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.
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. 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.