Thanksgiving Owes It All to Them

Thursday is Thanksgiving Day. Time to salute the folks who brought you your dinner (and we don’t mean those behind the deli counter at Ralphs). We’re talking about the nation’s farmers, of course. According to the Census Bureau:

* North Carolina is the nation’s turkey capital. Farmers there produced 1.3 billion pounds of turkey in 1998, nearly one-fifth the U.S. total of 7 billion pounds. Other top 10 turkey-producing states include: Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, Arkansas, California, South Carolina, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

* U.S. farmers grew 539 million pounds of cranberries in 1998. Wisconsin was tops in cranberry production, followed by Massachusetts and New Jersey.

* North Carolina, Louisiana and California led the nation in sweet-potato production, which totaled nearly 600,000 tons in 1998.

Thanksgiving may be an all-American holiday, but foreigners are providing plenty of the trimmings as well. The United States ran a $6.9-million trade deficit in live turkeys and a $24.7-million deficit in cranberries in 1998, according to the Census Bureau. Canada was the chief culprit in this trade imbalance. Time to ship all those holiday fruitcakes north.