Farm to Taber

There's a saying in food justice: "There's plenty of food to feed everyone! The problem is distribution."

But when we talk about reforming the food system, farms get all the spotlight. We rarely focus on distribution- even though we know it's the key to solving hunger. How does food get from the farm to people? Who decides where crops should go? Wow do those decisions trickle down to the place where most Americans get their foo...

This is a short clip of a bonus episode for Patreon followers. Subscribe to Farm to Taber on Patreon for the full episode!

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Today we talk contract broiler farming! This is the type of farming famous for "giant barns full of chickens that the farmers don't own." If you've ever wondered why farmers would keep farming in a way that "everyone just knows" makes them poor, this episode digs into why!

Joining us today is @...

I ran into the Nightingales a few years ago on Twitter. They've spent years working to make jobs more humane (and even succeeding!) It quickly became clear that we're running into a lot of the same workplace problems in our respective industries. But how? I'm in agriculture, and they're in tech! What's going on? We talk about how sucky jobs in any industry are a choice, making them not suck is a process, and what that process looks...

When sustainability advocates talk about Indigenous agriculture, it's often framed as folksy, timeless, hyperlocal, and incompatible with the modern world. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Historian Susan Sleeper-Smith joins us to talk about the reality of how the Miami, Shawnee, Haudenosaunee, and other Indigenous communities in North America's most fertile farmland actually farmed. They grew enough food to export and s...

Accounts of the US food system take it for granted that it used to all be nice little family farms, until agribusiness suddenly changed it all in the 20th century. But corn monoculture, feedlots, and cheap bulk commodities didn't come out of nowhere in modern times- they've always been the core of US agriculture!

This episode traces the origins of today's food system back to its origins: slavery, and most importantly, Jim Crow. ...

This is a trailer for a bonus episode. Join Farm to Taber on Patreon for the full episode here: patreon.com/farmtotaber

It's so easy to think of agriculture and finance as a large-scale, impersonal realm: import-export balances, federally-backed loans, and enormous capital flows. And those are all important!

But let's take a step back and remember that 95% of US farms are family-owned. That means the dominant financial consi...

Episode cover photo: “Roy Merriot getting ready to move a transportable house. He is a tenant of a 160 acre loan company farm which has recently been sold, and is now holding a ‘quitting farm’ sale. This is the third farm he has lost in the last ten years.” Russell Lee, photographer, December 1936, from Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information Photographs, Yale University Photogrammar Project. Available at http...