Sarah Taber traces her family roots back to Harlan County, Kentucky. Brought up in a military family, Taber succeeded as a farm consultant, and she and her husband live in Fayetteville, where they are raising a family.
The job
The agriculture commissioner’s responsibilities include promoting the state’s agriculture sector and enforcing regulations that protect North Carolinians’ health, safety, and welfare.
Our Q&A with Taber
As agriculture commissioner, what role should representatives from environmental and environmental justice organizations and their concerns play in your oversight of commercial agriculture?
It’s important that the Commissioner of Agriculture be fully briefed by meeting with leaders and advocates on agricultural issues—including environmental ones. And appointees to boards that are tasked with environmental oversight should be well-versed in environmental issues.
We’re amid what NOAA predicts will be an above-average Atlantic Hurricane Season. Given that there are CAFOS in eastern North Carolina in the floodplain, what should be done about the risks of flooding and contamination of nearby waterways? What’s your position on vegetative buffer zones near waterways?
Vegetative buffer zones are a win for everyone. They keep flooding and erosion from affecting farms and scouring away their land, and they help contain flooding and effluent.
We’ve seen high path avian flu be devastating in other states and now it’s appearing in cattle herds. What steps should NC be taking to manage the risk posed by this pathogen?
I’m often asked about avian influenza in cattle: How much is it spreading in North Carolina? How worried should I be? How will it affect farmers?
The only real answer is “we don’t know.” After decades of underfunding, NCDACS can’t run enough tests to find out how far avian flu is spreading in NC cattle, or how fast it’s mutating.
What steps should we take? First off, we need to stop flying in the dark. We’ve got to hire enough scientists to run tests. We’ve also got to do outreach with dairy farmers. They’re already facing enough issues without flu outbreaks: dairy hasn’t been a priority for NC’s farm policy. That’s left a lot of dairy farmers feeling abandoned. For a lot of them, if their cows get sick, their first thought is absolutely not to call NCDACS about it. That makes it easy to miss outbreaks until they’re causing serious problems.
We also need to diversify our farm economy. Right now, about ⅔ of all income NC’s farmers make is from hogs and chickens. Both of those species can get flu outbreaks, as well as other diseases. A single solid outbreak for either hogs or chickens can devastate rural North Carolina. We’re already seeing this play out in other states. Georgia’s heavily dependent on broiler chickens, just like NC, and is now leading the US in farm bankruptcies due to bird flu. We need to build out our rural income base so that a single outbreak in one or two species can’t devastate rural communities. Adding more fruit, vegetable, and nut production can build out and stabilize our rural economy.
Even as high path AI is a threat, the state knows little about large poultry operations. What kinds of oversight would you propose for monitoring this industry?
Everyone who raises poultry in NC—including suburban backyard birds—already has to sign up with the state. That’s so they can get notified when new avian influenza outbreaks are active, and take steps to protect their birds. And if backyard flocks with just one or two birds can do it, anyone can do it.
A key part of oversight is having strong, open lines of communication between the NCDACS and poultry producers. It’s important that large poultry operations can trust the Department of Agriculture to monitor outbreaks, push out notifications when they happen, and take action to protect their birds. That system will also make it easier for poultry producers to get support in testing their birds and reporting outbreaks-in-progress before they impact their bottom line.
There’s growing concern that several hog farms in eastern N.C. have lagoons nearing total capacity. Advocates of methane capture promote it as a solution to the hog waste problem, while critics say establishing methane capture programs on hog farms will only increase waste output. Where do you stand on this issue? What ideas do you have for addressing the hog waste problem?
I’m not so sure that allowing methane capture on farms would cause them to expand & make more waste. Why? NC’s hog and poultry industries are already facing a much bigger constraint on their growth: grain prices.
