fact that our recent surge is actually less than past surges? One difference between now and the earlier waves of labor importation is where these people are coming from. People are coming from Central America, South America, the Caribbean, China, and Africa as well as Mexico. The cultural mash-up of the US Southwest that we once celebrated—Tex-Mex food and Tejano music—is now a source of fear of erosion of “American culture” (whatever that is).

More justifiable is fear of crime. We are hearing that immigrants are all criminals in their home country or committing a large number of crimes after they get here. Now, Americans have been blaming immigrants for crime since before 1776; however, the modern “immigrant crime wave” story likely originated with the 1980 “Mariel Boatlift” when Cuba’s Fidel Castro bragged about emptying Cuba’s jails and mental institutions into unseaworthy boats. I recall wall-to-wall news coverage in 1980 of the Mariel Boatlift. It profoundly influenced my generation’s view of refugees and immigrants. Now Castro’s jails and mental institutions contained a large number of political prisoners, but there were some criminals in the mix. The bad publicity caused difficulties in getting US sponsors for these refugees (not illegal immigrants). President Carter detained about 20,000 at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, with military deployed to take care of them. The detention under substandard conditions at Fort Chaffee led to protests by the detainees. Outside the base, Ku Klux Klan members circled with torches, aggravating the situation. A scuffle ensued, killing one detainee and injuring others. Opponents of immigration blew this scuffle up into huge headlines, and Governor Bill Clinton lost his reelection over the bad press.

Miami (not Arkansas) did see an increase in crime for a time after the Mariel Boatlift refugee wave. This was a lone exception in recent US immigration history. The opposite usually occurs: immigrants generally commit crimes at about half the rate of US citizens. Many of these people fled crime in their native countries. Perhaps when you hike a thousand miles or so through mountains and jungles to flee from violence, you are rather biased against committing violent crimes in your new (safer) home, especially if committing those crimes will cost you a chance to stay here.

Unfortunately, the Mariel Boatlift has made the ground of our collective conscious fertile for the “13,000 murderers turned loose among us” story now making the rounds. That 13,000 (actually 13,099) is the number of convicted murderers outside of ICE detention over more than forty years, not the number today. That’s an average of fewer than 300 per year. A lot of these people are dead now. Others were deported long ago. Others are still serving time in US federal and state prison for their crimes. Some have finished prison terms and will be deported when ICE tracks them down. Local law enforcement can only hold a person suspected of being unauthorized for 48 hours beyond the end of their sentence, so ICE doesn’t have much time to pick them up.

The Obama and Biden administrations prioritized deporting unauthorized immigrants who had committed crimes, but—surprising to me—the first Trump administration did not prioritize deporting convicted criminals above others. Deporting these people can be a challenge, so perhaps focusing on them reduces your deportation success rate. Why is this hard? Some criminals finished prison terms here, but ICE couldn’t deport them because their country of origin wouldn’t take them back and no one else would either. Because US law does not currently allow ICE to detain a person longer than six months, they are freed to fade back into the unauthorized immigrant population here. Some were convicted of crimes in their country of origin – not in the US – and served their time there before coming the US afterwards. Some of these foreign crimes were real and some were not, because dictators often frame their political opponents with crimes to lock them up. A few unauthorized immigrants are fugitives from justice in their home country. Those people should never have been granted any protected status in the US. It’s really hard to do background checks from another country. I know this from personal experience with humanitarian and refugee cases—we struggled to produce the data the FBI demanded for someone on another continent with a hostile government.

The idea that the guy milking cows on our neighbor’s farm might have served time for murder makes a lot of people feel that a mass deportation of all unauthorized immigrants will reduce crime and make us safer. Several recent studies show that immigrants are 47% less likely than native-born US citizens to commit violent or property crimes. It turns out that the only crime that the most unauthorized immigrants commit is entering the US outside of the legal points and mechanisms of entry. Nearly half of these unauthorized immigrants haven’t committed any crime at all because they entered the country legally (although their visa overstay is a civil offense). Maybe hanging out at the nearest dairy farm is safer than hanging out at other places in the US. Oh, oops, I forgot about the bull: the dairy bull is the most dangerous farm animal. Maybe the most dangerous animal, period. Hmmmm…. I suppose I should make sure the unauthorized immigrant farm employees are between me the bull. Why am I singling out dairy workers? Stay with me through the next newsletter to find out.

I want to emphasize that I am not an advocate for breaking US immigration laws. A nation has to have control of its borders. I am also an advocate for finding US-produced food to buy in the grocery store and for US farms thriving. While US farms are barely surviving rather than thriving, we can still find some US farm products in our grocery stores. Unauthorized immigrants are helping enable that. Perhaps if we know who they are and how many they are and why they are unauthorized, we can find a legal way to have them help us put inexpensive, safe food on our dinner plates.

The new administration has put a number on this problem: 11 million. But 11 million who? All sorts of labels are bandied about: Illegal immigrants, illegal criminal aliens, undocumented immigrants, and unauthorized immigrants, to name a few. Because we are hearing the number 11 million so much, I went looking for the definition that matched that particular number. It’s the 2022 total “unauthorized immigrants” number from Pew Research, which is based on US Census data (Chart 6, below). Now you know why I have been insisting on that word “unauthorized” instead of “illegal.”

To clarify, “unauthorized immigrants” includes a large number of immigrants with some legal status, but they do not yet have political asylum, current visas, or green cards. I added up the numbers of “unauthorized” immigrants who are actually “legal” in some sense and got 3.18 million souls as of December 2024, about 29% of that 11 million total “unauthorized.” Organizations like Pew Research say the percentage of legal but not authorized immigrants is “about 30%” so I am pretty comfortable with my math.

But wait—my math and Pew Research’s math are now out of date. Unfortunately for people on TPS, the president can cancel that status for their country of origin, making them eligible for immediate deportation. And guess what, President Trump cancelled TPS for Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela on Day One. That made about 550,000 more people immediately deportable. President Trump also cancelled all pending political asylum cases for people who requested asylum after entering outside of legal entry points—the number of people this order affects is unknown. Unfortunately for those trying to follow our work and asylum laws, deportation is easy to do when you voluntarily gave the US government your address to legally obtain work authorization or apply for asylum.

Ah, you may be thinking, 11 million was the 2022 figure, and your charts show over three million people have attempted entry since then. Yes—the analysis is complicated and still being finalized, but right now the net number of unauthorized immigrants inside the US has probably grown to 11.7 million. Despite all the rhetoric, 11.7 million is not the peak number of “unauthorized immigrants” in recent history. The peak was 12.2 million in 2007. The Great Recession and the Obama administration’s very aggressive deportation program had a lot to do with this long-term decline.

If we subtract the people who have some permission to be here (TPS or pending asylum or pending visa applications) from that unauthorized total, the number of people who can be deported under Title 8 may be around 8.5 million. That’s still a lot people to find and deport. These are also the people who are hardest to find, because the US government doesn’t have addresses on file for them. The 2024 bipartisan immigration reform bill that would have (among other things) funded an increase in the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Enforcement and Removal Office (ERO) personnel did not pass. This is the same bill that would have funded more Customs and Border Patrol (CDP), immigration judges, and detention center beds, too. That bill would have funded a large number of the Project 2025 priorities on immigration reform. Remember that the US Constitution assigns responsibility for creating laws allocating resources for enforcing them to our Legislative Branch; the Executive is constrained to carry out the laws using the budget approved by the legislature. Over the past five years, the average cost to deport an unauthorized immigrant has been $19,599. So, it could cost $166,592,000,000 (about $166.6 billion) to deport 9 million immigrants. If the US dramatically changes political asylum laws (or the current administration just ignores US laws) to allow the legal deportation of all people who currently have pending asylum applications, the total deportation cost exceeds $216 billion. That’s direct costs, which are likely to increase with more use of detention and dedicated military aircraft flights. I don’t know enough to calculate the indirect costs of pulling law enforcement officers away from fighting crime and military personnel away from fighting terrorism.

At least 8.3 million unauthorized immigrants are working full time. This 8.3 million means that a significant percentage of unauthorized immigrants are working without work authorization. If you have applied for political asylum, for example, you can’t begin working legally for six months to a year after your application. Even after that waiting period, you must apply for “employment authorization” to work—often called work authorization. This delay in allowing work authorization the political asylum laws was meant to discourage people from applying for political asylum unless they had a very strong case. In practice, it means that a lot of immigrants who have some legal status must work without authorization to support themselves, because they are NOT eligible for US taxpayer assistance. Oh, the application for employment authorization (Form I-765, Application for Employment Authorization) has a filing fee of $520. Guess how you get that fee, along with your groceries and shelter, when you are not eligible for public assistance? But if your I-765 application is approved, you get a social security number and are in e-Verify. You must pay payroll taxes even though you may never be eligible to collect benefits. You transition from being an unauthorized immigrant who is working without a work authorization (unauthorized-unauthorized) to an unauthorized immigrant who is authorized to work (unauthorized-authorized). Are you still on this horse with me?

One frequent argument for deporting all these unauthorized immigrants is that they are taking jobs away from US citizens and legal residents. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (US BLS) says the total US workforce including unauthorized immigrants working without authorization was about 161 million in 2023 and about 162 million in 2024. Doing a little math suggests that unauthorized immigrants make up 5.1% of our total US workforce. The December 2024 unemployment was 4.1%, perhaps 6.6 million people. Remember that the official unemployment rate only counts people who are actually looking for work, not people who have sidelined themselves. If 8.3 million fulltime workers suddenly disappeared from the US workforce–an economic rapture, perhaps?—would those 6.6 million unemployed US citizens and residents jump up off the proverbial couch to take those jobs, leaving us with 1.7 million jobs with no one to fill them?

Somewhere around a million of those suddenly-empty jobs would be on farms. The tech industry laid off over 400,000 workers in the past three years. If you are a US citizen who got laid off from a six-figure IT job at, say, Twitter (oops, X), would you be eager to earn a $30,000/year harvesting strawberries or lettuce? Or milking cows and shoveling manure? “Content moderation” at X or YouTube might make shoveling manure look good. However, unlike the unauthorized immigrant, US citizens are eligible for benefits like unemployment, Medicaid, and SNAP. I bet most of those farm jobs would be in the 1.7 million unfilled. I bet the harder, messier food processing jobs would also land on that unfilled list. Perhaps those of you laid off from IT and tech jobs would see a higher ROI in fighting H-1B visa abuse. H-1B visas are given to highly-educated foreigners in specialty occupations like IT—or fashion models, who are eligible for H-1B3 visas regardless of their formal education.

Recent polls show that most US voters who named immigration as one of their top issues support a “mass deportation” policy that deports very recent illegal arrivals who have criminal records or are taking public resources away from US citizens. The common perception is that most unauthorized immigrants arrived since 2020, during the Biden Administration’s so-called “Open Border Policy.” Well, if you shout “the US border is open” on US TV, a lot of people who are having a rough go of it somewhere else will come to check it out. And yes, they are listening to US TV because they are studying English. When I was on a mission trip to Bolivia in 2001, I asked all the young people there who spoke English how they learned it. The almost universal answer was “My mother got a job cleaning house for wealthy families, and she took me with her so I could watch their American TV to learn English.” The reality is that the Biden Administration kept right on enforcing Title 8 and Title 42, albeit without some aberrations like separating children from their parents. The other reality is that the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants have been in the US for a long time. You probably already suspected this from the charts above, but take a look at this distribution by arrival decade (Chart 7):

Yep, over nine out of ten unauthorized immigrants got here before 2020. About four of five have been here over a decade. Almost one in eight is a spouse or stepchild of a US citizen. They work. They have essential job skills. Many own businesses providing essential services and products. They are part of community infrastructure.

What about our other concern that unauthorized immigrants take up public resources? They pay almost $100 billion in taxes each year (twice the entire FY2024 USAID budget). If they don’t have a work authorization, they don’t collect any tax credits. For example, in 2022, federal, state, and local governments received an average of $8,889 taxes per immigrant. $33.9 billion of those 2022 taxes went into Social Security, Medicare, and Unemployment Insurance, programs from which unauthorized immigrants can never collect benefits. Unauthorized immigrants paid about 2% of the Social Security deposit coming to a bank account near you.

The conservative Cato Institute says that even an immigrant arriving at age 25 with less than the equivalent of a high school education contributes more to our society than a US-born high-school dropout. In fact, that immigrant will make a net-position contribution while the US-born individual will be net-negative (a drain). For one thing, that unauthorized immigrant didn’t spend 12 years in US public schools before they started working. Take a look at this analysis (Chart 8):

That same immigrant’s children—birthright citizens—do go to school, so the Cato Institute deducts their descendants’ cost from their contribution to the US. Overall, an American University study concluded that unauthorized immigrants contribute $2.2 trillion to the US economy, boosting US productivity by $1.7 trillion. They may be contributing as much as 8% of the US Gross Domestic Product.

In a time of general housing shortages and rural healthcare deserts, however, you may find it hard to believe these numbers. During our recent primary election (for our VA-5 congressional representative), I received ten colorful, over-sized postcards from one candidate accusing his opponent of voting to use state taxpayers’ money to send “illegal aliens to college.” The real story? As a sitting state assembly delegate, said opponent had voted to approve the complete state budget. Buried in that budget every year is funding for our state universities to discount tuition for students who have resided in the state for three years prior to enrollment. Virginia state law allows Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals (DACA) who have been residing in the state for three years to enroll at the “in-state” tuition rate. DACAs are unauthorized immigrants despite having “documentation” and a quasi-legal status. Unfortunately, they currently have no path to US citizenship, stuck forever in limbo.

For me, the picture of a DACA immigrant is that of a brilliant engineering student who helped me on my graduate research years ago. He was working on the artificial heart project while still an undergraduate. We celebrated his admission to a prestigious joint medical and engineering graduate program. His plan was to get doctorates in both medicine and engineering, continuing his work on the artificial heart through graduate school. Then we got awful news: his acceptance into this prestigious graduate program was revoked upon the discovery that his parents had failed to file for his citizenship when they had gotten their own. He was not a US citizen despite having spent most of his life in the US, and he did not even know he wasn’t a citizen until he was accepted into graduate school. A quarter-century later, we still don’t have that artificial heart. Still in DACA limbo, he’s now a tech executive, but I will always wonder if we would have an artificial heart if he’d had a path to US citizenship.

Thanks for staying with me through this complex topic. I hope you feel smarter. I hope you are also wondering: Why are we so much more worried about unauthorized immigration now than we were during the nearly 30 years (1980-2008) when it was as high or higher? President Reagan told us that immigrants made us all richer and we believed it then—and supported naturalization of over 3 million. Well, almost: inflaming anti-immigration fears transformed the 1994 California governor’s election. Some people took notes. For 2024’s election, consider the pervasive messages about our country being in decline. When any group loses confidence in itself, its “in” members become more suspicious and fearful of any “out” group. Round-the-clock doom and gloom rhetoric piled onto pandemic isolation and trauma can erode a group’s confidence. The “in” group’s cohesion increases with rhetoric that amplifies their fear of the “out” group. Now you know why that’s a popular and effective political refrain. And why so many US voters who can’t name a single unauthorized immigrant decided it was their first or second issue. Check out the book How Confidence Works by neuroscientist Ian Robertson (link below) for more on this dynamic—it’s well worth the read.

Next time, I will return to farm country and dig into the impact of unauthorized immigrants on the farm-to-fork journey our food takes. What might our grocery stores look like after a “mass deportation” of 11.7 million unauthorized immigrants—or even just the approximately 8.55 million who now lack any kind of legal status?

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Reference Notes:

Should you want to do your own research on immigration, here are readable sources that are also reliable and accurate. I base my definition of “reliable and accurate” on cross-checks with each other and with government-published data. Always check the references cited to make sure they aren’t running you in circles. Please ignore the people who make it hard to find their data sources. In addition to US CBP and DHS data now being online, USA Facts (non-partisan site devoted to making government data more accessible), Pew Research Center (a non-partisan think tank), and The Cato Institute (a conservative think tank) all compile a lot of good data on immigration and explain it well. I have also included links to raw government data for those either very curious or suffering from insomnia. Links to recent Executive Orders are at the end for those looking for an emotional adrenaline fix.

Perceptions versus Fact:

Americans Have One Very Strange Cognitive Bias

Immigration Explanations:

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topics/immigration-101

https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2023-04/Fiscal-Impact-of-Immigration-WP.pdf

From USAFacts website:

How many unauthorized immigrants are in the US? | USAFacts

Statistics on unauthorized US immigration and US border crossings by year | USAFacts

Immigration Data from the Department of Homeland Security:

Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant Population Residing in the United States: January 2018 to January 2022

ICE releases fiscal year 2023 annual report | ICE (all annual reports are on-line, and are fairly readable, although they can leave you having trouble seeing the forest for all the trees!)

ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Statistics | ICE

Other Immigration Analysis:

Breaking Down the Immigration Figures - FactCheck.org

Sharp fall in migrant encounters at US-Mexico border in 2024 | Pew Research Center

What the Data Reveals About U.S. Immigration Ahead of the 2024 Election — ProPublica

Migrant Encounters at Southern Border Entry Points Surpassed Those Between Them for The First Time Ever

Debunking the Myth of the ‘Migrant Crime Wave’ | Brennan Center for Justice

CBP One App: CBP One - Wikipedia

Definitions of terms used in immigration tracking:

Words Matter: Illegal Immigrant, Undocumented Immigrant, or Unauthorized Immigrant? - Markkula Center for Applied Ethics

What we know about unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. | Pew Research Center

Fact Sheet: Temporary Protected Status (TPS) - National Immigration Forum

United States Code Title 8:

What is Title 8 — and what has it changed after Title 42's end? - CBS News

Title 8 of the United States Code - Wikipedia

United States Code Title 42:

42 U.S. Code § 265 - Suspension of entries and imports from designated places to prevent spread of communicable diseases | U.S. Code | US Law | LII / Legal Information Institute

Title 42 expulsion - Wikipedia

Title 42 dramatically changed who arrived at U.S.-Mexico border

Border Wall:

The Border Wall Didn’t Work | Cato at Liberty Blog

Mexico–United States border wall - Wikipedia

The failure of the last immigration control bill (February 2024):

Unraveling Misinformation About Bipartisan Immigration Bill - FactCheck.org

Taxes paid by unauthorized immigrants:

Tax Payments by Undocumented Immigrants – ITEP

Good Sanity Check on the popular “stories” about immigrants:

The 14 Most Common Arguments against Immigration and Why They're Wrong | Cato at Liberty Blog

Breaking Down the Immigration Figures - FactCheck.org

Weekly U.S.-Mexico Border Update: a quiet border, mass deportation, military flights - WOLA

Data on Legal Permanent Residents:

Legal Immigration to the United States, 1820-Present | migrationpolicy.org

Surveys on US Voter attitudes about unauthorized immigrants:

Most say undocumented immigrants should have some way to stay legally in US | Pew Research Center

As Trump vows mass deportation, polls suggest growing support – but not a mandate | CNN Politics

Economic Impact of Unauthorized Immigration:

Proof that immigrants fuel the US economy is found in the billions they send back home

Past Elections Amplifying Fears about Immigration:

The 1994 Campaign that Anticipated Trump 2024 | TIME

Great Book by Ian Robertson About Confidence (Group and Individual):

How Confidence Works: The New Science of Self-Belief

President Trump’s Executive Orders Impacting Immigration:

Guaranteeing The States Protection Against Invasion – The White House

Designating Cartels And Other Organizations As Foreign Terrorist Organizations And Specially Designated Global Terrorists – The White House

Protecting The United States From Foreign Terrorists And Other National Security And Public Safety Threats – The White House

Securing Our Borders – The White House

Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program – The White House

I awoke early this morning to sleet rattling against my bedroom window. There were several inches of snow when I hit the hay last night, so I was not really surprised. Now it was changing to sleet and rain, landing on very cold ground. I flipped on an outdoor light, and sure enough, icicles are forming on the porch railings while the stairs gleam with a coating of ice.

Winter storms bring conflicting emotions to all adults, but especially farmers. When I was a small child in the 1960s, a snowstorm brought joy at the prospect of school being cancelled. There might be days of sledding and snow forts and snowball fights before winding mountain roads were clear enough for school buses to return. Our county was plowing snow with equipment that was probably antiquated even then -- and half the roads were still unpaved.

Fluffy dry snow was especially fun and not just because it took me longer to get my winter clothes completely soaked. I recall years when the snow drifts were above my head. I have fond memories of hiding from my brothers in deep powdery snow, to ambush them with a carefully crafted pile of snowballs. This did not always end well, as my older brother Albert’s long legs enabled him to move faster in the deep snow than I could. He would usually catch me soon after he figured out where the snowball barrage came from. Unfortunately, Albert would show his appreciation of my ambush craft by shoving a large amount of snow under my shirt and down my jeans, if he could catch me. I’d end up back at the farmhouse to change clothes after that. Sometimes, he did this without my provoking him with snowball barrages. If the snow developed a crust, however, I had a major tactical advantage. I was a little squirt so I could run, skate, or slide very fast on top of the crust while he broke through on every stride and floundered.

No high-tech fabrics in those days: We soaked so many pairs of jeans on a typical snow day that Mom bought stacks of cheap jeans at nearby Wolftown Cash and Carry or Hood Merchantile. A Blue Bell jeans factory was just a few miles away and their “seconds” ended up in local stores. That was before Wrangler bought Blue Bell and moved production to Mexico. The dyes used for jeans in the 1960s weren’t as “fast” as the kids wearing them. We’d leave a faint blue trail in the snow when we parted company with our sleds. Unfortunately, rich city kids were not yet paying more for faded jeans than for new ones. If paying a premium for faded jeans with the knees worn out had been a thing in the 1960s, I would have had enough money selling my cast-offs to buy that new saddle at the co-op!

In Virginia’s Blue Ridge, a farm has lots of options for a child’s winter adventures and ruining jeans. Springs in our mountain ridge fed nine creeks, which cut our land into hilly chunks before they converged into Whetstone Run, a tributary to the Rapid Ann River, now better known as the Rapidan River. Every hill on our farm had a creek or a pond at the bottom. Mom decreed the hills around the pond off-limits for sledding, correctly visualizing what could happen if we lost control of a sled speeding downhill toward that pond. She also forbade skating on the pond ice unless the horses and cattle were taking short-cuts across the ice. Come to think, she forbade all activity on that ice, but we created our own guidelines at times. I mean, that horse outweighed us by an order of magnitude, and their instincts about their footing are legendary. If the horse thought that ice was safe, so did I. Sorry, Mom, you were very busy in the barn when it was really cold, and your children were not saints. And Dear Reader, in case you are visualizing those Currier and Ives or P. Buckley Moss prints of people skating elegantly on the farm pond: natural ice formation on ponds is not smooth unless the freeze occurs very fast on a very calm night. That happens almost never. So, you are quite likely to take a painful nose-dive when you hit a ridge while skating on that ice. Lesson: rinks are much more fun and safer.

The creeks also froze, but less often than the pond did. It has to be really, really cold to freeze fast moving water. The creeks would usually freeze only along the edges, or where a bend in the creek’s path had slowed the water into a deep pool. That ice was never thick enough to hold a sled and a small girl barreling onto it after she lost control of her sled. The “flexible” steering on a Radio Flexible Flyer sled only works when the runners can bite into the snow, which doesn’t happen on top of an icy crust. It also doesn’t work when you are airborne after zooming over a snow mound carefully crafted to make a Radio Flyer actually fly. Of course, you get the best speeds lying flat on the Flyer, headfirst, hands on the steering bar. I suppose there are “safety warnings” somewhere that tell you the proper way to ride the sled is sitting upright and using your feet to steer, but I think we tried that, like, once. The bright idea to wax the runners with a candle stub seemed a little less bright when sitting in an ice-water bath in the creek at the end of a fast run. Friction is not always the enemy!

My older brother was soon drafted for farm chores, and I had a few years for my winter adventures without so many of his ambushes. This included some illicit use of his longer -- and faster -- Radio Flyer sled. I learned that our dogs -- Weimaraners -- were much better at hunting birds than pulling sleds. “Mush” was just not in their doggie vocabulary or genetics. Also, I learned that trying to use a Radio Flyer as a substitute for a horse-drawn sleigh is a good way to ask a pony to kick you.

Sometimes, I wonder how any farm kids survive to adulthood. I knew a few who didn’t. Our farm had an old cemetery overlooking the pond, with tombstones sized by the time spent here on earth. I made up some stories involving wild horses about the smaller tombstones in that old cemetery. But Mom told me that those tombstones had more to do with the lack of medical care for mothers and the lack of vaccines for children in the 1800s than they did with stupid experiments with ponies. She’d noticed that some of the smallest grave markers had death dates matching those on some large grave markers. Perhaps those paired tombstones reminded her of how she nearly died during the stillbirth a couple years before we moved to the farm. Perhaps the children’s grave markers reminded her of her sister’s grave in Louisiana. Little Alice Rose died in 1932 of the Whooping Cough that Mom brought home from school. Mom felt responsible for Alice’s death to her own dying day. I came along when nobody complained about lining kindergarteners up at school for sugar cubes soaked in polio vaccine and no one ever heard of asking a kid to be excused from the Whooping Cough vaccine. No matter: Mom would have hauled us to Timbuktu to get a vaccination even if they weren’t required for school.

Fortunately for my chances of surviving my horsy heroics, Mom’s father lived with us for a time. Grandad had a lot of experience with workhorses at his Louisiana logging and sawmill operation. He taught me a few things about horse training in time to prevent my equine-assisted suicide. He was as famous for his workhorses as for his mill’s pickle barrels and baseball bats. He had a horse that would drag logs from the logging site to the mill and return to get another all day long without a driver. I found a yellowed New York Times Sunday clipping about that mare in Grandad’s papers after he died. I never could convince my pony to ferry sleds back up the hill without having to lead her. I eventually reconciled myself to the fact that dragging the sled back up the hill by myself was easier than dragging both the pony and sled up there. That slog up the hill is the price I had to pay for the adrenaline hit the downhill slide brings. Good thing adrenaline is addictive.

I finally grew big enough to be drafted for the extra farm chores that blow in with a winter storm, and the sledding and snow forts became fewer. I was conflicted about this: I wanted to help do important things like take care of the animals as badly as I wanted to play in the snow. Winter morning adventures became breaking ice on water troughs and hauling buckets of heated water when the water system froze. There was also a seemingly endless shifting of hay bales out of the barn onto a wagon to feed the cows in the pasture. Those bales were “square” and weighed about 50 pounds each. They were actually rectangular but we called them square after round bales came along. These square bales were still too awkward for me to lift until I was in my teens and actually outweighed them, but I got creative with rolling them along. I think it was almost 1980 before we switched to the half-ton round bales that we moved with forks on tractor loaders. No more illicit “hay forts” constructed as we “tidied up the haystack” after winter feeding, because you can’t do that with round bales.

We also fed silage on our feedlot. We stored the silage in open-top concrete-stave silos. Our two largest silos were sixty feet tall. Snow on top of the fermenting silage melted into a wet mess which then froze on top. That gave the automatic silo unloader fits. I don’t remember what make our unloaders were—any labels were long obscured by caked-on silage. Probably Clay. Today I get a kick out of the old Clay silo unloader ad, claiming that a Clay unloader is “GUARANTEED TO HANDLE FROZEN SILAGE!” and “Clay fluffs it up and throws it down, EVEN WHEN IT’S FROZEN.” Ha! We had to get up in the silo to help that unloader with the frozen silage. We’d climb up the wooden silo door handles, as they doubled as ladder rungs. Once in the silo, you’d break up the frozen layer with a 10-tine pitchfork designed to handle silage, then holler down for someone to start the loader. This contraption’s auger assembly rotated slowly in the silo’s interior (Videos at (20+) Video | Facebook and Silo unloader. How it works). We’d circle the silo interior just behind the rotating unloader, forking the chunks into at its augers at a rate its blower could handle, then the wet layer below that, until the unloader reached a dryer layer that it could pick up on its own. At least the fermented silage warmed your feet once you got the frozen layer forked away. I’m pretty sure this activity was not OSHA-approved, especially for child labor. Our definition of safe was working in pairs. Guess how we learned to do this? Watching Dad and Grandad, who probably did not realize all that their “whatever it takes to get the job done” example taught us kids.

Those of you who are more acquainted with grain bins than silos are horrified at the idea of us being in there, but silage doesn’t “bridge” over voids which can turn the grain into deadly quicksand. Corn silage is chopped corn, stalks and ears and all, “ensiled” in a silo. This feed system was inspired by sauerkraut. A few years we did grass silage—we called that “haylage”—but that’s more common in Europe than the US. All that chopped plant matter is blown into the silo a little moist. It settles as it ferments, and it stays moist. Our system unloaded the silo from the top, so there was no chance of voids developing or the material sliding and burying us.

Once we got the silo unloader actually unloading silage on its own, we’d climb back down the door-rungs to where the silage was piling in the middle of a feeding bunker under a long auger carrying it away from the silo. The cattle would be struggling to reach the silage, rearing up onto the bunker with long tongues straining to scoop some up. There would almost always be some smarty who figured out how to jump up on the bunker (about three feet tall and maybe eight feet wide and over a hundred feet long). More than one of these clever bovine souls lost part of their tail in the bunker auger, too.

We would use a shovel to scrape the silage from the bunker’s middle to the edges where the cattle did not have to jump or rear up to reach it. Making our way down the bunker, shovel upside down on the bunker surface, we’d push some silage to the opposite side with the away-stroke and pull some toward our side on the return stroke so the cattle could eat on both sides. We wore a lot shovels down to nubbins on that rough concrete-and-gravel bunker. Silage-warmed feet were soon very cold as the poorly-laid frost-heaved concrete captured puddles of manure and water runoff and ice below the bunker. This job went faster for the taller members of my family with long arms. And if we could convince the cattle with silage-on-the-brain to get out of our way. We had to shout pretty loud to sound intimidating over that rattling bunker auger. The cattle moved out of my way faster if I thumped them on the shoulder or head with the shovel, but I hated to do that and usually settled for poking them in the flanks with the handle.

