The Bracero Program began in 1942 as an agreement between the United States and Mexico to bring laborers to the U.S. to replace men who were leaving farms to fight in World War II. The program didn’t end with the war, however, it actually grew by hundreds of thousands of workers, and continued until 1964, laying the foundation for our current agricultural guest worker programs. Lindsey discusses the program’s history, and its intersections with contemporary immigration, labor, and food justice issues with Dr. Matthew Garcia, professor of History and Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College.
Further Resources:
Cows, Land, and Labor Conference at Dartmouth College
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Episode Transcript
Lindsey: This is the Young Farmers Podcast, I’m Lindsey Lusher Shute. The Bracero Program started out as an agreement between the United States and Mexico in 1942. It brought Mexican workers to the U.S. to replace men who were leaving their farms to fight in World War II. But the program didn’t end with the war. In fact, it actually grew after the war by hundreds of thousands of workers and continued until 1964. The Bracero Program laid the foundation for our current guest worker programs. The Bracero Program was controversial: 4.6 million Mexican nationals took farm labor jobs. They were paid 30 cents an hour, or about $4.63 cents today, and while the Bracero Program had safeguards to protect both Mexican and domestic workers, many of the rules were ignored by both farmers and the governments that put them in place. Today I am speaking with Dr. Matthew Garcia. He’s a professor at Dartmouth College. Matt helped to create the Bracero History Archive with the Smithsonian. His team gathered images of the program and stories from the people who lived it. We talk about what he’s learned and the context it provides for our ongoing debate on immigration and farm labor.
Emily: Hi, I’m Emily Mickley Doyle, farmer at SPROUT NOLA and organizer with the Greater New Orleans Growers Alliance. I’ve been a member of the National Young Farmers Coalition since 2013 because I believe that young people can be torch-bearers for current and future generations and creating community-based food systems. For $35 a year you can join, too. In addition to being part of a bright and just future for agriculture in the United States, you’ll also get discounts like 10% off high mowing organic seeds and 15% off Rosie’s Workwear for women. To join, go to youngfarmers.org.
Lindsey: So Matt you’re currently at Dartmouth, correct?
Matt: Yes, I am a professor of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies and I’m also in the history department currently chairing the Latin American Latino Caribbean Studies program. And I think that captures all my professional titles. I too want to claim and can accurately claim that I am a farmer as well. I own Taste for Good Farm in technically East Thetford, Vermont. I’ve been the owner of Taste for Good Farm for a year now.
Lindsey: Well congratulations. Welcome to farming. You too are a beginning young farmer.
Matt: Not so not so young, not as young, younger than the average farmer.
Lindsey: Well today we’re going to talk about the Bracero Program and it was something that I hadn’t really learned a whole lot about until a few years ago. When a friend mentioned that he, his family had come to the United States because his father had been part of the Bracero program. To begin with, can you give sort of a basic description of the Bracero Program? How did, how did it get started and, and what did it do?
Matt: So the Bracero program is a guest worker program that was started as a bilateral agreement between the United States and Mexico during World War II. And its objective was to replace the labor that was leaving the fields for the front lines of a World War II with guest workers from Mexico who were adept at agricultural work, although is always classified as unskilled labor. And that’s a problem of farm work in general. But in any case these guest workers were hired to come here on temporary contracts and it started as a kind of nation to nation agreement. And then as it moved through the decades, the United States acted somewhat unilaterally, private farmers of substantial size and means started to extract that labor and do whatever it wanted with it , and it became a more exploitative as the years went on. Of course the rationale for the program in the first place quickly evaporated with the end of World War II, but that didn’t stop big ag from drawing on this seemingly endless pool of workers. And it continued until 1964 when a variety of forces brought it down. Anyone from a Ernesto Galarza was an early advocate for farmworker unions, to Cesar Chavez who essentially started the modern farmworker movement with the explicit goal of ending the Bracero Program so that they could begin to unionize citizen workers.
Lindsey: Just to be clear, the Mexican individuals, Mexican workers, were brought to the United States and the intention was that they would return to Mexico. They were not meant to be permanent residents or eventual citizens of the country.
