|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Sarah Taber, the Democratic candidate for state agriculture commissioner, bucks the pattern of past aspirants for the role. She lives not on a 250-acre farm but on a quarter-acre lot near downtown Fayetteville.
Unlike previous agriculture commissioners, who were associated with legacy family farms, most of Taber’s experience isn’t in growing acres of crops outdoors or raising livestock. She consults for “controlled environment agriculture”—things like greenhouse operations, hydroponics (cultivating plants in water), and aquaponics (raising fish and plants in tanks).
Her vision for the state’s agricultural future contrasts with what farmers here have historically grown, especially tobacco and cotton. She wants to increase what North Carolina farmers earn by adding high-revenue fruit, nut, and vegetable production, along with food manufacturing.
Taber, who has a doctorate in plant medicine, is challenging five-term Republican incumbent Steve Troxler. On the campaign trail and in articles she’s written, she promotes her experience as a crop consultant, stating that she “helped launch a series of vegetable greenhouses and indoor farms that are now worth over $4 billion” and “all of Taber’s farm clients are still in operation, including those who began with little or no experience in agriculture.”
While Taber has worked for companies once cumulatively valued at $4 billion, her role in developing them appears more limited, an Assembly review shows. Interviews, texts, and emails with people who founded the companies said she did a small amount of work or handled food safety certification, an important task but one that took place long before their businesses took off.
Her characterization of her experience caught the eye of farmer Jeffrey C. Lee of Benson, who employs 50 to 70 workers to farm 1,700 acres of tobacco, sweet potatoes, and cotton across three counties.
“One trip, or one season, to a farmer [and doing] food-safety work does not constitute setting up a damn business and keeping it going,” Lee said. “There’s a lot more to it than the food safety issue and going there. I think she overstates her experience.”
Lee is on the board of the NC Ag Partnership, an advocacy group that supports Republican incumbent Troxler and has released a “Memorandum of Concern” about Taber.
The Assembly identified one operation Taber consulted for that folded, and she has dropped her claim that all of her clients are still in business. Taber said she didn’t know Falling Waters Farm went out of business until The Assembly informed her. (A second Taber client, Bowery Farming, also has ceased operating, PitchBook News reported on November 1.)
Jon Shope, founder of Falling Waters Farm, an Indianapolis aquaponics facility in business from 2015 to 2023, said Taber’s early-stage consulting was important.
“The significance of having early experts guiding any sort of startup business or small operation that aspires to be larger helps you avoid potentially costly pitfalls,” Shope said. “If you’re a small operation, and you have one issue, it could drown you.”
Taber said she provided critical guidance to companies—several of which didn’t have farming experience—beyond food safety, like ensuring that facility blueprints included floor drains or that robotics could withstand being hosed down daily. She says that she has ideas that could transform agriculture in North Carolina and make it more profitable.
“An authentic rural voice doesn’t just slap on a plaid shirt and repeat the conventional wisdom about rural life,” she wrote recently. “An authentic rural voice will tell you where the conventional wisdom is wrong.”
An Applied Academic
Taber, 41, grew up a military kid and got her start in farming when she was 14 years old, when she manually detasseled corn plants grown for seed in Iowa one summer. It was John Deere country, but intensive labor was required to keep the corn from self-pollination. That primed the ears to grow as a lucrative hybrid seed.
As a college student, Taber said she worked as a research assistant, analyzing soil samples for farmers and collecting insect specimens at Brigham Young University. She brought her entomology experience to the state of Florida’s Department of Plant Industry in 2006 to analyze bee samples from across the state for disease and research colony collapse disorder.
In 2011, Taber graduated with a doctorate from the University of Florida, where she worked on university and private blueberry farms, and as a postdoc managed aspects of the university’s blueberry breeding operations.
Around this time, Taber registered her first agribusiness, attempting to raise sturgeon for “farm-to-table” caviar. The business never launched. “We don’t actually have all the information yet to run one of these systems successfully,” Taber wrote in 2013.
She was also the volunteer director of food safety with the Aquaponics Association, working to ensure federal regulations would not restrict the growth of the industry.
Her first corporate job was working as a food safety auditor with the international behemoth now known as QIMA/WQS. Craig Lutz, a former WQS employee based in Washington state, said he met Taber around 2016 at one of the company’s national multiday meetings and recalled her as “fair and knowledgeable.”
“I saw her work through technical reports, technical reviews. I knew she was very accomplished and a well-polished auditor, and knew the ag industry,” Lutz said.
