This week I didn’t arrive at the Rose Cafe until later, which meant that I missed some of the talk.  But I did get to hear some thoughts from both of our guests, Justine Vanden Heuvel and Mary Jo Dudely, in their talk about farming.  One of the topics discussed at length was migrant farm workers.  I hadn’t realized that there were migrant farm workers this far north.  I had assumed that most illegal immigrant workers would work closer to where they came from, or maybe just not as far north as New York.  And when I found out that the entire northern strip of NY bordering Canada and Lake Ontario was simultaneously a very fertile growing land and a place where border patrols could easily deport illegals, I was quite shocked.

As a person born and raised in the heart of Manhattan, I knew very little about what farm working actually entailed.  Every summer my family and I would go out to Lancaster, PA, but that just showed me what farms looked like, not how they worked.  At the very least I did know that my food did not come from the supermarket, but actually from some farm somewhere.  This talk was very enlightening as I learned more about how difficult it is to run a farm and to work on a farm, and what people work on farms.