This is the not-so-secret reason why Congress has so many doctors and lawyers and coal barons and so few bartenders. It’s not that bartenders lack ambition or civic pride!

The confidence with which people will announce "She's bad at politics" of someone elected multiple times in a swing district, a feat most politicians never achieve. Bluesky never change <3 And she was removed from a committee because she chose to serve on 2 others instead. Not exactly a demotion!

Er… This is not a new problem? US leadership always been very white & upper class. I mean, 3/5 compromise. "Only landowning white men can vote." Jim Crow. When past generations won civil rights gains, they did it WHILE running uphill. I take courage from that.

This. Candidates with progressive policies have a way of coming out of the woodwork when there's a reason to believe voters will support them. Running for office means turning your life upside-down for a year or more. Sane, competent people aren't gonna do that for no reason!

Nope! About 1/5 of the farm workers in CA are US citizens. That alone is a voting bloc of ~100,000, which is nothing to sneeze at. Plus church networks, friends & family, & others who ought to be on their side. Including, theoretically, Democratic voters!

Funny story: I ran for office in 2024, had convictions, & worked to convince voters of my position. And didn't win! Because tens of thousands of Dems voted for a 20-year GOP incumbent who's virulently anti-farm labor. And then after voting that way, cried bloody murder when ICE came to our state.

My two tours in Iraq can support @sarahtaber.bsky.social's farm experience. Extreme activity in extreme heat demands breaks, water, carbs, salts, and way more clothing than you expected.

Great(?) news, I am this person! And I was a farm worker for years before I found out "Oh! Not everyone blacks out when they stand up?" I just thought that was normal! 🤣 So I just got real good at standing up slowly & uhhh... well, continuing to work while greyed out.

As a young man, I worked construction around DC in the kind of brutal weather discussed. Saw NCAA DIV I athletes laid low by it. This is the best short guide to working in extreme heat I have seen this year. Read it. It could save your life.

I would start by glaring at California voters tbh. Lawmakers do what they do, because they know it'll keep the largest possible number of people happy with them. Lawmakers keep voting against farm workers because THEY KNOW THE VOTERS ARE OK WITH IT.

Or conversely, "Ok shoutout to Larry. That fool kept walking after we were all sure the antelope were long gone over the horizon. Turns out, yes they they were. And Larry found them." And then we wonder why so many of us are blessed with the 'tism

Yeah feet are really good radiators. Lots of surface area, basically 0 fat for insulation

Honestly, IME no. The only real difference I've noticed btwn light & dark clothing is "Sometimes the sun can burn you right through the light-colored clothing." If you're dumping water on yourself, that cancels out & overwhelms any possible difference in heat from color of the clothing.

Real. This is a great example of "Yes, sometimes management IS a real job!" Heat deaths in the workplace are completely, 100% preventable. There's no reason people have to die for sweet potatoes to get picked or roofs to get built ffs. There are supervisors on site! They should be on top of this!

YES. We do the most thinky tasks right when we get to the farm early in the morning. Setting up a new wash/pack area, troubleshooting an irrigation problem, etc? Morning jobs.

Yep this is a good one! And for ag, yeah there's always some math to do. "If it took 6 minutes to pick this row of cucumbers & there's 86 more rows, how long until we all die out here" lolsob

I worked on a NSW cattle farm every January for about 10 years. Every word of this thread is true, but none more vital than this one. I nearly took my fingers off with a sprayer hose by not winding it up before I moved the quad bike. I still carry a lumbar injury from lifting up a box trailer.

YUP One can imagine how "overheating hyperfocus mode" might have been helpful 50,000 years ago, when the main livelihood was "walk up to animals in the hottest part of the day & slowly wear them down over the course of 4 hours" We are gonna FIND that antelope Jerry, feck your blisters

No worries! It only took me decades of working outdoors to figure this stuff out : / The classic medical symptoms list is real useful- but if you're working outdoors, you need to notice & fix heat stress BEFORE those symptoms hit. And we don't talk about that as much!

Farmer & farm worker tips on working outside in hot humid weather: First, the normal stuff. Stay hydrated. Take breaks in the shade. These are the basics! They'll get you pretty far & you won't make it without them! They are also not enough to get through a day on the farm IME!