Matt: Yes, they were, what one historian calls “impossible subjects.” They didn’t have citizenship, but they were present within our country. And so therefore were subject to the laws and restrictions that any citizen is, but yet not granted citizenship status to defend themselves or to advocate for themselves through collective bargaining. And in fact, their temporary status, their ability to be shipped out at any moment, they were often shipped out for labor rebellions made it very difficult to organize farmworker unions and to establish a kind of baseline organization that could lead to collective bargaining rights.
Lindsey: So some of those individuals have since become citizens and many of them have stayed in the United States and you have documented many of their stories through the Bracero History Archive. So I guess first of all, can you tell me about these individuals coming to the country and how many of them stayed? How did they get citizenship? What, what was sort of the story of those individuals crossing the border to find work?
Matt: So they’re famously referred to as “skips” and that’s a reference to the common nomenclature. The time they skipped their contracts. And so they basically would, you know, leave the farm sometimes in the dead of night and then just blend into the differentiated massive of farm workers that were a mix of citizen workers, Braceros, and undocumented, increasingly undocumented workers as we move into the 1960s. So they essentially moved from being documented as temporary guest workers to undocumented. Some of them, of course were able to get job, urban and industrial sectors and they became part of the larger sort of now 11 million undocumented working and living in the United States. We, at the time when we started this project, we had no idea that we would uncover this huge population, this huge community of former Braceros and their families. I had published a book about, partly about Braceros. There’s one chapter about Braceros in the citrus growing regions of southern California, primarily because local Mexican Americans objected to the Braceros’ presence on two counts. One was that they were allegedly taking their jobs and the second was a very heterosexual, homosocial consequence, there they were taking the women of the barrios. And so there was struggles over that and actually even murders so, so bad that the Mexican government in a period where there was much more bilateral maintenance of the program withdrew Braceros temporarily from southern California because of the antipathy express towards them. So I’m working at Brown University in roughly 2003, 2004. And my new colleague, Steve Lubar, had been working at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History for most of his career, was hired to start the public humanities program at Brown. And his colleague who runs the section of the National Museum of American History Work & Life, Peter Liebel, uh, had discovered all of these photos by a man named Leonard Nadel, who had worked alongside Ernesto Galarza in the mid fifties, roughly, I think it was 1956 documenting his attempts not only to connect with foreign workers, but to actually document the Braceros that were coming across. And so he had all these wonderful black and white photos, high quality, but didn’t have a story to go with them. And so appealed to Steve and said, you know, do you have anybody at Brown that actually writes about Latino history? And because I had Steve put us in touch, so Peter shows up in Providence. I call a student of mine who’s a niece of Braceros who were now living in Chicago. Her name is Mirella Losa. And that was the first meeting where we sat with Peter and he showed us the photos. Now some of them very famous, there’s one where Braceros are essentially naked or nearly completely naked crossing the border. A man who’s masked, with a kind of a spray gun pointed at the Bracero’s face spraying DDT directly into his face.
Lindsey: These were at border crossings where individuals were coming into the country specifically for this?
Matt: Yeah. So you know, specifically it’s in the moment, it’s delousing Mexicans, but the assumption of the non-hygienic, dirty, ill-kept Mexican proceeds that moment. Second of all, they’re expendable. The man that’s actually shooting them in the face knows the dangers of DDT. He’s got a mask on, right? And yet they’re shooting it directly into the man’s face. It’s really important to note at this point, too, that the concept of the Bracero, the word Bracero comes from the word “brazos” or arms. And so there’s a literal disembodiment of the worker, bring us your arms to do the labor, but we don’t care about the rest of your body. So, you know, that that image says a lot, and, in terms of Peter, he understood like that’s a powerful image and there’s lots more, but he didn’t know what to do with it. He wanted to ask historians. And so he, he turned to us after showing the photos and said, well, you know, if you’re to build an exhibit around this, what would you do? And we said, well, if you look at the dates for the Bracero program, these men are in their seventies, eighties, and some may even be in their nineties. If you don’t go out there and interview these folks, they’re going to die. And you’re going to miss a at least an opportunity to build an archive of their voices. And at that point too, we, we said we would interview the men, we’d interview the children and even grandchildren and definitely the wives and girlfriends that had been a part of this program on both sides of the border.
Lindsey: What’s a story that stuck with you from a Bracero?