At the time, I was more concerned about getting trampled or crushed by hungry cows than I was worried about getting hurt by the machinery inside the silo. This may be why I got more time up in the silo dodging the unloader than on bunker duty. Unfortunately, the silo held a hazard that we didn’t know about then: breathing the gases emitted by fermentation of that chopped corn did not help our young lungs. We didn’t think about the air in an open-top silo being bad—in fact, good silage has a nice pungent odor—but if I check the “worked in silos” box on certain medical history forms nowadays, I get an interrogation and extra stethoscope time from the doctor.

The dairies that were doing well in the 1960s and 1970s installed sealed HarveStore silos that unloaded from the bottom. They were kind of a status symbol. They were labor-savers and greatly improved the quality of the silage. Best yet in my humble opinion, they were insulated to keep the silage from freezing! HarveStore’s maker—A.O. Smith, who started out making tanks for brewers—had to do an intensive safety education program to teach farmers raised with open silos to stay out of sealed silos. Those distinctive blue silos with the white tops earned the nickname “Blue Tombstones”—and not just because they could be deathtraps inside. They cost so much that farmers mortgaged the farm to buy them. When the 1980s crash came to farm country, that extra debt load broke a lot of those farms. The Farm Aid concert proceeds were a drop in the family farm bucket. Wild swings in wholesale beef prices in the early 1970s—the result of President Nixon’s experiment in retail price controls on beef—had made my parents wary of big-ticket investments for feed storage. We stayed with our temperamental, labor-intensive silage system. Dad opted to invest in grain bins and a used combine to shell corn instead. It was the better choice: my parents were able to keep the farm through those tough times.

The change from silage to shelled corn was not so popular with the cattle. They loved that fermented winter silage more than ground corn or summer’s green grass. Ever see a cow smile? Hard to imagine, I know, given the rigidity of their faces. But if you’ve ever watched cows stagger off the feedlot after a big meal of fermented corn silage, you will swear that a cow can smile. I’ve seen them so woozy they’d trip on the way out to pasture. They’d take their sweet time getting back up. Moo-la-la-la!

Shouting over that noisy bunker auger and bellowing hungry cows would make me hoarse, but that noisy auger had its advantages. Need to get the cows up in the middle of July for worming? Just turn that auger on and watch them stampede up to the barn. I think the cows told their calves about that silage, because years—cattle generations, really—after we stopped putting up corn silage, you could still call the cows in by running that old auger for a few minutes. Time eventually took its toll on that equipment. When I returned to the farm in 2004, we were 100% grass farmers, running far more sheep than cows. I had a scrap man haul the rusting auger assembly away. I got the bunker bulldozed to make way for a manure composting facility. By then the taller silos were leaning like that fabled tower of Pisa. Turned out the foundations were faulty. Actually, they were almost non-existent. I convinced the tax assessor that they were a huge liability, and it would cost a fortune to take them down so he would lower our tax bill. I really did think it would cost a lot to get rid of them, and I worried that they’d fall before I found the money. Then the prices of concrete and steel went up. I found a bunch of Mennonites who disassembled them in exchange for the staves and the steel bands that held the staves together. They hauled those staves and bands away on several tractor trailers, to reassemble those silos on their farms. For a while, I did a few double takes at not seeing those silos on the horizon, but did I miss being inside that silo after a winter storm? Never.

The extra farm chores coming in with snow changed over the years as our farm operation changed and we gradually improved our infrastructure. Watering system designs that do not freeze are a wonderful innovation. Machines can move large amounts of fodder without the back-breaking labor, but they need maintenance. Hay bales weigh half a ton instead of the fifty pounds of yesteryear, and they are not going anywhere without diesel and hydraulics. It’s no fun to start a diesel engine when someone forgot to plug in the block heater. Or worse, when the block heater is not heating because ice brought trees down on the power line. And ice in fuel lines is the new version of ice in water lines.

Timing the lamb crop to mature in time for high holiday demand for lamb may mean long hours with ewes delivering lambs in freezing, icy conditions ((1) A Modern Shepherd's Christmas - by Kristin Farry). A newborn lamb has to have something in its stomach within its first hour or so to survive sub-freezing temperatures, and ewes having twins and triplets often need help to keep all alive. You have more time with calves, which are almost always single births, but any nursing mother must have water and food to keep making milk for her young. And speaking of milk, I shudder to think of modern dairy farmers milking a few thousand cows during a blizzard or when the power is out. Is that among the reasons that our dairy industry has been migrating to Texas and California? Milking our single dairy cow on top of the other snow-induced challenges was not my favorite farm chore in my younger years. Now, I suspect that even milking robots have temper tantrums in sub-freezing weather.

Here in central Virginia’s poultry country, my neighbors are out in today’s messy, wet snow tending the equipment keeping their birds warm and fed and watered in poultry houses. The folks with greenhouses and high tunnels are worried about their houses and tunnels collapsing under the load of heavy snow. They are also struggling to water plants and keep them from freezing as temperatures this week will be in the teens every night. That’s my future on Farm 2.0, so I am checking snow loads for my future facilities.

The commodity crop farmers may be the only farmers relaxing in this winter weather. Oh, oops, they are busy with equipment maintenance because last year’s harvest went all the way to Thanksgiving and spring planting will be here before we can say Jack Frost three times. Like my father before me, I swore that someday I was going to have a shop with a heated floor to make the winter equipment maintenance easier. We never did get that heated floor. Or even a heated shop. I still hoard big sheets of cardboard, even after I came to understand that commodity crops were not our future and can postpone equipment maintenance for a warmer day. Every time I try to put a big sheet of cardboard into the recycle bin, I think of using it to insulate my back or butt from that frozen ground or icy concrete. I get a chill and stick the cardboard back in the shop. My non-farming friends shake their heads at my huge cardboard stash, but I can’t help myself.

No matter what kind of farming you are doing, when you stagger in for a very late hot lunch after the extra workload that blew in with the snowstorm, you probably don’t have any energy left to play in the snow. You warm your butt leaning on the old radiator and thaw your hands on a mug of hot tea and look out the window at all that cold stuff and suddenly working on your taxes feels like a good après-farm chores idea. So, you send the kids out to play unsupervised. When you hear them screaming in play, you try not to think of the ways you nearly killed yourself when you were that age.

My younger brother—perhaps remembering our adventures all too well—got his boys plastic toboggans to slide down gentler slopes instead of giving them our old Flyers. You sit upright and slide feet first on those. They slide better on light snows than our Flyers did. Light snow seems to be the norm most years nowadays. It was a bittersweet moment a few years ago when I found our Radio Flyers in the farmhouse basement where they had hung, unused, for decades. Those sleds looked so much smaller than I remembered. I don’t have any memories of careening down a hill on my Flyer after the age of ten or twelve.

During my non-farming years, there have been some pure-play ski trips. On the farm, snow is associated more with work than play. But long-time family friend and sheep farmer Leo Tammi (Shamoka Run Farm) just reminded me of Christopher Robin’s observation (A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh): “If you choose not to find joy in the snow, you will have less joy but still the same amount of snow.”

So, dress warmly and find some joy in the snow. Take it from me, there will someday be a morning when you will miss all that extra work. For about two minutes, maybe!

Next time: How immigration policy fills your dinner plate—or not.

Growing food requires labor. Not only must you put in a lot of hours, but those hours are hard, dirty, and often dangerous. And the per-hour pay is very low, whether you are farm operator or farm worker.

Consider those grapes you are snacking on while you read this. The National Farmers’ Union says the farmer’s share of each dollar you spend on groceries is now 14.3 cents. That 14.3% has to cover land, liability insurance, mortgage and production credit interest, fences, barns, equipment, fuel, fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, seed, breeding stock, feed, minerals, medications, veterinary bills, freight, fees, taxes, miscellaneous supplies, and….. labor. So, you paid $4 for that pound of grapes? The labor cost share for fruit has been around 30% lately. That’s 57.2 cents going to the farmer with 17 cents of that paid to her farm workers to plant, stake, spray, prune, and pick those grapes. The farmer pays her workers before she pays herself, of course. And if my own experience is any indication, that farmer purposely does NOT count her own hours. If you do start counting your own hours, you will soon quit farming.

In the year 1800, 75% of the US population worked on farms. In 1900, that share had dropped to about 40%. By 2000, the percentage was under 2%. In 2020, farms employed only 1.2% of the US population.

The high percentage (75%) of the US population working on farms in 1800 gives some context to our founding fathers’ vision for the US. They thought that agriculture would always be the foundation of this country. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bands.…” Jefferson also said, “Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.” Hence our founders’ emphasis on farming and land and real property rights.

Those of you who were awake in high-school civics class will recall that the voting franchise was limited to male landowners in 1800. Those of you who were awake in that class despite having spent 5-10 hours working on the family farm the day before will recall thinking that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison had time to write the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution – spending months in legislatures and congresses – because they were not farming their land with their own hands. They had hired workers and slaves doing the actual farm work. Jefferson’s Monticello was about 5000 acres. Over the course of Jefferson’s life, about 600 enslaved people and 100 free men worked on Jefferson’s lands. Madison’s Montpelier was about 3000 acres and about 300 enslaved people worked that land during the Madisons’ ownership.

After decades of exporting more agricultural production (in dollars) than we imported, our agriculture trade balance has gone negative in four of the last five years (2019, 2020, 2021, and 2023). The fifth year (2022) had only a small trade surplus. Not long ago, there were headlines attributing these recent agricultural trade deficits to a shortage of farm labor inside the US. I’ve been digging in this manure pile ever since to understand this connection. My quest has become a little more urgent with the policy proposals of our incoming administration.

Both my personal experience and my research tells me that labor shortages have been a major factor in smaller farms consolidating into large farms. Only very large farms can afford to buy labor-saving equipment like robotic milkers and combines. Costly mechanization to deal with a shrinking labor workforce has also driven farms to specialize. In 1900, the average farm was about 150 acres and sold 5 different commodities. By 2000, the average farm was about 450 acres and sold only 1.25 different commodities. By this measure, my family farm’s evolution was fairly typical: we were selling corn, beef, and pork in 1970. We were selling mostly lamb, with a small sideline of beef, by the early 2000s. I suppose I should include the sale of wool from our sheep, but we didn’t even get enough from that to pay the shearer. In our case, additional specialization pressure came from the expertise required. In a highly-regulated system with small margins, you have to know a great deal about a perishable product to get it safely to market within those margins. All my ideas to diversify into other products were still-born due to the labor shortage.

One huge reason for the current farm labor shortage is the aging of the US population. For my family’s first decade in farming (1965-1975), the median age of the US population dipped below 27 years. Now it’s just north of 38 despite the “invasion” of fairly young immigrants. Looks like our country’s median age will be over 45 by the end of the 21st century – unless there is a mass deportation of immigrants which will increase the median age. The US population is aging faster than the global average. Keep in mind that the “global average” includes many countries with a higher median age than ours. The US doesn’t even make the top ten oldest. Offsetting these are quite a few developing countries where the median age now is under 20.

Rural America is aging faster than urban America. In 2020, the median age was 43 years in rural US communities versus 38.8 years for the entire US population. Comparing the age distribution of US rural and urban populations, it’s pretty clear that lots of rural kids head for the city right out of school and spend their prime working years there. They move back to the farm after a career outside of agriculture. Some even take up farming again, when they are no longer dependent on the farm to pay for things like health insurance. Farmers 65 and older are the fastest-growing farm-operator demographic, and Medicare is a major reason for that. There are now as many farmers over 65 as under 55. The median age of farm operators is now over 58.

The workforce on our family farm in Virginia over fifty years confirms these national demographics. In the 1960s and 70s, we would get work-seeking calls from a lot of teens, usually boys from the High School’s vocational-agriculture program. Our high school ag program wasn’t open to girls until the mid-1970s when a classmate of mine – one of only two immigrants in the school – succeeded in convincing the school to let her take agriculture. She did not feel welcome in that class but she persevered. She became a pillar of our community, farming for decades with her husband and pursuing a second career as a Methodist pastor, “circuit-riding” in her pickup to cover three small churches every Sunday.

Few older men would come looking for farm work in our early days (1960s and 1970s). My parents were more receptive to hiring older workers than most farmers. They figured those older workers had valuable experience that they lacked, being relative newcomers to farming. Sometimes there were interesting dynamics associated with how much respect those older farm workers had for us. The TV sitcom “Green Acres” was popular then, propagating some negative stereotypes. Do you remember that the New York City transplants on Green Acres were World War 2 veterans, with Oliver being an Army Air Corps pilot? Well, my Dad flew B-25s in WW2. The neighbors addressed him with “Colonel” but I suspect that they added “Crazy” to that title when out of earshot. Dad and Mom were innovators, and innovation usually looks crazy – right up until it works better than what everyone else has been doing for years.

We had some interesting employees in the early days. I recall Dad’s words when he discovered that the new neighbor whom he had hired to help rebuild our farm bridges — Agnes washed them away in 1972 — had a doctorate in philosophy from an Ivy League school. “What in the world are you doing standing here in this muck?” Dad demanded. “Feeding my family,” was the learned philosopher-turned-farmhand’s reply. “My wife and I have three kids. Plato and Socrates aren’t exactly hiring.” He was boot-strapping his own small farm operation just up the road.

As time passed, young adults willing to work for farm wages tended to be those who fell out of the bottom of the labor market rather than those who loved farming. My father had a soft spot for “giving a person a second chance,” so we may have had more than our share of these folks. I recall one young man who had a drinking problem, although he claimed that a childhood injury was the reason he couldn’t reliably show up for work. He came to work one day drunk enough to make advances on me. I was a young adult then, and farm-girl strong, so he didn’t get very far. Yes, that was his last day on our farm. He later sobered up and ended up making much better money as a welder’s assistant and then as a welder. Funny, that childhood injury stopped bothering him when the work was inside and paid three times as much.

As the years passed, the people looking for work on our farm got older and older. During the last twenty years, applicants often limped up the driveway, having no car. They usually wanted just parttime work to “earn a little cash under the table” because the local doctor had gotten them on disability so he could get them medical care. The disability payment was not enough to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table and a reliable car. Farm work was not compatible with their disability status. As much as I felt for their situation, I couldn’t pay “under the table.” Plus, providing transportation to and from work was usually not something I could do as I juggled my mother’s care, the farm, and the business that paid for my own medical care. Often, these unscheduled “interviews” would end with me driving the unfortunate soul home with something that would make their lives a tiny bit easier: firewood, a coat, or a pair of Grandad’s sadly-empty boots that happened to fit them. One cold fall morning, we loaded up a small woodstove along with firewood to heat the applicant’s ancient camper trailer sitting on flat tires – the only home he could afford on his disability. Another time, “home” was a small cabin at the end of a rutted dirt road, with outhouse advertising the lack of indoor plumbing — and this is the 21^st century. A big part of the rural labor problem is a shortage of inexpensive rural housing, a shortage made worse by zoning and anti-growth ordinances implemented by wealthy retirees.

We’d still get the occasional teenager looking for work in the last decade. Most were in for a rude surprise at how hard real farm work was because they hadn’t been raised doing it. Some thought I was a terrible boss because I did not allow ears to be plugged with music players while doing jobs where not being able to hear everything and everyone around you could get someone hurt. Hiring teens has gotten more legally complicated in recent decades. In Virginia, you can start working for pay at 14 on someone else’s farm, with your parents’ permission and outside of school hours. However, teens under 16 can’t do any paid work that is considered hazardous by the Department of Labor and Industry. This includes farm work involving large livestock. Working for your parents on the family farm, none of those rules apply, although you can get in trouble for missing too much school. You also don’t need a “youth employment certificate” on file at the school if you are working for your parents. The restriction on hazardous work also doesn’t apply. I tend to tilt against over-zealous government bureaucrats, but then I remember the injuries and deaths that punctuated my formative years on the farm as well as my own close calls. Maybe I have to temper my criticism of these labor regulations – but the hazards of farming deserves their own newsletter.

I don’t think all modern teens are softies, however. Some teens are the hardest and best workers ever. I especially appreciated Amanda. She was firm on $10 an hour when most teens were lucky to get minimum wage ($6.55 then). She was worth every cent, whether in the barn or the field or rebuilding the farmhouse porch. She was also the changing face of US agriculture: women are increasingly likely to be the primary face of farming. Of course, women have been farming since there was farming. Anthropologists tell us that women invented agriculture. But for many years in American agriculture, women held farms together working behind the scenes. Now, they are recognized as owners, managers, and field workers.

Some farmers have built bunkhouses and advertised “internships” to young suburbanites and urbanites with a yearning to experience farm life and food production. That’s one way to get very cheap labor from highly-motivated, energetic people. You have to teach them a lot and work through their naiveté and inexperience, but you get a lot of nearly free labor. I suspect many of these programs are a bit on the exploitive side. Amanda came to us from what was supposed to be a veterinary-assistant training program. After two weeks of cleaning that farm’s barn for bare room and board and not a whiff of anything that smelled like veterinary training, she decided that she wasn’t going to learn anything she didn’t already know about cleaning barns. She had already served that time taking care of her own horses, thank you. She quickly proved that in our barn, paycheck included, blond ponytail flying as she forked dirty straw out of lambing huddles or maneuvered the skid-steer around gates and livestock waterers or flung bales of straw over fences. Poison ivy was the only thing that slowed that young lady down.

The problem with hiring hard-working teenagers is that farming is usually a job they are moving through. Even the ones that love farming move on and up. Last I heard, Amanda was building up her own greenhouse business as well as raising a young family. Her husband was a farm boy who quickly figured out that he could make a lot more money as a mechanic for the local tractor dealership than he could growing food, with health insurance for his family as part of that deal, so Amanda is the full-time farmer in that family.

Those great teenage employees who don’t grow up to be your competition are going to college or at least to better-paying jobs with better working conditions – and a much more exciting social life in a city. In Virginia, the state minimum wage law and overtime law excludes agriculture workers. The federal minimum wage law applies to all farms, but it’s still only $7.25 per hour, about $15,000 per year for full time. Guess what the poverty line is in Virginia? $15,000. Hard to imagine how anyone survives on that in an area where rents start at over $1000 per month. Fortunately, the median wage for an experienced farm worker in Virginia is now almost $15 per hour, about $30,000 per year without overtime. That’s less than a third of the median income for all Virginians. Zillow says the median 2023 rent in rural Virginia was $18,804 per year, so you have to wonder where the folks earning only minimum wage are living.

While starting from this low place, the average national wage for farmworkers has been keeping up with inflation and possibly exceeding inflation; in January 2024, the USDA says that farmers were paying as average of $19.49 per hour for crop workers, 5% more than in January 2023. Livestock workers are averaging a little less. The Department of Labor disagrees with USDA on average farm worker wages and says their national hourly rate is more like $14-$15 per hour. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) exempts agricultural employers from the requirement to pay workers “time and a half” for hours over 40 hours per week. So the 80-hour week you just worked to help your employer through lambing and spring planting and first cutting of hay all happening at once? All 80 hours at the same hourly rate. The USDA data shows that farm workers average over 40 hours per week for the entire year.

What about fringe benefits like paid vacation and health insurance? Ha! Last time I had a farm employee, Virginia law prevented me from buying that employee an individual health insurance policy or directly assisting them with paying the premiums on an individual policy in any way. I had to buy a group employment policy or nothing. And no, you don’t pay enough for your food for a small farmer to buy group health insurance for her 1.5 employees. The Department of Labor’s 2019-2020 survey of farmworkers showed that only 26% had employer-provided health insurance. Employers struggle to cover health insurance for themselves and their own family working on the farm. A farmer has to gross over $350,000 to get her own family of four up to federal poverty level with basic health insurance.

Despite the popularity of “Green Acres,” CBS cancelled it and other shows based in rural communities in 1971 as part of a “rural purge” in response to criticism that they didn’t have enough programming featuring suburbanites and urbanites. They even cancelled “Lassie.” So rural Americans started seeing the easier life in the city on their televisions, during the rare moments they could spare to watch it. No wonder the kids all left the farm for a different kind of “green.” A young person can earn a lot more at entry level moving stuff around a warehouse than an experienced farm worker does out in the field. In that warehouse, you aren’t baking in the sun or freezing in the snow – and it’s likely they will train you to use a forklift while they pay you far more than you’d make back on the farm. Better yet, go to college for a desk job. Farmers have good reasons to mortgage the farm to pay for their children’s college education.

So, what’s a farmer to do? Mechanize her operations, if she can afford it. Farm machinery has come a long way since Cyrus McCormick’s first harvester. A modern tractor or combine is a lot like an airliner. You don’t drive the machine so much as supervise it. Autopilots, GPS guidance, monitoring systems. The downside? Each machine costs a fortune, over a half-million dollars. And they need skilled operators. A robotic cow-milker costing a quarter million dollars still needs someone on duty all the time. And to pay for that machine, you have to be milking hundreds of cows three times a day, seven days a week. There are still many jobs that just require hands-on care. I can’t imagine a machine that could automatically find a ewe having trouble lambing and help her give birth. Rest assured that US farms are going to need some workers for the foreseeable future.

In recent years, the average number of workers per farm has leveled out at about 1.5. That’s not counting the farm operator and unpaid family labor. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projects 116,400 new job openings in US agriculture every year this decade just to maintain the current workforce as people retire or move into other fields. This is after BLS factors in increasing productivity, technology, and mechanization. A little rough math – using BLS’ projected ag labor vacancies for the remainder of this decade versus our current population of 15-19 year-olds being shy of 22 million – suggests that US agriculture will need 3% of all our young people coming of age. Since this decade has been net-negative so far on US agriculture trade balance, I assume that we need even more people joining the US agricultural workforce to restore our trade surplus. Are you encouraging your kids to consider farm labor as a career choice? I suspect the refrain in your house more like that Waylon Jennings song: “Mammas, don't let your babies grow up to be cowboys… Let ‘em be doctors and lawyers and such….”

This is what the collision of demographics and limits to automation come down to: We can import food, or we can import labor. Right now, we are importing some of both. Immigrant cowboys have ridden into town to save our farms and domestic food system. Next time, we’ll get into whether they are the heroes or villains in the story of US farming.

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Animated chart of Population Distribution:

Chart: US Population Distribution by Age, 1900 Through 2060 | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

Other population statistics:

Demographic history of the United States - Wikipedia

Median age - 2021 World Factbook Archive

Global Median Age 1950-2024 & Future Projections | database.earth

Compare all countries of the world here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/median-age

A Glance at the Age Structure and Labor Force Participation of Rural America

USDA ERS - Atlas of Rural and Small-Town America

https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/rural-population

Percent-of-the-Labor-Force-Employed-in-Agriculture-United-States-1800-to-2000-Sources.png (850×726)

Increasing share of US Food that’s imported:

USDA ERS - U.S. Agricultural Trade at a Glance

U.S. agricultural trade deficit could reach record high this year - Marketplace

USDA ERS - Agricultural Trade

Composition of US ag workforce from the Department of Labor:

Findings from the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) 2019–2020

USDA Report on the 20^th Century:

The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy

USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service:

Farm Labor: Number of Farms and Workers by Decade, US

Bureau of Labor Statistics on Agricultural Workforce:

Agricultural Workers : Occupational Outlook Handbook: : U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

United States Population by Age - 2024 Update | Neilsberg

2022 Census of Agriculture Impacts the Next Generations of Farmers | USDA

The Federal Trade Commission’s opposition to the merger of the two retail grocery giants Kroger and Albertsons has dominated the food news over the past month.  The FTC is concerned about the merger reducing competition in many local grocery markets and increasing grocery inflation.  The FTC’s investigation revealed an email from Kroger’s senior director of pricing saying that “retail inflation on essential items…” including eggs and milk has been “considerably higher than cost inflation.”

For decades, egg price increases lagged general inflation.  But lately, egg prices have been rising faster than general inflation.  The price of eggs in the grocery store is now going up faster than the cost of producing eggs is.  Consumer demand for eggs is “inelastic,” which is a fancy way of saying that we complain about the prices, but we keep buying them.  This makes eggs a good item to start price gouging, if you are so inclined.  My research shows that the late-2022 price of eggs was (just barely) the highest in almost fifty years.  After a brief dip in 2023, egg prices have increased again in 2024.  Yet, egg-production input costs have been decreasing in 2023 and 2024.

Eggs price inflation, 1935→2024 (in2013dollars.com)

This news sent me circling back to an investigation into grocery-store egg prices and quality that I started last winter, before I got so interested in how eggs get to our respective tables, egg farmers, and hen health that you’ve seen from me over the past few months.

Readers have asked me what a conscientious egg-consumer can choose in the grocery store to help farmers as well as their own health.   Some of you have also asked me about nutritional variations and yolk color, having noticed differences between brands and over time.  Many of you have asked how to use their grocery dollars to influence the care of the hens laying those eggs. So, let’s crack a few eggs together – and crack a few egg-marketing stories!

Last winter, one of you asked specifically about the brand Vital Farms featured in an up-scale organic market as “pasture-raised.”  To tell the truth, I hadn’t noticed the Vital Farms (VF) brand because I hadn’t been shopping for eggs at grocery stores for a while.  The timing of this question was good, as my neighbor’s flock size had been challenged by the local foxes and the remaining hens had packed it in for the winter.  I was running out of the eggs I had frozen and pickled. So, I headed out on a grocery expedition and egg comparison journey.  At my local Food Lion (FL) last Christmas, I was surprised to find that the store’s efforts to move upscale a little included introducing Vital Farms and some other upscale brands.  It seems that I might not have to go all the way to Whole Foods to find Vital Farms eggs:

Food Lion did not stock the organic “restorative” eggs – you have to go to a specialty organic market to find those.  Really, $10.99 for a one dozen eggs boggled my imagination.  “Restorative” was a new term to me in this context, so I looked for a definition.  There’s a lot of hand-waving in the food production community, but no agreement on its meaning.  It seems to be the newest marketing term for “regenerative,” possibly applied when regenerative techniques have just been introduced to a farm.  I have a bit of a beef about the term regenerative being new, as it looks a lot like the no-till Dad introduced in our area in 1970.  We called it “sod-planting” then.  I will dig deeper into this whole regenerative story in the future, but the idea is practices that improve soil health and soil organic (carbon) content and prevent erosion.  Turns out that no one knows exactly what regenerative practices are in egg production, any more than they know what restorative practices are.  Currently, no one offers a “regenerative” or “restorative” poultry practice certification.  For now, VF seems to be using “restorative” as a kind of placeholder for attempts at using chickens to promote “sustainability.” The Vital Farms videos that I checked out did not show “pasture” meeting my definition of regenerative practices, but those videos showed only the $6.99/dozen farms.

The expenses of transitioning my new farm from hogs to vegetables made paying $10.99 for a dozen eggs feel too extravagant, especially without a good definition of what the extra $4 was paying for.  I went back to my local Food Lion and bought a dozen each of Vital Farms (VF) Pasture-Raised Hens eggs ($6.99) and Food Lion (FL) store-brand eggs ($2.39) to compare.

The VF eggs were a rich brown, and very pretty.  But looks are not everything, so I started my comparison with Mom’s old float test (What Color was the First Chicken Egg? - by Kristin Farry (someonegrewthat.farm)).  This test showed that the Vital Farms eggs were not quite as fresh as the Food Lion eggs--the VF egg was starting to tip up.  The VF egg carton had a sell by date of 1/11/24 while the FL egg carton showed 2/4/24.  Hmmm.  I think I just learned that Food Lion sells low-priced eggs faster than high-priced eggs, rather than VF having some systemic freshness problem.  You might want to check those sell-by dates on any eggs you buy, but most especially the high-end ones at stores where people like me shop.

Vital Farms allows you to trace your eggs back to the source at the dozen-egg batch level. This impressed me until I remembered that the European Union tracks individual eggs ((10) What Color was the First Chicken Egg? - by Kristin Farry (someonegrewthat.farm)).  Still, it’s fun – and a positive step toward accountability.

VF claims to have 300+ “small” family farmers as partners.  But how does VF define “small?”  The USDA defines farm size in terms of farmer gross income, not land size.  I looked at the application to become a Vital Farms egg producer.  They are only asking for “family farmers” not “small family farmers.”  They currently require a minimum of 52 acres of suitable pasture for a minimum of 20,000 hens per farm.  A typical laying hen can produce an egg every 26 hours.  Because daylight influences her ovulation, she’s probably going to skip one day per week.  That’s over 18,000 eggs per day, and a half-million eggs per month from the smallest VF egg producer.  And over 46,000 dozen eggs per month.  This does not sound “small” to me; however, the USDA says that about 81% of egg-producers have flocks of 30,000 hens or more. With the average American eating about 280 eggs per year now, one 30,000 hen flock keeps over 30,000 Americans in eggs all year.

So VF’s minimum flock size of 20,000 hens is smaller than the average USDA-reported flock sizes, but VF does not disclose their average flock size on the public website.  Applying a little math to the VF minimum flock numbers suggests their average space per hen could be as much as 113 square feet per hen. That’s a little more than their stated minimum of 108 sq ft per hen, which is also the minimum required in the “certified humane” rules for “pasture-raised” poultry.  Good!

According to the Certified Humane Animal Care Standards, Version 21 for Egg-Laying Hens, the label “Pasture-Raised” requires year-round pasture access, at least 6 hours per day during daylight hours.  Emergency confinement indoors is limited to 14 consecutive days.  If you are located where the daytime temperature gets below freezing and precipitation (eg, snow) can prevent free movement of the birds outside, but you still provide the birds with 108 square feet per bird outside on the nice days, you can apply for the “Seasonal Pasture-Raised” certification.  My farm is outside of what VF considers the “pasture belt,” the region where poultry can be outdoors year-round, and so is not eligible for a partnership with them.  I am wondering if I should research that “seasonal pasture-raised” certification. 

Contrast 108 square feet of “pasture” per hen with only 2 square feet of “outdoor space” per hen for the “Free-Range” humane certification.  Note that the basic “Cage-Free” humane certification requires at least 1.2 to 1.5 square feet (indoor or outdoor space) per hen.  There’s a lot more to the humane certification and even the space in the 45-page standard, but this is a key difference between the certifications.  The “Free Range” certification space requirement of 2 square feet was a surprise to me. My mental picture of “free range” had birds strolling around everywhere on the farm, more like the pasture-raised standard, not in small outdoor pens.  Nope.  It can mean a concrete-floored, covered area that differs from the rest of the hen-house only in its absence of solid walls.

