Notices by Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)

it's "surprise kittens on your doorstep" season

Today's farm literacy moment! Ballerina Farm.

Many have done thinkpieces about the women's lib of it all.

But nobody had the stamina. the oomph. the juice to look at the business empire side of Ballerina Farm.

So that's what we're doing today, and I would love to start with The Meats.

(keep reading to the end for juicy ballet gossip if that's your thing though)

So if you've seen headlines panicking bc "the cHiNeSe smuggled bioweapons into the US to kill America's crops!!"

The Michigan Farm Bureau would like to remind everyone "Yeah they're junior scientists who are working to STOP CROP DISEASES. It looks like they just didn't do the paperwork for bringing in samples."

Link:

https://www.michiganfarmnews.com/chinese-researchers-charged-with-smuggling-potential-agroterrorism-weapon-into-us

on a scale of 1-10, how down are people to hear some Surprising News About Farms that might not be flattering, but in a way that I GUARANTEE you can't see coming

asking for a friend

RAW MILK TIME

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

Let's get to know him!

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

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

(source: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/raw-farm-raw-milk-mark-mcafee/)

Mark McAfee also got a $10M USDA-backed loan to build a brand new factory for raw milk dairy products in 2022.

https://thebusinessjournal.com/arson-destroyed-its-creamery-fresno-county-raw-milk-dairy-rebuilding-with-10m-usda-backed-loan/

We're gonna come back to this later, because it involves his old cheese facility burning down in an arson case some would describe as "suspicious."

Mark McAfee's gotten over $800,000 in federal subsidies.

$118,407 under his own name, and $682,255 under the LLC "Organic Pastures Dairy."

https://farm.ewg.org/persondetail.php?custnumber=A11886121

https://farm.ewg.org/persondetail.php?custnumber=A13139155

If that's "government oppression," hook me up!

If you can, get a look at their farm.

I looked up Mark McAfee's farm on Google Maps & was surprised to see that his "grass-fed dairy" is a bog standard, feedlot-style large commercial dairy.

With over 1,000 cows standing & lying around on what we call a "dry manure pack" in the biz.

BTW this is a great case study to talk media literacy for farms.

If someone says "the guvmint is out to get them," sometime's that's bc they keep getting themselves in legal trouble!

Don't take claims at face value. Fact check!

https://www.marlerblog.com/case-news/raw-milk-llc-a-k-a-organic-pastures-linked-again-to-an-e-coli-outbreak/

Farm update! Indian radish (mooli) & why it's a great crop for our local soils.

There are a million and one "how to grow X" tutorials out there.

But I also want to talk about "WHY to grow X." How do farms decide what to grow, & why?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jma6DQMid8E

Everyone thinks we grow a lot of corn & soybeans in the US "because of subsidies," & that's just... not accurate?

So I made a video about it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlSRyPcc-so

Excited to announce my next farm video, Ten Crops You Can Plant & Harvest Faster Than NC Judge Jefferson Griffin Can Lose An Election

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/republican-jefferson-griffin-concedes-nc-supreme-court-race-rcna205358

look guys I finally made a nice video about nice things

(Costco is legitimately great! It also does a lot of the heavy lifting to keep the US food system safe & sanitary, filling holes in state & federal food safety enforcement.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNO8TBZn0rs

It helps explain why the Confederacy was so cocky!

They really thought they could force the British Empire to come to their rescue & fight the North for them.

How? By withholding their cotton, & bringing English textile manufacturing to its knees. AKA starting a trade war with the British Empire.

Before the war, the US South was THE global source of cotton.

Other places grew cotton. But only the US South grew enough to ship to England & feed its Industrial Revolution textile boom.

US planters knew this! They thought it meant the British Empire would have to join their side in the war.

Farm trade wars are wild because we've already done similar things in the past, and it did NOT work out for the US farmers in question.

Let's talk about the trade war part of the US Civil War, one of the biggest farmer self-owns in world history.

So when they say "Ohhhh sorry the prisons are a labyrinth! We just can't find this person," that cannot be the whole truth in a prison system where people are truly working off sentences.

So. Either they CAN track people & are lying to the US about having lost our people in there. Or they can't track people, and they're lying to the prisoners about how every day they work in there takes 2 days off their sentence. I'm just saying.

Strictly from a business POV, gangsters who do murders are the last people you want to lock up with expensive equipment. They don't want to be there & have way more experience busting heads than you do.

You want nice, quiet people pleasers who will do what they're told- with minimal supervision.

So check out the ratio of workers to wardens in there. It looks like at least 20:1. Could be up to 40 or 50:1.

They *know* those folks aren't a threat to anybody!

Looking at footage of that workshop, I see the same thing at work.

Sewing machines are fragile. Destroying equipment is a go-to move for unhappy workers for a reason- it costs the bosses a lot of money. And they literally can't make you work on busted machines.

Again, this is a business decision. Every overseer you have to hire is a financial drain.

So the best investment a prison labor program can make is fill it up with nice people who are easy to dominate.

All you have to do is tell them "You're working off a sentence" & they'll supervise themselves.