Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

In this newly released documentary "American Harvest - The Real Truth About Immigrant America," Angelo Mancuso, director of the film asks what happened to America's old fashioned work ethic. The answer: it's the immigrants, stupid:

Angelo writes:
Let's face it, there are certain jobs that some Americans won't do. And some of them involve hard work.

Whatever happened to a good old-fashioned work ethic?

This is why many Americans complain about the immigration issue, some of them don’t find physical labor or hot and dirty conditions appealing.

Some jobs like agriculture and farming have gone the way of the migrant worker. If you were an employer whom would you rather have working for you? A hard working immigrant or a soft lazy school kid that is being taught to go to college and get an education instead of learning a trade.

The problem is so complex that no single black and white solution will due.

Somewhere we need to find a balance between immigrant labor and encouraging our young people to learn skills and trades with a purpose as if their entire existence depended on it. This is where immigrant outperforms their American born counterparts.

If you have skills and a work ethic then an employer will find you desirable and want to pay you more money than your less-skilled less-industrious counterpart.

In the mean time we need to fix our broken immigration system.

If you understood the backlog for the ineffectual legal immigration process you would understand why moderate voices are calling for immigration reform.

People and businesses want a legal system that works. We need to compromise on immigration reform.

We need to encourage reasonable and rational debate.

As March goes in Kansas City, it was an unusual weather day. It felt more like New York City. The air was damp and cold, the sky was gray. Hopping on the Crops in the City tour bus at 7am, I never had time to check the weather forecast or maybe I would have taken the Local Chefs tour. We arrived at a farmhouse in Kansas City, Kansas, on a deserted road which was Huns Garden, a transitional organic farm that is operated by Hmong farmers, Pov and Chaxamone Huns.  I reluctantly got off the warm and cozy tour bus and traipsed across Pov’s fields with the rest of the group, over the remains of last year’s crops, over the charred fragments of what looked like tall grass. The wind pushed us all from behind and my hands and ears became numb. But Pov was smiling. “I’m the laziest farmer you will ever meet,” he claimed and stretched his arm out to show off his weedy fields like Vanna White showing off a new car on The Wheel of Fortune. “That’s right, I don’t weed my fields. Never. I just burn the crap out of them.” Working with SARE, Pov has been able to grow his specialty asian vegetables like bitter melon in high tunnels. He is now experimenting with ginger. But out in the field this morning, Pov bent over to pick up a neglected dried bitter eggplant. “This plant here, it helps with post-partum depression and mens-troo cramps.” He seems very proud that he is growing produce that has medicinal value – like Flower Pac Choi (a remedy for allergies), Lemon Grass (a remedy for the common cold), Melokhiya (a remedy for chronic fatigue.) He and his wife also grow up to 20 varieties of Asian greens. Their 3.95 acre plot is jam-packed thanks to double cropping, growing cilantro on the same plot of land with snow peas for instance. And Pov says that he never ever uses pesticides. “It’s all natural here. Burning is natural. You know why they say Asians live longer? It’s because we don’t use fertilizers!”