Matt: The one that we immediately encountered in Coachella, southern California. By the way, we showed up and we didn’t know what we would find we put out advertisements on Spanish speaking radio. And we ended up coming to a community organization auditorium that had about, 50% was waiting for us at 8:00 AM in the morning. They’d been waiting since five. They’re farm workers. But what was interesting, one of the things that we uncovered and since the diversity of the Braceros we met indigenous Braceros who are Mixtec Indians coming in from Oaxaca, had actually a kind of a nominal grasp of Spanish and English and more proficient in their native language. And they experienced discrimination from their fellow Braceros who were, they were Mestizos. Mestizo meaning predominantly what’s presumed to be the Spanish Indian mixture that makes, makes up the Mexicanidad. But, quickly it was, it was revealed to us that indigenous Mexican people were sort of absent in the history and the memory of the Bracero program. And here they were telling their stories of discrimination before they even crossed the border. And then once they cross the border they talked about the special skills that they had. This one guy who was a, what they call a Palmetto, he walked on the tree tops of Palms picking dates. Very, very dangerous work. His name was Isias, oh, I’m going to mess up his last name. I’m sorry. But, but he talked very wistfully about his adventures. Like a lot of the Braceros, despite the popular perception of it being exploitative, the new knowledge of experiencing discrimination as Indian in this mostly Mestizo program. They also talked about the adventure of they, they loved being in the United States. They loved being honored and appreciated for the work that they could give. And so there was a mix of both sorrow but also pride in the things that they achieved.
Lindsey: I guess I’m just wondering like what was his path to the U.S. border, the Mexican government advertise in Oaxaca? How did the, I mean, this was an agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to provide this additional labor, like what was the Mexican government’s participation in this because it must have been very involved.
Matt: Well, so Mexico stood to benefit from this in a couple of ways. They encouraged people to come to these receiving stations in urban Mexico. And then they were put on trains up to northwest Mexico and then bused up to the border. But they encouraged an abundance of workers to come to these places. Mexico’s interest in this was partly political because they worried that coming out of the revolution as a private land is consolidated- they’re afraid of another rebellion, another revolution. So this was a way of getting people off the land, out of those communities and into a system that would sort of channel that revolutionary spirit out, literally out of the country. The other ways in which they spun it was that they would go to the presumptively modernized America and learn the latest technologies and modern agriculture. And then because they were temporary, they come back to Mexico and bring all of that know-how back to Mexico and help Mexico modernize its agriculture. Little did they respect or know that they were just going to be exploited as field laborers. They were going to be given implements like the short handed hoe that forced them to bend over and really destroy their backs that later was outlawed as part of the United Farm Workers push for justice in the fields.
Lindsey: To ensure that the laborers would come back to Mexico, some of their wage was withheld in the United States. Is that correct? And then the Mexican government was supposed to pay the workers?
Matt: Yes. So it was 10% of their wages was collected usually by U.S. banks. Wells Fargo was one. And then it was sent to the Mexican state for disbursement, we wouldn’t say returned from United States to Mexico. And this became a huge scandal and the origins of the modern Bracero justice movement. Initially there was this accusation that wells Fargo had absconded their money and it wasn’t paid back to them but in fact it was discovered that it’s actually the Mexican state that absconded the money and never gave it to them. So there were mass rebellions and demonstrations. Years later after the Bracero program had finished we actually started collecting amidst that social justice movement. I remember going to San Bernadino and one of the primary leaders of an organization called Bracero pro a, his name is Ventura Gutierrez who helped facilitate some of our interviews. He was leading a transnational movement to get the 10% back. And ultimately it forced the state to acknowledge, the Mexican state to acknowledge that they did abscond the money. And they offered just pay off the Braceros $3,000. Those that were living who could prove that they had served in the program.
Lindsey: I imagine that’s inadequate.
Matt: Totally, totally. I mean, can you imagine the interest, that didn’t even cover the like one one or two years, the interest. Right. So, and I don’t remember the exact day. It was sometime after we started collecting and some accepted because of the, their age, they were very old. They’re going to die. They might as well take something. Some took it because they were dubious of the government ever improving on their offer, but many actually resisted. And they actually used images of their exploitation, being stripped, being sprayed with DDT in the face, they use those images that actually Peter introduced to us Nadel’s photos as a kind of guilt trip against the Mexican government.
Lindsey: Ah, as an organizing tool.
Matt: Yeah, it’s an amazing story of a modern social justice movement of really elderly men and their, and their families to extract an agreement.
