VOA常速英语:美国的有机农业

I can tell that organic produce it really help.
People they don’t know what to eat and I really, really worry.
I like to work outside.
I raise vegetables to feed my family and educate the kids, my grandchildren.
Cucumber, my favorite plant, but I don’t like to pick.
Too hard to pick, too much to pick.
My name is May Lee, I’m a Hmong, I’m a farmer in Minnesota.
I’m a Hmong, nobody know much about my people, because were a really small group.
And so, we are from Laos.
We are refugees to Thailand and so were refugees to America.
We arrived in the United States in 1981.
It’s really, really different.
I don’t see animals around like chicken, pig, cow,
and so it’s really, really different to me.
I applied for a job with Minnesota Food Association,
but they not hire me because I don’t have enough education.
Instead, they let me farm over here, because they are training farmers who want to become organic.
And I leased two-acres land and I plant bell peppers, heirloom tomatoes, grape tomatoes for the store.
Sometimes you really worry at home, then you come to the field, they make you feel good.
Because soil has what we call glacial and so we see which area is good.
I like searching for it.
That made me happy that this area is good for vegetables, this ones good for corn and this is good for potatoes.
And so, I say to my kids that I am a master.
I graduated my Masters because I know so much in my mind.
At the same time, I don’t know how to write it, and so I don’t have any record.
It’s really, really bad because I just keep it in my brain and when I’m gone it’s gone with me too.
I never go school and when I arrived in the United States, I didnt know how to write my name.
I’m not shy at all;
I need to go and talk to who speaks English.
I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if my mouth open, bad or good,
I learn from verbal, not from class.
My hours, my time. Nobody controls me. I control myself.
And so that’s how I like farming over here.
I also a mentor for the farmers here. Now I started working for them.
It’s really fun and we have different people like, Latino, African American, Burma, Hmong, Laos all in here.
This program has really help me.
I hope, in the future, the kids who want to learn it, and do the same thing what I like to do.