The dozen VF eggs I bought came from Rusty Feather Farm.  It’s fun to scan the end of the carton and download a video of the hens.  They have red (rust-colored) hens on this farm, which fits the “Rusty Feather” moniker.  The video shows them flocking together in a large field.  I would not call that field “pasture.”  There are very few green plants.  And those plants are not grass, just some stalky plant species.  Where I come from, that’s a “lot,” not a pasture.  VF’s farmer-facing page suggests that pasturing poultry is a good use of “marginal land.”  Reviews of many VF farm videos show a lot of woodland in use for “pasturing” these flocks – grass doesn’t grow in heavily-shaded areas.  This bare ground does not meet the “Certified Humane Pasture-Raised” standard, which requires maintaining actual grazing conditions.  This is also not “regenerative agriculture” practice by any definition of that term that I have found.  So, VF gets points from me for transparency but not for meeting all the Humane Pasture-Raised standards.  Perhaps the hens producing the “restorative” eggs ($10.99/dozen instead of the $6.99/dozen these cost me) have a real pasture and that increases their production cost?

The chickens at Rusty Feather do seem happy, however.  In the video, they are enthusiastically gathering to peck at the dirt and clucking a lot more than a grazing hen usually clucks.  My guess is that they are enjoying a snack scattered on the ground to encourage them to come to the camera.  Some buildings in the background are likely laying areas and nighttime roosting where Mr. and Ms. Coyote can’t snack on the hens or their eggs.

The VF website caveats the pasture access with a note that a health emergency may require the hens to be occasionally confined indoors – hence the 14-consecutive-day confinement exceptions in the certified humane standard.  In other words, when the avian flu threat is high, your VF “pasture-raised” eggs are really “cage-free” eggs.  I suspect that their prohibition on ponds and creeks in the pasture in their farm requirements are related to the fact that migrating waterfowl have been a major avian flu transmission vector.  Folks, protecting your flock from disease is not cruel, even if it reduces their freedom to roam.  Just keep this in mind while buying eggs from the grocery store during chicken health emergencies—there may zero difference between how the hens are treated and fed during these emergencies, no matter what the carton says.

VF’s marketing department doesn’t call the birds “hens” on the website.  They call them “girls.”  Even the VF CEO talks about the “girls” when interviewed by business magazines.  That’s the sort of term a farmer uses.  We called the brood cows and the ewes on our farm “The Girls.”  I greet my neighbors’ hens with “Hello, Ladies” or “Hello, Girls” when I raid the nest box for eggs and drop off my little feed supplement thank-you.  But “Girls” seems a little over the top on a marketing website.  It feels like co-opting, to be honest.  I find myself wondering, “How much poop have YOU scooped?  How many nights have YOU spent in a barn lately?”

The bare ground in the farm videos on the VF website is quite a contrast with the website banner photos.  The website banners show hens walking through tall, diverse grass.  It’s also a contrast with the FAQ on what the “girls” are eating.  Here are some quotes (in bold text) with my reaction:

“seeking out native and seasonal grasses like clover, rye, and wild onion.”  Um, when did clover and wild onion get re-classified as “grasses?”  And when did clover get re-classified as native?  It’s a European import.  The VF marketing department is not filled with grass farmers who have spent decades grazing livestock.

“They don’t stop with plants, though! You’ll often catch our girls munching on a grasshopper or snacking on a worm.” Hmmmm…. No grasshoppers without grass, folks.

“supplemental feed consists primarily of corn and unprocessed soybean meal, which the hens need for protein, as well as additional natural ingredients, including paprika and marigold, which, along with their outdoor snacks, provide nutrients and help the hens produce eggs with deep orange yolks that our consumers prefer.”  VF hens are essentially eating the same grain diet that FL hens are eating, with an additive to fake the appearance of a more natural diet.  Their “outdoor snacks” are apparently too rare to make yolks look that natural-diet orange.  I also have to question the “unprocessed soybean meal” part.  Raw unprocessed soybeans can irritate their intestinal tracts and interfere with protein digestion and mineral absorption.  Raw soybeans inhibit growth of chicks, too.  Feeding additives to counter the negatives of feeding raw soybeans is still on-going.  For now, if you want to make soybeans more than a token feed additive, you need to roast them to make them safe for your hens.  This is true for mammals without rumens as well as poultry.  And of course, you need to grind them.  Roasting and grinding soybeans sounds a lot like “processing” to me.   

In my skillet, VF egg yolks were bright orange from the paprika and marigolds.  I can’t explain why the VF yolk was a smaller percentage of the egg volume that the FL yolk -- genetics, perhaps?  The FL egg white less was transparent than the VF, but that just confirmed that the FL egg was fresher than the VF egg, rather than being a comment on the feed or quality.

What was I expecting to see in this skillet?  Chickens are naturally omnivores.  They eat anything they can outrun and they can get a beak around.  In practice, this is usually plants and insects, but even the odd baby snake is dinner.  An egg from a hen with a lot of plants and insects in its diet looks different in the skillet from one raised with grain.

Last fall, I had a nice review of how the differences in hen diet show up in the skillet.  My main source of eggs for a couple of years was my neighbors’ backyard flock.  For over a year, their hens were out every day, all day, eating bugs and plants all day and topping off in the evenings with a “egg-layer” grain-based ration from the local feed store.  They’d stroll into my front door if I left it open or hop into my truck while I was unloading it.  Then a coyote and a fox family moved into the area, and some of the hens became their dinner.  The remaining hens are now “free ranging” in their hen-house 24/7 with its small enclosed run, eating only a grain-based ration.  Same hens, different diet.  The difference is quite noticeable in the skillet.  My neighbors’ eggs currently look just like the Food Lion eggs (although fresher, with thicker, milkier egg whites).  Last year’s eggs had even thicker whites, and the yolks sat well on top of the whites.  The yolks were darker and more orange than the current eggs, but not the bright orange of the Vital Farms eggs.  No marigolds or paprika in their diet.  In my way of thinking, marigolds are what you plant with the tomatoes to keep the bugs away, and paprika is what you use to season eggs (especially huevos rancheros), not food for the hens.  I can’t imagine a hen choosing to eat paprika when there are green plants and insects, even dung beetles, to eat.  Some people run chickens with their livestock just for parasite control, never mind eggs.  I wanted to try that, but over the years, we did too good a job of wildlife restoration on Excalibur, and chickens ranged with livestock would have become coyote lunch in very short order.

I suspect that VF pays their marketing gurus more than they pay their farmers.  The vitalfarms.com website includes banners like “Raised with Respect” and “American Family Farms,” “Conscious Capitalism,” and “Honest Food, Ethically-Produced, No Bullsh*t.”  Their website contrasts their “pasture” practice with “cage-free” operations, claiming that those average 1.8 sq ft of space per hen, just unconstrained.  They have an entertaining little video of the human-office equivalent of “cage-free” which is misleading.  Yes, the “cage-free” hens have an average of that much space, but they are in a large open space.  The office cubicle analogy would be a more appropriate analogy for caged hens, not cage-free.  Think of a big open office bay instead of office cubicles for the cage-free analogy.  Still, creative advertising aside, we have to give Vital Farms credit for giving their hens roaming room when conditions permit it.  As for “American Family Farms,” the US exported 23 eggs for every egg imported last year, so even though Food Lion is a Belgian company, the basic Food Lion eggs are most likely also “American.”  I don’t know about the “Family Farms” part as a marketing tool.  What’s the definition of “family?”  Since I became a solo farm owner recently, can I still represent anything I grow as coming from a “family farm?”

Slick marketing trying to push my buttons to make me open my wallet wider tends to annoy me; however, I had bigger concerns.  What is the relationship between Vital Farms and the farmers?  Recall that my turkey newsletters last winter dug into the vertical integration for poultry.  The dominant arrangement in “broiler poultry” has the farmer-grower providing only the facility to house the birds and the labor while the processor provides the chicks, feed, and veterinary care; the grower never owns the birds.  A completely vertical integration where the processor owns the facilities and pays wages to laborers to take care of the birds is more common in turkeys than broiler chickens.

Unfortunately, as you’ll recall from my earlier post, complete vertical integration dominates the table-egg industry ((10) The Chicken or the Egg? - by Kristin Farry (someonegrewthat.farm)).  Vital Farms is somewhat less vertically-integrated.  They describe their business model as an enhanced “middleman.”  VF handles contracts with a large hatchery to get the young, ready-to-start-laying hens (called pullets) on the farmers’ behalf.  Their farmers buy the hens and own them during their laying phase.  VF enters a multi-year contract with their farmer “partners” to purchase all their eggs.  Note their use of the word “partner” instead of the label “grower” common elsewhere in the industry.  The farmer must build a facility to VF’s specifications, getting their own financing independent of VF, in order to “partner” with VF.  VF dictates care and feed composition (while requiring the farmer to purchase VF feed).  VF arranges shipping of the eggs from farms to their processing facility “Egg Central Station.”  And the difference between this “partner” and the “grower” is…?  According to VF, it’s the farmers’ ownership of the birds while they are laying, versus other industry players retaining ownership of the birds even while they are on a farm and laying.

I find myself wondering if “farmer ownership” of the hens in the VF contracts is a cover for VF externalizing more risk onto the farmer, because the farmer has given up the freedom to make any of the care decisions.  The VF website encourages the consumer to ask questions of the farmer producing their dozen eggs, so I tried asking the farmer about this.  Turns out that VF corporate screens communications submitted via their website invitation to “ask the farmer” questions.  A VF corporate employee intercepted questions I had directed to the Rusty Feather farmer.  Their corporate answer was basically “apply to become a VF farmer to get the details of our relationship with farmer-partners.”

So, I started the application process for my new farm.  The VF application for farmers is almost the same as for more vertically-integrated corporations, except for some additional questions about pasture availability and why you want to grow for Vital Farms and your “farm philosophy.”  VF is not sharing their contract with anyone who doesn’t have at least 52 acres available in the “pastured poultry” climate belt, so I couldn’t get far enough in the process to learn how risks are shared between VF and its farmer-partners.  Ah, the irony of having a farm too small to qualify as “small” for an egg producer.

I suppose it’s fair to treat contract conditions as proprietary.  I looked elsewhere, at general industry and open-source information, to see what costs and risks VF pushes onto the farmer beyond the farm and facility.  What happens if a disease or other disaster strikes a VF partner flock:  does the farmer bear 100% of the loss?  Or does VF assume some of that risk?  It depends on the disease or disaster.  The US Department of Agriculture pays poultry producers for birds that are “culled” when avian flu is detected on their farms.  In 2023, this reimbursement totaled over $500 million dollars.  The USDA pays this bill to encourage farms to report the infection of their flocks.  The USDA also now offers poultry producers assistance to upgrade their facilities’ biosecurity (government-speak for measures to prevent disease spread).

These USDA programs make me wonder why the 2022 grocery-store egg cost increase was blamed on avian flu.  The price increase is not driven by the cost of replacing the culled chickens because your tax dollars are paying for those.  The flu impact is only an interruption in supply while hatcheries restock hen houses, and the hens mature to laying age (about six months from egg hatching a chick to hen laying eggs).  This impact shows up in total US egg production and in US egg consumption per person, along with pandemic supply chain problems.

Take another look at 2014-2015 in the chart of egg prices corrected for inflation.  That avian flu outbreak was much worse than the current one.  Yet, grocery-store egg prices increased only slightly (after correction for inflation) during that outbreak and then dropped to a 15-year low after the flu crisis was over.  Why?  The prices of main inputs (feed and fuel) were in a seven-year trough.   Reviewing USDA records of corn prices and production costs 2013-2019 made me very glad I was not growing corn.  Average net farm income from corn in that entire time was negative!    Soybeans were a better bet during that time, but not much better.  During this time, the grocery stores mostly passed the lower production costs onto customers.  The 2015 price peak was driven only by temporary shortages while the hen houses were repopulated after the avian flu.  You were paying for that low grocery-store egg price with some of your income tax dollars spent on culled chickens and commodity supports.  At least, those of you lucky enough to be paying income taxes were.

So, in 2016-2019, the inflation-corrected price for eggs dropped.  In 2019, the price was nearly at an all-time low. In 2021-2022, feed grain prices increased by 83 percent, and the pandemic drove other costs including labor up.  So, some increase in egg prices had to show up in 2022.  That would explain the inflation-corrected price finally getting back to the 1980 level, before the dramatic improvements in laying-hen and grain genetics.

In 2023, the prices that corn and soybean farmers got for their crops tanked.  Surpluses drove one of the largest single-year decreases in farm income ever.  Looks like those surpluses and low grain prices will continue for the next few years.  How is that reflected in egg prices at your grocery store?  The price of some eggs dropped in 2023, according to Purdue’s egg price dashboard.  But the prices of pasture-raised, free range, and organic eggs stayed high.  In fact, pasture-raised egg prices went up!

What happened to keep the price of those eggs so high?  Are egg lovers inelastic about their concerns for factors other than protein and baking ingredients?  Consider this:  Vital Farms “went public” (stock symbol VITL) a few years ago.  A lot of people are making money on these eggs who are not farmers and egg-handlers and grocers.  I paid $4.60 more for the VF eggs than I did for the FL eggs.  How much of the $6.99 (or $7.32 in some area stores) per dozen VF eggs goes to stockholders instead of farmers?

In my searches for contract leaks from third parties, I came across an interesting comment in a business analysis (by Cristain Velasquez): “Farmers choose to work with Vital Farms despite sacrificing income. Traditional methods of egg mass-production are more profitable but don’t align with the shared values of Vital Farms and their farmers.” In addition to paying their farmer-partners less to begin with, VF has not reduced the retail price as the feed costs dropped over the past eighteen months.  In 2023, the company’s net revenue was 35%, their highest ever.  This was a 2000%-plus increase over 2022.    At 35% net revenue, $2.45/dozen and possibly more is going to shareholders.  VF is Certified B Corporation, a “beneficial” for-profit corporation which voluntarily meets some “transparency, accountability, sustainability, and performance” goals set up by a private-sector group (B Lab).  That certification costs money that doesn’t go to farmers, either.  I’d rather give that directly money to a farmer neighbor.

While contract grower arrangements and limited market options make farmers’ lives challenging, it’s not a lot of fun to be the hen, either.  The VF hens have more room to roam, but the VF business model hasn’t translated into improving what happens before those hens get to that pasture.  This includes the destruction of day-old male chicks and beak clipping of the laying hens.  I was surprised to learn that beak-clipping is done in a pastured flock where I would have expected their beaks to be worn by pecking food out of the dirt.  It’s not something we had to do on our farm.  It’s also not something that my neighbors’ little flocks need, probably because they are wearing their beaks down in the sandy soil here.  The dirty little secret of laying hens is that the best layers are the most aggressive and most likely to insist on being at the top of the “pecking order” and will resort to violence to get there.  Once blood is drawn, there is often a “pecking party” that ends very badly for whomever is on the bottom.  Yes, hens gave us that “pecking order” expression.  Layer genetics is a balance between egg production volume and hen aggressiveness, especially where hens are housed together.  Beak clipping reduces the damage hens can do to each other in a pecking party.  It also reduces their pasture-foraging ability.

Even without pecking parties and avian flu, a laying hen’s life is fairly short.  She’s fertilizer or in Fido’s dinner bowl in couple of years. Pushing the genetics to increase egg production per unit of feed and laying rate has resulted in high rates of ovarian cancer in laying hens.  The only good news here is that women have benefited because ovarian cancer researchers have learned a lot from hens.

Vital Farms has a subsidiary working on technology to determine the sex of the chick before hatching.  This would eliminate post-hatching killing of male chicks, but that technology development seems to have stalled short of deployment.  It’s been about eight years of relative silence since the initial chatter about this technology.  Most of the European Union has banned destroying male chicks over the past few years, requiring hatcheries to route the male chicks into broiler production instead of euthanizing them.  Destroying male chicks is still normal industry practice here in the US because the genetics for egg-producing chickens result in lower body mass  and feed conversion which in turn makes raising the male chicks for the dinner table a losing proposition.  In the meantime, VF’s advertising and corporate structure have made them a juicy target of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). PETA has sued VF for “misleading advertising” of humane egg production while engaging in practices such as mass euthanizing of male chicks and beak clipping.  I’m not a fan of PETA.   It’s not that I mind their advocacy of veganism, but they have a “ends-justify-means” mentality.  They would like to end all “humane certifications” because they believe those certifications lull consumers into eating more animals and animal products by reducing consumer guilt.  PETA also claims that these certifications trick consumers into paying a lot more for only marginal improvements in the animals’ lives.  They may have a point there — is “Humane-Washing” a word now?

Despite PETA’s lawsuits, Vital Farms seems to have a strong consumer fan base.  In fact, a secondary market has sprung up around VF.  You can buy “vintage” Vital Farms lapel pins on eBay – basically, they say “Founded in 2007” with the logo.  You can buy VF eggshells sterilized and crushed to use as plant fertilizer on Etsy.  At $10/pound, it’s a pretty expensive source of lime.  I confess to sterilizing my eggshells (a tray of them in the oven when it’s already heated to bake cookies does this for free).  I grind them to powder in the Vita-Mix.  I use some to prevent blossom-end rot when planting veggies, some for a calcium supplement for friends’ hens, and some for a calcium supplement for me.  But hey, I am a little OCD about not wasting any gift from a critter. 

The sad truth is that it is no more fun to be a laying hen than it is to be a dairy cow in a world where food is so cheap.  Or perhaps I should say, in a world where the farmer is getting paid so little for her produce.  The price you pay for eggs and milk in a grocery store may have little correlation with what the farmer is getting!

Kroger-Albertson Anti-Trust Findings:

Kroger Raised Milk and Egg Prices Beyond Inflation Costs, Exec Testifies: Report - Business Insider

Kroger Admits to Price Gouging: Evidence and Impact | Explee

Inflation and price of eggs:

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/egg-prices-adjusted-for-inflation/

Eggs price inflation, 1935→2024 (in2013dollars.com)                                                                            

Egg production and consumption:

Facts & Stats - United Egg Producers

Costs contributing to egg production:

The Layer Ledger: Economics of Egg Production and Pricing - HusFarm

Commodity Prices:

USDA ERS - Commodity Costs and Returns

Purdue University

Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) and Egg Price Dashboard:

Egg Prices - Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) (purdue.edu)

Egg prices: The data tell the story - Center for Food Demand Analysis and Sustainability (CFDAS) (purdue.edu)

Certified Humane Standards for Egg Layers:

Layers (certifiedhumane.org)

Feeding Poultry:

Feeding Soybeans to Poultry (agriculture.com)

Whole soybeans in diets for poultry | The Poultry Site

Vital Farms Website:

BSFree - Vital Farms

Forbes on Vital Farms:

https://www.wattagnet.com/egg/article/15537921/high-egg-prices-push-vitals-net-revenue-to-us119-million

https://www.wattagnet.com/egg/article/15665893/us-vital-sees-2000-increase-in-net-income-for-fiscal-2023

B Lab Corporation Certification for Social Impact:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Corporation_(certification)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_Lab

PETA Suits:

PETA-affiliated lawsuit accuses Vital Farms of lying about ethical treatment | Food Dive

PETA continues to mislabel Vital Farms on welfare claims | WATTPoultry.com (wattagnet.com)

European Ban on male chick culling:

Male chick culling to stop in France by year end | WATTPoultry.com (wattagnet.com)

Vital Farms Pasture Raised Hens Grade A Organic Egg Shells Hand Crushed 5 Lb - Etsy

Vital Farms Business Relationships with Hatcheries and Farmers: Vital Farms (extended): An Analysis by Cristian Velasquez | by Cristian Velasquez | Medium

To be a sheep farmer is to live under siege, all the time.  It’s not just the banker breathing down your neck.  Sheep are prey, through and through, born lunch for anything with teeth and carnivorous instincts.  The worst days on a farm are when you discover one of your flock has been mauled or killed. Losing lambs is bad enough.  But if it’s a ewe, it’s not just the one animal. It’s a lifetime of breeding and nurturing to get the maternal bloodlines to where you have a ewe raising at least two lambs every year.  A farm that weans fewer than two lambs per ewe per year is a farm going out of business.  A farm losing those ewes to dog or coyote or wolf attacks is also a farm going out of business.

We learned to fight fire with fire as our flock size increased.  As our beloved Weimaraners aged and passed away, livestock working dogs replaced them.  Not just herding dogs, but large guard dogs to protect the sheep. The best were Hungarian Komondorok.  These large, white guard dogs outweigh both sheep and most predators.  We had one that tipped the scale at 160 pounds.  They bond with the sheep and live with them.  Their long, corded coats are protection from predators’ teeth and camouflage.  You have to look twice to pick them out in your flock. You’d pay a thousand dollars for a Komondor pup in the 1980s, when you could find them.  Then you have to train them.  Sadly, they don’t live very long.

Our latest Komondor had just died of cancer at five years of age.  The loss of yet another canine partner and worrying about the sheep being unprotected aggravated Dad’s insomnia.  He would call me in the wee hours of the morning when he was unable to get to sleep.  Fortunately, I was working in a western time zone, so these calls were late night for me, and so not too disruptive.  While our relationship was rocky and he could be defensive in person, there was something about the phone that made him feel safer talking to me about his worries and daily challenges.  After handing his worries off to me, he could finally get to sleep with the illusion that someone else is now carrying the water to the fire.  These phone calls greatly relieved Mom, because Dad’s alternative was to wake her up and dump whatever was worrying him on her.  Then he could go to sleep — and leave her lying awake worrying!  So, for Mom’s sake, I would pick up those late-night calls and listen to the latest farm crisis.

“No one has any Komondor pups,” Dad complained.  “I’ve called every breeder we know and no dice!  But that Great Pyrenees breeder on Route 230 just called to say she heard we were looking for another sheep guard dog.  She has a nearly full-grown dog and wants us to consider him. He’s not Komondor. He’s Great Pyrenees.  He won’t be as big as a Komondor but he’ll probably live longer.  But I’ve heard a lot of different opinions on those and I just don’t know.”

“How much does she want for this dog?” I asked warily, remembering that this particular breeder got very good prices for her Great Pyrenees pups.  Not as much as the Komondor breeders were getting, but still a hefty bite out of the bank account.

“Well, that’s the thing.  Something bad happened to this dog when he was little—she doesn’t know what—in his first home,” he answered. “She’s a reputable breeder, just like we were. You always take a pup back if things are not working out,” Dad recalled from our own time breeding Weimaraners in the 1960s and 70s.  “She says she already tried two other homes. The dog didn’t bond with anyone and ran away from both. She thinks he needs experienced handlers and a completely different environment.  Like a farm.  She’ll just give him to us.”

Great Pyrenees are known for being a one-person-plus-livestock breed, so the genetic deck was stacked against this dog.  “She said ‘If anyone can restore this dog’s faith in humanity, you all can.’  Well, for us, the dog just has to bond with the sheep and protect them, so she thinks that giving him a job he’s bred for will be the magic cure for whatever ails him.” Working guard dogs live in the barn and pastures with their charges, not in the house.  Bonding with people is optional, although it helps if the guard dog doesn’t decide that the sheep need protection from the shepherd. “Well, can’t hurt to go look at the dog, I guess.”

The dog was a little over a year old.  He was a magnificent representative of his breed and had the pedigree to show where those looks came from. But whatever had happened to him as a pup—what, the breeder did not know—had destroyed his trust in any human being.  The first owner had returned the young dog to the breeder with no explanation for why he cowered and avoided people.

Dad took an instant liking to the dog despite his aloofness.  Mom and Dad decided to give him another chance.  Dad volunteered to make the dog—soon named Bear—his project.  This was a departure from his history of assigning “any problem that had legs” to Mom or me while he focused on “the problems with roots.”  But a few years before this, Dad had taken our advice that he needed to quit his corn operation.  The sheep won him over.  He had become a full-time shepherd and grass-farmer.  And he’d always loved dogs.  His love of dogs had even overcome being attacked and badly injured by one during his military service in Germany.

But Bear was not willing to give any human being another chance.  “He just hangs on the other end of the leash, as far away from me as he can get, no matter what I do,” Dad complained to me after several weeks. “He’s so busy keeping his distance from me, he’s not even looking at the sheep!”

One day, Bear got away from Dad during a walk to the barn. “Somehow he slipped out of his collar, and I was left holding the leash and empty collar, feeling like an idiot!” Dad reported.

Bear took up residence in a thicket of trees between the farmhouse and a nearby creek.  He would watch warily as Dad set out food for him near the barn.  Dad’s plan was to gradually shift the bowl closer to the barn where Bear would presumably take up residence after deciding the sheep were his family.   Dad would sit a little distance away from the food and speak to Bear quietly, in hopes that would accustom the dog to his presence and build trust.  He planned to move his chair slightly closer to the food each day, as soon as Bear began to eat in his presence.

Dad updated me regularly on his progress with Bear—or rather, his lack of progress.  “I can’t sit there ALL day,” he said in frustration.  “That dog just stares at me across the food bowl, not moving an inch until I have to go take care of the flock.  Lambs are dropping now.”  Dad would go in the barn or run to the co-op and return to find the bowl empty.  Over the weeks, he never saw the dog actually eat.  Dad was worried about him.  “I don’t know if he’s eating the food, or that damn ‘coon is,” Dad complained.  Racoons love dog and cat food.  I understood his concern.  During my visits home, I could see that the dog’s appearance was declining.  His coat became matted with burrs and he looked thinner.  But he didn’t run away and Dad kept trying.

“Bear watched me from a spot closer to the bowl today,” a typical night-time call might start.  “So maybe he’s coming around a little.”

“Bear is back to his old distance,” would be the next report. “I never saw a dog that would leave food sitting that long.  I wonder what somebody did to him.  Must have been really awful!”

A couple of months went by, and it was time to try something different.  “We started putting a tranquilizer in his food today, hoping he’ll fall asleep and we can get him back into the kennel where we could handle him, but he’s not touching the doctored stuff,” Dad ranted in frustration.  “He’s going to starve to death before he eats that tranq.  I don’t what else to try!”

Then something began killing sheep. In broad daylight. Almost every weekday.

“Another one today,” Dad reported, despondent.  “I have to go get feed or tractor parts, and I come back and there’s another animal dead.”

“That ewe was torn apart!  Torn apart, torn apart!” he wailed the next night. “It has to be something big, to tear up a mature ewe that much.  I called the game warden, and he came out and looked, and said it was dogs.  The dog warden came out and he said it would have to be a really large dog.  None of the neighbors have dogs that big, so he thinks that it had to be a bear.  ‘This close to the barn and house?’ I asked him.  He didn’t have an answer to that!” That was the usual finger-pointing in farm country, as officials try to protect their respective budgets from livestock loss claims.  And of course, you never can get the county dog-tag program or the state hunting-license program to pay the real cost of replacing that animal.

“‘They’re just stinkin’ sheep, it’s not like losing a cow,’” Dad imitated the county Board of Supervisors Chairman’s sneer almost perfectly.  “You know how those cattlemen feel about sheep. The Board will only authorize the cull-ewe price on the Cornell market reports, and that’s only after we argue about it another month or two or six.  Mutton price is less than a tenth of the cost of a ewe in her prime lambing years!”  Mutton or cull price was running about $30 for a head because no one sells a ewe still producing lambs.  Raising a ewe to lambing age was topping $300 and over a year of work.  Forget buying good breeding ewes ready to lamb. Those were at least $350, if you could find anyone willing to part with good blood.

The toll mounted. “Bear is not figuring out on his own that his job is protecting the sheep from predators,” Dad reported glumly.  He put a loaded rifle in his truck, hoping to catch this predator in the act, but the days passed without him catching the predator in the act.

Somewhere after the toll reached double digits, another terrible thought occurred to Dad.

“It has to be Bear!  He’s the only dog within miles large enough to tear up a hundred-and twenty-pound ewe like that!” Dad wailed during that night’s call.  “My own dog!  Trying to get him to eat that tranq must’ve pushed him over the edge!”

“I’m …  going … to have to … shoot … my own dog,” He could hardly force the words out.

The next night, I could hear the tears in his voice.  “I shot my dog!  My God, I shot Bear! Hardest shot I ever took….” Somehow, during those months of staring at each other across his food offerings had built a strange but strong bond.  Dad was grieving for this dog who had never trusted him enough to eat in his presence.

But the following night, he was nearly incoherent.  “It wasn’t Bear!  Another ewe got torn up today… this one inside the barn …  in broad daylight! I shot my dog and it wasn’t him!  It wasn’t him….” He choked on whatever else he was going to say.  The war veteran who had nearly always chosen rage over vulnerability was sobbing uncontrollably.  This time, guilt was mixed with grief, a toxic stew.

Dad decided that he wasn’t going anywhere until he found the real killer.  He kept the flock close to the house and barns, and his rifle with a round chambered.  He spent as much time as he could with the flock in the barn.

“I have to eat sometime,” he started the next Monday night’s call. “I went up to get a sandwich for lunch—I swear I was gone only minutes!  I looked out kitchen window and the ewes were pouring out of the barn. They ran to the end of the lot and stopped and turned to look back at the barn.  You know that stamping thing they do when they are preparing to protect their lambs?  Something was really wrong.  I took off running for the barn.  I could hear a commotion inside, a ewe bawling in pain.  And shrill barking.  It wasn’t one big dog—it was TWO dogs!  Two SPANIELS had taken down a ewe!  Inside the barn! One was ripping out her throat and the other was ripping the skin off her haunches!”  A shepherd’s nightmare, in broad daylight.

