Wayne Smith: Tomato King of Alabama

The MSM is still pushing the narrative that “crops are rotting on the vine” in Alabama, the Alabama economy has been destroyed by HB 56, and that there are “jobs Americans won’t do.”

YWC readers have good reasons to be skeptical of these liberal propagadists who masquerade as journalists. In Florida, superfluous blueberry production in Central Florida driven by diet fads derailed immigration reform in the Sunshine State. In Georgia, Morris Enterprises has a $30 million dollar business growing Vidalia onions and has received almost $1.8 million dollars in farm subsidies from the federal government.

The beleagured farmers of Alabama who are most commonly cited by the MSM are Wayne and Leroy Smith of Steele, Alabama. There are other tomato farmers (such as those in the video below) who have given interviews to the media about “crops rotting on the vine” and about how their “family members” have been forced to flee to other states.

How big is the tomato industry in Alabama? Tomatos account for a whopping 0.3 percent of Alabama agricultural commodities.

As we have already seen, the biggest crops in Alabama by a mile are corn, soybeans, cotton, and peanuts which have never been “picked” by illegal aliens. Greenhouse crops (including tomatoes) are also grown in the state, but that is not what is being referred to here.

Wayne Smith grows tomatoes on an awesome 75 acres in St. Clair County. Field workers get paid $2 for every 25-pound box of tomatoes they fill. Unemployment benefits provide up to $265 a week while a minimum wage job, at $7.25 an hour for 40 hours, brings in $290 a week.

What would happen to commercial tomato production if every illegal alien in Alabama vanished tomorrow? Surely, it would collapse, right?

In 2009, 1,400 acres in Alabama were planted in tomatoes and 1,300 acres were harvested. In 1973, 9,300 acres in Alabama were planted in tomatoes, and 9,300 acres were harvested.

In other words, 7x as many tomatoes were grown in Alabama in the early 1970s before over 100,000 illegal aliens were allowed to settle in this state, only a small fraction of whom are farm laborers.

Before there was a single illegal alien from Latin America in Alabama, native Alabamians produced 7x as many tomatoes as we do now, but according to The Washington Post and the New York Times and CBS News, Whites and African-Americans in Alabama are racially unfit to grow vegetables like tomatoes. 

In reality, it was a common thing for Whites and African-Americans in Alabama to grow vegetable gardens and to raise livestock before the supermarket and the welfare state. Most families in rural Alabama were engaged in agriculture. In many places, this agrarian tradition has survived down to the present day.

You won’t find such critical facts being reported in the MSM though which always adapts the truth to the fit the mold of its open borders “progressive” political ideology.