Harvest of Shame and Ag Education

Hey, those of you out there who are teaching 205 with a focus on food politics, consider showing Edward R. Murrow's famous documentary "Harvest of Shame,"which debuted on network television in November 1960--right before Thanksgiving, the time of year when we are enjoying plentiful food. It is a documentary about migrant farmworkers and their working and life conditions. It is entitled "Harvest of Shame" for good reason.

I think it's interesting to show the documetary to your students (or part of it), then ask them to read Eric Schlosser's essay "In the Strawberry" Fields" from the _Atlantic Monthly_, which is about migrant workers (many of them undocumented workers from Mexico) harvesting strawberries. This piece, although written forty some years later shows how little has changed in terms of working conditions for many migrant farmworkers.....Indeed, a good question is "What has changed (or not) in the working conditions of this labor force?" This, then, can lead to all kind of interesting discussions about globalization, immigration policy, racism, food politics, etc.

In my 205 class, we have started our unit on immigration policy and immigration issues with this very assignment.

There is also a documentary called "New Harvest, Old Shame," which updates "Harvest of Shame."

The other thing on my mind tonight is ag education. We don't have an agriculture program/major here at Syracuse, so it's probably not on the radar screen for most academically inclined folks here, but if you have ever taught or will teach at a land grant university or if you are considering a degree in agriculture, consider this:

"Ag Gets Postsecondary Boost


The rising interest in agriculture education isn't limited to high school students. Universities, too, have attracted a diverse group of enrollees thanks to progressive changes in curriculum and industry demand for workers.

Enrollment in ag ed programs at land-grant colleges climbed to an all-time high of nearly 118,000 last summer, reported the Los Angeles Times. That's up from 64,000 in the late 1980s. The new student population is more than 50 percent urbanite, 40 percent female and 10 percent ethnic minority, according to the Food and Agricultural Education Information System, a clearinghouse based at Texas A&M University.

"We woke up a few years ago and said, 'Hey, no one's walking in our door,' Joe Stasulat, director of an agriculture internship program at the University of California-Davis, told the Times last July. So he, along with colleagues at ag schools around the country, overhauled the program.

Today's university-level agriculture programs lean much more toward lab- based research. Their students are just as likely to be studying genetically altered mice under fluorescent lights and engineering high-tech farm equipment than they are to be rotating crops. More undergraduates now study natural resources (such as urban forestry and range management) than study animal science.

University educators cite the availability of jobs as the top reason for the increase in ag enrollments. One California dean said industry demand outnumbers graduates by about 3 to 1. "

Now what this article doesn't really say is that agricultural economics is a big major for a lot of ag folks and the destination may be large agribusiness firms, not farms. What I'm interested in is how many beginning farmer programs these ag education programs sponsor. Are we producing more bureaucrats or more farmers? Now there's a place for the bureaucrats, of course....but since the farming population is aging, we are in need of beginning farmer programs, sustainable agriculture programs, training in organic agriculture. Is that happening in higher education ag programs, which are funded and supported by agribusiness research dollars? Or does that education mostly take place outside the land grant system?

Worth looking into....Also, a lot (and maybe most) of agriculture education in terms of learning to farm happens through apprenticeships and non-school environments.