“A bush-axe was closer than my gun, so I grabbed that first and went after those dogs, hoping I would scare them enough to back off and give me time to grab them or get my gun,” he continued, still feeling the adrenaline.  “But they were crazy with the taste of blood.  I hit them hard with the back of that axe first, but they just would not let go of that ewe.  I finally turned it around and slashed one dog in the neck so bad he let go of her throat.  I got him so hard he went flying into the wall and stayed where he hit the ground.  Then I went for my gun.  When I got back, the other dog was still ripping away at that ewe like I’d never hit him!  I had to shoot him to make him stop. I didn’t have to shoot the other one:  I’d wacked his head half off with that axe.  He bled to death, I guess.  It was a mess.  Blood everywhere, between the ewe and the dead dogs.  I was too late to save the ewe.  She was a good one, too:  two sets of triplets in less than two years!”

The dogs were well-cared-for Springer Spaniels wearing collars and tags.  The kind of dogs that have pedigrees and professional grooming.  Dad called the phone number on the tags and left a message that he’d just had to kill the dogs in the act of killing his sheep.  My own experience with Dad’s brief, blunt phone messages had me visualizing what a shock that message had been to the dogs’ owners.

“This evening, a man and a woman showed up, in a BMW.  Don’t see many of those around here. I told them what I’d had to do and warned them that the barn was a gory mess, and if they hadn’t brought something to wrap the dogs up in to protect their car, I’d find them something.  But they brought blankets.  They were pretty shook up by what they saw.  They just stood staring at the dead ewe and the dead dogs and holding each other for the longest time.  Didn’t say a word.  I helped them bundle the dogs up in blankets and carry them to their car.  I told them I’d shot my own dog, thinking that it had to be a very large dog ripping up ewes like this, and Bear was the only really big dog in the area.  It had never occurred to me that two smaller dogs working together could tear up a ewe like that.  I guess those spaniels weighed maybe forty pounds each.”

“The man finally said that they had no idea that their dogs could do anything like this.  They are attorneys with a law practice in Charlottesville. They’d been letting the dogs out during the day while they went off to their office, thinking they would stay close to home.  That explains why the killing was only on weekdays.  It was a big shock to them that their precious pets were going so far, almost every weekday, to kill sheep. It must be four or five miles over the mountain to their place on White Oak Lake!”

Then Dad started choking up. “I said I felt bad for their children if the dogs were their pets,” he finally said. “And the woman—she’d been quiet the whole time—just burst into tears and ran to the car.  The man followed her and sat with her for a while.  When he came back, he said, ‘No children, just us.  We haven’t been able to have children. We got the dogs to help us deal with the empty house.’  So then I felt really, really awful.  I darn near lost it, too.

“But in the back of my mind, there’s this little voice saying, ‘TWO lawyers!  This is going to court and it’s going to be expensive!’  You know how many people tell you that ‘Dogs will be dogs, it’s their nature’ or ‘They were just playing with the sheep,’ like it’s your problem, not theirs.”  Well, I thought, the dog may be playing but the sheep are dying.  Or sacrificing their fetuses to throw the dogs off the chase.  People who don’t have sheep don’t get that you can lose next month’s entire lamb crop in one dog’s game.

“But then this lawyer says, ‘I’ve seen what our dogs did to that animal.  It’s horrible.  I love—I loved—those dogs.  They are—were—family.  I’m also really sorry for the loss of your sheep and your own dog.’ So, part of me is relieved that he’s not leading with the usual ‘Losing a few sheep to dogs once in a while is just the cost of doing business’ crap.  The other part of me is thinking, Sorry doesn’t pay the mortgage.”

“But then he surprised me,” Dad continued, telling the story just holding him together.  “You know what that lawyer said next?  He said, ‘I know the law. You acted within your rights to protect your livestock.  How many did they kill?  How much do we owe you?’  Well, I counted up the dead ewes and explained what it was going to cost to replace them,” Dad said.  “The man just wrote a check for that amount and handed it to me. ‘I have to get back to my wife now,’ he said as he left. ‘Think about what you had in your own dog, and I’ll come back to take care of that after we bury ours.’  But you can’t put a price on a dog easily, especially a rescue.  And that offer was beyond what the law required. So, I told him that paying for the ewes was enough.”

Finally out of words, I could hear Dad choking again, on the other end of the phone line.  Sobbing for Bear and his mistake, for fourteen dead ewes that he had helped raise.  And probably for the dogs that had meant so much to two naïve city transplants.

Dad had been to a war and killed people.  I never saw him cry for a person.  But somehow, it’s different when it’s an animal that you have taken responsibility for. It’s different when you’ve had to choose which of your animal friends live or die.

Bear was his last dog.

Hello Friends,

The Summer Olympics may be over in Beijing, but we are still going strong here at Excalibur.

Except possibly for orienteering and equestrian events, and a few creative jumps into the swimming hole, our sporting events don’t resemble those Olympics events much.

One big sport here is the Zucchini Toss.  This event requires a number of qualifying stages.  You get started with the cookbook and graduate to internet recipe searches shortly after these prolific plants start producing.  These garden goodies do not “can” or freeze well, but they make you wonder how there could be hunger in any space-time continuum containing even a few zucchini plants.  You steam, fry, sauté, stuff, pickle, and casserole—yes, if you are a rural Methodist, casserole is a verb—all the zucchini you can stand to eat in a recognizable form.  When you discover that all of your friends are avoiding you because they are also out of recipes, you start baking zucchini bread and chocolate chip zucchini brownies.  This baking marathon has diminishing returns, as you can lose only one modest-sized zucchini in a typical brownie recipe.  You run off the extra calories from those brownies by racing away from your neighbors’ houses after leaving your extra zucchini on their porches.  You don’t want to stick around long enough for them to find their shotgun and ratshot.  Fortunately, everyone has forgotten that my mother introduced this prolific plant to our community over 40 years ago.

Finally, you give up on miracles occurring in the kitchen and start throwing zukes over the garden fence.  If you miss a day, you have zukes that rival baseball bats in size.  You have to keep picking the green buggers to “keep the plant producing.”  For some strange reason, you must want this plant to keep producing, because you keep picking.  Funny that those who protest against farming livestock to eat haven't wised up to how cruel we are to plants in our garden: we keep these plants feeling like they are under siege, stealing their offspring as fast as they can generate them before they go to seed.

Fortunately for me, the sheep never get tired of zucchini and stop by daily to help out.  Thus, I don’t feel as guilty about the waste as my gardening colleagues do who have no small ruminants nearby.  The sheep prefer the zukes lobbed far enough and fast enough to split open on impact, making them easier to munch down, so my throwing technique is important.  I have to get some height.  Or, I can make each zucchini’s arc just clip the top wire on the fence, which will slice the zukes open rather nicely on their way into the pasture.  This takes practice, but even with only a few zucchini plants, I have plenty of that!

Here’s the garden in early August, with the sheep working their way over to check for a zucchini hand out:

It's not quite as tidy now that the butternut squash has run amok, attempting to strangle its neighbors and beating what passes for lawn here into submission.

I warm up for the Zucchini Toss with the Cucumber Lob.  Being smaller than the zukes, the cukes don't challenge the throwing arm as much, but you still have to get the excess off of the plant every day to keep it producing new ones of a size you actually want to eat.  It generally takes me well into August and far more jars of pickles than we can eat in years, let alone one winter, to ask myself why we want this plant to keep producing.  The cucumber has fewer uses beyond putting on the table fresh than the zucchini does. I have found exactly one (1) cucumber recipe other than pickling and salads: cucumber soup.  It’s delicious cold or hot, but this soup requires nowhere near enough cucumbers to keep even one plant fully occupied.  No surprise that all those old pickling recipes start with bushels of cucumbers, and yes that's bushels, plural. Consequently, I have pickles left over from two years ago. I planted only a single cucumber plant this year, not enough to motivate me to start pickling, but still enough to amaze me. Lettuce weather is looming in the fall, so I keep on pitching the excess cukes to the sheep in hopes that I'll have some fresh cucumbers for salad when the fall lettuce sprouts.

I never look at a cucumber plant or a pickle jar without recalling that Grandad (Mom’s father) made pickle barrels at his sawmill in Louisiana between the world wars.  They would put those huge barrels on flat railroad cars and half-fill them with pickling brine.  Those railroad cars would roll slowly through cucumber fields, where the field hands would pick the cucumbers and throw them into those barrels unwashed. Those cukes were well on their way to being crispy pickles by the time those trains got to Chicago.  I wonder if those workers made a sport out of filling those barrels, or perhaps placed bets on their cucumber throwing skills.

“Putting up” the garden is an endurance event:  canning, freezing, pickling, and drying whatever you can't eat or give away.  “Canning” is a bit of a misnomer since nearly everyone now uses glass jars instead of tin cans. Mom remembers her father using tin cans in a fire pit in the backyard for their winter stash.  It seems her mother refused to have “that mess” in the house.  And it is a bit messy—peelings and cobs and such everywhere.  You don't realize how much sugar vegetables contain until you have to scrape peelings off the counters after a food preservation marathon.

I really hate vegetables that have been in a metal container for any length of time—yes, I can taste the difference blindfolded—so I use jars for canning. They have a clever two-part lid.  The sealing part of the lid can't be reused but the rim and jar are carefully saved from year to year. I bet some of our jars are 40 years old.  In between uses to preserve food, some of the jars find their way onto the table for use as drinking glasses.  You engineers might find it interesting that Ball Aerospace got its start making canning jars.  At their peak production in 1931, Ball produced 190 million jars a year, more than one and a half for every person in the US.  They got into aerospace to save the company from the decline in home canning that came as refrigerators became common in homes.  I think they recently sold the canning division to Kerr, but you can still get canning jars embossed with that classic “Ball” signature.

Picking tomatoes is replacing green beans and squash as the main event as the season progresses.  Romas, anyone?

This is most fun with young companions who enjoy a tomato fight, because there's always a soft tomato or two or six that give a rather satisfying smack, soon punctuated by cries of indignation, when thrown correctly.

A somewhat less popular farm Olympics event is peeling tomatoes for canning.  This is done by dumping the tomatoes in boiling water until the skins split, then fishing them out of the pot and pulling the skins off under cold running water while trying not to burn one's hands.  My surgeon canceled my participation in this event when she took out all those lymph nodes last year. My left hand can no longer tolerate burns and cuts.  Oh, darn. Lymphedema sucks in general, but you can imagine I'm so disappointed to be on the sidelines of this particular event.  Fortunately, my mother remembered that she had a Squeezo packed away.  This little machine is really wonderful: throw tomatoes in the top, turn the crank, and it separates the part you want to eat from the part you would rather not.  Best of all, Mom is still able to use it:

This year, I am experimenting with drying produce.  Note the bags of dried veggies up on the shelf behind Mom.  I got a dehydrator for Christmas. I am making zucchini chips and squash chips along with drying vegetables for winter soups and herbs for tea. I am also letting some things dry on the plant naturally, like sweet corn, to save energy. This year's drought has made this easier—the corn crop has been abysmal.  Even though I have way too much else to do, it feels a little strange to not be freezing corn. When I was a kid, we grew acres of sweet corn.  Dad would plant several rows of the “sweet corn” along the edge of the “field corn” crop that was our main income crop besides beef in those days. Mom would put an ad in the Washington Post:  “Sweet Corn, pick your own, $1/dozen ears.”  Adventurous people would drive all the way down from Washington and fill their cars to the roof.  This pick-your-own sideline was eventually overcome by concerns about liability and difficulties in educating a new generation of city people about the difference between sweet corn and field corn (“but the ears on those stalks are so much bigger!”), not to mention which snakes are not poisonous, plus improvements in grocery store produce offerings and people getting away from preserving their own food.

City slickers buying corn or not, there was always a week or two of the summer in which we did the freezing-the-corn marathon for our own winter supply.  My mother supervised a long processing line starting in the cornfield and winding its way up to the back stoop where shucking took place with a large audience of dogs and cats who eagerly devoured the “nubbins”— the tips of the ears we whacked off to make shucking easier.  From there, the corn went onto the kitchen stove for blanching in large pots of boiling water, then to cutting boards on the kitchen table where we sliced the kernels off the cob.  We bagged the kernels in quart-sized baggies, tied them up (no zip-lock then!), and stacked them into our thousand-pound freezer.  My brothers would turn anything into a competition, so we had quite a few races shucking corn and cutting corn off the cob, with the biggest pile of cobs winning the latter.  Technique was important, too—somehow you got extra points if you could go the entire length of the cob with a single stroke of the knife.  I don't really remember who won most of these races, but I definitely remember my younger brother Jeff needing a trip to the emergency room and a bunch of stitches in his thumb, courtesy of competitive instincts mixing poorly with a very sharp corn knife.

Eggplant grows very well around here.  Fortunately, it has more uses than zucchini and summer squash and cucumbers, especially for someone who likes Indian and Chinese food.  I have created a bit of an uproar, however, with eggplant-and-cardamon ice cream.  Fortunately, just the idea of eggplant ice cream freaks out enough people for me to have plenty for myself, because it's actually very good.  Our sheep-shearer now demands some of this ice cream as part of his fee; after he got past the idea of eggplant in ice cream, he loved it.  He recommends rebranding it as “Grandma’s Christmas Cookie Ice Cream” because it reminds him of his grandmother’s old-world cookie recipe and that would get more people tasting it than “Eggplant Ice Cream.”  I’d rather eat it all myself.

Ice-cream making is my very favorite summer farm Olympics event, although I have to confess that I haven't cranked an ice cream freezer for decades.  The hand-cranked version had a very short residency here in the 1960s.  I'll never forget my Dad telling the Sears Roebuck salesman, “No, I'm definitely NOT buying the motor option.  I have three motors already,” as he pointed at us three kids.  “I cranked an ice cream freezer when I was their age, and they can do it now.  It will be better ice cream and they’ll appreciate it more.”    Funny how 40 years later you remember the ice cream more than the cranking.  Well, we got that new freezer home and everyone got to work immediately on the first batch of ice cream.  The ice cream was really good when we finally got it done—close to midnight—but the very next day my dad went back to Sears and bought that motor.  We all quickly agreed that we couldn't tell the difference between hand-cranked and motor-cranked ice cream.  So much for nostalgia.

This year we have a new water sport:

This hay bale has spent several sulking (er, soaking) weeks refusing to learn to swim.  The real story is not its inability to match Michael Phelps once in the water, but how it got there.  Perhaps it was trying out for the diving team.  I didn't see its dive—I was probably running the bean-canning marathon then—and no one else is ‘fessing up to seeing the performance.  My brother Jeff has been coordinating the “make hay while the sun shines” venue, his version of OCD “stocking up” for the winter. Racing a summer storm to get the hay under cover is one of the more exciting farm sports. Knowing how many bales Jeff was stacking onto wagons when wrapping up that hay-making marathon, I have my suspicions that there was one too many in one of those laps through the field.  Round bales have some advantages over square ones, but staying where they fall off the wagon is not one of them.  The sheep are hoping that hay-bale diving is not going to become a regular event on the Excalibur, as this is their winter dinner, and they prefer it dry.  Or at least they prefer not having to swim to dinner.  Sheep hate getting wet more than cats do.  If you’ve ever handled a wet ewe, you understand why they hate swimming.

All this is a long-winded way of giving you a little insight into what “eating local” really means.  Truthfully, every year about this time I wonder if it's worth it.  Forty years ago, when it was fifty miles from our farm on bad roads to the grocery store, the investment in the garden was a no-brainer.  Now, you can buy produce in two places within 15 miles on much better roads.  Produce is cheap enough nowadays that you can never make an economic argument for growing your own unless you have no skills other than migrant farmworker. On the other hand, much of that so-called “fresh” produce is weeks old by the time it gets to your local grocery store.  According to the USDA, frozen vegetables have greater food value than the “fresh” vegetables that have been separated from the plants for the time it takes to ship them all over the world.

What keeps me gardening is the delight of nurturing a growing thing into food and the flavor of truly fresh vegetables. Mom and I have a little ritual of asking the garden what's for dinner every day around five or six o'clock.  You put the water on the stove to heat before you pick the corn for dinner.  After the novelty wears off, what keeps me preserving my own produce is some challenging dietary issues, mostly post-cancer, such as sodium restrictions. I have learned that you really don't need salt to preserve food.  It's also a self-reliance thing.  But I don't have any qualms at all about buying chocolate, the most important food group, which I have not (yet) learned to grow.

It's time to pull a batch of chili out of the canner, so I will explore this “eating local” thing more later.

Take care and think about what you eat!

Love from Excalibur,

Kristin

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Many things have changed in the five and a half decades since my brother Albert ran his egg business on our Virginia farm out of a rehabilitated chicken coop.   That chicken house was old enough to be made of Chestnut. The tree huggers among us know that lumber dated its construction to the 1920s, when the Chestnut Blight devastated our eastern forests.  My first chicken-or-egg newsletter (https://www.someonegrewthat.farm/p/the-chicken-or-the-egg) covered the changes in egg production business models and those impacts on farmers since we had those chickens.  Consumer preferences have also changed a lot.

Take eggshell color.  In the late 1960s, Albert sold only white eggs.  We ate any brown eggs from his flock ourselves, because his customers demanded white-shelled eggs.  They thought that white eggs were better than brown eggs and they were willing to pay a premium for them.  Most swore they could tell the difference on their plate without a bit of shell in sight.  Grandad’s chick-hatching program soon became heavily biased toward white-egg producing hens as Albert’s egg business grew —much to my mother’s secret relief.   Mom also suspected that the brown eggs were somehow inferior to the white ones.  In our area, grocery stores sold only white eggs in those days.  Albert’s flock was eventually all White Leghorns.

I’ve recently learned that egg color preference varied by region.  My older New England friends tell me that they remember their local grocer selling only brown eggs in their youth.  They associated brown eggs with freshness because their hometown Rhode Island Red hens laid brown eggs right there in New England.  Other New England breeds, like New Hampshire and Plymouth Rock, also lay brown eggs.  For New Englanders of a certain age, white eggs were for Easter egg dying and not much else, as they had to be shipped in from points far south and west. Not fresh—ick!

Sometime in the last fifty years, brown eggs became acceptable on tables which once saw only white eggs.  In fact, brown eggs seem to have become downright fashionable even on tables outside of New England.  I wonder if it was a halo effect when we recognized the health benefits of brown rice over white rice.  Brown eggs now cost significantly more than white eggs at grocery stores in my area.  I can’t help thinking about Albert’s customers demanding white eggs – and willing to pay extra for them – every time I buy eggs at a place with a choice of brown and white eggs and see that price difference.

Many studies have failed to correlate eggshell color with nutritional content.  Brown eggs are not any healthier than white eggs.  The brown color has nothing to do with the egg’s contents. The brown egg is completely formed as a white egg inside the hen.  Some hens just have an extra step in their egg production.  Right before she pops out that egg, the brown-egg layer coats it with a layer of brown color produced in her uterus (protoporphyrin IX, for you geeks).  If her color distribution is abnormal, she may put some extra calcium spots on the egg, too, making them look freckled or speckled.  As the hen ages, her eggs may be lighter brown.  Some breeds have a pinkish tinge to this coating.

Take a look at the inside of a brown eggshell next time you crack one and you will see the brown color is superficial.  Usually, you’ll see that the inside of the shell is white.  White is the original egg color laid by the wild ancestor of our present-day chickens: Jungle Fowl.  Calcium is, after all, white and eggshells are calcium.  So, white eggs are the most “natural” eggs.  Chicken experts call white eggs the “wild type.”

As a child, I thought that domestic chicken eggs came in only two versions:  white and brown.  If you wanted any other color egg, you had to go find a robin or some Easter-Egg dye.  Nowadays, if you are shopping where Vital Farms’ True Blue or “Heirloom” eggs are sold, you can buy chicken eggs that have a bluish tinge to their shells.  These blue shells have an origin and chemistry very different from robins’ egg blue.  Domestic hens that have had a certain retrovirus infection lay blue eggs. That virus incorporates itself into the chicken’s genome during the infection.  This mutation is heritable and dominant.  It causes the hen’s liver to generate a blue pigment (Oocyanin) which influences the entire formation of the eggshell, so the blue color is not just superficial.  You can see this blue on the inside of the shell.  The offspring of these hens with virus-altered DNA will lay blue-tinted eggs even if they have never been infected.  In a few generations, all the eggs laid by that genetic group will have that bluish tinge.   So, there’s actually nothing “Heirloom” about those blue-colored eggs. 

If blue-egg laying breeds are crossed with light brown-egg laying breeds, the offspring may lay green eggs.  The hen’s light brown coating of the egg on top of the blue base gives it a greenish tinge.  Crack these green eggs open and you will see the interior of the shell is blue.  In the US, blue and green eggs usually come from hens with South American genetics, but the virus-caused mutation occurred independently in both South America and China.

During my early years, I also thought that the hen’s color determined her eggs’ color.  In my limited experience, white hens laid white eggs and brown hens laid brown eggs.  Simple, right?  Later, my high-school friend Linda – who raised fowl of all types – introduced me to green and blue eggs.  She did not have green and blue hens.  Until I met her varied flock, I thought green eggs were something Dr. Suess made up.  Introduction to her green eggs made me wonder what the green-eggs-and-ham fuss was all about.  They looked the same in the skillet to me.  I’ve been told that you can tell what color a hen’s egg will be by looking at her earlobes.  Yes, chickens have ears, just behind their eyes, hiding beneath tiny feathers.  Their earlobe is an area lacking feathers between their ear and their wattle.  The egg color supposedly matches the earlobe color but that’s only true for the most common chicken breeds.  Chickens laying green eggs don’t have green earlobes, for example.  Somewhere along my way, I gave up on predicting egg color from chicken color.  I just wait and watch the hen lay an egg to figure out what color her eggs will be.

Given the absence of nutritional difference correlated with shell color, why do brown eggs cost so much more than white eggs?  One source says that applying the brown color requires extra energy, so the hen needs extra feed to color the egg.  Other sources say that hens laying brown eggs are about 10% larger than hens laying white eggs.  Larger hens need more feed. This farm girl thinks that’s a more plausible explanation for the higher cost of brown eggs than energy required to produce the pigment.  So duh, most eggs produced in the US are white because they are cheaper to produce.  Still, I am having a hard time visualizing enough extra feed to raise the price two dollars a dozen.  In farm country, we call anything that allows us to charge more for the same product “selling the story” versus “selling the product.”  An exercise for you, Dear Reader: Share your reason for paying extra for brown eggs in the comment section.

When buying eggs in the grocery store, I mostly buy cage-free eggs without regard for color.  I get cage-free eggs despite a slightly higher price and somewhat higher risk of Salmonella compared with eggs produced in cage systems.  Deadly Salmonella outbreaks traced to eggs in the early 1970s led to widespread adoption of cage systems for laying hens.  No, cage systems weren’t introduced by some evil-empire industrial-agriculture complex trying to maximize exploitation of hapless hens for money.  The cage systems result in cleaner eggs.  Personally, I like the idea of the hens being able roam around the henhouse and perch and all that chicken stuff.  Blame it on those childhood memories.  I’ll explore the various systems (cage-free versus free-range versus pasture-raised) more in the next egg newsletter.

When I can, I get “farm eggs” from neighbors with laying hens.  Those are usually colored as well as ungraded.  I admire the variety of colors and sizes before I crack them, despite the extra effort of making sure I have the right amount of egg going into a loaf of bread.  Gluten-free breads are especially sensitive to the amount of egg, so I use a scale to select the farm eggs for baking.

Honestly, tracking down farm eggs is a fairly recent effort for me – I had gotten into an egg-is-an-egg-is-an-egg mode for years until the pandemic left me facing empty grocery store shelves.  My food allergies limit my protein sources, which left me very motivated to find eggs.  I rediscovered chickens in that process.  For a time, I rented an apartment from folks with a small flock.  One of their Rhode Island Red hens took a liking to me.  She would hop into my truck or follow me inside my apartment.  She laid large, dark brown eggs.  Sadly, lots of other critters – including birds of prey, coyotes, and foxes – like chicken for dinner, so her curiosity and freedom to roam did not end well for her.

My preference for farm eggs is actually based more on how the hens’ diet affects the inside of the egg than the variety of their shell colors.  I can’t tell the difference between a brown- and white-shell egg or even a blue- or green-shell egg after they are in the skillet.  But I can tell the difference between an egg from a hen eating greens and bugs and an egg from a hen eating corn and soy.

I don’t know exactly what the nutrient difference is, but a chicken is what she eats.  If it’s not in her diet, it’s not in her egg.  Some studies say that the foraging hen’s egg is higher in Omega-3s than the eggs of her grain-fed colleagues.  I’m more interested in the color and consistency of the foraging hen’s egg yolk and its white before I cook it.  This is the fault of both my inner cook and my inner environmentalist. My brother Albert long ago left his egg business for auto repair, but he still loves chickens.  “A chicken can make something out of nothing faster than any other critter on earth,” he says.  “That chicken scratches around what everything else leaves behind and grows and gives you an egg almost every day.  And eventually, stew.”  A more modern way of saying this is: Protein from chickens (eggs and poultry) has a low carbon footprint compared to other domesticated livestock.  Foraging chickens have an even lower carbon footprint. 

Chickens are omnivores – plants, bugs, even the odd baby mouse or mole can be their dinner.  The yolk of an egg from an omnivorous, foraging chicken looks quite orange next to the yolk of an egg from a grain-fed chicken, which will be yellow.  However, you can’t say that a foraging chicken was “vegetarian-fed.” That vegetarian-fed label on some grocery store egg cartons means 100% grain-fed, in contrast to a mix of grain and “rendered protein.”  Parts of slaughtered animals and poultry that we humans don’t eat or feed our pets gets processed (“rendered”) into high-protein feed.  This may include feathers, which are almost all protein.  Feathers can be cleaned, pressure-cooked, and ground up for a high-protein feed additive called feather meal.  Feeding feather meal is not as unnatural as rendered slaughter waste.  Foraging chickens will eat stray feathers for the protein.  A chicken grinds up feathers (and a lot of other things) in its gizzard.  You and I chew our food with teeth to break it down into small pieces to make it easier to digest.  Chickens don’t have teeth. They pick up some gritty sand in their travels and stash it in this muscular gizzard, which uses that grit to grind up what they gulp down.  So, the average chicken has more, and truer, grit than any John Wayne character!

So what makes an omnivorous foraging chicken’s egg yolk orange? Why does an egg laid by a chicken fed grain and rendered protein have a yolk the same yellow color as a chicken fed grain only? Eating leafy green plants with lots of beta-carotene gives a foraging hen’s eggs the orange-colored yolks. I got a recent confirmation of this in my skillet. When my little feathered Rhode Island Red friend became prey, her people decided that it was too dangerous to let the rest of their flock outside anymore — and now those hens are laying eggs with yellow yolks instead of orange yolks. The avian flu risk right now is also keeping a lot of flocks indoors on feed mixes, so you may notice this change in your own skillet if you eat local farm eggs.

One hazard of getting eggs from your neighbor is: if there’s a rooster around, the egg may be fertilized. That will also put a spot of a color in the yolk.  On our farm, my grandfather showed us how to “candle” a fertilized egg to see the shadow of the embryo developing inside: hold the egg up in front of a light. If there’s something blocking the light coming through the egg, it’s probably an embryonic chick.  We actually used a flashlight instead of a candle, but the principle remains the same.  It’s much easier to see through a white shell than a brown shell, making it easier to sort out the fertilized eggs as well as the older eggs.  I think the greater visibility was a major contributor to that bias toward white eggs before egg processing was standardized.

Farm eggs might be fertilized, but you should be eating them before that embryo shows up with a candle.  If eating or scooping a tiny bloody spot off the yolk freaks you out, then buy farm eggs from someone who doesn’t have a rooster or go back to the grocery store.  In the US, those grocery-store eggs will be unfertilized. (I’ll get into why I say “in the US” in a future newsletter.)

US grocery store eggs are refrigerated from just off the farm to your grocery basket.  Why? As the hen finishes forming the egg, she seals its pores with a protective protein film called the “bloom” or the “cuticle.” That film prevents bacteria from getting through the shell.  It is nature’s way of keeping the egg clean inside while the chick develops.  In 1970, in the wake of those Salmonella deaths, the USDA issued a regulation requiring that egg producers wash eggs right off the farm. The invention of high-volume egg-washers and dryers efficiently removed external contaminants including chicken litter. Water and sanitizing detergent dissolve that cuticle, so eggshells are left porous to bacteria and must be refrigerated.

During my recent trip to Germany, I was bothered at first by unrefrigerated eggs in the grocery stores.  I then remembered that we didn’t refrigerate the eggs from Albert’s chickens when I was growing up.  Our little Westinghouse refrigerator didn’t have enough room in it for those big baskets of eggs.  We just waited to wash the eggs until we were ready to use them.  And we all survived eating those unrefrigerated eggs.  In Europe, the eggs are not washed before you buy them.  European farmers vaccinate the hens for Salmonella.  Their philosophy is: a hen infected with that bug can lay an egg with the bug inside it.  It’s also cheaper to get the unwashed eggs to the consumer without refrigeration.  They do mark every egg with its origin and date for safety and quality feedback.

When I get eggs from the neighbor’s backyard flock, I assume that they haven’t been washed and probably not refrigerated.  I do put them in the refrigerator as soon as I get them to my kitchen, to extend their shelf life as long as possible.  Refrigeration more than doubles the shelf life of an egg, even when unwashed.  The unwashed, unrefrigerated egg lasts 21 days — the time it takes a chick to develop and hatch if the egg is fertilized.  Refrigerated eggs can last up to 50 days, washed or unwashed.

I also test those backyard eggs for freshness before I use them, just as Mom taught me nearly sixty years ago.  This test is an easy step toward washing them: just see if they float in a glass of water. The fresh eggs will sit on the bottom, both ends even, while the ones that you shouldn’t eat will float or peak above the water a bit, sort of like an iceberg.  In between are the ones that will tilt up, one end a little higher than the other.  The tilters are still okay to eat, but you will notice that the whites are runnier than fresher eggs, and usually totally transparent.   What’s happening inside the egg over time?  As our hen lays the egg and it cools, an air pocket forms at the more porous end of the egg. The chick needs this air space eventually to reposition itself and break out of the shell.  As the egg ages, the shell becomes more porous. That pocket gets bigger as the egg loses moisture.  If you have a bright enough light and an educated eye, you can see the air pocket through the shell and judge freshness by its size.  For the rest of us who are not trained egg graders, the float test is easier.