That decade, commercial aquaponics began to take off. Taber coupled her knowledge of food safety and indoor growing, and she began consulting for startup businesses. “I worked with a lot of farm operations that were small when I started with them, but they were about to become very large; they were about to hire maybe 10 times more people than they had,” Taber said.
The Assembly reached out to seven companies Taber said she has worked for. Five company directors said Taber’s consulting work was centered around food safety; a sixth affirmed her involvement but couldn’t recall her role. A seventh company gave no information, but Taber provided emails documenting her work for that company.
“An authentic rural voice doesn’t just slap on a plaid shirt and repeat the conventional wisdom about rural life. An authentic rural voice will tell you where the conventional wisdom is wrong.”
Sarah Taber, Democratic candidate for commissioner of agriculture
Irving Fain, the CEO and founder of the New York-based hydroponics company Bowery, said in a text that Taber’s name “does ring a bell but admittedly [I] don’t remember any details. I think she helped with food safety.”
Lucianne Kempton, CEO of robotics-based seedling company Inevitable Technologies, which was formerly Iron Ox, confirmed that Taber “previously provided food safety consultation services for Iron Ox,” a service they have since brought in-house.
Indiana-based Falling Waters Farm, which eventually closed its doors in 2023, was among her first clients. Taber worked with the farm when it was in the design state in 2015, “consulting on food safety at a time when the USDA did not readily understand aquaponics,” founder Shope said.
The farm was among the first USDA-certified aquaponics facilities; at its peak it grew, processed, packaged, sold, and shipped organic vegetables and microgreens to 27 states.
Green Life Farms in Florida, where Taber consulted on food safety, stressed the importance of that role to their business.
“Almost all—if not all—major retailers would fire you if you don’t meet food certification through a third party,” said John Halle Jr., Green Life’s director of sales. “You can’t even onboard with a new retailer without it.”
In 2016, Taber consulted for Superior Fresh, a Wisconsin aquaponics company that produces 1.5 million pounds of salmon annually and is capable of harvesting 125,000 heads of lettuce a day. Her work began in the construction phase, helping to lay out the first facility for food safety long-term.
Aquaponics has additional layers of complexity when it comes to food safety, and the farm is the first indoor, land-based Atlantic salmon farm nationwide. Taber’s yearlong involvement included setting up a system to ensure every head of lettuce was accounted for.
To get to the $4 billion valuation, Taber said she added the values companies have listed publicly and estimated values for companies like Superior Fresh and Green Life, which are privately owned.
Plenty, a California-based indoor hydroponics company where brightly lit warehouses with vertical columns of leafy greens look like scenes from a science fiction movie, was valued at $1.4 billion in 2022 and is developing indoor farms in the Middle East. Taber said it’s now worth $2 billion.
Bowery, the hydroponic farming company that sells pesticide-free leafy greens to groceries like Whole Foods, Walmart, and Albertsons across the Northeast, was valued at $2.3 billion in 2021. The company encountered significant financial problems last year; Taber estimated its current value at $500 million. (Bowery has shut down since The Assembly first published this article.)
Green Life Farms is successfully running three hydroponic greenhouse operations and has kept its energy costs low, Taber said. She compared Green Life to how Bowery was once valued, and estimated the Florida company’s value at $1 billion.
Superior Fresh, which operates a fish farm and recycles its water to avoid pollution problems, recently expanded to a second facility. She estimated its value at $500 million.
Iron Ox, the robotics AgTech company, was once valued upward of $200 million, though its spinoff has raised just $7 million.
When asked what her role was in these companies, Taber said, “I taught a lot of these people how to farm. They wouldn’t still be here if they didn’t have somebody like that.”
She contrasted the presence of her role to the absence of a similar position in the Kentucky greenhouse tomato startup AppHarvest, which went bankrupt in 2023.
“Their favorite fail of mine was they had their greenhouses going up to 125 degrees,” Taber said, noting the company wasted $800 million in capital. “That’s bad design. You just built them wrong in the first place.”
Marlowe Ivey is a fourth-generation farmer in Wayne County who is registered as unaffiliated and supports Troxler. She challenges whether Taber is qualified to lead North Carolina’s largest economic sector. “People don’t realize how important that position is for our state,” she said.
State law requires the commissioner and members of the Board of Agriculture to be “practicing farmers engaged in their profession.”
“I honestly don’t see how she meets the requirements to run,” Ivey said. “There’s an economic footprint to sustainability; if you’re not making a living off your farm, you’re not a farmer—you’re a gardener.”
