Notices by Sarah Taber (sarahtaber@mastodon.online)

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.

I'm also just gonna point out that if these inmates are in fact working off a sentence, then the prison system absolutely knows who they are.

They're tracking people through the system well enough to know which people are a good fit for sweatshops, & how many days they've worked.

When you think "prison labor," especially *farm* labor, most people think Hollywood-style chain gangs. "Ah yes. Hard labor for hardened criminals. Murderers & the like."

Nope!

Think about it. What kind of person is ideal for giving a shovel & ordering them to work?

Not someone who's good at murder! They'll just use the shovel to chop you & run off!

Ok. So. Um. As somebody who's had some experiences with prison labor, I want to talk about what we're seeing here with CECOT's "work off your sentence" program.

(I had multiple manual labor farm jobs where I got to work & found out most of my coworkers were inmates. Long stories for a different day.)

The last thing prison labor programs want is honest-to-God violent offenders. They know how to fight back.

So my farm inmate coworkers were just standard-issue 19 year old boys. Weed & Xbox kids.

I spent a lot of time seriously outnumbered with these dudes out in the fields. At no point was I worried ~harm might befall me.~

The worst thing about them? They were just clumsy kids who didn't know where their feet were. Kept stepping on seedlings we'd just planted.

They were not scary people!

Remember that MSNBC interview where they asked North Carolina farmers some hard questions about Trump's trade wars?

As a North Carolina farmer, I'd like to set the record straight.

Call me next time MSNBC! I'll hook you up with some quality farmer interviews!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sk2y_JtIzMI

160 years ago today, Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union forces in Richmond Virginia.

There are a lot of reasons the Confederates lost. Among them, its leaders didn't know how to run a functional economy.

Crippled by hyperinflation, trade deficits, & inability to industrialize, the Confederacy tore itself to shreds in just four years.

in honor of WISCONSIN, mods are asleep post Muenster

For context: if you remember 2022 when I kept saying "The global wheat shortage is not real. Stop panic-buying & driving up prices" & I was right? (Foreign Policy does! https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/04/12/russia-ukraine-war-wheat-global-food-supply-panic/)

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

So that $10B bailout for farmers.

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

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

https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2025/03/18/usda-expediting-10-billion-direct-economic-assistance-agricultural-producers

Let's talk about the payoff part first?

"So why do y'all keep supporting him?"

He mumbled something about how there are "other benefits" to being in the Trump coalition that his farmers & industry group members "didn't want to miss out on." So they prefer to "support Trump in public, and negotiate out their differences quietly."

Last year I had a sit-down with a major farm lobby rep.

I said "Hey, we both know Trump'll stab you in the back. You know he doesn't care if your farms are viable or not. He'll wreck your livelihood just because he's feeling mad about China that day."

And he said "Yeah, we know!"