During the pandemic, I re-discovered some egg preservation techniques, such as pickling eggs.  This involves treating hard-boiled eggs almost as you would cucumbers, to make pickles.  Hard-boil your eggs and peel them, then make a pickling brine of vinegar, salt, sugar, a bay leaf, garlic cloves, and any other spices you like.  Submerge the eggs in the brine in an air-tight jar and put them in the refrigerator for a week.  They keep quite a while – but leave them in the refrigerator unless you pressure-can them.  I like to pickle some beets along with the eggs:  the egg whites come out pink. Pink eggs are a guaranteed conversation starter.

Oh, and don’t use your fresh-off-the-farm eggs for this.  Hard-boiled eggs are the one application where fresher is not necessarily better.  We’ve all had the frustration of trying to peel an egg where the egg white clings to the shell.  If the egg is only a couple days away from the chicken that laid it and unwashed, the egg white won’t separate cleanly from that membrane just inside the shell.  The reason is also what gives the “white” of a fresh raw egg its milky character:  carbon dioxide dissolved in the white.  This makes the egg white pH about 7.7.  Once the egg is washed, the shell is porous enough for oxygen and carbon dioxide to change places.  The egg’s pH creeps up to about 9, considerably more “basic,” which helps the membrane and egg white to separate.   So, wash that fresh egg and leave it in the refrigerator for a week – or buy the eggs you will hard-boil and peel from your local grocery store.  Do the math:  those eggs do not get from the chicken and through processing to your grocery store in less than a week.  Especially since the chicken and the grocery store are probably not in the same state anymore.  All that said, thermal shock still helps separate egg white from shell:  plunge those eggs into cold tap water as soon as you remove them from the stove.  Some people say that adding vinegar to the boiling water will make the egg easier to peel.  I know vinegar keeps the white from coming out of cracks in the shells, but I can’t see how lowering the water’s pH would make the egg easier to peel. Please comment below if you can explain this.

A Navy submariner friend just told me about another egg preservation method:  Water-Glassing.  This was done by almost everyone before refrigeration and rural electrification (1930s in our area).  This is how they kept eggs on the table during the winter months when the hens stopped laying.  Apparently, mariners at sea on boats without refrigeration still use this technique, as you can preserve raw eggs for up to 18 months this way at very little cost.  You must start with unwashed eggs – the “bloom” the hen coats the egg with must be intact.  You submerge the raw eggs in a solution of pickling lime and water, cap the container, and store it in a cool, dark place.  If you are getting eggs from a neighbor’s backyard flock and want to try this, volunteer to help them keep the laying boxes clean, so the raw eggs will be relatively clean.  You want to preserve just the egg, not the chicken litter which contains bacteria — remember you can’t wash the egg first!

Speaking of bacteria, you already know that you shouldn’t eat an egg with any sort of crack in it that you did not put there.  A crack in an egg is a path for bacteria to enter, even if the membrane is not broken. The inside of an egg is a perfect bacteria incubator.  It’s not safe to eat more than a couple of hours after cracking.  If you were the one who dropped the carton of eggs, you can safely have scrambled eggs for your very next meal, as long as you cook them solid. Use the “if it runs, I run” rule supplied by a friend who likes her eggs well-cooked, crack or no crack.  Or use your egg-cracking accident as an excuse for an impulsive baking marathon—no bugs will survive the hour at 350F needed to bake that bread or cake.

We’ve all learned to make sure the eggs have no cracks at the store before purchasing them because you don’t know how long any cracks have been there.  But what about feeding cracked eggs to your dog?  An Indiana acquaintance explored this idea, hoping to prevent waste.  To his surprise, his local grocery store was quite unreceptive to giving him cracked eggs for his dog.  His grocer’s story:  their wholesale supplier paid for them for returning the cracked ones, making them worth as much to the grocer as the whole ones.  There’s another reason grocery stores don’t let any cracked eggs go out their front door:  most states fine a grocer for each carton of cracked eggs they sell.  You may have noticed your grocery-store cashier opening the egg cartons and checking for cracked eggs – this inspection is their final opportunity to avoid a fine.  These fines may be $200 per dozen carton containing any cracked eggs sold, depending on the state.  Ten years ago, a single cracked egg in a carton meant that the entire carton was condemned.  Recent egg shortages resulted in some research and changes in the regulations.  Grocers and wholesalers can now take the uncracked eggs out of a carton where eggs have been cracked and use those uncracked eggs for human consumption.

What else should you consider when you are buying eggs?  Next time, I will delve into egg marketing and decipher more of the labels on eggs like “free range” and “pasture-raised” and “humane-certified.” And how some egg producers fake that “foraging hen” yolk color.

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Statistics on chickens and eggs:

Publication | Chickens and Eggs | ID: fb494842n | USDA Economics, Statistics and Market Information System (cornell.edu)

Diagram and explanation of an egg:

Anatomy of a Chicken Egg (scienceofcooking.com)

Egg Color:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/brown-white-eggs-difference_n_5a8af33be4b00bc49f46fc45

Chicken Egg Colors: A Complete Guide (thehenhousecollection.com)

Are brown eggs healthier? Science debunks a pervasive myth (inverse.com)

Are Brown Eggs the Only Local Eggs? | The Brown Eggs vs. White Eggs "War of the Eggs" - New England

Blue Eggshell Mutation:

11 Chickens That Lay Blue Eggs — & Why {With Pictures!} (thepeasantsdaughter.net) (the light-read version)

An EAV-HP Insertion in 5′ Flanking Region of SLCO1B3 Causes Blue Eggshell in the Chicken | PLOS Genetics (the Geek version)

Feather Meal:

The Use of Chicken Feather Meal in Feeds - ScienceDirect

Chicken Gizzards and Digestion:

What Is a Gizzard and How Does It Work? - Cackle Hatchery

Pickling Eggs:

Classic Pickled Eggs Recipe (allrecipes.com)

{Old Fashioned} Pickled Eggs Recipe - Belly Full

Pickled Eggs in Beet Juice Recipe - These Old Cookbooks

Water-Glassing Eggs:

Water Glassing Eggs for Long-Term Storage - Backyard Poultry (iamcountryside.com)

Look up your state’s laws and regulations concerning sale of eggs:

State Laws & Regulations | The National Egg Regulatory Organization (nerous.org)

General Egg Safety:

Can I still use cracked eggs? – (eggsafety.org)

Egg-loving salmonella bacteria have been sickening people for decades — https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091303594.html

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You’ve no doubt heard that Avian flu (H5N1) infections are ramping up.  This disease is also known as Highly Pathogenic Avian Influenza A or A(HPAI) due to its nearly 100% fatality rate in domestic poultry. Since the beginning of this year, about 12.7 million domestic birds have been infected or exposed to a level that dictates “culling.”  Culling is a euphemism for killing the birds before the avian flu kills them.  Culling presumably involves less suffering than the slower death from this avian flu.  The USDA justifies this aggressive response as a means of preventing infected eggs or meat getting into a grocery store as well as stopping the spread of the disease.  Over 80% of these 12.7M infections and exposures have occurred since early April of this year.  The first big loss was in Texas.  Cal-Maine Foods, the nation's largest table egg producer, detected H5N1 in a large flock and culled 1.9 million birds at the beginning of April.  The CDC now reports detections in 48 states and 541 counties since the beginning of the current H5N1 crisis in early 2022.  Poultry growers have lost over 92 million domestic birds in this surge.

Avian flu is not new – the first cases were noted in 1878, although it took a hundred years to understand the virus behind the disease.  One strain or another surges up every so often.  The current H5N1 virus family has been making periodic rounds since 1996.  In 1997, every domestic bird in Hong Kong was killed to try to stop it, as six people died of the disease.

The CDC has an H5N1 website (H5N1 Bird Flu: Current Situation Summary | Avian Influenza (Flu) (cdc.gov)) tracking the disease’s spread from the beginning of 2022.  It includes a map where you can click on your home state and county to see what’s going on close to home.  The map looks terrible, but egg-lovers should not panic.  You can’t catch avian flu from eating eggs if you take a few precautions.

If you want to be totally safe from egg-borne disease, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says to cook your eggs until both white and yolk are firm.  The FDA was recommending that before the discovery of H5N1, because of the risk of other nasty bugs like Salmonella and Listeria.  Despite farmers’ best efforts, about one egg in twenty thousand contains Salmonella.  The FDA would prefer you NEVER eat anything that contains raw, unpasteurized eggs.  This includes raw cookie or cake dough.  So much for reliving my childhood by “licking the bowl” after the cake goes into the oven.  Sigh.

What about mayonnaise, Caesar salad dressing, hollandaise sauce, carbonara pasta sauce, tiramisu, meringue, eggnog, and some ice creams – all made with “raw” eggs?  Before you discard half of what’s on your refrigerator and freezer door out of an abundance of caution, remember that store-bought versions of these are safe because they are made with pasteurized eggs.

Pasteurized eggs?  Until recently, I thought that pasteurization was just something we did to milk.  Turns out you can buy pasteurized eggs in the shell in some stores.  More likely, you will find pasteurized egg out of the shell, in a carton, because the USDA requires that all eggs sold out of the shell must be pasteurized.  You can pasteurize eggs at home, too.  You have to get them to just below 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius) for some period of time.  The viruses and bacteria die around 130F and eggs start “cooking” around 140F, so the trick is keeping them between those temperatures long enough to kill the bugs.  The time differs depending on whether you are pasteurizing them inside the shells or after cracking them out of their shells.  In their shells, use 3 minutes in 135F water for average-sized eggs, 5 minutes for extra-large eggs.  If you want to pasteurize eggs often enough to get tired of watching the water temperature with a thermometer, you can get a device called a sous vide (an immersion circulator) to relieve you of watching the pot.  Out of the shells, you add some liquid to the eggs from your recipe -- lemon juice or vinegar or milk-- and whisk them while keeping them warm.  You can use a double-boiler or even the microwave to heat the eggs to a safe point without actually cooking them enough to change their character.  I am still learning techniques myself, so I can’t yet recommend any particular one of the zillions that come up in an internet search. I’ve included a few links below for those that I am experimenting with, because I really, really want to “lick the bowl” again after the cake and cookies go into the oven.

I’m assuming that all of you are cooking your poultry thoroughly – 165F.  I feel like that’s been beat into us so long I don’t need to belabor that here, except to say that’s more than enough to kill the avian flu virus.

If people are not catching avian flu by eating poultry or eggs, how else might they catch it?  You have to catch it from an infected bird or animal.  No human-to-human transmission has been recorded.  Most humans who have gotten bird flu directly from birds have had sick chickens as roommates.  People keep chickens in their homes in many parts of the world.  Cuddling a sick bird is one way to catch this bug directly from a bird.  Or handling a very large number of sick birds. The only known US case of chicken-to-human transmission occurred in someone participating in culling a very large flock where avian flu was spreading.  That person had contact with thousands of sick or exposed birds. Fortunately for him, H5N1 seems to have gotten less dangerous for humans over the past 20 years.

Even so, don’t go visiting chicken flocks.  Honor farm quarantine signs.  If you have pet chickens or a backyard flock, make sure your birds have no contact with strange chickens or wild birds or their leavings.  This H5N1 strain of avian flu has a mutation that enables it to more easily infect wild birds, especially waterfowl, than earlier avian flu viruses.  The earlier viruses were spread by wild birds with mild cases, but primarily killed domestic poultry flocks.  The latest mutation is more likely to kill wild birds than earlier versions, leaving lots of dead birds for lazy predators to snack on—including the family dog or cat.  If you find a dead bird, contact the local or state health department to get it and test for avian flu.  Those of you with a backyard chicken or turkey flock should dedicate a pair of shoes to chicken care and leave your outdoor shoes outside the chicken coop.  Don’t let your birds drink from any ponds or puddles – and clean their (indoor) water source daily.  Keep your feathered friends under a roof during the avian flu peaks.  Remember that migrating birds don’t stop flying to use designated toilets at rest stops.

Unfortunately, H5N1 infections have been found in over 200 different mammal species – including marine mammals and pets.  The virus has also figured out how to infect ruminants including cows and goats, our most common diary sources.  This spring, the USDA has found infected dairy cattle in nine states—which include four of the top ten dairy-producing states.  So don’t drink any “raw” unpasteurized milk.  Cows eat grass that may be contaminated by infected migrating birds or wild predators that ate infected birds.  The evidence points toward cow-to-cow transmission, but no one knows the exact mechanism.  Because infected cows shed a lot of the virus in their milk, perhaps milking machines can spread it.  High-pressure dairy wash-down systems may “aerosolize” the virus (suspend the virus in tiny airborne particles), allowing other cows to breathe it in or consume it with their feed after it settles out of the air.  Ironic that a system to reduce spread of some diseases might increase spread of a new disease, isn’t it?  The dairy farmers will probably soon be quaking in their rubber boots at the thought of a new round of requirements to modify expensive wash-down systems, after they struggle through the immediate crisis in their barns.

When the cow is really sick, her milk changes character and it’s easy for the farmer to find her and discard her milk.  Unfortunately, a lot of infected cows do not show symptoms right away, and some never show any symptoms.  This makes it harder for farmers to separate out infected cows and discard their milk.  Twenty percent of US dairy products on store shelves recently tested contained fragments of H5N1 RNA.  That’s fragments of viruses, not live, viable viruses that can infect you.  And yes, someone has tried the experiment to make sure virus fragments can’t infect people drinking the milk.  Pasteurization works, even for disease agents that Dr. Louie Pasteur did not know about when he developed the treatment.  Influenza viruses are especially sensitive to heat; fairly low temperatures kill them.

The business impact of avian flu on dairy farmers will be significant.  It doesn’t kill cows like it does birds.  Cows usually recover from avian flu in a couple of weeks – but their milk production goes down for a while after they recover.  Dairy farmers with infected cows are reporting revenue losses in the tens of thousands of dollars beyond the milk discarded during the cows’ active infections.  That’s on top of treatment costs (mainly giving dehydrated and feverish cows comfort) of thousands of dollars.  The USDA reimburses poultry farmers for flocks that the agency “culls” but the dairy farmers are on their own dealing with this.

What can you do?  Well, now is definitely not the time to start your course of cow-hugging therapy.  That’s a real thing, no kidding!  Avoid cow barns unless you work there.  A second dairy worker has been diagnosed with avian flu this week, in Michigan.  The danger to dairy workers is getting live virus from raw milk in their eyes, because human eyes have receptors for this avian flu virus.  The US human infections have been eye irritations.  Unfortunately, the surveillance of dairy cows for avian flu is a very new thing (in contrast with surveillance of poultry flocks, put in place over two decades).  Dairy farms are getting larger while there are fewer of them (recall my newsletter Eighteen Thousand Dairy Cows, RIP - by Kristin Farry (someonegrewthat.farm)).  Large concentrations of like critters increase disease risk, so the USDA is in catch-up mode.

Maybe we shouldn’t be in such a rush to shut down the Office of Pandemic Preparedness.  Or cut our public health budgets, which has become a popular way to vent our frustration over the COVID-19 lockdowns.  Our generation has enjoyed the results of public health investments so long that we’ve become complacent.  Those public health investments include keeping farm animals from getting sick, too.  Farmers want to see culling and its related “depopulation” approaches to disease control replaced with preventative measures like vaccination and prophylactic treatments.  These culling and depopulation policies are traumatic for the farmers involved.  Not every farmer caught up in these policies are compensated, either.  We won’t save these animals from death or farmers from emotional and financial hardship by cutting investments in public health and pandemic research preparedness.  Bacteria and viruses don’t read political statements.

I’ll be back with more on eggs soon.  In the meantime, be careful what you eat and what’s going on with the creatures around you.  For the most current and quickest risk assessment on avian flu and any other bugs, I recommend Dr. Katelyn Jetelina’s Substack Newsletter Your Local Epidemiologist:

Avian Flu and Food Safety:

Avian Influenza: Past, Present, Future (asm.org)

The largest fresh egg producer in the U.S. has found bird flu in chickens at a Texas plant (nbcnews.com)

As bird flu spreads in the U.S., is it safe to eat eggs? (nbcnews.com)

H5N1 Bird Flu: Current Situation Summary | Avian Influenza (Flu) (cdc.gov)

As Bird Flu Spreads through Cows, Is Pasteurized Milk Safe to Drink? | Scientific American

Experts Confirm First Bird Flu Outbreak in Cows: Is It Safe to Drink Milk? : ScienceAlert

Four Important Questions About Bird Flu, Answered | Smithsonian (smithsonianmag.com)

Pasteurizing Eggs:

How to Pasteurize Eggs: 14 Steps (with Pictures) - wikiHow

How to Pasteurize Eggs in the Microwave (thespruceeats.com)

How To Pasteurize Eggs - Boston Girl Bakes

Office of Pandemic Preparedness:

American Pandemic Preparedness: Transforming Our Capabilities (whitehouse.gov)

Cow-Hugging Therapy:

Cow Hugging: Yes it's a Thing | Psych Central

Poultry giant Tyson pulled out of my area last spring, closing the Glen Allen, Virginia broiler plant.  They left a lot of poultry farmers in the lurch.  Supposedly, Tyson bought out the growers’ contracts, but I’ve heard the buyouts were not enough to cover many local farmers’ Tyson-directed facilities investments.  Given the current state of poultry processing in the US, it’s unlikely that another broiler bird processor will be buying broiler birds in the region.  And you can’t just start raising pigs or cows in those purpose-built poultry houses.

How can you survive and compete with those corporate giants that left you and your farm hanging on the edge of a financial cliff?  The local newspaper just reported that area poultry farmers deserted by Tyson have formed the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative, Inc.  They are not exactly going head-to-head with Tyson, as they are shifting from broilers to eggs.  They will produce “cage-free, premium table eggs” and sell them to Dutch Country Organics LLC (in Indiana).  Dutch Country Organics had its start with mid-western Amish farmers and now sells to big grocery retail chains.  As I watched children looking for Easter eggs at church, I was praying for a resurrection miracle for these farmers, although I suspect they are praying harder than I was.  I hope to be sharing good news with you as their new co-op matures.  In the meantime, let’s talk eggs and farmer cooperatives and why I’m excited about this development, even if I have to visit a big grocery chain to buy my neighbors’ eggs.

Chickens and eggs were an early part of my own farm story, beginning shortly after my family started Excalibur Farms in 1965.  Grandad got fertilized chicken eggs from somewhere and made a little incubator to “ed-you-ma-cate” us kids.  He set up an incandescent heat lamp bulb under an aluminum reflector to keep the eggs warm in a wooden box.  We checked the eggs frequently and probably drove Grandad crazy asking when they would hatch.  It was better than Christmas, seeing those chicks finally emerge.  My older brother Albert was especially taken with the chicks.  They became “his” chicks.  As they grew, Grandad helped him clean out one of the three old chicken-houses in the back yard and repair the old nesting boxes and fence.  That’s how Albert fell into the egg business. I was more involved with the adjacent vegetable garden, but I have fond memories of the hens scratching in their yard while I weeded the garden.  Well, mostly fond memories.  Chickens are omnivores.  When the hens got out into the garden, I was a little less fond of them.  Looking back from decades of farming, however, I realize that the chickens were probably eating far more insects and baby moles than vegetable plants.

Another family complication came with my mother’s dog breeding operation.  My family was among the first to breed the Grey Ghosts – Weimaraners – in the US.  In those early years, puppy sales brought in more money than cattle sales, a signal we probably should have paid more attention to.  I was Mom’s number one puppy pooper-scooper.  The whelping box was in the kitchen, but we converted another old backyard chicken house into a kennel for the older puppies.   Let’s see, raise bird-hunting dogs right beside a chicken flock:  What could possibly go wrong?  I recall a few incidents where a chicken got out and lots of tears were shed on both sides over the result.

Albert’s flock was not a big chicken operation even in those days. He usually had a few dozen laying hens.  It was far smaller than what prior families had there, considering the multiple old chicken coops in the backyard.  Still, I remember wicker baskets full of eggs coming out of the one hen house in use.  We ate a lot of eggs.  Not just for breakfast.  French Vanilla ice cream made from scratch requires twelve egg yolks per gallon.  Baking bread uses three eggs a loaf, and a growing family eats a loaf a day.  There were also cakes, egg salad, and egg noodles.  Oh, and deviled eggs for church luncheons – Methodists do pot-lucks like no one else!

The abundance of eggs spawned its own art form.  Mom liked to put hand-painted miniatures inside the empty shells.  We would carefully cut a window into the eggshell with tiny, sharp scissors and empty it.  Then we’d clean the empty shell and paint it inside.  Next came nestling some miniature figure in greenery inside the shell and gluing some decorative trim around the opening.  One of my favorite projects was an entire manger scene mounted on a cross, where each character was nestled inside its own eggshell. Baby Jesus was in the center and surrounded by Mary and Joseph and shepherds and wisemen and animals. Each little figure and eggshell was meticulously hand-painted, mostly by me, under Mom’s supervision. No wonder I am near-sighted!  That cross won an award at a local art show before gracing the door at my mother’s physical therapy clinic.  Similar stuffed eggshells became gifts to teachers and neighbors and even the vet and the doctor.  They saved cash during those early years after we became “land poor.”  This is where the farm makes your balance sheet look great but all the money in your bank account is just waving at you as it zooms through, from crop sales to feed and seed and fertilizer and vet and machinery bills. 

Even with us eating all those eggs and crafting whole sagas in eggshells, those hens kept ahead of us.  Albert made decent spending money selling the eggs we didn’t eat.  Albert’s egg business model was mostly what USDA now calls “Open Production.” In open production, the farmer assumes all risk from start to finish:  owning the facility, buying inputs on the open market, and selling the product to whomever is buying when it’s ready.  It’s the production model that most of you visualize when you hear the words “family farm,” and it’s the model our family used for all our farm ventures over the following five decades including cattle and sheep.  In the case of Albert’s egg business, I say “mostly” open production because Grandad was standing in for a hatchery, and I don’t think Albert paid him for the chicks.  Albert also benefited from some of the feed (corn) being produced right on the farm.  But Albert bought specialty feed supplements wherever he could get them (with logistics of feed hauling provided by Mom and Dad). He sold the eggs to whomever was buying when he had fresh eggs.  Given his scale and local customer base, he was selling retail, not wholesale.

If Albert had scaled up, he may have shifted to buying chicks from a commercial hatchery and selling eggs at wholesale to an egg processor under a marketing contract.  That processor would sort, wash, and grade those eggs.  They would have packaged the best eggs in cute cartons as “table eggs” for retail grocery stores and sent the rest into a food-processing supply chain—an ice-cream maker, perhaps. The USDA calls this model “Marketing Contract.”  In a marketing contract business model, an egg processor-purchaser and a farmer agree on product standards, delivery schedule, and pricing method.  The egg processor doesn’t get involved in the farmer’s decisions to achieve those standards.

On the way to get egg-layer supplements for Albert’s hens and supplies for our cattle and pigs, we would pass a row of empty poultry houses.  Those poultry houses looked very modern to me.  They were long, low, and all metal instead of the wood houses we inherited from previous owners of our farm, but they were already abandoned in the late 1960s.  Eight- or nine-year-old me thought they were huge.  Perhaps they were large by 1960s standards, but small by today’s standards. I imagined ghosts of hundreds of chickens in there.  I would ask if Albert should take them over and fill them with hens.  I continued to wonder what caused a farmer to abandon that investment over the years as I passed them.  A personal tragedy?  Or was it an early business failure in a trend that we couldn’t see in the 1960s?  I never learned the story. Those poultry houses were still there in 2021, my last trip down that road, rusted ruins with collapsing roofs, barely visible through the overgrowth, like tombstones in a forgotten graveyard of dreams.

In 1955, the year Albert was born, about 90% of US-produced eggs were from open production operations, while almost all of the remaining 10% came to the consumer via marketing contract operations.  In 1965, the year Excalibur Farms started, the open production of eggs had shrunk to 60%; however, open production was not being displaced by the marketing contract business model. Instead, by 1965, two other egg production business models had become significant:  Production Contract (almost 20%) and full Vertical Integration (about 15%).

By 1975, the production model accounted for 40% of egg production. In the production contract model, the processor-contractor is very involved in the farmer’s decisions and owns most or all production input supplies.  These may include the hatchery, the feed mills, and even the laying hens.  The farmer may be providing only the land, facility, and labor – hence the moniker “grower” replacing the title of “farmer” in production contracts.  This model rapidly took over broiler chicken production between 1950 and 1955:  the open production share for broiler chickens was 95% in 1950 and less than 10% by 1955.  Production contracts were almost 90% of the broiler chicken industry by 1955.  It’s still close to 90% now.  The remaining broiler chicken production is almost all full vertical integration.  Growth of the production contract model in turkeys and chicken egg production was slower.

By 1975, 30% of eggs came from the vertical integration model.  Full vertical integration has become the dominant business model in egg production, where a single company produces, packages, and markets the eggs in facilities they own.  That company is likely to own the feed mills and hatchery, too.  As of 2002, 60% of US eggs came to you via this business model.  The people caring for the hens in this vertical integration model are employees of the production company, not farmers in our traditional US concept of the term.  Open production of eggs by completely independent farmers was only about 2% by 2002.  Marketing contract arrangements were also only about 2% that year. The balance – about 36% – came from production contracting.  Unfortunately, I haven’t found any more recent data broken out by business model covering the twenty years since the USDA’s Steve Martinez analyzed poultry business models.

So what business model will the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative members have?  From what I have seen, it looks like a variation on the marketing contract theme, with the cooperative negotiating the best possible egg sale contract rather than each individual farmer negotiating with egg processors on her own.  The cooperative will also have a role in negotiating with input suppliers. It plans to supply feed and birds.  Because the farmers own the cooperative, they should get better egg prices than typical under marketing contract business models.  I am hopeful that these Virginia egg-producing farmers will remain farmers instead of growers (production contract) or employees (vertical integration).

Cooperatives are common in US life outside of farming.  You may belong to cooperatives that have nothing to do with farming – insurance, banking, rural electric, and even shopping.  For example, Recreational Equipment, Inc. (REI) is a consumer cooperative for outdoor gear and clothing formed in 1938.  Farmer cooperatives are governed by different laws than non-farm cooperatives like REI.  Farmer cooperatives can be marketing farm products, providing services to farmers, or supplying inputs to farmers.

My earliest memories of shopping for farm supplies are in a farm co-op.  It was the Madison branch of the Orange-Madison Cooperative, which began supplying inputs to farmers in 1935. It was involved in services and crop marketing by the 1960s.  The cavernous and mostly unheated building featured a loading dock across its entire front.  It was in the middle of the town of Madison then.  I recall the dust and mice and feral kittens and sweet smell of molasses in the feed mixing–and bins of nails.  Some of those nails were huge to a six-year-old.  I often entertained myself playing with those giant nails while Mom and Dad bought seed, fertilizer, and feed supplements (including goodies for Albert’s chickens).  I was hoping to find the pennies that I heard customers talking about as they bought nails, because I was saving for a pony.  Dad tried to explain the nail-penny system to me, why it was abbreviated with a “d” instead of a “p,” and that the really big nails (10 inches long) were 100-penny nails or “100d.”  Oh, and one hundred was 100 except with nails where it could be a “long hundred” or 120.  I’m afraid a lot of this was lost on me then. It was not until I was a teenager–and that co-op had moved to a new and much less interesting building on the northern edge of town–that I understood how to buy nails and the differences between a cooperative and a regular store like Sears Roebuck.  The feral kittens were gone due to concerns about toxoplasmosis infecting feed, but Dad’s cat Purrfect would accompany him to shop for mice while Dad bought supplies— including (of course) nails.

I accidentally became the local expert on farmer cooperatives when I was 14.  There was a national farm cooperative conference at Michigan State University that summer and I really, really wanted to see what some state west of the eastern seaboard looked like.  I won a scholarship to that conference from the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, by scoring well on a test about farm cooperatives.  I had to memorize the history, laws, regulations, and all sorts of farmer co-op trivia. It was a memorable trip for a teenager, made more so by my parents’ eleventh-hour discovery that I was the only female member of the Virginia delegation.  Somehow the county agent who was going allayed my parents’ fears and I got to go despite their concerns.  I felt so grown up, taking agribusiness classes at that huge ag school with farmers and farm kids from all over the country. It was the ultimate farm-geek experience.  I had to pay it back by giving speeches about the conference and farm cooperatives to agribusiness groups back home.  It sure beat doing the beauty-queen-of-the-fair thing. Not that anyone would mistake scrawny, tom-boy me for a beauty queen.  As I write this, however, I am realizing how much I have forgotten about cooperatives!

Farmer cooperatives were not a new thing even in the 1960s and 1970s.  The first US farmer cooperative may have been formed in 1804, by a group of Connecticut dairy farmers.  In 1867, farmers began forming Granges.  A USDA employee and Free Mason named Oliver Kelly ignited the grange movement to help modernize US farming.  He had the backing of US Presidents in the 1860s and 1870s.  Local granges became part of the National Grange of the Order of the Patrons of Husbandry.  “Husbandry” was the original word for taking care of farm animals.  It’s still used now sometimes, but a college student getting a degree in Animal Husbandry in 2024 is more likely to tell you their degree is Dairy Science or Poultry Science or some other genus specialty.

The grange movement was initially powered by frustration with railroad and grain elevator monopolies gouging farmers who had to move perishable crops quickly to buyers.  Granges also advocated for women’s suffrage, as the Order of Patrons of Husbandry reserved four offices in every grange for women.  Teenagers fourteen and older could join as soon as they demonstrated the ability to “draw a plow” – that is, manage the animals pulling the plow while keeping it in a furrow.  Granges took many other rural concerns to Washington.  They won direct delivery of mail for US rural residents.  Known as Rural Free Delivery (RFD), it wasn’t free but at least you no longer had to go to a post office to pick up your mail.  Excalibur’s RFD mailing address was RFD 1, Box 36.  You could also write Route 1 or RR1 (where RR stood for “Rural Route”) on the envelope to get a letter into the mailbox at the end of our farm road as long as you also put Box 36 on there.  “PO Box 36” did not work—that letter stayed at the post office until the owner of PO Box 36 handed it back to the Postmaster.

