Budding Minds: Students reap real-world insight at ag fair

HARLINGEN — Yvonne Welther is in her second-to-last semester at Texas State Technical College where she studies agriculture and technology.

She spent the better part of a rainy Thursday morning in the college’s Student Center browsing a variety of tables offering information that could affect her future during a symposium that U.S. Customs and Border Protection called an Agricultural Open House.

CBP and eight other agencies staffed the event in hopes of piquing the interest of students and to inform them on agricultural inspection processes.

For Welther, the event was a no-brainer because a career in agriculture was a natural course to travel.

“My family has been making a living off the land and the sea as long as I can remember,” she said as students browsed tables and talked with various officials from the CBP, Border Patrol and United States Department of Agriculture. “My grandfather was the captain of a shrimp boat. My dad was a country boy who lived off the land, not because he wanted to be a hillbilly, but because he had no choice.”
She said all the agencies were interesting and that the Agricultural Open House was helpful because it opened her eyes to many opportunities.

“There’s a wealth of information and I didn’t know about the other sub-agencies,” she said. “It was very interesting and I became better informed.”

TSTC mentoring coordinator Jorge Alanis said events like this are important for students, as well as to him in his work.

“It was just a coincidence that I was out here. I came here because I was just going to help out some students at the Learning Resource Center,” he said. “I saw a lot of information that is very beneficial for our students on campus. So whatever information I obtain here, I’m going to distribute to the students that we mentor.”

Alanis said for students studying agriculture and technology, this event shows them the light at the end of the tunnel.

CBP public affairs liaison Eduardo Perez said holding events like this at universities and colleges is invaluable.

“It’s important that we be able to teach students who are going into the agricultural field what we do, what our different agencies within the CBP and the USDA do,” he said.

But it’s more than just that, he said. Informing students and staff at TSTC about what CBP actually does helps them become better informed travelers.

“It shows the students and staff at TSTC the importance of declaring the different items that they are bringing into the country, the importance of not bringing in hitchhikers under flowers, not bringing in pets or plants into the country that could wreak havoc in the Rio Grande Valley and the rest of the country,” he said.

Participating in the event were CBP, U.S. Border Patrol, the USDA Plant Inspection Station, USDA Smuggling Interdiction and Trade Compliance, the USDA Citrus Greening Program, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, the Texas Department of Agriculture and the Texas Animal Health Commission.