Meet Dr. Sarah Taber

Dr. Taber’s roots in agriculture run deep. Born to a military family with roots in Harlan County, Kentucky, she helped operate her family’s small holdings and took field, garment shop, and factory jobs to pay for school. At a young age, Sarah learned that romanticizing farms doesn’t put food on the table. Agriculture has to be a viable livelihood or it’s just not worth doing.

Alongside her work with family farms, Dr. Taber helped launch a series of vegetable greenhouses and indoor farms that are now worth over $4 billion. This experience taught her how to bring new people and perspectives into agriculture. Failure is common in the highly competitive greenhouse sector- but all of Dr. Taber’s clients are still in operation, including those who began with little or no experience in agriculture. All too often, our leaders treat the loss of farms and farmers as inevitable. But it’s not! Dr. Taber is an agricultural leader with a track record of growing new farm businesses and bringing new people into farming.

Sarah Taber is raising her family in Fayetteville, North Carolina, where her husband teaches at Fayetteville State.