We had that RFD address well into the 1990s, over one hundred years after the grange movement won us rural mail delivery.  The 911 address system (which admittedly makes it easier for emergency responders and your friends to find you) replaced those RFD addresses with “street addresses.”  That created a lot of consternation in rural America, as we suddenly had to formally name our roads.  Before that, we gave directions by what was at the end of a road or road numbers.  Minor rural roads had a numbering system that started over in every county in Virginia.  Route 662 in Madison County became Graves Mill Road becausethe old Graves Mill was at the end. The many other Route 662s in other Virginia counties got different names.  Google still has trouble getting you to driveway entrances to farms with long driveways, however.  I’ve had that problem on both Excalibur and now Farm 2.0.  But I am grateful that the ambulances found Mom during her later years’ emergencies without the detailed instructions required before the 911 address mandate.

Granges went well beyond policy advocacy for farmers.  They were strongly influenced by Free Masonry, with rituals and secret passwords to keep railroad spies out of their meetings.  The granges became educational and social hubs in rural communities.  They introduced new farming techniques and rituals to hold the community together.  Many granges adopted an English cooperative business system known as the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, a precursor of all modern cooperatives, both farm and non-farm.   Granges provided farmers with services and supplies as well as crop transportation and marketing arrangements.  Some offered credit and banking services.  Unfortunately, in the 1880s, as the granges became more powerful, they became targets of the anti-trust movement, culminating in attacks using the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law.  Ironically, the Sherman Anti-Trust Law was intended to break up railroad monopolies, the original impetus for the grange formation.  The same business tycoons who were controlling the railroads were also controlling grain and cotton distribution.  Farmer cooperatives became an anti-trust target along with the business tycoons that they were fighting.  An ambitious and failed venture into manufacturing farm machinery also caused many farmers to lose faith in the National Grange.  More political groups such as the Farmers’ Alliance and American Farm Bureau rose up in competition with the granges to carry farmers’ concerns to Washington at the end of the nineteenth century.

Farmers finally regained some cooperative organizing privileges in 1914 with the Clayton Act.  This only allowed a small subset of cooperative structures–those with no capital stock and no member dividends.  After World War I, US farmers suffered a horrific crash in food prices. It spelled short-term disaster for many farmers, but opportunity in the longer term.  In 1922, US farmers won additional exemptions from the 1890 Sherman Anti-Trust Law.  Senator Capper (KS) and Representative Volstead (MN) teamed up to get the Capper-Volstead Act–the Co-operative Marketing Associations Act—passed.  This Act allowed farmers to collaborate in co-operatives to process and market their products.  Senator Capper presented the Act with the statement that its “purpose is to give to the farmer the same right to bargain collectively that is already enjoyed by corporations.”

To qualify for Capper-Volstead protection, the farmer cooperative must comply with these restrictions:

1) Membership - Members must produce agricultural products and have an ownership stake in their production.  In other words, members are farm owners who are actively farming their land.  This excludes salaried farm managers and cash-rent lessors, and those engaged only in agricultural product processing. That means the new Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative can’t admit their egg processor and distributor as a member.

2) Structure - The cooperative:

(a) must be organized for the mutual benefit of the members.

(b) allows only one vote per member, no matter how much stock that member owns OR may not pay dividends on stock or membership capital more than 8% per year.  This provision makes farmer cooperatives much more democratic than most consumer cooperatives.  While 8% was a great return on investment in 1922, it has made raising capital difficult a hundred years later in 2024.

(d) cannot deal in the products of nonmembers to an amount greater in value than what it handles for members. This is known as the "50% rule" and non-member products are defined as "all commodities not actually produced by members, but which are marketed by an association.”  So the co-op has to make sure it moves a greater dollar amount in eggs than in, say, externally-manufactured chicken-house equipment and veterinary medicines.

3) Activities - The only activities protected are “processing, preparing for market, handling or marketing... [of agricultural] products of persons so engaged.”  The new Central Virginia Poultry cooperative could eventually develop a wholly member-owned egg processing and distribution service, as long as at least 50% of the eggs processed came from member-farmers.

4) Federations - Capper-Volstead cooperatives may join together, but mergers with ineligible organizations will remove the anti-trust protections from all involved.  In theory, a farmer cooperative could end up absorbing 100% of production of a farm product in a market without triggering anti-trust action, as long as the co-op gained that position within the constraints of the Capper-Volstead Act.

Capper-Volstead made the US Secretary of Agriculture responsible for preventing these associations from abusing the collaboration to harm consumers, not the Department of Justice.  But in practice, the USDA refers violations to Justice.  The courts (including the Supreme Court, five times) have yanked the Capper-Volstead exemption from cooperatives conspiring with non-producer processors and labor unions to fix prices, restricting members’ production, organizing boycotts, and other illegal anti-competitive activities. No, farmers are not saints.  Or not all saints.  You can lose your perspective on the law in the process of trying to save your farm.  You’d have a hard time feeding hens and milking cows and paying the mortgage from the jail house, so violations have been very rare.  There’s been only about 250 cases brought in one hundred years.

Joining an established cooperative may be as simple as filling out a form to show that you are really farming or as complicated as purchasing stock.  Farmer-owned cooperatives mean that members get a percentage of profits in two forms:  yearly patronage refunds and equity increases.  The equity account is often used to catch anything over 8%. Co-op equity sometimes has a catch:  some farmer cooperatives are structured so that only your estate can cash out your equity share, not you.

The Orange-Madison Cooperative (formed in Orange, VA, in 1933) had eclipsed the grange as the agribusiness center in our area by the time our family started farming in 1965.  By then, Madison’s Burnt Tree Grange was mostly just a small, poorly-heated, shabby meeting place for 4-Hers and farmers.  In 2012, someone started trying to revive the organization as a real grange.  It’s listed as Chapter 957 on the National Grange website.  There’s only one web-posting, unfortunately.  The grange hall has evolved into a music venue and community center now, with a much better heating and cooling system – far from its agribusiness roots.  Across the US, grange membership is no longer restricted to farmers, as farmers are less than 2% of the US population, down from a third in the heyday of the granges.   The transition is sad, in a way, but our local farm co-op never contributed a lot to our social lives, beyond chance meetings during feed runs, and a weekday old-timers’ breakfast gathering.  So the old Burnt Tree Grange Hall is still serving one important purpose for which it was built.  Elsewhere, many community granges are still active agribusiness advocacy organizations, true to their roots. The National Grange has about 160,000 members now and is still advocating for farmers and rural communities in Washington, DC.   Farm 2.0 is close to a grange that seems active.  I will have to visit it soon, as April is National Grange Month and their Facebook page has chatter about bread, scholarship awards, and community service. 

Meanwhile, the 2021 USDA census showed 1,699 active farmer cooperatives in the US, operating 9,531 locations.  Gross business for farmer cooperatives was about $230 billion in 2021.  Compare that to about $2 billion in 1923.  Over half are marketing farm commodities on behalf of their farmer-members.  The new poultry cooperative would make 1,700 – except that the Orange-Madison Cooperative merged with the Front Royal Cooperative in 2022 to become EverGRO Farm Services with five locations, probably offsetting this addition.  Like everything in agriculture these days, the number of cooperatives has declined but the average size is increasing.  During the first quarter center after Capper-Volstead, the average farmer cooperative averaged 371 members.  Now, it’s 937 members.

Many prominent brands emerged from farmer cooperatives.  Sunkist is a farmer cooperative. It once was party to a Supreme Court decision that allowed farmer cooperatives to process and distribute their products to retail consumers.  Donald Duck is a brand produced by Florida’s Natural Growers Cooperative.  Most farmer co-ops operate out of sight of the grocery shopper.  Farm Credit financed our land, equipment, and production expenses.  We sold Excalibur’s wool production via the Mid-States Wool Cooperative, which sorted and graded the wool and sold it on our behalf to textile mills.  My parents joined other Virginia sheep producers to form a cooperative to sell lamb in the 1990s.  At other times, we sold corn we grew and bought feed, feed additives, fuel, fence, and equipment through cooperatives.

Southern States Cooperative was our biggest farm supply brand for decades.  Southern States was formed in Richmond, VA, by 150 farmers in 1923 as the Virginia Seed Service, shortly after Capper-Volstead became law.  Its first purpose was developing quality seed for its members. This cooperative is now a $1.5 billion business and even owns refineries, as fuel is a key input in food production.  Southern States began to operate stores where non-members could shop for garden supplies and pet food.  In the early 2000s, however, the Southern States co-op had diversified too much and was struggling to manage it all. Portions were sold off to become for-profit businesses as the co-op returned to its core businesses.  Not long ago, our local co-ops and Southern States had a messy divorce. Our co-op had relied on Southern States for accounting and business services as well as packaged feed and seed.  No longer. I suspect the 50% rule also forced the divesture of Southern States store-fronts as they grew into suburbia.  Or suburbia grew into them. If you visit a Southern States store thinking you are supporting farmers with your business, ask if it’s still part of a farmer cooperative.  The sign over the door in Amelia Court House’s Southern States hasn’t changed to reflect that store’s new non-cooperative status; I had to ask.

At the 100^th anniversary of Capper-Volstead (February 2022), data on corporate control of many farm product sectors suggested that the Act hasn’t helped farmers gain ground against agribusiness corporations.  The number of farmers in the US is fewer than one-third of what it was in 1922. Farms and farmer cooperatives have increased in size, but the buyers of farm products have also increased in size.  Thus, the 1922 producer-buyer size ratio persists today.  In 2021, all farm cooperatives in the US did about $212 billion in business.  The top ten grocery chains in the US (comprising 77% of the grocery market) did over $450 billion in food business that year.  Wal-Mart ‘s food revenue dollar value exceeded the total business done by all US farm cooperatives in 2010 and has kept growing since then.  An individual farmer with a perishable product who is a long way from a consumer (and probably needs some additional processing) is still a “price-taker.”  President John Kennedy summarized the situation well: “The farmer is the only man in our economy who buys everything at retail, sells everything at wholesale, and pays the freight both ways.” Capper-Volstead was intended to empower farmers to become “price-setters,” at least to the extent that non-farm and farm-product processing corporations are.  A hundred years later, farmers have barely held the 1922 line, and Capper-Volstead is under attack. I am having a hard time ginning up the enthusiasm and optimism I had as a youth farm cooperative advocate in 1974.  Still, I shudder to think where we’d be without this law.

Consider eggs: definitely a perishable product, although not as perishable as, say, milk.  But while egg production in the US has nearly doubled in the last 40 years, the majority of eggs now come from vertically-integrated operations that are large corporations.  In one of the more nuanced attacks on Capper-Volstead, these corporations are questioning the definition of a farmer in Capper-Volstead. What is the difference between a vertically-integrated egg producer—who owns the land, henhouses, and hens and makes all decisions about the hens’ care—and an individual poultry farmer in central Virginia?

Here’s hoping the Central Virginia Poultry Cooperative can turn the tide and not get washed away by industry trends toward vertical integration.  This new co-op and its members face huge challenges, not the least of which is the resurgence of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI aka A(H5N1)) this week.  Cal-Maine—the largest table-egg producer in the US (and a vertically integrated company) — just shut down one of its Texas operations and destroyed nearly 2 million birds due to avian flu infection, almost 4% of the company’s total bird count.  The news got worse with the discovery that cows can carry that highly pathogenic disease.  Dairy operations in Texas, Kansas, and Ohio report infected cows, and the virus is showing up in unpasteurized milk (hint, hint, don’t drink any raw milk!).  Now a Texas dairy worker caught the avian flu from a cow, the second human HPAI case in the US (the last one was in 2022).

Next time, we’ll talk more about the hens and eggs and less about the farmers.  I’ll share Mom’s trick for ensuring eggs are fresh, too.

References:

Business Models in Poultry and Egg Production:

(PDF) Vertical Coordination of Marketing Systems: Lessons From the Poultry, Egg, and Pork Industries (researchgate.net)

Farm cooperatives:

Capper–Volstead Act - Wikipedia

Capper Volstead Text and Evolution:

https://web.archive.org/web/20121230023910/http://www.uwcc.wisc.edu/info/capper.html

https://www.ams.usda.gov/sites/default/files/media/Capper-Volstead%20Act.pdf

Co-op 101 - NCFC

https://cooperatives.dyson.cornell.edu/home/cooperatives-101/types-of-co-ops/

https://www.rd.usda.gov/files/cir55.pdf

HISTORY OFCOOPERATIVES IN THE US (wisc.edu)

The Capper-Volstead Act at 100: Farmers, Monopolies, and Corporate Power in America, 1922-2022 | The Business History Conference (thebhc.org)

Size of Farm Cooperatives:

Agricultural Cooperative Statistical Summary Results for 2021 (govdelivery.com)

Trends of US Agricultural Cooperatives Branded Final November2018 PUB.pdf (ohio-state.edu)

Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers:

Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers - Wikipedia

Rochdale Principles - Wikipedia

Grange/Order of Patrons of Husbandry:

Dec of Purposes Brochure 2012 Pg 1.pdf (grange.org)

19th Century GRANGERS Rise: IMPACT on U.S. Farms

Avian Flu/Bird Flu situation:

H5N1 Bird Flu: Current Situation Summary | Avian Influenza (Flu) (cdc.gov)

COP28 was very much in the news through this past Christmas season.  “COP28” is short for the “28th Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.”  Wow, no wonder everyone just calls it COP28. Reports on this year’s conference included a lot of comments like “agriculture causes a third of all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.”  Given that COP28 took place in a country—Dubai—where the number one product is oil, not food, this spotlight on agriculture GHG emissions does not surprise me.  Nor does this year’s efforts to wring commitments to reduce agriculture-related emissions out of the attendees.

Whether you believe that human activity is causing the increase in weather extremes may depend on what media you consume; however, it is pretty hard to make a case in farm country that the weather is not changing at all.  Farmers spend a LOT of time looking at weather.  Probably more than any profession besides weather forecasters.  Keeping the farm depends on a farmer planning for the weather, predicting the weather, working in the weather, and weathering the weather when the weather isn’t what said farmer hoped for.

And now, farmers have to figure out how to weather being blamed for the change in weather.

A Reuters article quoted the “global leader of food practice” at the World Wildlife Fund (Joao Campari) as saying "Business as usual food systems would use nearly the whole carbon budget for a 2-degree Celsius world. We need to implement food systems approaches throughout COP28.” Ouch.  Well, the World Wildlife Fund is not exactly known for advocacy of agriculture.   Or people.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)—a somewhat more neutral organization—says that GHG emissions from agriculture are probably 31% of the total of human-made GHG.  Not quite a third, but big enough to prompt this farmgirl to dig deeper in this manure pile.

One problem is what the definition of “food system” and “agriculture” are.  A Wikipedia article cites five scholarly sources to conclude that “The agriculture, forestry, and land use sector contribute[s] between 13% and 21% of global greenhouse gas emission.”  But then the same article goes on to say that domestic livestock emit 14.5% of all “anthropogenic” (human-caused) GHG.  Hmmm. Not sure I follow their math.  Still, evidence is accumulating that domestic livestock are producing a lot of GHG.  A 2019 University of California-Davis study showed that a single Holstien could “burp” 220 pounds of methane in a single year.  We owe that poor girl a nice green-pasture retirement somewhere, because apparently she spent the whole year with her head in a bubble, cooperating with those scientists.  Methane traps 28 times more heat in our atmosphere than pure carbon dioxide does, and it takes about a dozen years for it to break down naturally into carbon dioxide. No wonder cows are getting a lot of attention at climate conferences.

Some US media outlets talk of a conspiracy to take away your steaks while others are bent on serving up a side of guilt with your burger.  Grocery stores are trying to convince you to pay more for “environmentally-sustainable” food. So, a deep dive into food production impacts on climate feels timely.  But which of the stories shouting at you from the grocery store shelves or media outlets should you heed?

I think we can agree that we all have to eat to live.  Food requires energy to produce, move, store, and prepare.  Energy production and usage has emissions.   Food production emits greenhouse gases, including methane.  And as population increases, those emissions increase proportionally.  As people boost themselves up from subsistence, graduating from rice and bread to meat for dinner, those emissions increase exponentially.  The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization projects a 70% increase in beef and dairy consumption over the next thirty years.  But those of you feeling guilty might pause the draconian no-beef New Years resolutions until we cover the tradeoffs.  There’s a lot you can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions short of giving up steak forever.

I am biased observer.  Our family’s very first livestock venture in 1965 on Excalibur Farms was a small herd of Angus heifers.  I was six years old. I still remember watching them unloading from a truck, hoping that a pony would get off with them.  A neighboring cattle breeder had tried closing the sale on his heifers by bribery.  He promised to give me the pony I was petting in his barnyard if my parents bought heifers from him.  I don’t recall where those first heifers came from that day, but I do recall my disappointment, looking at the empty truck and no pony.  But once I got over that—my grandfather helped by finding a Shetland pony with a cute black colt somewhere—I decided that cows were cool.  Good thing, too:  my father soon discovered he had a squeamish streak.  He delegated livestock care to my mother while he learned to grow corn.  “If it has roots, it’s mine.  If it has legs, it’s yours,” he told Mom.  Being Mom’s shadow, that made livestock my job, also.  Dad got very good at growing corn and Mom got very good at breeding cattle.  Within a couple of years, we were filling the old dairy-cow feedlot with steers to be finished for beef.  We had a thousand-pound freezer to hold any cow that goofed up calving, too, as the punishment for that crime was an invitation to dinner.  Our operation expanded to include pigs (my grandfather’s favorite) and egg-laying chickens (my older brother’s favorite) for a time.  Two decades in, however, the pigs and chickens were memories and sheep outnumbered cows on our farm.  As Dad lost the energy to grow corn, he became fascinated with sheep.  But Mom still got stuck with the messy parts of the sheep operation.

Along the way, I learned what humanity’s fundamental food problem is:  Getting the protein out of grass is hard!  Nature grows a lot more grass than vegetables.  We humans can’t get enough nutrients out of cellulose to live.  We are predators because we need our prey to digest those plants for us and turn them into something that we can digest.  We domesticated reindeer and cows and sheep and goats because they are really good at digesting cellulose and turning it into something we humans can digest much more easily.  These animals have the added bonus of storing that protein on the hoof in a non-perishable package until we are hungry, which was a lot more important before we invented freezers.  Ask a cattleman or shepherd east of the Mississippi River what he does for a living, and you will often hear “I’m a grass farmer.”  Grass in this context is a loose term for all the plants that whatever animal you are grazing will eat.  The technical term is forage.  Easterners grow really good forage, which they sell on the hoof.  West of the Mississippi, cattlemen call themselves “ranchers” because they usually have enough space to let nature do the work of growing forage.  Many young livestock growers who graze their livestock on land they don’t own—all too common today given the price of land—have resurrected a Victorian term for their business model: “graziers.”

Reindeer and cows and sheep and goats do the magic of extracting protein from forage by fermentation.  They break down cellulose in a special chamber in their stomachs, which old-timers called the paunch but we now call the rumen.  Hence the name ruminants.  Deer, moose, antelope, giraffes, buffalo, and aurochs also have rumens, in case you still insist on chasing your dinner around the woods instead of the grocery store.  Aurochs, you ask?  That’s the wild Eurasian ancestor of the modern domesticated cow, thought to be extinct but recently brought back in Europe.  Wikipedia says there are about 200 species of ruminants in the world.

Technically, the rumen is not a separate organ but the front end of a long, long multi-chambered stomach.  There are actually four chambers in a ruminant’s stomach—not four stomachs in a ruminant.  The “four stomachs” is a very old conception of this very complicated organ. The first two chambers—the rumen and its next-door neighbor the reticulum—work together as the fermentation apparatus to tease the nutrients out of that stubborn forage.  This is why ruminants are in the “foregut” fermenter class.  Most of the fermentation takes place upfront in the rumen.  The rumen is huge: it’s the reason ruminants have such round mid-sections.  The forage-eating animal keeps that chamber at a nice warm 100-108 degrees Fahrenheit and a pH between 6.0 and 6.4.  Compare that with the pH of our own stomachs, which hovers around 1.5!  Recall that pH goes from 0 on the acid side to 14 on the base side, with pH of 7 being neutral.  The ruminant’s higher pH is welcomes microbes that break the cellulose down into nutrients for the animal—and methane.  These bugs are (surprise!) called methanogens.

To start the cellulose digestion process, the animal chews the forage into a “cud” and sends it down into the rumen with lots of saliva for fermentation.  Later, when the animal is relaxing, perhaps chillin’ in the shade, it brings solids that haven’t broken down in the rumen yet back up into their mouth and chews them again. Farmers call this “chewing the cud.”   An important aspect of chewing the cud is mixing in more saliva to help the fermentation chemistry. Saliva is a natural antacid.  Our own saliva’s pH is about neutral, neither acid nor base.  A ruminant’s saliva has a base pH: between 8.1 and 8.9. Injecting more saliva via chewing the cud is the way the animal keeps the rumen’s pH high enough for fermenting the cellulose. 

Perhaps because of the relaxed and thoughtful expression the average cow has while chewing her cud, the expression applied to humans has come to mean “to think slowly and carefully about something” (Cambridge Dictionary).  The word "ruminant" comes from the Latin ruminare, which means "to chew over again.”  Perhaps you’ve told someone that you needed time to “ruminate” on a proposal before you could decide on accepting it.   I wonder how many people who use that expression realize what is literally being chewed and how many times.  The other culturally-important detail about the cud comes from Leviticus 11:3-8:  to be kosher, an animal must chew the cud as well as have a completely split hoof.  These kosher restrictions have theological roots.

The press made much of a cud-chewing fact during this past Christmas season.  In the northern latitudes, reindeer have to digest most of the year’s food in a few short months of very long days.  They have developed a fascinating time hack for this:  reindeer chew their cud while sleeping.  Who knew?  I wonder if they also chew their cuds on the housetop while waiting for Santa to leave toys and coal.

But back to chasing that forage through our neighborhood ruminant.  The reticulum—the number two stomach compartment—helps the rumen with fermentation by filtering out the large incompletely-fermented cud and sending that back for another round.  It is often called the “honeycomb” (and it looks like one), but other very old terms are “bonnet” and “kings-hood” (still trying to figure that one out).  You won’t find these terms connected with ruminant stomachs on the internet.  I found them in a book that I bought at an antique shop for a quarter when I was ten years old:  Diseases of Livestock and Their Most Efficient Remedies, by Miller and Tellor, published in 1890.  It was a momentous find for a kid who wanted to be a large-animal vet. Our farm vet Dr. Matt [Graves] teased me unmercifully about this book, but we both had a lot of fun evaluating medical progress. I rediscovered this treasure last week when sorting through over five decades of family stuff from Excalibur’s farmhouse.  Curiously, the page on “Hoven-Blown”—the old name for impacted rumen—was book-marked by a newspaper clipping of Princess Anne galloping her horse Goodwill during her 1976 Olympic appearance.  Perhaps I kept that picture as a reminder that Princess Anne got back on that horse after a horrific fall and concussion and completed that Olympic course.  The connection between the Princess Royal and that particular cattle ailment escapes me now, but I note the 1890 vet book refers to four distinct stomachs, not chambers in one stomach. At times the authors struggled to attribute various conditions to one stomach or another, a clue that they were really working together closely.

One old term for the third chamber (omasum) is “butcher’s Bible” because its interior surface looks like the pages of a book. There were times and places where the Bible was the only book many farmers had to read.  The Wesley brothers’ Methodist Societies got around bans on working class people having books by teaching children to read using Bibles in Sunday School.  The cow’s “Bible” controls the size of what gets to the last chamber as well as being the place the animal absorbs some of the fatty acids from this process.  I am still pondering possible theological meanings of this.  The veterinarians of yesteryear used the terms “psalterium” (a fancy name for the Book of Psalms) or “manyplies” for this chamber, possibly to show that they had been to a real school.  A trip through the cow’s digestive tract from the grass’ perspective helps you understand those old names.  Of course, you can find this virtual trip on the internet. Check out these Bing Videos.

The last chamber (the abomasum) is the “true stomach,” similar to our own stomach.  It’s where the cow absorbs most of the proteins and other nutrients freed from the grass in the first three compartments.  Farmers where I grew up called that stomach the “maw” or “rennet” but apparently butchers and cooks call it the “reed.”

Whoa—do cooks really have special names for parts of ruminant stomachs?  Most Americans are a couple of generations removed from the “eat everything but the moo” days, but the foodies among you may have eaten some of this fermentation apparatus.  That honeycomb?  When a cook slices it up for dinner, it’s tripe.  If you eat menudo on Sunday morning in central Texas to chase away your hangover from Saturday night out on the town, you’ve eaten some cow’s reticulum. If you are fond of Dim Sum (ngau pak yip), you have probably eaten the butcher’s Bible.  In Scotland, the national dish of Haggis was traditionally cooked in the animal’s stomach—but you won’t find true Haggis in the US unless you butcher the animal and make it yourself from scratch.  US food safety regulations ban the sale of some Haggis ingredients.

Do you like cheese?  The complex mix of enzymes traditionally used to make cheese—also called “rennet”—comes from the abomasum, that true stomach.  For millennia, the most prized rennet enzymes have come from calves slaughtered for veal, because those calves have been fed only milk.  The rennet enzymes curdle the milk in the calves’ stomach so that it is easier to digest.  The calves’ digestive enzymes change with age and diet, thus changing the type of cheese formed with the rennet harvested from the animal’s stomach.  You can now buy this on Amazon, to make your own cheese.

Every now and then, I have to pause and marvel at the complex web of our food system, developed over millennia, nearly all before refrigeration.  Imagine how humanity learned to exploit all the corners of an already-complex ecosystem. Imagine how our ancestors learned to create easily-stored delicacies like cheese by imitating what goes on in an animal’s stomach.

Fortunately for the cheese-lovers who are horrified by the idea of killing young animals for veal and rennet, Pfizer transplanted the genes responsible for producing the rennet enzymes into microbes.  Yes, the same company that brought us an mRNA coronavirus vaccine during the pandemic.  These microbes produce a very consistent quality rennen, the ingredient in rennet important to cheese makers, also known as chymosin B.  This microbe product is known as fermentation-produced chymosin (FPC).  Approved by the FDA in 1988, it’s the “rennet” used in over 90% of the cheese on the market today.  No, the FPC does not contain any “GMO” material—that is filtered out.  And now you also have an inkling of why making cheese for sale requires extensive education and a special license.  And if you are opposed to both genetic engineering and killing animals for food, you need to stop eating cheese.  Sorry about that.

For everyone else, trading your steak for a nice hunk of cheese may not reduce methane emissions much, unfortunately.  There’s a ruminant somewhere in the cheese production process, digesting forage and burping.  Most likely cows, but cheese lovers are keeping sheep or goats or perhaps even yaks in clover (or some such forage). While beef production is blamed for 25% of the agriculture system’s greenhouse gas emissions, dairy is being blamed for 8%.  That’s 9% of total greenhouse gas emissions for beef and about 3% for dairy. Dairy cows ruminate in the process of converting forage into milk. So, it's not just steak at stake here. 

Every cow, sheep, goat, or reindeer has a phenomenal bio-reactor inside of it, converting plants to protein that we in turn can easily digest.  Unfortunately, just like a bioreactor you might build to intentionally produce methane from organic material, the ruminant’s bioreactor produces methane.  For the ruminant, it’s an unwanted byproduct.  They are in this for the fats and proteins.  So they burp the methane out as a waste product.  This is called “enteric methane emissions.” There was a time when this was a good thing, because our planet needed greenhouse gases to keep it warm enough for mammalian life.  Win-win.  But now that some of that mammalian life (us!) has found many creative ways to make or release large amounts of GHG into the atmosphere, not so much.

Some of you are wondering:  what about flatulence, the emissions from the other end of the animal?  Turns out that’s minor compared to the front-end emissions.  90-95% of livestock methane emissions come from burping—the fancy word is eructation—and only 5-10% come from flatulence and livestock waste storage.  The non-farmers are dying to ask a question at this point. No, the barn is not filled with a racket from burping critters.  Ruminants have very quiet burps.

Sheep are also ruminants, but lamb has a lower per-serving carbon footprint than beef.  Sheep require only 60% of the forage per pound of meat that cattle require.  Sheep are also better at offsetting their enteric methane emissions by enhancing carbon sequestration in soil.  Spending a large chunk of my life raising sheep biases me just a bit but having lamb for dinner instead of steak sounds like a great climate-change mitigation plan to me.

You might also try those tasty Mexican cabrito (goat) dishes, as goats are also more efficient than cattle at converting feed to meat.  I personally have a love-hate relationship with the little rascal-Houdini’s, as they are nearly impossible to fence in and will eat anything.  But the “eating anything” part can be useful, because goats will eat a lot of invasive species that a cow won’t touch. And even some the sheep won’t eat.

What about moving away from eating ruminants altogether?  Denmark passed a law in 2021 requiring its agriculture sector to cut GHG emissions by 55% from the 1990 level by 2030.  Unfortunately, Danish dairy and beef industries have been on a growth track since 1990—greatly encouraged by their government(!)—which means that meeting this target will require a per-cow methane-reduction miracle.  This year, Denmark is considering a large tax on cattle to “encourage” Danish farmers to switch to crops and pork production.  Small wonder European farmers are blocking traffic in cities with their tractors.

Pigs and people have something in common:  not only are we both omnivores, but neither of us have rumens.  We are both “monogastric.”  We both have single-chambered stomachs where we wrest proteins out of protein-rich food with very acidic enzymes.  The interesting microbiome shenanigans needed to digest most plant matter happen post-stomach in our intestines.  This is “hindgut fermentation.”  We don’t burp out methane.  We do release some methane, but we won’t get into the how here in polite company.  Most of our bio methane contribution comes from processing our own waste outside of our bodies.