Lindsey: It must’ve felt pretty good for you all who had worked on the archive project, having helped to likely bring more recognition to those images of miss treatment in the light. You know, the other thing that I found so fascinating, so initially, right, Roosevelt talked about, you know, the, the Mexican labor coming to United States as kind of part of the war effort, right? Like an act of support for the United States. And really speaking in such positive terms about this labor force, really what he was talking about was ultimately a very, you know, in 1942, a really small part of the program overall because it was tens of thousands of workers, but then became hundreds of thousands of workers after the war. And then there was this Operation Wetback I suppose, which was this, you know, also agreement between the U.S. and Mexico to bring these workers back to Mexico in the fifties, which was just shocking that it was named that for one thing as an official government program. Initially, this immigration was sort of celebrated, at least, you know, in words, not certainly by actions and certainly how these, these workers are received and treated on the ground. But then, you know, this also became the beginning of a really permanent border presence at the U.S.-Mexico border. And it seems like this whole sort of trajectory of the Bracero program really came to define so much of our current border situation and guest worker programs, and the immigration system, overall. I wonder if you could just speak to that because it’s such a, such a strange sort of push and pull right, of, of the U.S. understanding the vital importance of the Mexican labor and, but then at the same time deporting all these people in the 50s with the help of Mexico and then also the U.S. establishing a permanent program for guest workers. Can you sort of speak to what you make of all of this and also, you know, this deportation program and in the 50s, why was, why was that initiated?
Matt: So the popular perception of the Bracero program is that they were the sort of international component of what’s frequently referred to as the greatest generation, right? They saved the crop. The reality is that 7% of the contracts filled happened during World War II. So this premise that they were needed to save the crops that they were needed because the workforce was going to the front lines was frankly just B.S.
Lindsey: You don’t think that it was never the intention for it really served that purpose?
Matt: No, I think it was an excuse to get access to labor that was exploitable. That was, was knowledgeable actually, you know, as an agricultural state, Mexico, there were people that had been traveling to the United States as early as right after the U.S.-Mexican war. And this was just a way to kind of create a regulatory system by which they can bring Mexican workers in that they can control, they can keep the cost of labor down, and then to expel those that proved themselves to be radical and a problem in the fields. It’s the main reason why farm work is unorganized, is the most exploited work force in the United States throughout the 20th century. The other thing that they did, which is I think noteworthy, is that they increasingly saw undocumented immigrants coming in because, you know, because Mexico was willing so many Mexicans into, indiscriminately into the program, and there was never enough contracts to meet the demand that farm owners just began to see the benefits of circumventing the program and the government and just employing undocumented workers for less money than the Braceros. And so that’s why undocumented workers increasingly supplanted Braceros. The federal government tried to regulate that in these years and that’s why Operation Wetback got started and they’re trying to manage that flow. And so they’re literally taking undocumented workers that they capture, and then they’ll put them through the revolving door that goes into Mexico. They’ll give them a contract and bring them back in as Braceros. This process was known as “drying out the wet”. So wetbacks were shortened to just “wets” and then they had this unofficial official process of “drying out the wets”. But because of the demand for labor on the northern side of the border, the United States, because of the struggles in Mexico and the grinding poverty, and the Mexican can state trying to create a kind of safety valve for that potentially revolutionary population, there was always more people needing the work not enough contracts for a system that could keep up with that demand. And so ultimately, undocumented workers kind of overwhelmed the Bracero program.
Lindsey: And I guess, you know, the, the root of this relationship between the U.S. and Mexico, I’ve heard you talk about really this is sort of the economic disparity and imbalance. I wondered if you could just speak to that a bit, like the root cause of why workers from Mexico want to come to the United States?
Matt: Oh Gosh. I goes so deep, right? First of all, the United States and Mexico in balance benefits, the United States. The standard living wage in Mexico is far lower than the United States. So, Mexicans will continue to come even if they’re being paid 30 cents on the dollar, right? But if you go further back in time, I mean, part of this is a kind of semi colonial relationship. As my Latin American historian friends will say, “don’t say semi colonial” colonial relationship between Mexico and the United States whereby you had companies like Phelps Dodge going in and extracting iron ore and gold ore from northern Mexico and shipping it across the border. If you look at, for example, oil extraction prior to Pemex and the nationalization of the oil industry in Mexico, it’s standard oil that is taking that money, excuse me, taking that oil, and taking that money and siphoning it north, right? And then all of the railroads that are built in Mexico, they’re built in part with U.S. capital and it’s going through El Paso to extract the wealth that’s, that’s coming out of Mexico into the United States. So almost all economic enterprises all profit that’s being produced within Mexico in the 19th and early 20th century is directly flowing to the United States, undergirding this imbalance that is not as severe as it once was, but it’s still prominent in today’s relationship between Mexico and the United States.
