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The Daily Tar Heel

Column: Students shouldn’t devalue farming

Danielle Herman

Danielle Herman

It’s 9 a.m., already growing hot, and off go the church bells. For 15 minutes they ring from the top of Marcus United Methodist Church, which sits across the street from N.C. State University’s Sandhills Research Station, where I trudge across sandy fields carrying trays of baby peanut plants.

I am in the middle of a nowhere that really is somewhere. Jackson Springs, N.C., is an unincorporated crossroads community an hour-and-a-half southeast of Raleigh. It’s isolated and houses a variety of North Carolina’s most important crops. Maybe there aren’t a lot of people, but there is a lot of life.

Once the bells stop, in the silence that stretches across the field, I start to think about the contradictions in front of me. I am working for some of the most intelligent people in crop science — people who understand quantitative genetics and can complete Punnett squares in their sleep.

And then there are the people who work for the station, many of whom probably never had the opportunity to go to college. And then I think about how that’s the case for a lot of industries — and how it took being surrounded by plants to figure that out.

In between semesters studying English and history here at UNC, I spend most of my time in what feels like an alternate universe: the peanut genetics lab in the Department of Crop Science at N.C. State University.

There is a weird and long story behind how I got the job, but what’s important is that I’ve learned just as much from working there than from anything I’ve done at UNC.

I’ve planted seeds and young plants by hand, hoed nutsedge from fields just 10 minutes from N.C. State’s campus and ridden around on a combine harvester during a wheat harvesting event that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

So go ahead — cue the farmer jokes. Make fun of N.C. State for being redneck because it still focuses so heavily on agriculture.

But agriculture is a huge part of North Carolina culture, and it’s something many UNC students are distanced from because we don’t have the same programs here.

From what I’ve seen in my limited experiences with the state’s agriculture research through N.C. State, agriculture is an all-encompassing industry, employing people who have little education but also those like my boss, who have dedicated their lives to genetic crossing and plant studies to improve farmers’ yields.

It is a weird combination of many types of people. It is a microcosm of what makes up our state — all kinds of people from all walks of life contributing in a small way to our food, which is something none of us can live without.

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