Some herbivores (horses, rabbits, and our arch-nemesis the rat) don’t have rumens either, so how about eating them?  These hindgut fermenters have a very large “large intestine,” and an area called a caecum that contains a microbiome suited to breaking down cellulose.  I can’t see those becoming our choices at Fourth of July cookouts anytime soon.  We hate the idea of eating Trigger and Blaze in the US.  In fact, we have banned horse slaughtering here.  Rats totally freak us out.  Rabbits, not so much, but when did you last see rabbit in the grocery store?  If you have seen that recently, it says a lot about where you shop.

How about poultry?  Chickens and turkeys are not ruminants.  They require a lot less food per pound of human-edible protein than cows do.  That translates into a lower carbon footprint in their feed production, in addition to less GHG produced while they digest that feed.  According to Consumer Ecology Footprints, a four-ounce serving of turkey has only one-fifth the carbon footprint as four ounces of beef.  So there’s a little serendipity in our holiday turkey traditions.  But Santa may need to rethink his reliance on reindeer for toy transport.  Up on the housetop, reindeer pause—and burp methane.

Even though the world demand for meat from ruminants is increasing—mostly due to the increase of human population—the number of ruminants in the world has not increased in lockstep with the human population increase.  This is due to two factors.

First, genetic and nutrition improvements have greatly increased the amount of meat yielded from each domestic animal.  US cattlemen and women produce 18% of the world’s beef with only 6% of the world’s cattle.  (Buy American Beef… oops, that’s another newsletter.)

Second, the population of wild ruminants in the world prior to industrialization was huge.  Perhaps 165 million wild ruminants ate grass in North America alone prior to Columbus.  That population has decreased while the domestic ruminant population has increased.  Some researchers say that bison numbers may have been as high as 60 million.  Perhaps over 100 million other wild ruminants typically lived in what is now the US.  Bison numbers are down to a half-million today, and that’s after intensive recovery efforts brought them back from near extinction.  Other wild ruminant numbers are increasing but are still less than half of the pre-Columbian numbers.  Bambi is the only big winner on the wild ruminant side.  Today, 25-35 million white-tail deer roam the US.  They are destroying our forest ecosystem as well as shrubs and gardens.  So, eating more venison is a climate win-win.  That dinner choice opens up some space for the endangered deer species.

About 92 million cows, 5.2 million sheep, and 2.5 million goats lived in the US in 2022.   That’s about 100 million domestic ruminants.  I have not yet found ruminant population growth for the entire world, but I am starting to get the idea that the much bigger population change between then and now is the human population, not the ruminant population.  In 1800, humans numbered about 1 billion.  Today, we are closing in on 8 billion.  Methane in our atmosphere has doubled.  Maybe we need to take a harder look at our own GHG emissions.

We can start with reducing food waste.  A typical US household of four spends $1500 per year on food that ends up in the trash.  To quote the USDA/EPA draft National Strategy for Reducing Food Waste and Loss and Recycling Organics, “producing, grading, packing, processing, distributing, retailing, preparing and disposing of the amount of food that is currently wasted annually in the United States contributes greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions equivalent to those of 60 coal-fired power plants and requires enough water and energy to supply more than 50 million homes each year.” This draft strategy was released December 5^th, 2023, for public comment, with over 10,000 comments received as of today.  Both the strategy and comments are an interesting read (links below).  Here’s one of my favorite comments, submitted by private citizen Marty Green:

Tons of food waste could be prevented by educating the public that food does not need to be thrown away on the date stamped on the carton. My children and grandchildren have been brainwashed to believe they will suffer dire consequences if they eat anything with an "expired" date. To them, it does not matter if the stamp says "use by," "best by," "sell by," or "expires." An entire generation has been misled into throwing out heaps of food that is perfectly good just because there is a date stamp on the package. Maybes my kids will come to dinner again without being suspicious that I've prepared "expired" food.”

Another favorite comment comes from the National Potato Council, whose CEO explains that the majority of food thrown away by children in school cafeterias is vegetables other than potatoes, so having potatoes as one of the vegetable-and-fruit choices at every school meal will reduce school food waste and might even encourage children to eat more vegetables. I was surprised to learn that current school lunch regulations limit the number of meals per week at which potatoes can be served.

Sadly, nearly a quarter of the beef we buy in the US is never eaten!  One of every four cows slaughtered dies for naught. Beyond that tragedy, when we throw away food, we have gotten nothing in exchange for all those enteric methane emissions. We’ve gotten nothing for all the water, labor, fertilizer, fuel, and other resources used to grow that food and get it to you.  This waste is compounded by the fact that most food waste winds up in a landfill.  Discarded food makes up a quarter of what we put in our landfills.  There, that food waste produces methane and other greenhouse gases while it decomposes. Landfill methane capture systems are not so great.  About 60% of the methane produced by food rotting in landfills escapes.  Yes, there’s a lot of waste in our food processing and storage and distribution system that you don’t see, and that’s another newsletter.  But we are wasting a lot right in our homes and we can each do a lot about that.  It’s not just about eating all our leftovers. If you have a yard, try composting what you remove in food preparation (peels, stems, eggshells, etc). If you don’t have a yard, see if you can join a composting co-op.

Bottom line:  your steak is not helping the environment, and your cardiologist would like you to cut back on beef for heart-health reasons.  But your steak may have a smaller environmental footprint than the food you waste.  If you really want to help the planet, how about resolving to reduce your personal food waste?

The animal that does not end up buried in the landfill will thank you. And so will your children and Santa and Rudolf.

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References

How food and agriculture contribute to climate change | Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/factbox-how-food-agriculture-contribute-climate-change-2023-12-02/t

Greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture - Wikipedia

US Cattle Industry Efficiencies versus Global Cattle Industry: https://www.beefresearch.org/programs/beef-sustainability/sustainability-quick-stats/us-vs-global-in-efficiency-and-production

Cows and Climate Change | UC Davis:

https://www.ucdavis.edu/food/news/making-cattle-more-sustainable

Using Global Emission Statistics is Distracting Us From Climate Change Solutions | CLEAR Center (ucdavis.edu)

Methane isn’t just cow farts; it’s also cow burps (and other weird facts you didn’t know about this potent greenhouse gas) | (ted.com)\

Rennet Facts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennet

Genetically-Engineered Rennet Approval:  "FDA Approves 1st Genetically Engineered Product for Food". Los Angeles Times. 24 March 1990. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-03-24-mn-681-story.html

Burping and flatulence: methane gas emissions and cows (rte.ie)

Theological Meaning of Kosher Restrictions: https://www.chabad.org/kabbalah/article_cdo/aid/2670214/jewish/Kosher-Animals-and-Humans.htm

Danish farmers required to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 | Reuters https://www.reuters.com/business/sustainable-business/danish-farmers-required-halve-greenhouse-gas-emissions-by-2030-2021-10-05/

Taxing farming vital for Denmark’s climate target | Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/taxing-farming-vital-denmarks-climate-target-govt-adviser-2023-02-20/

Euronews -- German farmers’ protest over diesel tax break cuts: https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/12/18/german-farmers-protest-over-diesel-tax-break-cuts-brings-traffic-to-a-standstill-in-berlin

Energy efficiency of meat animals: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-efficiency-of-meat-and-dairy-production

Environmental Impacts of Food – Consumer Ecology: https://consumerecology.com/footprints/

Turkey Carbon Footprint & Environmental Impact - Consumer Ecology: https://consumerecology.com/turkey-carbon-footprint-environmental-impact/

Wild mammals have declined by 85% since the rise of humans, but there is a possible future where they flourish - Our World in Data: https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammal-decline

What is the White-Tailed Deer Population by State? - A-Z Animals (a-z-animals.com)

Federal Register :: Draft National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste and Recycling Organics: Request for Public Comment

Docket EPA-HQ-OLEM-2022-0415-0001 Regulations.gov

Comments on National Strategy for Reducing Food Loss and Waste: https://www.regulations.gov/document/EPA-HQ-OLEM-2022-0415-0001/comment

Video of cow chewing cud: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?mid=7BD31F298F28FD12CE0E7BD31F298F28FD12CE0E&ajaxhist=0

Educational videos about cow digestion: https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?mid=B63BCA7F92248398304EB63BCA7F92248398304E&ajaxhist=0

A trip through the digestive system of a cow – Really! (The “inside story”) https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?mid=7BD31F298F28FD12CE0E7BD31F298F28FD12CE0E&ajaxhist=0

These Spring 2021 reflections seem more appropriate than ever to share in 2024 on Dr. King’s birthday.

Mom was a semi-single mother for our first three years on Excalibur Farms, as Dad had not yet retired from the military when we moved there in 1965.  His last station was the Pentagon.  He spent weekends and Wednesday night on the farm with us, but it was Mom holding down the fort — Fort Excalibur, that is — for the rest of the week.  Today that “commute” is almost exactly 100 miles, and you can do it in about two hours on divided highways when traffic is light. In 1965, the roads were not nearly as good or straight.  Most of Dad’s commute was on two-lane roads with narrow or non-existent shoulders.  It must have been an ordeal in those days and in that Volkswagen Bug, especially at night after a weekend of farm work.  Nowadays, my military colleagues on an assignment apart from family call this “geo-batching.”  I wonder if that term was in use when my Dad had a tiny apartment near the Pentagon.

Mom soon found a helper to tame this chaos:  Mrs. Wizey Carpenter.  She would pick up Wizey at her house a couple of days a week. Wizey and her husband Charlie lived near the Hood Mercantile store and gas station in Wolftown, on an unpaved dead-end road.  That road also led to a small Baptist church called Rock Hall Baptist.  It was probably less than a mile from our farm as the crow flies. That road had no sign then, but people called it Rock Hall Lane. It has a street sign now, courtesy of the 911 system that replaced “Rural Route” system sometime around 1990.  I suppose that the lane was named for the church.  Looking back, I wonder if the lack of pavement or signage had anything to do with who lived on that road and who went to that little church.  The Rapidan Baptist Church where some county officials go to church -- less than a half-mile away -- has always had pavement, even in the parking lot.

Sometimes Charlie would come along, to help out around the barn or in the fields.  But Wizey is the one I remember most.  She was a buxom, Black woman going grey who didn’t take much nonsense, instructing us in ways to be helpful as well as considerate.  One admonishment that I remember was “if you clean that spill up right as you make it, the kitchen’ll stay clean until I get back to help your Mommy.”  We still called my mother “Mommy” then.  Mom appreciated Wizey’s approach with us.  They had only one disagreement: the way Wizey carried laundry baskets. Wizey would pack two baskets with laundry, then hoist one on each hip to make the trek from the bedrooms to the spring porch on the opposite end of the house where the washer was.  This was fine with the wicker baskets, but the new-fangled plastic “snag-free” baskets that Mom prized did not hold up well with this step-saving system.  The brittle plastic soon deformed and cracked.  Plastic technology has come a long way since then.

I now know that “Wizey” was a nickname.  Country folks tend to give out nicknames early and often, frequently based on some bit of childish foolery or perhaps a lesson learned the hard way.  Black country folks are ever so much more so inclined to give nicknames — and they keep the nicknames all their lives as a badge of honor.  Kind of like fighter pilots and their “handles.”  I don’t recall Wizey’s story of her nickname, if she ever shared it with me.  As a child, I imagined she got it for her wisdom. She was always at least one step ahead of us kids.  Unfortunately, not knowing her given name has made reconnecting with her family hard.

Wizey told me once that she had been born on our farm, and lived there for many years.  I had a vague childhood image of her living in the upstairs apartment — the farmhouse had been split into two for a time before we moved there.  Or perhaps in the old Jackson homestead, which we later took to calling the Tenant House after several attempts to use it for farm help in need of housing.  When I asked, however, she waved toward the northeast and said, “The place is long gone.”  I forgot this for many years.

When I grew old enough to help Mom around the house, Wizey’s visits became less frequent.  By the time Mom went back to work as the sole physical therapist in the four-county area (Madison, Culpeper, Rappahannock, and Orange), I was ten and back-filling Mom on just about everything around the house and many barn chores.  There were days when I did wish for Wizey’s help and companionship, but Mom said she was completely retired and deserved it.

The last I heard about Wizey was when I was in college.  Mom called to tell me that she was gone.  Charlie had called a few evenings earlier because Wizey was really sick, and asked her to come help.  “Charlie was beside himself,” Mom related, “so I went right then.  I knew it was really bad when I walked into the house -- I could smell the infection at the front door.”  Wizey had a prolapsed uterus.  This is something that we usually associate with difficult childbirth, but it can happen much later, especially when a woman has had difficult childbirths.  “I don’t know how long she had been suffering,” Mom told me, “But as soon as I saw the prolapse, I called an ambulance to get her to the hospital and called an OB/GYN surgeon.  But it was too late — sepsis.  She died yesterday.”

Mom was pretty upset about it, but she did not elaborate beyond the almost-clinical description. I picked up on an undercurrent of anger even on the phone. Was she mad at Wizey for not calling a doctor right away?  Or at Charlie for waiting until Wizey was so sick?  But Mom had “gone clinical” on it and I knew that she would not welcome questions.  Mom’s own mother had died of ovarian cancer, and I had to piece together that story from crumbs, as Mom had herded me to my first OB/GYN visit as a teenager. She held my hand through the painful exam that the health-class film (narrated by a male doctor, of course) said was painless.  Mom thought her stubborn mother had died far too young because she refused to see a doctor about her symptoms.  “I’m not going to turn my tail up like that to any man except my husband,” she said when my mother (by then a young medical professional in the military) urged her to go to a doctor.  I remember my mother going rounds with our veterinarian’s wife, who died of breast cancer rather than undergo a radical mastectomy, the only breast cancer treatment option offered there in the 1970s.  My mother was on the front lines of convincing many rural women to seek medical treatment, in a time when modesty kept women from talking about “female problems” and women’s OB/GYN health care mostly consisted of helping a woman through childbirth and her final days.  I remember my mother’s words when I told her about my struggle in the 1980s to get insurance coverage for preventative measures like pap smears. My OB/GYN doctor had to lie on the forms that I had some “symptoms,” because insurance companies did not cover women’s preventative care, only illnesses. “A man can always get another wife,” Mom said, her words tinged with bitterness. “Nobody has put a dollar sign on a woman’s contribution to society, so preventing her from dying is too expensive.”  That turned out to be the key to getting preventative care for women.  Once we were in the workforce, we could speak to the value of a woman’s life in terms that employers – some of whom were large corporations and health insurance purchasers – could understand and they joined the fight.  We made good progress -- for women who had jobs with health insurance, that is.  Jobs requiring formal education.  Like mine, my ticket to wider world, the sky and space.

It was only much later that I realized Wizey may have had reasons other than feminine modesty to not call a doctor.  Perhaps Charlie chose to call Mom for help instead of a doctor because even in the late 1970s, he feared the response of the medical establishment would be nothing.  A lifetime of hard work on the margins of society would not have earned an elderly Black couple the same care that I would have gotten.  Perhaps Charlie had already tried calling a doctor and was told his concern was unfounded. Perhaps Mom was his last call rather than his first.  Charlie and Wizey would not have been able to pay much for the treatment and may have feared being turned away for that reason.  They may not have known about new laws that required the state university hospital to treat everyone in a life-threatening case, without regard to ability to pay.

Madison, after all, was slow to catch up with civil rights legislation. My parents led in integrating the county schools; yet, it has taken me many years to understand that Wizey’s and Charlie’s decision process would have been profoundly different from that of mine or of our white friends.  I find myself in the position now and again of coaxing my friends into going to the doctor, or being their intermediary, helping them interpret medical reports or doctor recommendations or understand the side effects of prescription drugs.  There’s an extra reluctance among my older Black friends to confront the medical establishment. Or even ask questions of a doctor.  I think a bit of my mother’s mantle has descended on me, a much less-worthy banner-carrier when it comes to health care.  I did learn to question authority, something critical to being a health advocate.  I have been slow to understand how hard that is for many people, especially those born and raised with no examples.  It’s hard for me to understand what my life would have been like without two parents who knew that “no” was a starting place for negotiations rather than the end of the conversation.  My Black friends had a lifetime where the “no” came earlier and oftener.  Wizey and Charlie grew up in a world where doctors only treated white people.

I am thinking of Wizey now, after a hike up the mountain road on this early spring day.  Part way up the mountain road on our farm, a tiny cabin once stood.  All that remains now are the foundation stones, large grey cornerstones and smaller intermediate stones, jumbled by the collision with the logging equipment that skidded through there, our rediscovery of them in the 1980s.  Most of the year, you have to be looking hard to spot them. The stones are not that different in color or even shape from the ones that the mountain disgorges periodically along the nearby creek. The distinguishing feature is the arrangement, no longer quite sketching out a rectangle about the size of the living room in our farmhouse.  In the spring, however, a crooked line of daffodils emerges before there are leaves on most of the trees. Those flowers mark what was once a doorstep and a path down to the spring that provided water to the cabin’s occupants: little yellow ghosts of a dark past, where someone made a family home out of a single-room cabin.

I mentioned the cabin remains to my brother Jeff one day, and his response was: “Oh, you mean Wizey’s cabin.” The connection stunned me. I don’t know how I missed that connection all these years. The ruins are northeast of the farmhouse, in the direction Wizey pointed. Apparently, Wizey’s family were sharecroppers or laborers on this farm after the Civil War.

A look at the topographical maps and the Department of Agriculture’s soil surveys (1899-1935) reveals another dark truth: while there’s a nice spring and creek in that hollow, and a patch of fairly level ground that was cleared in those days, the soil quality is poor.  It’s not the worst on our farm, but it’s Class IV.  There are seven classification levels.  Class I is the most fertile and Class VII is the rocky mountainside.  Class IV soil has a commodity crop index of 0.3 to 0.5.  Definitely not the best soil around either – the better land on this farm tops out at in Class II with a commodity crop index of 0.69.  Class I soil has commodity crop indices up to 1.0 in theory, but the best farmland in the Midwest US has commodity crop indices well above 1.0.  The lay of the land limits the sun around Wizey’s cabin, too.  It would have been hard work to feed a family there.

What would I have accomplished if that cabin had been my beginning?  The tidy little cottage where I visited Wizey and Charlie in the 1960s and 1970s had an indoor bathroom and a large garden.  That cottage was high on the hog compared to that tiny one-room cabin on our farm with no plumbing or electricity or heat other than a fireplace.  I have never lived in a home without a flush toilet and hot water.  Growing up, I visited school friends without indoor plumbing.  I also had some primitive accommodations on humanitarian aid missions as an adult.  That gives me a clue, but only a clue.

A Black girl in Wizey’s day might aspire to being a teacher in a segregated school or a midwife. A very, very few might become a nurse or a nurse’s aide in a hospital serving a Black community, but the education for that would mean leaving home and kin for a city.  More likely was work as domestic help, or in a school cafeteria making lunches for white children.  Or cleaning their school.  To think I chafed at many opportunities to become a teacher, nurse, or secretary.

For a Black man coming of age in Madison County then, the options were perhaps more limited: farm laborer, sharecropper, handyman, groom at a racing stable.  A few became carpenters and worked in a local furniture factory and built homes in the black communities.  A very few saved enough to buy a small farm.  A few became preachers, but not full time.  Saving souls was something they did in addition to hard work.

Our friend Luther Hill was a farmhand and sharecropper.  But my parents never called him that.  He was always introduced as a Farmer -- and our friend.  He farmed much of the Eddins’ farm in the next county.  I suppose that was how he and my Dad met — the large Eddins family was involved in many businesses in the area and owned the local Ford dealership.  One branch of Eddins hatched a plan to build a golf course and “country club” on part of their farm.  They pulled my parents into those discussions as Mom and Dad had been avid golfers during their military years.  Or perhaps they met when Dad and Mom were managing a farm near the Eddins farm for an Army friend who was doing his own version of “geo-batching.”

Luther and Dad helped each other on various farm projects.  Dad needed a farming mentor and Luther’s equipment was old.  Luther would help us with the heifers one day.  Dad would help Luther the next day with our new tractor.  They’d bale his hay and ours faster than he could do his own with his tractor.  Or Dad would plow some ground for Luther with our six-bottom plow – Luther’s plow only had two -- while Luther changed out disks on our harrow.  After the hay was done or the earth was turned, they’d spend some time hanging on the fence row just chatting.

One day, the Eddins’ invited them in for lunch. Dad was seated and being served in the dining room when he realized that Luther was not in the dining room and there wasn’t an empty seat. He was shocked to learn that Luther was being served lunch in the kitchen, alone.  I recall him describing this that evening at our dinner table, in disbelief.

Dad never accepted another lunch invitation from that family.  When Thanksgiving came, Luther had dinner with us — in the dining room.  It was not the first time our dining table had been surrounded by people of different skin colors or ethnicities or faiths.  Mom and Dad had friends from all over the world, and Dad had frequently brought colleagues to the farm for weekends.  I was only beginning to understand that my family’s attitudes were different from many others in our neighborhood.  When I asked, Mom told me that she’d seen a lot of men bleeding for their country in the war, and their blood was red no matter what color their skin was.  She did some bleeding of her own during the Battle of the Bulge, injured while helping to evacuate the wounded of the 761^st Tank Battalion.  Those were the Black Panthers, the most decorated tank battalion in the war.  They also had the highest casualty rate, because they were always in the hottest part of the action.

Racial attitudes drove my parents’ decision to buy a farm several years before Dad retired from the Air Force. My parents had purchased a lot in a Maryland subdivision, and designed a home for this last military assignment.  I remember playing in the dirt on that lot, plucking the twine between the stakes marking our future home’s foundation, vaguely aware that my parents were arguing with someone.  My father mentored a brilliant young Black colleague, an engineer who had taken a transfer from Ohio to Maryland to work with my father at Headquarters.  Dad suggested that he consider building a home for his young family in this new subdivision, where they would be neighbors. Well, the developer refused to sell a lot to Dad’s colleague on that same block because he was Black.  When my parents found out about that refusal, they cancelled their own lot purchase and building contract.  That was probably the argument I recall. Mom and Dad abruptly pivoted from building yet another suburban middle-class home to buying a farm over a hundred miles from that development.

Maybe I shouldn’t say “abruptly.”  Mom and Dad admired the “farm kids” they knew: resilient, uncomplaining, able to improvise a solution with whatever they had.  Their war experience had taught them that the farm kids were most likely to get their units out of a jam when the shooting started. I can imagine them looking at each other over the cancelled building contract and saying, “What now?” “We’ve been joking for years that we wanted to raise ‘farm kids.’ Maybe we should start now….?” “We aren’t getting any younger!” “Could we really just buy a farm? Would we really miss these suburbs?”  And that’s the short version of how we ended up on a farm in Madison. It was a gigantic leap, especially for my Dad, who had never lived in the country before, let alone farmed. For Mom, it was a shorter leap, as she had been raised in the country by a sawmill operator.

But Dad and Mom may have failed to see that they had jumped from one kind of fire into another.   When we moved to Madison in 1965, there was a community pool at the American Legion Hall.  At least we thought it was the community pool.  Mom took us there for swimming lessons during our first couple of summers.  I did not notice then that our Black neighbors were not taking swimming lessons with us.  I did not notice their absence in school, either.  It was only around the farm and co-op that I met our Black neighbors.  I guess I did not realize how many Black kids there were in Madison County until after our third summer in Madison, when the schools were finally desegregated – fourteen years after the US Supreme Court declared public school segregation unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.  The evening news in 1968 was full of civil strife in cities and stories of “busing” white kids into predominately black neighborhoods and vice versa to integrate the schools.  This was hard for me to understand, because in Madison what had to be done was to STOP busing Black kids past all-white schools to their “separate but equal Negro” schools.  We did not use the term “Black” then — it was “Colored” or “Negro.”  In my family, other terms got your mouth washed out with soap, and you didn’t look for encores on that experience.

Until 1968, Madison had a Negro School for lower grades, but the older Black kids were bused to a high school that served several counties.  It was actually a vocational training school, not a truly academic high school.  I wonder if these students got the same high school diploma that the white kids got.  Years later, in Texas, a Hispanic naval officer told me that he got a trade school certificate for drafting when he graduated.  He was told it was a high school diploma.  When the engineers at the design firm where he worked as a draftsman offered to sponsor him at University of Texas for an engineering degree, the university refused to admit him.  He was shocked to discover that he did not actually have a high school diploma.  In San Antonio, Texas, as in Madison, the students who were not white were only given choice of which vocational program, not a choice between an academic college-prep course and a vocational course.  My Texas friend was able to take the GED and get into University of Texas with the help of his co-workers.  From there, he went on to US Navy flight school and a long career at NASA.  In Madison County, my Black friends did not find many such mentors.

The busing in Madison finally stopped in September 1968. The Negro school was converted into the elementary school for the entire county. The white elementary and middle school became the integrated middle school. The high school integrated as it was. The Black multi-county vocational school—George Washington Carver High School--became the vocational school for everyone. It had some good programs, too, such as drafting, which my older brother enjoyed.  So there was a remnant of busing: if you wanted to take those vocational classes (which also included auto repair, welding, air conditioning repair, and cosmetology), you took a bus from your home high school to George Washington Carver Vocational School for half-day sessions.

The new elementary school hosted all of the first and second grades, but only half of the third grade.  I was “tracked” into the lower half of the third grade.  I didn’t know what “tracking” was.  Years later, when the school was required to open up its records to students, I found that my early IQ test scores were low, and that was the “official” reason for tracking me into the lower half, despite the fact that my reading grade level was far beyond third grade.  Perhaps my dyslexia (undiagnosed then) gave me trouble on the IQ test.  I actually had no idea that anyone was testing my IQ then.  So the low track could have been explained by that IQ test score – or not.  Looking back, it seems that was likely just rationale to fill those third grade classes at the formerly Black school with the few white students whose parents would not complain. I wasn’t complaining about anything but the cold lunches, mostly baloney and Wonder Bread sandwiches. I hated baloney, no matter what it was between, but Wonder Bread was my idea of truly disgusting.  At home, I made the bread from scratch.

I was very happy about the fact that there were students new to me, students who did not know how un-cool I was, having been born outside the county.  I made new friends.  In the meantime, Mom investigated my complaints about the school lunches.  Mom discovered that not only did the school lack a fully-equipped kitchen, but also had no steam table to keep cooked food hot while serving the entire school lunch.  She also discovered that the school had no Parent-Teacher Association (PTA), the way that parents and teachers and school administrators collaborated back then.  My parents and a few others caught in this lurch organized the first meeting of the PTA at the “new” school.  Much later, someone at that meeting related to me the awkward moments of that first PTA meeting.  All the attendees were white parents.  They soon figured out that whoever got elected president would have to meet regularly with the school’s Black principal, Mr. Brody. The school district had inherited Mr. Brody along with the school.  Most of the parents were scared of going to a Black man and telling him that they wanted to make changes in ‘his’ school.  Finally, Dad said he didn’t understand the concerns – it wasn’t like Mr. Brody spoke a foreign language or anything like that.  My Dad was immediately elected PTA president, without even a formal nomination.  And Mom was elected both secretary and treasurer the same way.

The school did not have equipment to serve hot lunches because the school had been limping along underfunded for decades.  The current year’s budget was getting sucked up fixing deferred maintenance – plumbing, roof leaks – and the addition of two temporary classrooms for the third graders.  Mr. Brody’s response to my parents’ offer of help for the kitchen was greeted with “Praise the Lord.”  Mom didn’t lose a minute.  The very next month, my mother organized the first elementary school Halloween fund-raiser in the high school gym.  Mom thought kids should make their own Halloween costumes, so most of my memories are of the costume creation.  I dressed up as a cowboy, complete with a stick horse that I had made out of a spare rake handle and a large stuffed sock and felt ears and eyes.  I did not win the costume contest.  Maybe the judges found that a cowboy with long braids falling out from under “his” hat was not credible.  One of my brothers did better (Honorable Mention) with a robot costume composed of several large boxes spray-painted silver.

Besides the costume contest, games, baked goods sales, and something Mom called a “cake walk” raised enough for the first steam table and stove. The cake walk – a new thing in Madison – consisted of paying a quarter to join a circle of people marching around to music until a blind-folded moderator picked the needle up off the phonograph record.  If you were the one standing on a particular number drawn out of a jar when the music stopped, you got a cake donated by some generous home cook.  This was really popular.

The cake walk and the school Halloween festival became an annual fixture in Madison for decades, well after that little school kitchen was equipped.  Long after that building was abandoned for a brand new primary school.  That old school is partially converted to school board and administrative offices now.  The rest seems to be storage for old desks and supplies, judging from my reconnaissance mission in 2009.  I was on the county finance committee then, auditing the school’s use of funds.  I was amazed at how small the building was, with low ceilings and small windows, considering it was built long before air conditioning.

Another thing that happened the year of school integration was the “temporary” closure of the pool at the American Legion.  Suddenly, the pool needed “major repairs” and just as suddenly, there was no money to pay for them.  That pool still sits empty, a temporary closure stretching more than fifty years.  That same year, the Eddins – yes, those Eddins – broke ground on a development called “Country Club Estates” on one of their farms in the next county, including a pool, tennis courts, and a golf course.  My parents had been avid golfers during their military years, so they had already signed up as charter members for the golf course and pool.  I played “caddy” with enthusiasm that year, bent on convincing anyone and everyone that I was really an eight-year-old adult.  This was before my Dad’s experience with Luther eating in the kitchen. The golf outings were few before ending altogether, with my parents’ excuses ranging from “too busy with the farm” and “it’s not the same as it was in our military days.”  Probably both true.  I recently found their golf clubs in the attic – in dry-rotted leather golf bags.  An internet search revealed they were not anything special for collectors, so I left them at the “Share Shed” at the waste transfer station.  I recall that we continued to use the Club’s pool for a few years; Jeff and I participated in local swim meets as teens.  Jeff became good enough for military academy varsity swim team, but I brought up the rear on most events.  I needed a horse to get anywhere faster than anyone else, in or out of the water.