If you wanna know how the Protestant work ethic is going, I felt weird for taking a nap after getting home from "working the farm during a heat advisory, under a sun that is tanning my hide through my clothes"

They're a little "meatier" & stand up to cooking better than standard green beans. Noodle beans are actually a type of black-eyed pea! We just pick them before the peas turn ripe & cook them like green beans. So the plants stand up to hot summer weather GREAT.

felt kinda silly taking glamour shots of vegetables but these pics just sold a bunch of eggplant to a restaurant I'd never met before, so that's nice

Behold, the thing is posted youtu.be/iu8VHqL83dU A video on how the "Aaaa they're cutting down all these peach trees in California" is mostly just.....weird reporting. Ain't no point in using perfectly good water & fertilizer to grow fruit that ain't got a use ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Also: when I was in school to become a veterinarian for crops (DPM degree at UF), there were a grand total of two (2) white American dude grad students in the entire horticulture department. Out of ~50-100ish grad students total. Funny enough, both of them were Mormon

thank you, and you can tell the mormonism happened bc there's a covered wagon on fire

Bingo! It's wild too bc the US tends to assume that we're the brain trust of whatever's happening in the hemisphere. But the expertise on agriculture & especially fruits & veggies in the Americas is uh.... not in the United States.

To be clear: I'm getting the "weird racism in agriculture" on easy setting. A fellow crop scientist got summoned to a tomato farm by its owner to help them handle a disease issue. Then they started taking potshots at her when she showed up, bc they assumed she was there to steal tomatoes.

Ish, peach trees are a lot smaller than most people think (about human height tall) and only live 10-20 years. So it's not really worth it to topwork them vs just grub them out & start over.

Yeah I've had farmers assume I'm Latina bc 1) brunette, 2) work on farm, 3) they don't know me from childhood and I don't kiss their ass. "So clearly she's gotta be a foreigner!" Incoming rant re how "Americans won't work on farms" is racist as fuck actually, & we need to stop falling for it.

Nope! -The company that owns the plant went bankrupt bc people just eat way less canned fruit than we used to. -At least half the farm & food handling workers in CA ARE US CITIZENS & GREEN CARD RESIDENTS.

Not really! The peach trees getting pulled are *canning peaches* (clingstone, plus firm texture). Imagine the texture it takes to stand up to high-temp, high-pressure canning. That's not a peach that's really compatible with "fun to eat fresh"

Social mobility has been declining for decades but that's fine, we don't need the talents of 340 million people as long as we have the several dozen children of our stupidest oligarchs

LOL. LMAO

YUP 35,000 acres is a LOT of stuff to be growing if people ain't using it!

Video coming up on Sunday: All those panicky headlines about "farmers being forced to cut down peach trees"? Clickbait!

Babe wake up, new industrial band five-album discography just dropped

I think the "THINGS cheap, LABOR expensive" thing explains so much right now. The stuff you can buy for cheap is so good by comparison to my childhood that no one knows what's real anymore, but then labor-intensive things like burritos keep costing more and it's like, BUT I'M SUPPOSED TO BE RICH

withering but accurate I want to think Ms Austen would be proud

Austen's rep as "writer of fluffy girly novels" is mostly a symptom of Readers Failing To Smell What She's Cooking. Sure there are love stories IN the books. They're plot-critical. But the books are also mostly about spelling out the sins of the upper class in agonizing detail.

Yes! Pride & Prejudice is an epic saga of Fuck These People In Particular

Yeah the thing is, the global economy has changed so much in the last 273 years that the "inflation calculator" approach just straight up doesn't work. A quick guide is "Today, THINGS are cheap & LABOR is expensive. Back then, THINGS were expensive & LABOR was cheap."

Ding ding ding ding ding

At last we have made the Great Gatsby from that famous piece of Regency literature, Get a Load of These Fuckin Gatsbys

really excited about my groundbreaking initiative, It's Ok To Admit Wealthy People Can Be Real Stupid

Ok, so that's the thing! The Bennets' income (2,000lbs/yr) put them in the top 0.2% of English society at the time. To do that in today's US, you'd have to make $20M/yr. They were, in fact, kinda ludicrously wealthy! And the inheritance structure wasn't as big a problem as people think it was!

today I learned how many people identify with the Bennets on a deep, spiritual level as "good humble country folk" and somehow missed the many (MANY) signposts Jane Austen planted to let you know "The Bennets are Great Gatsby-class idiots."

ok time to get off the keyboard & do chores, BUT The extended, "here's all the snarky commentary that had to be cut for time" version is now up on Patreon. www.patreon.com/farmtotaber/...

So I usually make 2-3 different thumbnails for each video & let them fight for dominance, bc YouTube lets you do that. Here's the winner for this video 👀 youtu.be/rbcVCDr6PZI

There's no one better at making the country make sense.