While the dust continues to settle from the election on November 5th, Congress continues to dole out some troubling unknowns for agricultural producers. For example, according to Politico, Democratic and Republican farm bill negotiators have begun formal talks with the goal of negotiating a farm bill extension, to avoid having farm bill commodity programs fall over the cliff if a new bill isn’t finished by January 1st.
Also, President elect Donald Trump has doubled down on his campaign promise that he will declare a national emergency as soon as he is sworn into office so that he can use the military to begin deporting illegal aliens. The Pew Research Center estimates that illegal immigrants make up a bit less than 5% of the total U.S. workforce. But if mass deportations are carried out, construction and agriculture will lose one in eight workers. This would pose serious disruptions for the production of fruit and vegetables in Arizona and California, and on dairy farms across the U.S. For example, In Idaho, the third-largest dairy-producing state in the country, the Idaho Dairymen’s Association estimates that nearly 90% of the state’s on-site dairy workers were born outside of the U.S. Nationally, according to the USDA, undocumented people made up about 45% of all hired crop farmworkers in 2017, but that number declined to about 41.% in 2020. So would this disruption to agricultural production have an impact on consumers? Well, according to a September study by the highly regarded Peterson Institute for International Economics, a mass deportation of agricultural workers could lead to a 10% increase in food prices.
Since Thanksgiving is just a couple of days away, here is the American Farm Bureau’s annual Thanksgiving survey that shows the average cost of the classic meal for a family of 10, this year it is $58.08, or just over $5.80 per person. This is a 5% decrease from last year’s meal price and 9% lower than in 2022. This year, the average price for a 16-pound turkey is $25.67, 6% less than a year ago, which is somewhat surprising, because the American turkey flock is the smallest it’s been since 1985 because of avian influenza, but overall demand for turkey has also fallen.
Last week I mentioned that many of the accounts of the first Thanksgiving feast in 1621, don’t mention turkey as being on the menu. Venison and fish have top billing, since the Wampanoag Indians are reported to have brought five deer to the feast. Since the Pilgrims lived near the coast, some historians assume that fish and waterfowl like ducks, and maybe swans ,were also served. But turkeys have an interesting history, because scientists believe they were the first animal to be domesticated in the Americas, and that they were independently domesticated twice. The Ancestral Puebloans or Anasazi people probably, domesticated turkeys about 2000 years ago, while the Aztecs did the same in southern Mexico. The Aztec species is believed to have been transported to Europe in the early 1500s and came back to the Jamestown settlement in 1608. Turkeys raised today are believed to trace their roots back to the Jamestown birds that mated with the wild populations, while the Anasazi-bred turkeys no longer exist.
Dominican theologian and writer, Meister Eckhart wrote, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was “thank you,” that would suffice.”