Dr. Sarah Taber’s roots in agriculture run deep. Born to a military family with roots in Harlan County, Kentucky, she started working manual field jobs at 14. She kept working field, garment shop, lab, and factory jobs to pay for crop school. At a young age, Sarah learned that romanticizing farms doesn’t put food on the table. Agriculture has to make a viable living or it’s not worth doing.
She also learned firsthand how women hold up the farm industry — from the women of family farms who make their families’ finances work, to women who travel the country as migrant farm workers. They do much of the hard, dirty work in our country’s food system alongside the additional risks of assault, lower pay, and agrichemical exposure while pregnant and nursing. Healthcare and protection from violence against women are critical rural issues.
In her campaign, Dr. Taber is focused on an economic message. Farmers in North Carolina make half to one-third as much per acre as those other major farm states like Iowa, Georgia, and Virginia. This is due to poor leadership. North Carolina’s farmers simply don’t know their options. The chronic rural poverty, labor and environmental abuses, and loss of farmland that plague North Carolina can all be traced back to low farm revenue. The first step in solving all of these problems? It’s to get farmers making more money.
Dr. Taber’s ready to take on farm economics. For several years, she’s run a small business helping family farms and food businesses improve their revenue or get started in agriculture. All of her clients are still in business. They’re now worth over $4 billion. Dr. Taber knows what it takes to build rural economies and a farm sector where people can make a real living.
Sarah is raising her family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where her husband teaches at Fayetteville State University.