Hog and chicken farms need lots and lots of cheap corn and soy nearby. And growing enough corn and soy to supply a livestock industry has always been a challenge here in NC. Our clear, dry springs and sandy soils in eastern NC (where most of the livestock industry is based) just aren’t ideal for growing the huge bumper crops of cheap grain that livestock farms need. In fact, when the hog industry began expanding here in the 1990s, a lot of livestock experts were puzzled. They pointed out 30 years ago that NC’s grain supply would always be a big hurdle for livestock farmers to overcome. In recent years, with about three-quarters of our farmland in corn and soy, we’ve still had to import about half the corn and soy our livestock industry needs. That chronic grain deficit has long pushed up NC’s grain costs and posed a challenge to NC livestock farms.
NC’s corn supply issue has only gotten more pressing as weather patterns change. Climate scientists predicted that NC’s usual clear, dry spells in spring would get longer, hotter, and dryer. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what’s been happening for years now. These dry spells already hampered our corn yields. Then, 2024’s spring dry spell finally broke through into a full-on drought. It killed up to ⅔ of eastern North Carolina’s corn crop. There’s no reason to believe the spring dry spells will let up any time soon. Because of this, many NC hog farmers are already exploring changing their operations to cope with higher grain prices. Incidentally, these changes will also reduce waste.
Some NC hog farmers are considering following the lead of hog farms in Oklahoma and the Netherlands. There, they’ve switched from raising hogs all the way to slaughter, to farrow-only: that is, raising piglets and shipping them to areas with cheaper grain. There, the piglets can be raised to full size at lower cost. Farrowing farms produce much less waste per dollar’s worth of hog raised. The manure from farrowing farms is also poorly suited to biogas, due to different nutrient content.
Environmental watchdogs have long feared that allowing hog farms to make biogas would cause them to expand. Due to changing climate and market conditions, I don’t see much risk of that happening. However, I am still concerned that energy stakeholders are using hog farms to advance their own interests. Claiming that gas pipelines are meant to serve hog farms can make it easier for energy companies to get permits to build new pipelines in this farm-heavy state. But hog farms can be a relatively costly source of natural gas. That means that once pipelines are built, it will be in energy companies’ best interest to abandon hog farms and simply tap cheaper sources of gas. That’s why our farmers deserve a Commissioner of Agriculture with a background in developing competitive new markets. We need leadership that can stay on top of changing climate and market conditions, and help our farms adapt in ways that will serve them long term.
In summary, I support methane capture and do not think it will lead to major increases in the amount of waste. We also need to diversify our crop base to include fruits and vegetables that thrive in our current weather patterns, bring in more revenue per acre, and help insulate our farm economy from outbreaks and droughts that are hammering our grain and livestock sectors.
What should NC’s farm community and agricultural regulators be doing to prepare for the threat posed by climate change, especially those from low-wealth Black and brown communities, who are more likely to live near a CAFO?
There are two main risks from climate change in eastern NC: droughts in spring/early summer, and heavy rains, hurricanes, and flooding later in summer.
We tend to spend the most time worrying about flood risks, and for good reason. Floods hurt everyone, not just farmers. Hog waste can escape during floods. It’s a general public health risk. It also means nearby crops may have to be destroyed due to contamination, so that’s a big economic hazard for eastern NC where agriculture is a huge part of the economy.
Allowing farms to make biogas can help cut down on hog waste escapes during floods. Lagoons are covered, so there’s less risk of them being breached. Biogas also breaks down waste faster, so there’s less of it to escape in the first place. Regulators can help by making sure biogas installations are built properly, don’t leak gas or waste, and are protected against floods.
But there’s more to climate risk than just floods. As a state, we also haven’t spent much time thinking through the “spring drought” part of NC’s climate change picture. It poses a real financial risk to our farm sector. To handle that part of our changing weather, we need to broaden out into fruit and vegetable crops. Most of them like dry weather. They don’t make manure that needs to be disposed of. And most fruit and vegetable crops make more money per acre than corn, soy, and even tobacco.
The bottom line- rural areas need more than regulation to handle climate change. They also need real livelihoods. A focus on building rural economies, not just “what do we do about flooding,” goes a long way toward making sure that communities can be resilient in a changing climate.