- [Chelsea] Howdy from Texas A&M.

- [Bart] They're growing a commodity where they can't control the price, they can't control the weather, and then, oh by the way, most of their revenue comes at one point in time.

- [Justin] Every student is unique because the types of things that they're here to accomplish and the difficulties that they encounter along the way can be very different.

- [Margaret] I can't say enough about this program, it's changed my attitude.

I have my grandchildren and my family to live for.

- Welcome to campus.

"Welcome to Texas A&M Today."

Howdy, I'm your host, Chelsea Reber.

Today we're continuing to shine a spotlight on the best and brightest of Texas A&M University.

In today's episode, we find out just how hard and expensive it is to run a family farm in the 21st century.

Plus an A&M-led program helping South Texans live long and fulfilling lives despite their medical conditions.

And there's a piece of every continent right here in College Station.

We'll take you there.

But we're beginning today by learning how A&M's Disability Resources Office helps students find success as we follow a student and a staff member who won't let anything or anyone stop them.

(somber music) - Disability is really interesting.

It means something different to literally every person.

Your experience with disability could even vary from somebody that has a similar disability to you.

Students who might have physical disabilities, they might have learning disabilities, mental health or ADHD, and every student is unique because the types of things that they're here to accomplish and the difficulties that they encounter along the way can be very different.

(keyboard keys clacking) My name is Justin Romack and I'm a Program Coordinator with Disability Resources here at Texas A&M.

I was born with congenital glaucoma and it destroyed my optic nerve.

I had about 90 eye surgeries for various things until I was 23.

When I started losing my eyesight, I just desperately wanted to be successful.

I remember having a lot of people in my world tell me that success was going to be very difficult for me.

- My name's Maureen Hayden, I'm a fifth year PhD candidate in the Biology department at Texas A&M.

I teach 20 hours a week and then I also do research 20 hours a week.

I hope that my career will help make change to preserve our oceans and beaches for future generations.

My retina in my right eye is detached and I only have light perception, so light and dark.

And then in my left eye, my vision's pretty blurry, not correctable by glasses at all.

I think when the public thinks of blind, they think of totally blind, but really it's anywhere from having some vision to no vision at all.

- My name's Kristie Orr and I'm the Director of Disability Resources.

It's very important for us that we remove as many barriers as we can for students who are coming to campus who have a disability.

We've been through many different models of disability over time.

Biblical stories of people who were begging in the streets, and the word handicap actually comes from that concept, and so we don't use the word handicap because it's from someone begging on the street with their cap in their hand.

Then we got to kind of where the idea was institutionalize everyone.

So whatever the disability was, sterilization was common, putting people away in an institution, hiding people away.

Then we got into civil rights and disabled people in the 60s started fighting for their rights, just along with other marginalized populations.

When you talk to them, you say, would you take away the disability from who you are, and they say, no.

- I grew up learning ways to accommodate and how to use assistive technology like ever since kindergarten.

Growing up, I would always have my printouts on big 11 by 17 legal paper, and my books would come in big 11 by 17 volumes.

So like my math book would be like seven volumes or eight volumes.

I was affectionately called the pack mule in school.

The braille writer, plus a magnifier, plus the braille, which is very thick card stock and heavy.

- Oh, hold on, maybe...

When I was in school, when I lost my eyesight in 2008, I had just recently bought a brand new touchscreen cell phone.

I remember losing my eyesight and being really frustrated because now this piece of technology that I was really excited about when I could see was now totally and utterly inaccessible to me.

Imagine feeling that, imagine recognizing that the barrier is not me, it's the device that's in my hands.

That was really frustrating.

(gentle music) - I think we're probably still a ways from really understanding disability and accepting it fully.

I'm very proud of Texas A&M and where we've come with accessibility.

Not just one office's responsibility, so our name may be Disability Resources, but we work with all kinds of different departments to make sure that whatever they're doing is accessible.

So we really emphasize that everyone is responsible for accessibility.

If you are blind, you need to have an auditory textbook.

But being blind doesn't mean that you can't think and you can't produce work, it just is in a different manner.