Taber told The Assembly that she has “off-farm jobs to supplement what comes in from my farm operation—just like 96 percent of U.S. family farmers.” In 2021, she shared details about her consulting income on X (formerly Twitter) when she wrote, “You should know that I make about $20-40K per year doing freelance crop consulting because the southern ag industry is Like That.”
Troxler also questioned Taber’s claim to be a farmer. He noted that when she filed her statement of economic interest in January, she described her business as “agricultural consulting.”
On a podcast in 2020, Taber described one of her then-current jobs as working in a food processing plant. In interviews this year, she’s described growing vegetables, fruit and nut trees, and berries at her small farm. She described herself as a “small family farmer” in a tweet on October 23.
“If I’m not a ‘real farmer,’ neither are most of the farmers in North Carolina,” Taber wrote.
The Assembly asked Taber several times to identify the location of her family farm and whether it is separate from her yard in Fayetteville. She never provided a definitive answer beyond it being in Cumberland County. (Taber told the Raleigh News & Observer, in an article published Friday, that her farm was on her quarter-acre lot in Fayetteville.)
A David v. Goliath Race
On a crisp and clear morning Friday at the State Fair, Taber wore a “Taber for Agriculture” T-shirt under her zip-up athletic jacket, blue pants, and sandals. At the state Democratic Party booth, she greeted fairgoers as they walked by, letting them know she was running for commissioner.
She brought Lincoln County winesap apples, an heirloom variety, to the booth and gave away neon green bracelets reading, “We’re not going back,” Kamala Harris’ campaign mantra. In Taber’s bag was something no other farmer likely brought to the fair—years of her redacted Schedule F filings, IRS paperwork showing a farmer’s profits and losses.
Taber told The Assembly she has filed Schedule F’s since 2019. She said she would release them if Troxler would do the same; Troxler declined to share his. He said he has filed paperwork with the State Ethics Commission showing he is a farmer, and that, as part of a routine schedule, Guilford County recently re-verified 10 acres of his 50-acre farm as currently being used for agriculture.
Polls show Taber mounting the most competitive challenge to Troxler in years. Meg Scott Phipps, the daughter of former Gov. Bob Scott and granddaughter of former Gov. Kerr Scott, was the last Democrat elected commissioner in 2000. Phipps’ tenure was rocked by scandal, and she resigned in 2003, four months before she pled guilty to accepting illegal cash payments, and served three years in prison.
“If you’re not making a living off your farm, you’re not a farmer—you’re a gardener.”
Marlowe Ivey, Troxler supporter
A longtime agency employee, Britt Cobb, was appointed to fill the role. Troxler beat Cobb in the 2004 election by 2,287 votes. His margin of victory has only grown since, widening to as many as 500,000 votes. Troxler’s campaign coffers historically outpaced the Democrats; any challenger has been cast as a David taking on Goliath.
Taber said she decided to run after hearing rumors that Troxler, 72, wouldn’t seek re-election this year. The rumor didn’t pan out, but she still says she can do more for farmers and the state’s agricultural economy.
“If you’re one of the few big buyers in the state, he’s very, very good at making sure you have a steady supply of lots of farmers trying to grow for you,” Taber said about Troxler. “And that’s amazing if you’re a big company, and it’s terrible if you’re one of the farmers.”
At public gatherings and in interviews, Taber has questioned Troxler’s leadership of the department on a range of issues from farmland disaster recovery response to its promotion of tobacco and livestock. She believes Troxler is stuck in the past.
“It’s really interesting to have a commissioner of agriculture whose main focus has just been prolonging the reign of tobacco,” Taber said in an interview. While tobacco isn’t the cash crop it used to be, North Carolina is the largest producer in the nation; the state’s production is more than that of all other states combined.
Her own vision seeks to boost vegetable, fruit, and tree nut production, along with other crops, which represent a fourth of the state’s $18.7 billion in agricultural sales.
“It’s really easy if you just grow up on your farm and have always worked your farm, to run it the way you want it and not realize that other people need other things,” Taber said about the state office. “You got to have a broad array of things, so different farmers can specialize in different things … and that means we need state leadership that understands that there’s not going to be a silver bullet.”
Per acre, fruits and vegetables yield far higher revenue than crops like tobacco, corn, and cotton, but they can’t sit in storage or curing barns like the state’s legacy crops.
Taber wants to build processing and freezing facilities for vegetable production and a saucing plant to process tomatoes grown Down East. Tomatoes are from the same family as tobacco, require similar nutrients, and are easier to grow than tobacco, Taber said.
