Last Wednesday, I heard Mary Jo Dudely, Senior Extension Associate Director of the Cornell Farmworkers Program, and Justine Vanden Heuvel, Associate Professor in Plant Sciences, discuss farming/agriculture in America. This is a topic that I do not know alot about, and I was amazed to first learn about how much land New York devotes to agriculture and about the extraordinary amounts of food being produced. One interesting point brought up was that, when the average person buys a tomato at Wegmans, they rarely think about where the tomato really came from. As we enjoy dinner in the company of friends, how often do we think about the manual labor and long processes it took to provide the delicious food we eat? I know that I rarely think about where the food I eat comes from, the taste and cooking is always the first point of comment around any dinner table. The hard labor and cost put into the food is abstracted from the food itself. Now that I am more aware, I appreciate all that it took to produce the food we eat and agriculture’s vital link in society.

Another interesting point is that, as a nation, we are fully dependent on the hard work of our farmers to provide us with the nourishment we need. Despite the importance of the agriculture industry/farming, there is still a negative stigma attached to farm work. The hard, physical labor invovled may seem distasteful to the average American, but what would America be with broken agriculture? Agriculture is a multi-billion dollar industry, and its workers are largely undocumented immigrants from Mexico. It is easy to become distracted by the current state of the political world from the issues that really matter to the integrity of our country.  We should focus on immigration reform instead of infeasible ideas like Trump’s “wall” and provide all immigrants with the opportunity for happiness and security, a dream we all strive for.