If we were not able to do that for students, we would be losing out on a lot of talented students who can go forward and make great things happen in this world.

- It's on our computers, it's on our phones and our tablets, it's on our TVs.

You talk to it in your kitchen, you talk to it in your living room.

This gradual transition where assistive technology is really part of our everyday lives.

Now I can type braille probably faster than you can type text on your screen because they thought outside of the box.

Technology is not the barrier, it's our creativity, it's our awareness, it's our desire to create equitably that really is our biggest barrier.

- [Maureen] I learned that interacting with people and showing them my technology and that the technology I had was cool and that they don't have to feel sorry for me, that was a cool place to be in.

They learned that like, oh, blind people can do stuff and they can interact.

- I have skills that are in demand, and my disability, honestly, has facilitated almost sort of a next level to a lot of those skills.

Being able to communicate well and manage yourself in tight and tense and complicated conversations and situations, being able to handle yourself in pressure, being flexible.

These are all skills that I've been able to refine as a professional, but they really started with being a disabled person.

And so I recognize that that makes me very valuable and I like to be useful.

The barriers that I encountered, the attitudes, the digital accessibility, those were things that were external to me.

It had nothing to do with my ability or lack thereof.

It had nothing to do with my potential or what I could contribute to the world.

These were obstacles and barriers that were set up by someone else.

And not intentionally, but if you're unaware of those barriers and you don't have a desire to address them, then they just continue to be obstacles.

- Disability Resources even helps students with housing needs, food allergies, and dietary restrictions.

(upbeat music) It's time for an Aggie fact.

Scoates Hall is home to a very unique light fixture.

Built in 1932 as the Agricultural Engineering building, Scoates is known for its wrought iron doorway, stone goats and owls, agricultural murals, and oh yeah, a chandelier made from plow parts.

The one of a kind light fixture was made by Voss Metal Works in San Antonio.

It hangs in the main auditorium.

It was restored to its original luster during a renovation project a few years ago.

In the 27 Southernmost counties of Texas, patients outnumber doctors 1,000 to one.

And five of the counties don't have a doctor at all.

Over the last seven years, an A&M AgriLife program has stepped in, helping people manage their medical conditions through education.

(somber music) - When I first saw my doctor and he says, "Well, you have diabetes.

You will not live longer than 40 years."

- You don't forget when you are diagnosed.

I was pretty devastated.

I said to myself, I wanna live a long life.

- Under the Healthy South Texas Initiative, we have five different locations for our diabetes program.

We have it in Corpus Christi, we have McAllen, Kingsville, Lake Jackson, and Victoria.

We like to be interactive with our participants.

We use food models because we provide the lunch, and so we're able to talk about, this is what you're eating today, so let's talk about how many carbs or calories.

We discuss about physical activity and how it impacts their blood sugars.

- Access to healthcare is limited.

We're going through somewhat of a crisis across the United States right now in small rural areas.

What we're trying to do with Healthy South Texas, particularly diabetes education program, is make people aware of what diabetes is, how to prevent it, and if you do have diabetes, how to manage that effectively.

- When I signed up to become a registered nurse, I felt that I needed to be helping people.

Besides their primary care physician, very limited resources are out there for them, so their referral to our diabetes education program is a must.

(gentle music) - There were seven of us.

Five of us have the diabetes.

I didn't want our children to get the diabetes, but they did.

It's prevalent in our family.

At that time, there wasn't a lot of things available for people to be well informed.

They just went with it and they all passed away from diabetes.

We do not want our children to be suffering with us being bedridden if possible.

So we have to make an effort.

- We'll host a class maybe in a community center or at a church or at a clinic, wherever there's space to be able to hold a class.

We're trying to make it convenient for folks to be able to access this education within their own community.

It's a lifestyle change for the rest of their lives.

- Yes.

Knees!.

- [Leticia] It's important for us to plug in and to be in tune to all of the other aspects of their life.

We're talking about being diligent, about taking your medications on time, and eating well, and all these are the things that affect our blood sugars.

(gentle music) - I don't know why I can't use this.

I had to start learning how to eat better and try to take care of myself.