She said there’s funding available to build these types of facilities—from private investors, government grants, and philanthropies—but Troxler hasn’t gotten it done. “So what kind of leadership is that?” she said.
Troxler is popular in the agricultural community. He’s a family farmer from Browns Summit in Guilford County who’s grown tobacco, wheat, vegetables, and soybeans.
Even though Taber describes herself as a “small family farmer,” she has criticized family farms on social media. She wrote that they’re not a “good model” for “treating workers or the land right.” She said they’re “a very tidy way to make sure land stays in the hands of colonizers,” a claim that has caused some farmers to bristle.
She elaborated in an episode of the podcast “Farm to Taber,” saying there are other ways to “bring new people in who weren’t necessarily born on a farm,” including worker-owned businesses, land trusts, or passing a farm onto a trained apprentice.
“I don’t think anything based on the accident of birth is sustainable,” she said. “It’s a bad way to run a country, and it’s a really bad way to run an entire sector that’s so critical to our survival.”
Back when X was Twitter, Taber took to the platform to write threads on agriculture, labor, history, and inequality. Today, most have been deleted, something she said she did soon after Elon Musk bought Twitter, not knowing the direction he would take the company.
The day after two electrical substations were attacked in Moore County in December 2022, Taber tweeted that Southern Pines is “an enclave for the most racist & bigoted people” at Fort Liberty, including elite commando units.
While no one has been arrested for the crime, Taber stood by her tweet.
“The military is worried about the amount of white supremacy going on at Fort Liberty,” she said in an email. “It’s not ‘disrespecting the troops’ to talk about this problem. It’s disrespecting the many troops who are affected by it to not talk about it.”
Disappearing Farms
According to the federal agricultural census, North Carolina lost 20 percent of its farms over the last 20 years—more than any other state. Those two decades are roughly the same period Troxler’s been commissioner.
“When I came into office in 2005, we were leading the nation in the disappearance of farms,” Troxler told The Assembly, attributing the farmland loss to the end of the federal tobacco quota program in 2005, a program that for over 60 years set the price of tobacco and where it was grown. He said that the state’s rank has since dropped to No. 17, according to the Census of Agriculture.
His first year in office, Troxler pushed the legislature to set up a farmland preservation program. To date, it has put over 36,000 acres of farm and forestland in conservation easements so that property cannot be developed.
North Carolina ranks in the top 10 nationwide for 21 different commodities, including high-value vegetables that Taber cites, Troxler said. The state is the largest producer of sweet potatoes (Troxler said this is because of his department’s work to grow exports to Europe), ranks third in the country for cucumbers, fourth for strawberries, and seventh for apples.
The department has a section to help farms smaller than 179 acres or farmers with less than $50,000 a year in sales. It helps farmers with marketing and grants, but as a bureaucrat, Troxler said he’s not going to tell farmers what to grow.
“I taught a lot of these people how to farm. They wouldn’t still be here if they didn’t have somebody like that.”
Sarah Taber, Democratic candidate for commissioner of agriculture
Troxler, like Taber, wants more money for state employees and sees room for growth—including in growing greenhouse vegetables and aquaponic operations. He said the state is already investing in vegetable processing facilities, and said Taber’s idea is eight years behind.
In 2015, then-Gov. Pat McCrory established a multi-agency task force to foster the growth of food manufacturing. In years since, the state legislature has awarded tens of millions for agricultural manufacturing and recruiting, Troxler said.
To him, farmland loss and population growth are two sides of the same coin. “There are more mouths to feed, more opportunity for local produce, for local animal operations, but when you lose the farmland and you get further and further from cities to farms, it gets more and more difficult,” he said.
To Taber, Troxler doesn’t explain how the state’s farmers can feed more mouths.
“There’s really a feeling that our ag department only likes the kinds of farms that our leadership itself runs: big-acre and tobacco farms,” Taber said. “They’ve got some buddies and hogs and chickens, and that’s the only kind of thing they know.”
Update: This article has been updated with more details about Sarah Taber’s statement that she has helped launch companies now worth $4 billion. It also was updated to include Taber’s statement to the Raleigh News & Observer about farming on her lot in Fayetteville; to report that Bowery Farming has shut down; and to clarify The Assembly’s outreach to the seven companies Taber worked for.
Matt Ramey contributed reporting to this article.
Ren Larson is a staff reporter at The Assembly. She previously worked for The Texas Tribune and ProPublica’s investigative team, and as a data reporter with The Arizona Republic. She holds a master’s of public policy and an M.A. in international and area studies from the University of California, Berkeley.