Friends,
Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you are looking forward to a peaceful and fun celebration with loved ones. This year and every year, I’m grateful for my wonderful family and the opportunity of a lifetime to represent Virginia in the Senate.
As some of us prepare to tuck in and eat a turkey dinner, I wanted to make sure you heard about an exciting win for Virginia’s economy and poultry producers. Now, we can sell our turkey to India, creating an enormous new market to grow our poultry exports!
Here’s how it happened. For many years, India placed extremely high tariffs on importing turkey from America. Since India has an enormous population, that cut Virginia poultry producers out of a huge potential market for their products.
In my capacity as Co-Chair of the bipartisan Senate India Caucus, I set to work to see if a little old fashioned diplomacy couldn’t grease the wheels for Virginia’s poultry farmers. I directly pushed on trade leadership, and after that effort, I announced a trade agreement and tariff reduction that makes it financially possible for India to import American turkey for the first time!
This is great news because we now have a huge new market for our turkey farmers to grow their businesses. It also creates more downstream business for folks that work in our ports, trade, and transportation, because we’re going to need to ship all those birds across the ocean somehow!
I’m thrilled to fight for our turkey producers and continue to push for policy that supports farmers across Virginia. I’m keeping up my fight to pass a full, bipartisan Farm Bill too, because I know there’s a lot more work to be done for producers of all types in every corner of the Commonwealth.
If you work in agriculture, I also want to take a moment to say thank you for the work you do to feed Virginia and the world. Your work is indispensable to keeping food on tables across the nation. Happy Thanksgiving! If you’re interested in reaching out to me about agriculture or another issue that is important to you, I encourage you to reach out to me using the form on my Senate website. You can also follow me on X, Facebook, Threads, or Bluesky. I look forward to hearing from you.
Sincerely,
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