Christina Kohler Returns: Farm Workers not getting vaccinated, managing farm employees, easter eggs

About this episode

Christina Kohler, an egg-processing manager at a 250,000-bird New York farm and Young Farmer chair for the New York Farm Bureau, returns to discuss a specific institutional failure: farm workers, despite being federally designated "essential" and prioritized on the national 1B vaccine list, were excluded from New York State's actual 1B rollout — a gap Kohler discovered state leadership was simply unaware of (a senator told her farm workers were "already receiving" vaccines when they weren't). She details the added vulnerability of the state's 25,000 migrant farm workers, who face language barriers, shared housing, lack of transportation and rural broadband, compounding the vaccine-access gap. The conversation moves into New York's overtime-threshold labor law (60-hour overtime trigger, contested efforts to reduce it to 40) and its unintended consequences for small-margin farms and labor availability. A substantial middle section applies Rob Henderson's "luxury beliefs" concept and Hume's is-ought distinction to food-system debates: Kohler argues cage-free/free-range distinctions are widely misunderstood by consumers and that urban/university audiences hold confident opinions about farming built on incomplete information, while noting an emerging alliance between farm groups and NYC legislators over unrelated live-animal-market legislation as a bridge for mutual education. She closes with detailed craft knowledge — egg-processing machine "sweet spots," Julian date codes, best egg-boiling and dyeing techniques — and reflects on hands-on people-management lessons from running a 10-person team that blends retirees, high schoolers, and college students around shifting availability, closing with an enthusiastic pitch for the Articulate Ventures Network as a low-pressure community-building resource.

“We're not receiving [vaccines], we're not eligible... I've lobbied at the state level and the federal level, and our senate majority leader, Andrea Stewart Cousins, when I brought up this issue... she said, you're already receiving them.”

“Hume's guillotine describes the idea of is versus ought... a lot of young people are going to school and they're being taught a lot of oughts about the way the world ought to look... without actually having a functional knowledge of what is, you're completely divorced from reality.”

“The machine... has its sweet spot. If you're running at 205 cases an hour or 215, it'll just run well, but anything above that or if you slow it down too slow, things start to malfunction.”

Key moments

• ~6-15%: Discovery that NY state excluded farm workers from the federal 1B vaccine-priority list; a state senator's ignorance of the gap.
• ~19-24%: Vulnerability of 25,000 migrant farm workers — language, housing, transportation, broadband barriers to vaccine access.
• ~26-33%: NY overtime-threshold labor law (60hr→40hr proposal) and its practical effect on small-margin egg operations.
• ~38-45%: "Luxury beliefs" and Hume's guillotine (is vs. ought) applied to food-system debates; cage-free vs. free-range misconceptions.
• ~57-66%: Urban-rural legislative alliance forming over live-animal-market bans as unexpected bridge for mutual understanding.
• ~74-80%: Egg-processing machine "sweet spot" throughput and hands-on team-management philosophy blending retirees, high schoolers, and college students.

Notable quotes

“We're not receiving [vaccines], we're not eligible... [the senator] said, you're already receiving them.”

“A lot of young people are being taught a lot of oughts about the way the world ought to look... without a functional knowledge of what is, you're completely divorced from reality.”

“Half of our farm workers, 25,000 farm workers, are migrant workers... vaccines needing to be refrigerated... we don't have a mobile unit that could come out and reach these rural areas.”

“If you're running the machine at 205 cases an hour or 215, it'll just run well, but anything above or below that, things start to malfunction.”