Lindsey: What are the threads between this population of Braceros coming into the U.S., the organizing in California, and the establishment of the H-2A program as, as we know it today?
Matt: Well, you know, it’s funny that we say the Bracero program ended in 1964 but it never really ended. You know, because the H-2A program, guest worker programs that have been with us, they’ve mutated into a much more of a global phenomenon. It’s not just Mexican workers, it’s still like three fourths Latin American workers. But what’s interesting is that the guest worker program, particularly the H-2A has always offered as a kind of solution to our current immigration crisis. But there’s a kind of collective amnesia and we were noticing this when we’re collecting in 2006. This was a period in which the last great attempt to build a comprehensive immigration reform act was in process. This was the Kennedy/McCain attempt. And what was so interesting and kind of surreal about that, that process is that they were, they were proposing a new guest worker program. I think they called it an an H5 or something like that, without citing or even acknowledging that there was exploitation in the original Bracero program. It was just presumed to be the best path. It was presumed that if there’s bilateral management, if the federal government’s involved, then no exploitation, no abdication of the terms of the agreement could happen. But of course it did happen from 1942 to 64. And so we were, we continued to use those lessons and use the words of the Braceros who are experienced these things, even though there was regulation of this guest worker program to say, “hey, this is not the panacea. This is not the cure all that you all believe it to be” in particular people on the, in the more moderate side, I won’t say left or right, but moderate side propose a guest worker program as a kind of mill road in terms of immigration reform.
Lindsey: Well, the program has improved considerably. I mean, there are problems with the program, certainly. And, and not to say that their exploitation doesn’t happen, but I wonder, do you think that’s true that this, the modern H-2A program is better than the Bracero program and if not, a guest worker program, what is the path forward?
Matt: Yeah, I mean the H-2A program has all of these provisions whereby you, they’re going to get housing, they’re going to be treated fairly, they’re going to be paid a livable wage, but there were incidents of slavery in Florida. There was incidents of people having their visas or their passports taken away and held hostage until they served a certain amount of time without pay in fields across the United States. So it’s like anything, whether it’s safety and health regulations on the job, it’s all in the amount of funding you give to regulation of those regulations, right? So that would be the first and most important thing. What I think is important though is recognize that we live in a world where people are on the move. I mean, I’m living, I live in Vermont, this state, I’m sitting in New Hampshire, I speak, but I’m a Vermonter. Vermont’s primary agriculture industry is dairy and they are dependent on primarily immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, right? And there are mostly undocumented. So they’re coming anyways, right? You don’t need a guest worker program to bring people here. What you need is pathways to citizenship. You need security for those people. If they’re not intending to stay, you need to not harass them because they’re important part of the local, state, and regional economy. And yet that’s all they’re getting right now, because of our proximity to Canada, because we’re approximately the border, Isis active within a hundred miles of that border. And they’re just getting harassed and picked up in front of a grocery store so that they live in a condition that is, dare I say, close to slavery, enforced by the surveillance that exists. So from my point of view, it’s not about creating a program that sanctions their temporary existence, but honoring their existence and their contributions already and making it possible for them to continue to make that contribution.
Lindsey: You know, the undocumented workers that are currently in a country, you know, they have quite a harrowing journey to get to get to those farms. And you know, so much of the national conversation these days is specifically about the border. And we have, how do we manage the border and who comes across? Do you have thoughts on just immigration in general? Like should there, I, would you advocate for just a more free flow of, of workers across, across the border? What is the thinking on that? Like what would be a more just system outside of a guest worker program?
Matt: Well, I mean, I think anytime you’re crossing an international border, you have to regulate like who’s coming in and why. And I don’t, I don’t think that we should just open the borders and let people cross in. I mean, you know, I think we should document who’s coming, who’s going. But what I would say is, is that those border crossings and border management be there to facilitate a peaceful, just, mobility that is actually serving, if done right, both sending country and receiving country. Right? So as long as we’re ensuring that they’re not being forced into the desert to cross, that they’re able to come in a timely manner so that they’re not missing the season in which they’re working, right? All these things are happening as a consequence of the punitive border management and the kind of racialized border management that’s happening at our borders today. You know, because today the United States is so dependent on sectors of their economy, of our economy is so dependent on immigrant labor. I mean they’re just integral to what to who we are as a society.
