WESLACO — The border counties between Brownsville and Laredo are home to some 70,000 migrant students whose studies are constantly interrupted when their families travel northward to harvest crops. Grades suffer, dropout rates are high, and few earn college degrees.
“Even fewer study agriculture,” says Celina Wille, the 4-H youth and development specialist at the Texas A&M Agricultural Research and Extension Center at Weslaco.
“But if anybody should benefit career-wise from the food and fiber industry,” she said, “it should be these school children whose families devote their entire lives to harvesting crops for the rest of us. That’s why the Extension Service, the (Texas Education Agency’s) Region One Service Center, and the Kellogg Foundation started this migrant youth conference that we hope will become an annual event.”
Some 120 junior and senior high school migrant students from 38 school districts in South Texas were chosen by their counselors to take part in the recent conference titled “Food for Thought; Exploring Careers in the Food and Fiber System.”
Students toured agricultural research laboratories at the Weslaco Center, spoke to ag industry leaders and ag researchers, toured the H&H Foods facilities in Mercedes, and met with college financial aid officers.
“Unfortunately,” said Wille, “migrant students are usually exposed only to the labor aspect of agriculture and not to the many lucrative and professional careers to be had in the food and fiber industry. In this one-day event, we explained the many careers there are, the education required to land those type jobs, and how professionals in the food and fiber industry spend a typical day.”
Valley native and retired Weslaco Center pepper breeder Dr. Ben Villalon was the keynote speaker at the youth conference. He spoke of working on his father’s farms as a youngster, never dreaming of making agriculture his life’s work.
“Like most of these migrant students, I wanted to get as far away from farming as I could, but then I realized farmers here needed help, they needed better varieties. So I devoted my life to improving agriculture for people like my father. And I tell these kids to keep their eyes open to the many career possibilities in agriculture.”
Villalon developed the mild jalapeno, which revolutionized the food industry and made picante sauces the nation’s top condiment, surpassing the sale of ketchup by a margin of two to one.
Surveys conducted at the beginning and end of the conference showed that many students left the event with new attitudes. One student, when first asked what she thought of agriculture, responded with the word “plants.” At the end of the day her response was “industry.” Another first wrote, “hard work,” but later defined agriculture as “business jobs.”
“That was precisely our goal,” Wille said, “to change their stereotypical thinking about an industry that has so much more to offer than what they’ve been exposed to.”
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