Somehow, I got magically “re-tracked” in the fourth grade into the “smart kids’ class” for middle school, without my new Black friends.  In that class, I found that my social connections and my family’s history of supporting the integration of the schools made it very difficult to make friends with most of the “smart kids.”  I won’t repeat some of the names I was called.  One of my best friends was a mixed-race girl, so you can guess.  I was more clueless and socially awkward than idealistic then. I honestly did not understand why these kids were acting that way.  It didn’t help that I also would defend anyone getting picked on, regardless of race.  I had nothing to lose by coming to the aid of an outcast student, being an official “foreigner” (pronounced “furrenner”) and outcast myself.  Fortunately, the bullies themselves eventually forgot why they picked on us.  Perhaps they forgot that they ever had picked on us.  A few Black students somehow eventually made it into the “academic” group, and several became athletic stars for the school.  My mixed-race friend was elected home-coming queen as a senior, eight years later.  She became an airline flight attendant, probably a pioneer on her airline.  Flight attendant was not on her personal career radar in 1968, when we met.  She was in the air on 9/11, not far from the Pentagon.  I can visualize her remaining calm and comforting her passengers as her flight was diverted to the nearest airports, all the while wondering about her colleagues on the doomed flights.  I know she had a lot of practice calming upset people in school.

Madison did not completely close public schools to avoid desegregation and route the funding to private schools formed for white kids, like some other Virginia counties did.  The trap that most of my Black neighbors were caught in – underfunded or unfunded education leading to low test scores which in turn was used to track them into marginal classes and vocation programs – only recently became clear to me as I helped my mothers’ caretakers to navigate the health care system, figure out doctors’ instructions, file taxes, get loans, and balance checkbooks.  These are capable, kind, dedicated women with whom I trusted my mother’s life.  They are nearly the same age as I am, the product of the public school system as I was.  Yet, they are functionally illiterate.  I got to college poorly prepared for it by public schools, but I got there, and with enough education to figure out what I needed to do to survive there. The gap between me or the local doctor and these friends is now so great that neither the doctor nor I understood that they might not be able to read the label on a loaf of bread or a can of beans and add up the grams of sodium or sugar.  It took me an embarrassingly large number of chats before I finally “got” this and found an effective way to explain food nutrition labels.

Teaching these employees to navigate the modern financial and tax systems continues to elude me.  Many of my Black neighbors are unbanked, leaving them at a huge disadvantage in running a business and even getting a car loan.  I have had to take copies of checks paid to my employees to one or another used car dealer that I would never dream of getting a car loan from, to prove that they were employed and getting paid.  It seemed like such a simple thing to me.  Take the cash you just earned and go to the bank and open a checking account.  Use checks to pay for things until you have a credit score.  Use a credit card with a low limit to make a few small purchases.  Then you can get a lower-interest bank loan for a car purchased at a better price from a reputable seller.

But one day as I passed the Court House and the building that used to be the bank, I remembered my own first bank experience.  My father took me to the “real” bank with my little toy coin bank, maybe when I was eight or so. I was quite proud of my little pot-metal coin bank, despite the fact that it was one of my older brother’s cast-offs.  It featured a tiny spring-loaded gun in the hand of a cast metal cowboy.  You put your coins in the bank by cocking the spring on the little gun, placing the coin on the barrel, and hitting the spring release.  If you did this right, the coin would be “shot” into the slot over the “bank” door and raise the hands of another little metal cowboy at the bank’s entrance.  The little bank was nearly full, so Dad took me to the Second National Bank of Madison.  I wondered why it was called the Second National, as it was the only bank in Madison then. There, Dad introduced me to a balding older man wearing a grey suit and black tie.  I don’t remember his name, but I remember how he was dressed, because few people in Madison wore ties then.  He patiently and gravely explained passbook savings accounts to me.  He showed me the big vault to reassure me that the real bank would keep my money safe and even pay me something called “interest.”  I shook the coins out of my cowboy bank into a tray on the banker’s desk.  I left with a tiny blue book recording that I had deposited nearly twenty dollars, excited about “interest.”  I kept that account for at least two decades, opening my first checking account there as a teenager, once more feeling welcomed.

But, duh. I finally realized that if my friend Mary and her father had entered that bank lobby in 1969, they would have been asked to leave. Not that her father would have even tried to enter that building.  When he was a young man, he’d have been threatened with physical harm at the polls and perhaps the bank also.  At the least, a bank employee would have called the sheriff who might have arrested him and charged him with attempted robbery.  That’s all before he even got to the part that Virginia law allowed banks to confiscate the balances in savings accounts if they had not had a deposit made in a certain number of months.  Lots of poor depositors lost savings with that law.  No wonder her father did not have a bank account.  And probably her grandfather and great-grandfather.  Or mother.  No wonder neither of her parents took Mary to the “real” bank with her toy bank to open a passbook savings account when she was nine years old.  The lesson beaten into her family was “don’t trust those bankers.”  Mary and I have lived on two different planets when it comes to financial management.

Now the Second National Bank is long gone, absorbed into a truly national bank that then closed the local branch.  The building houses the county’s social services office now.  Another couple of banks built branches at the north end of town and they have changed hands and names too many times to count.  I thought that the Black gentleman – also wearing a grey suit and black tie -- who now handles new accounts at one of those would be able to make Mary comfortable, but I can’t get her to go see him.

A walk through the Town of Madison on the main street takes you through a sort of “square” that’s not quite a square, formed by that old bank building, the Court House, and the War Memorial Building, and the fire station-turned sheriff’s office and Tanner’s Feed and Antiques.  When I was growing up, the War Memorial Building had an auditorium on the top floor where most of the 4-H and farm meetings occurred, as the building also contained the Virginia Cooperative Service “county agents” who were the 4-H club supervisors.  After meetings adjourned, we would call parents on the sheriff’s phone (the sheriff’s office was also in that building).  We would play outside around the Monument to Madison County Confederate Dead.  The inscription, often felt by young hands looking for a way to climb the monument, reads: “Plant the fair column over the vacant grave. A hero's honor let a hero have.”  As a child steeped in fourth-grade Virginia History class -- which emphasized states’ rights, “culture,” and then brutal destruction of crops by Sherman’s Army causing starvation as the reason these men died fighting the US Army -- I imagined that grieving families had erected the monument immediately after the “War Between the States.”  My parents had made sure I knew that this vague word “culture” happened to include slavery.  Still, slavery did not seem to be a prominent part of Madison’s history.  I know of only two farms in the county that had slave quarters.  Stories of starvation in the latter days of that war were part of local New Year’s celebrations, told as the black-eyed peas were passed around. General Grant’s and General Sherman’s armies took all the crops that northerners thought were fit for human consumption.  The US Army left the “cow peas” because those were not considered fit for human consumption.  They also took the cows and pigs and horses and mules.  Many southerners got through the winter of 1864-65 by eating cow peas, now called black-eyed peas, which were available because the livestock that would have eaten them was gone.  I suppose that with the war ending in 1865, eating black-eyed peas on New Year’s Day 1865 could become a symbol of good luck.

In 2020, I participated in a quiet, orderly “Black Lives Matter” march from the Madison County Library to the War Memorial Building, around this monument and back.  I had begun settling my own memories into context, but I realized that day that I did not know the real history of this monument.  A quick search after the march revealed that the United Confederate Veterans (UCV) erected this monument “on behalf of the Madison Confederate army veterans” in 1901.  The UCV was not a local organization at all. Headquartered in New Orleans, the UCV was formed in 1889 out of a merger of several southern confederate veterans’ groups.  The United Daughters of the Confederacy was an affiliate.  The UCV wore uniforms and had officers and ranks—sounds a lot like a militia, doesn’t it?  Madison’s monument was donated to the county one year before Virginia’s poll tax was revived in the state Constitution.  Beginning in 1904, a citizen had to pay $1.50 per year to vote.  On his first registration to vote, a citizen had to pay three years in advance, a total of $4.50, about $130 in today’s dollars.  If you got behind in payments later, you had to pay back taxes to reinstate your voting rights.  This poll tax remained in place until a 1966 Supreme Court ruling invalidated it.  The Virginia legislature is only now repealing the poll tax law, fortunately not enforced for decades.

To get to the front door of the Second National Bank in 1969 to open my savings account, Dad and I walked past the Monument to Madison County’s Confederate Dead.  Leaving the bank, the first thing in our line of sight was that monument.  The other war monument on that green, a much smaller obelisk honoring Madison citizens who died in five other wars including the two World Wars, was not placed in the town square until 1991.

The foundations of wealth that my parents used to boost themselves from hard-scrabble working roots to farm ownership – bank accounts and education and a job above subsistence level – were not available to our Black neighbors.  Nor was the healthcare that got us through so many illnesses.

I pause at Wizey’s cabin on my walks up the mountain, sometimes sitting on a cornerstone to look at her daffodils on early spring days like this one, wishing that I had understood this in time to have made a difference in her life.

March 2021

Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat!

Please put a penny in the old man's hat.

If you haven't got a penny, then a ha'penny will do.

If you haven't got a ha'penny, then God bless you!

-        (Christmas Is Coming, the Goose Is Getting Fat - YouTube)

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By this time, your Thanksgiving turkey is frozen leftovers or a memory.  But Christmas is coming and by the time that fat goose is in your grocer’s freezer, it is lots of pennies and ha’pennies more expensive than the turkey right next to it.  Probably five to ten times more expensive per pound!  Unless you can afford nostalgia for Christmases Past or have a goose hunter in the family, you are likely to be cooking another turkey for Christmas.  Even taking out the loss lead discount some grocers use to get you in the door to buy the marked-up trimmings, turkey is a bargain in any form except sliced at the deli counter.

Figuring out which turkey to buy is still a challenge.  Now that you know the “independent family farmer” branding from large integrators is a marketing myth, you’ve dropped that discriminator off your list.  So what other discriminators should you consider?

As I like to support US farmers, I always look for US agriculture products.  All the turkey labels I have examined claimed they are a “Product of USA.”  That sounds good.  US laws apply for food safety, worker protection, and animal care? There’s been a battle raging over the past 30-some years between farmers and processors over “country of origin labeling,” which we call COOL.  This saga winds around the world as well as through the World Trade Organization and US courts and your grocery store.  Farmers have had wins and losses on this.  That means consumers have had wins and losses on this.  Meat packers and processors opposing COOL have argued for years that consumers don’t care about meat origin and that only price matters to you. Well, in November 2022, the USDA published a rigorous survey on consumer consideration of that label for beef and pork purchases.  Nearly half of you said that you looked for that “Product of USA” (PUSA) label all or most of the time.  You are willing to pay 24-43% more for meat carrying that label.  That same USDA survey also checked consumer understanding of that PUSA label.  Turns out that most of you assume it means that the animal was born and raised and slaughtered and processed in the USA, not merely packaged here.  Logical conclusion. Unfortunately, the USDA is currently allowing the use of “Product of USA” labels on any food product where the last processing step took place in the USA. The PUSA label does not guarantee that the critter was born and raised in the USA as well as completely processed here.  Oops.  

As more consumers have learned that “Product of USA” may mean that only the final processing occurred in the USA, they have joined farmers and ranchers in lawsuits.  Unfortunately, the meat processors have gotten these lawsuits dismissed as recently as 2022.  But in March of this year, the USDA proposed a new rule: FSIS-2022-0015.  This proposed new rule will restrict the PUSA label to meat, poultry, and eggs only when the product is derived from animals born, raised, slaughtered, and processed in the US.  Nearly 3,400 comments were posted during the comment period that ended in June of this year.   If you posted, thanks!  My sampling of comments suggests that nearly all support the proposed rule, with the vast majority coming from farmers and consumers.  A few comments from organizations (not individuals) claim that the rule will raise prices in the grocery store or reduce the prices that US farmers receive for their animals, with one of these noting “that the processors never give up a dime.”  They have a point.  Perhaps that commenter knows this because his organization represents processors.  But I have more faith in you consumers than that.

The final rule version is probably months away, given the amount of money at stake.  Until then, I believe the PUSA label is more meaningful when you are buying poultry than when you are buying beef or pork. The US is the world’s largest exporter of turkey products and the world’s second largest exporter of chicken.  In 2021, poultry ranked 67^th on the list of all US exports, not just food, making it a huge factor in our US trade balance.  There is some poultry being imported into the USA, but the export-to-import ratio is about 14 to 1.  The chances of that bird labeled PUSA having been hatched and raised and slaughtered in the US are very good.  In contrast, our country imports more beef than we export.  Until this rule defining PUSA is finalized, you might want to put PUSA turkey burgers on your grill instead of PUSA beef burgers.  As I mentioned last newsletter, I tend to take a dim view of regulating our way out of a mess – but truth in labeling is one that I have always supported without reservations!

While we are looking at USDA-approved labels like PUSA, what exactly does the USDA-inspection label mean?  You will find some variation of this on all meat and poultry sold retail in US grocery stores, and now my PUSA revelations have given you cause for suspicion.  The package in my refrigerator says “Inspected for wholesomeness by U.S. Department of Agriculture” in a white circle.  What is “wholesomeness” anyway?  The “Ask USDA” website says:  “Wholesome means ‘promoting the health of the body.’  There is no official United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) definition of the word for use in labeling a product.  However, all USDA-inspected products would be considered ‘wholesome.’”  I think that Mr. Carter, my 10^th-grade English teacher who did the most to pound grammar into my head, would call this a “circular definition.”  He would not mean that as a compliment, either.  Oxford’s definition – “conducive to or suggestive of good health and physical well-being” – is only a little better.

This “wholesome” label dates from the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act, which made adulterating or mislabeling meat sold a crime.  That law also required that animals be alive and healthy before slaughter.  It mandated sanitary conditions for slaughter and meat processing.  Federal inspection of the animals prior to slaughter and of the process became a requirement for interstate sale of meat under this act.  This law was passed in response to public concern about meat safety raised by Upton Sinclair’s 1905 novel about the Chicago meat-packing industry, The Jungle.  Sinclair wrote the book to draw attention to the miserable conditions for meatpacking plant workers, but the American public reacted to most to its depictions of unsanitary processes and food safety threats.  Because President Teddy Roosevelt suspected that Sinclair was a communist trying to undermine America, he sent his own advisers to investigate meatpacking plants.  That investigation confirmed the food safety allegations of the book and led to Congress passing the Meat Inspection Act. President Roosevelt signed the Act in 1906.  Thus, the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) was born.  Now USDA inspectors are in all meat processing plants with raw meat sales across state lines.  Their work includes running random tests on carcasses and meat looking for bacteria, antibiotic residues, and banned substances.  The USDA also ensures that states have their own intra-state meat inspection program.  The USDA service replaces state inspection programs if the state does not have its own inspection system.  USDA inspectors also test a random sample of foreign meat imports.  Busy people!

Amazingly, poultry was not federally-inspected until the 1957 Poultry Products Inspection Act (PPIA), signed by President Eisenhower (a farmer, incidentally).  Yep, it took over fifty years after starting meat safety inspections to get the USDA involved in poultry slaughter and processing.  The PPIA is more informative on the meaning of wholesomeness:  “sound, healthful, clean, otherwise fit for human food.”  It reveals far more about wholesomeness by defining “unwholesomeness.” It calls out twelve ways that poultry can be unwholesome.  Don’t read these right before dinner.  Your hard-working USDA inspector has memorized these, so you don’t have to.  On second thought, you might want to read these so you know how government shutdowns might affect your safety.  The FSIS inspectors are expected to continue working during a shutdown, but they may be working without pay for the duration.  How long would you do their job without pay?

The main take-away from that USDA inspection label is safety.  It says nothing about quality beyond the guarantee that the product is unadulterated.  USDA meat quality certification comes via another system – voluntary -- called “grading” which is more important for meat than poultry.

Now that you know that any grocery-store turkey is likely to be grown in the US and safe to eat after you cook it to 165 degrees Fahrenheit, what other discriminators do you have?  Take a look at the sodium content, especially if you have a health reason to control your sodium intake.  All critters have some sodium in their muscle because sodium enables a muscle to contract.  Four ounces of un-brined roasted turkey contain about 80 milligrams of sodium.  Yet the integrators “pre-brine” the whole turkeys to “keep them fresh and moist.”  When the label says “flavor-enhanced” or the ingredients also include “turkey broth,” assume that’s a fancy version of pre-brining or soaking the turkey in salt water before packaging it for sale.  Salt is a very cheap preservative.  So is sugar, often added to the brine.  That same brine solution keeps the turkey from drying out if you over-cook it.  But that means somewhere between 4% and 40% of your turkey’s raw weight is salt water and possibly some sugar.  So, 4 to 40% of your purchase price may be going for something besides turkey.  A Butterball “Fresh All Natural” turkey claims to be on the low end of this range at 4%.  Their sodium content appears to be about 60% greater than what turkey left the farm with.  Sodium in Jennie-O turkeys appears to run from 2.5 times the natural baseline (for the “Sodium Smart” version) to 8 times for pre-cooked turkeys.

I have to limit my salt intake.  The year after my first cancer nightmare, I went on a quest to find a turkey for Thanksgiving that was not sloshing with saline solution.  Zero luck in the grocery stores.  I ended up getting a fresh turkey from a nearby Mennonite farmer for the family celebration.  Delicious and 100% guilt free. Not USDA inspected, either.  Cost?  About ten times the price of the same-sized Jennie-O or Butterball turkey in the nearest grocery store. This is not an everyday solution for those of us in the 99%, especially those a long ways from a turkey farm doing its own processing on site.  In fact, that was the only year I splurged like that.  If you have to limit your sodium intake, consider ground turkey.  It is not inundated with salt by the processors.  And, it’s cheaper and easier to cook.  You can put a low-sodium turkey meatloaf shaped like a roast turkey on your holiday table.  No bones, either.

If you like deli meats, be sure to read those labels carefully.  That beautiful, sliced turkey breast may be only sliced turkey and salt. Usually a lot of salt!  And it may contain more than turkey and salt.  Dairy proteins (whey and casein), for instance.  My dairy allergy has taught me that an amazing number of processed foods contain dairy.  Dairy proteins may be added to the turkey as an emulsifier, to keep fat and water from separating and to stabilize the fat.  Sometimes they are added to “improve” texture and “mouthfeel.”  I suppose they help hold the thin turkey slices together long enough for you to make your sandwich. The safest deli meats for someone with a dairy allergy are those certified as Kosher, because Kosher rules prohibit mixing meat and dairy.  You may also find additives such as cornstarch, potato starch, and carrageenan.  These are plant-based “plumping agents,” some with emulsifying tendencies.  Allergy considerations aside, these additions (often paired with innocuous-sounding “turkey broth”) translate into less turkey in your turkey.

What else could be lurking in our turkey?  And possibly not in the ingredients list?  Some labels trumpet “Turkey raised without Hormones or Steroids.”  I don’t know anyone who wants to eat “Hormones or Steroids.”  I recently heard a UK citizen transplanted to the US complain that he couldn’t eat chicken or turkey anymore.  Why? He said: “Because US poultry is loaded with hormones and steroids.”  Some European food producers claim that US animals are loaded with growth hormones and steroids to convince EU residents to spend their food dollar close to home, so I suspected that was the source of his opinion.  Turns out, this attitude does not come from rivalries across the big pond.  Or not only from those rivalries.  The National Chicken Council (a poultry industry advocacy organization) surveyed American consumers in 2015 and discovered that 77% of US consumers believe that poultry contains “added hormones or steroids.”

Would you believe that the USDA banned ALL hormones and steroids in US poultry production in the 1950s?  It’s been about 70 years since then.  Europe waited until 1981 to ban these. Yet many US consumers still believe their poultry contains added hormones and steroids.

A poultry science professor -- recently retired from a major southeastern ag school -- told me that this misconception about hormones and steroids in poultry is not entirely the consumers’ fault.  His school once decided to produce public-service messages to inform the consumer of the laws prohibiting use of these drugs in US poultry.  The campaign was abruptly canceled on the “advice” of the major integrators funding the school’s poultry research program.  The “advice” could be summarized as “you run those ads and we will cut off your research funding.”  Why?  The integrators had marketing studies showing that US consumers would pay more for poultry labeled “raised without Hormones or Steroids” because they believed the product was healthier than poultry without that on the label.  If you knew that none of the US-produced poultry in their grocery stores had ever had these drugs, the integrators would not be able to fool you into paying a little extra.  That little game may be ending.  Note the asterisk after that statement on the labels now.  The asterisks lead a conscientious consumer to a confession that it’s illegal to give hormones and steroids to poultry in the US.  The USDA no longer allows anyone to put “Raised without Hormones or Steroids” on poultry labels without also including the statement about those drugs being illegal for poultry in the US.  The labels don’t have to show those facts together, however.  Or in the same-sized or same-color print.

But how can you be sure no one cheats?  The National Chicken Council has finally realized that maybe we’d eat more poultry if we had a more favorable view of the industry. They launched a website called “Chicken Check In” which tells you why growers don’t cheat.  They even have a video of a poultry scientist explaining why.  This earnest scientist and her viewers could both benefit from getting her an acting coach.  I’ll save you some time and cringe with a summary of her message.  Growers aren’t cheating because it’s much cheaper and easier to grow poultry without hormones and steroids than with them. Imagine you are a poultry farmer with tens of thousands of young birds. The digestive tracts of the birds break down these drugs into ineffective compounds before absorption, so adding them to feed and water is throwing money away.  You have to inject these drugs into each bird individually, every day.  Would you catch every single bird every day to give them a dose of hormones or steroids? If it took you a minute to catch and dose and mark one bird, and you did not need to eat or sleep, you would still get only 1,440 birds dosed in a single day.  That leaves you over 8,000 birds to dose in just that one poultry house.  You have five of these poultry houses.  Your income is already below the poverty line at the price you get for your birds. It’s a lot cheaper to rely on improved breeding programs and good feed.

A quick informal poll of my friends buying “organic” poultry revealed that most believe buying organic-labelled poultry was the only way to avoid hormones and steroids in poultry. The organic growers don’t mind you believing that non-organic growers are loading their birds up with drugs. They want you to think you are getting healthier food when you pay a premium price for that organic label.  I’ll dive deep into organic versus non-organic soon, to help you better understand exactly what you are paying extra for when you buy organic.  In the meantime, you can scratch hormone and steroid content off your list of reasons to buy any particular US turkey, organic or not.

What’s left?  In my deep-dive at Kroger, the only labeled differences I found between the Cargill Kroger-labeled ground turkey and the Cargill Shady Grove-labeled ground turkey are: (1) the prominently-displayed claim that Kroger ground turkey contains “NO Preservatives” and (2) the prominently-displayed claim that Shady Brook turkeys are raised without “growth-promoting antibiotics.” The Kroger-labeled turkey costs about 50 cents per pound less than the Shady Brook turkey.

Kroger’s “NO Preservatives” claim is rather clever.  The package lists just two ingredients: “ground turkey, natural flavoring.” Exactly the same as on the Shady Brook turkey.  Nothing there that sounds like a preservative, right?  Given my allergies, I asked the meat department manager to find out what “natural flavoring” was in the ground turkey with their store brand labels. That “natural flavoring” is a rosemary extract.  It’s in all the ground turkey brands.  The label on pre-formed turkey burgers at a high-end organic market (MOM’s) was a little more specific.  That label said the ingredients were “Organic Turkey, Organic Rosemary Extract.”  According to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS):

“Spices (e.g., black pepper, basil, and ginger), spice extracts, essential oils, oleoresins, onion powder, garlic powder, celery powder, onion juice, and garlic juice are all ingredients that may be declared on labeling as "natural flavor," "flavor," or "flavoring." Spices, oleoresins, essential oils, and spice extracts are listed in the Food and Drug Administration regulations.” (https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fs ... try-labels)

Can you taste the rosemary in the turkey?  I can’t. The “rosemary extract” isn’t added for flavor.  In fact, the “extract” part is the clue. The rosemary oleoresin is added to ground turkey only to prevent oxidation and retain color.  It keeps the meat red (or pinkish, in the case of ground turkey breast).  Without it, oxidation starts immediately upon grinding and turns the ground meat gray-brown.  “Looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is a duck,” my father used to say. Here I suppose we should say “Looks like a turkey, gobbles like a turkey, is a turkey.”  Rosemary oleoresin preserves the meat, so it’s a preservative.

Serendipity!  A plant that we routinely use for seasoning is also a preservative.  But wait, how is rosemary oleoresin extracted?  Rosemary leaves are treated with a food-grade version of a solvent such as ethanol or acetone.  The dissolved extract is filtered, the solvent is removed, and the residue is dried and ground into a fine powder.  The solvent is organic because it belongs to the class of organic chemicals, which has nothing to do with how the organic turkey is raised.  If the use of this solvent worries you, you might want to do a search on how caffeine is removed from that decaf coffee you are drinking.

The big picture: Both Kroger and Shady Brook ground turkey contain a preservative. So does the organic turkey burger from MOM.  It’s a preservative with a somewhat more natural lineage — rosemary is a plant — than, say BHT (butylated hydroxytoluene), BHA (butylated hydroxy anisole), the preservative that rosemary oleoresin replaces.

So, one less reason to pay a premium for your ground turkey. I suppose that Kroger’s “NO Preservatives” labeling may be trying to discriminate its store brand from other store brands rather than compete with Cargill-branded products.  I checked a bunch of other store brands for you such as Publix (supplied by Prestage, which bought out Swift Turkey some years ago) and Food Lion.  They all contain rosemary oleoresin and no other preservatives.

That leaves the possibility of less antibiotic residue in one brand or another. Perhaps the Shady Brook turkey has less antibiotic residue than the Kroger turkey, but I have not been able to trace the Kroger turkey that far.  “Growth-promoting antibiotics” means that antibiotics are mixed into feed or water provided to the birds, both to prevent disease and because birds treated like this grow up to slaughter weight faster or on less feed. Use of growth-promoting antibiotics in agriculture is complicated enough to merit its very own newsletter.  The fine print on Shady Brook’s label reads that antibiotics are “used responsibly to treat disease.”  That means they will give sick birds antibiotics.  As a former livestock farmer, I endorse use of antibiotics to treat disease and limit livestock suffering; however, we eliminated their use as a feed additive to promote growth on our farm long ago.

If you are really concerned about antibiotic residue in your turkey, consider Cargill’s Honest Turkey “No Antibiotics Ever” labeled product, which they claim is completely antibiotic-free.  This does not mean that a grower is going to let a disease sweep through her flock without any action.  She can’t afford to lose an entire flock. Nor can she afford the long-term hit to her reputation sure to result from sending sick turkeys to slaughter. Here’s my take – based on how this is done on sheep and cattle farms – on what “completely antibiotic free” means.  Every time a critter gets sick with a disease that can be treated with antibiotics, you separate that critter from others and treat the sick critters with whatever antibiotic is necessary to save them.  Then, you keep those critters separated.  You now have two separate slaughter streams. The ones that have recovered with the antibiotic are heading for the “antibiotics are used responsibly to treat disease” branding. The rest are heading for “no antibiotics ever” branding.

Note that the critters who were treated with antibiotics will not be slaughtered for a USDA-mandated withdrawal period to ensure you won’t be eating any antibiotic residue. The USDA inspectors check for antibiotic residues.  It may further comfort you to know that antibiotic residues are in organ meats, not muscle.  However, keep in mind that the Honest Turkey supply chain is not participating in the USDA’s “Process Verified Program,” so Cargill is not going to send you a third-party audit proving that the bird on your table has never had any antibiotics ever.  If you are concerned that your turkey may be contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria in processing, the “no antibiotics ever” brand probably won’t address that concern.  According to ProPublica, Honest Turkey and Honeysuckle White are being processed in the same plant. It’s possible that your organic, free range, no-antibiotics-ever bird was processed there, too.  Bacterial contamination during processing deserves its own deep dive – stay tuned. In the meantime, cook your poultry carefully and completely, no matter what brand it is.

For now, I give you permission to buy the cheapest turkey in your favorite grocery store without a load of guilt.  If you don’t need to worry about sodium level or allergies, you may want to help the environment by buying the product with the least amount of packaging. Or buy the brand with the plastic tray that can be reused to start your tomato plants in the spring or hold your beading project.

If Mom is visiting, you might want to buy the brand your mother prefers.  Just don’t tell her that her favorite brand has been bought up by some major processer since she was a newlywed, perhaps canceling the once-valid reasons for her preference.  At least, wait until after Christmas dinner for that conversation. There is nothing in any grocery store turkey today worth having a family fight over.  Just try not to waste your grocery money on stories that don’t add value to your food.  Buy food, not stories. If you are not on the edge financially, consider giving the money you save directly to farm preservation, animal welfare, and food safety organizations. Or to your local foodbank.

Enjoy that turkey dinner. And share this post with friends. Subscription is free.

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Fun rendition of an old round that has nothing to do with turkeys: Christmas Is Coming, the Goose Is Getting Fat - YouTube                                                                            

“Product of USA” Regulatory Docket:  Regulations.gov

USDA Proposes New Requirements for the “Product of USA” Label Claim | USDA

Survey on Product of USA labels: Analyzing Consumers’ Value of “Product of USA” Labeling Claims (usda.gov)

Poultry Industry Exports around the World: Poultry Meat in United States | The Observatory of Economic Complexity (oec.world)

Who is eating the poultry exported from the US: USDA ERS - Poultry Expected To Continue Leading Global Meat Imports as Demand Rises

Beef Imports/Exports for comparison to poultry: National Beef Wire | U.S. Beef Imports vs. Exports By Year | The

Ask USDA: What is meant by "wholesome" in regards to foods? (usda.gov)

Information on poultry for consumers, from the chicken industry: www.chickencheck.in

Information on hormones and steroids in poultry for consumers, from Mississippi State University: chickens do not receive growth hormones: so why all the confusion? (msstate.edu)

Poultry Products Inspection Act original text: STATUTE-71-Pg441.pdf (govinfo.gov)

The searchable on-line version of the PPIA: Poultry Products Inspection Act | Food Safety and Inspection Service (usda.gov)

List of Federal Regulatory Actions associated with food safety: Federal Register Rules | Food Safety and Inspection Service (usda.gov)

USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) website: https://www.fsis.usda.gov/wps/portal/fs ... try-labels

Report on crowd-source activity finding where your poultry may be processed: Your Free-Range Organic Chicken May Have Been Processed at a Large Industrial Poultry Plant — ProPublica