Lindsey: So, you know for me, this brings up another question. I mean, so much of the organizing around farm labor in New York State, there is, there are a couple of bills that are out there right now to allow farm workers to organize to pay over time, etc. And that conversation is really directed at farmers, specifically. And I’m asking you this because now you’re, you’re among us as a farmer and farmers really, they’re in a very difficult position because there is a labor shortage. And I think some would argue there’s a labor shortage because of the wages, right? Like farm workers aren’t making enough to justify the work. But the farmer, right, if they raise the wage, I mean we, this is something we deal with on our farm right now looking at our budget for this year, we pay a lot for labor, a lot. And like we also are very aware of sort of what we believe to be sort of the upper limit of what a consumer will pay for our vegetables and our, and our CSA shares. And that is highly influenced by a much more industrial scale of agriculture elsewhere in the country like, or internationally, right? Like what, what those consumers are seeing at the grocery store. So I guess I, in my mind, there’s some other sort of reckoning that needs to happen about the price of food. There is a very large consumer presence that’s rallying around farm workers, which is wonderful on one hand that these individuals are coming forward in solidarity with farm workers, but at the same time I feel like we have to help farmers make economic sense of this problem so they can, you know, have the ability to charge a bit more to reflect what they should be paid and what their farm workers should be paid. I guess I’m wondering where do you see that conversation and where’s there room for that conversation and discussion?
Matt: Ya, I mean the young, socially conscious farmers being squeezed by the cost of production and the expectation of low cost or low prices for food. I mean, I think that we as a society have to take our collective wealth and redistribute it to a place that supports young farmers and the kind of production and consumption we want to see in our society. Perhaps there needs to be more support from that on a policy level and a budgetary level for farmers that are doing it ethically. So, you know it does sound like wealth redistribution to some extent, but I actually think that we need to think about the ways in which we spend tax dollars to produce the kind of results that we want. Too often, too, for too long we’ve been spending tax dollars to support an extractive approach to agriculture that benefits big corporations.
Lindsey: So my last question to you, as a historian, what is the most important thing that we should know about this, about the Bracero program and what is something that you wish policymakers knew about this program and the general, you know, general public knew about this program and, and this history of guest workers in the United States that should be influencing our decisions today?
Matt: That for the majority of their existence, they’ve been exploitative, that they have not contributed to farmworker justice, and that they have enhanced the profit making ability of the most fortunate and most privileged in the agricultural economy.
Lindsey: Matt, I’ve learned so much. Thank you for your incredible work archiving the stories of this community that has played such an important role in the history of the country. And has, has not received the attention and respect that it needs. And the justice I should say as well.
Matt: Thank you, Lindsey.
Speaker 6: This is an interview with Felix Gallego Reyes on April 15th in the city of Oxnard, California.
speaker 7: [in Spanish] We lived here for a few months because he was contracted with the Braceros.
Speaker 7: [in Spanish] I don’t know what to call it, I was a Bracero.
Speaker 8: [in Spanish} My first question in, how did you feel in the Bracero Program?
Matt: So is that it?
Lindsey: That’s it.
Matt: If you have, so we’re hosting a conference on April 26 and 27. It’s called “Cows, Land, and Labor” and I can send you information about it, but it’s going to involve New York farmers, dairy farmers. And also Vermonters and New Hampshire folks.
Lindsey: That’s terrific. Yeah, well we will definitely include, maybe we’ll include some of your audio right now about it. But we’ll be sure to include that in the show notes for today. I’m sure that would be of interest. Thank you, Matt, to see photos and learn more about the Cows, Land, and Labor conference, Matt is organizing at Dartmouth on April 26th, check out our show notes and go to cowsandlabor.com. This looks like a super interesting event combining so many important issues. If you haven’t already, please take a minute to rate and review this show, or just tell somebody something that you learned today. Recommendations, ratings, and review on how people find us and honestly, they really help our team. This episode was edited by Hannah Beal and it was recorded at the studios of Radio Kingston. See you next week.