I would think, ugh, everybody's gonna be drinking, everybody's getting to eat all the sweets, everybody's doing this, and I'm gonna have to discipline myself.

I would try to stick to the safe foods as much as I could, but then sometimes I was weak and I would go ahead and overindulge.

I had to start going to exercise classes.

I had to start learning how to eat better.

My husband helps me a lot.

You have to have that comradeship.

He's my life source.

- I had a bunch of bad habits.

(somber music) I quit drinking, I quit smoking, quit doing a lot of things.

I had to learn how to eat the right foods.

I started going to these diabetic classes.

These classes, they give me more information on how to get help with my medication.

A lot of it, it's got to do with a lot of help from my wife.

We always go to classes.

I never attend a class without her.

She's always watching out for me.

- I'm always constantly right behind him.

If they have a wife, they gotta 100% supportive.

- We encourage them to share this information with their loved ones, with your spouses, with your children.

That just because mom, dad, all your relatives had diabetes, you can be the turning point to the point where you can say, no, it ends with me.

(gentle music) - I have made this for a guy and I haven't given it to him yet.

Keeping my diabetes in normal control could be a little better, but everything's not always perfect.

- It's frightening when you don't know what's going on in your body.

I can't say enough about this program.

It's changed my attitude.

I'm more positive about it, I'm living a happier life.

I'm not gonna give up because I have my grandchildren and my family to live for.

- [Angie] As people go through these courses, they're better able to manage their own chronic conditions.

We're hoping that we're making more generations of Texans healthier.

- When their numbers are down into healthy levels and they're so excited, it makes me feel that I actually did something worth living for.

- A&M AgriLife isn't doing this alone, they're working with doctors and community leaders to advance the mission of a healthier Texas.

Now let's move from helping people stay healthy to helping our planet stay healthy.

At the S.M.

Tracy Herbarium, here in College Station, hundreds of thousands of plant specimens are collected.

But from the outside, you wouldn't even know.

(gentle music) 360,000 dried plants, grasses, seeds, and mushrooms fill these cabinets inside A&M's herbarium.

Some are more than 100 years old, including a Texas bluebonnet from 1888 and a French grass from 1806.

But this place is more than just a collection: it's critical to environmental research, and it's right in our backyard.

- An herbarium is a museum, and we document the extent of biodiversity across space and through time.

So we have in the state, probably the largest collection of grasses, we have the largest collection of mosses and of fungi, and then every continent on earth, we have samples from.

So we have mosses, mosses from Antarctica.

- [Chelsea] Dr. Daniel Spalink is the director of the S.M.

Tracy Herbarium.

It's one of more than 3,000 herbaria around the world.

All keeping and sharing records of the earth's ecosystems.

- Distributions of species are moving with the changes in climate.

They're also changing in relation to how we manage land and use land.

There are botanists using our collections for forensic work as well.

We can compare pollen grains or seeds or something gets stuck in the bottom of your shoe, and we can help to identify that as well.

- [Chelsea] Their work isn't limited to academic research.

Don't recognize a plant in your yard?

Bring it to these experts for help.

- I try to emphasize to my students that the specimens that they collect will be here for any number of years, it could be hundreds of years.

They take a plant, they press it in newspaper, they record the information about what the species is, where it came from, and then they send it to us.

- [Chelsea] While you could call this place a museum, it's immediately evident that the specimens are not relics of the past, they're living history.

- [Dr. Daniel] Every specimen has its own inherent worth in value that can't be replaced.

These ones that are 100, 200 years old, it feels like you're holding a piece of history.

But you know what, every single specimen is unique and important.

It's amazing.

I mean, even the ones that are collected two days ago, they tell a story.

- [Chelsea] And as advancements in DNA and digitization technologies continue, Dr. Spalink's hopes for the future of A&M's herbarium are high.

- We wanna be the collection in Texas that represents our flora.

We want every species from every county documented repeatedly in our collection.

And that would be the baseline that we would need for tracking in really high resolution how Texas has changed and how it will change in the future.

- As the world relies on the internet more and more, so do herbaria.

Dr. Spalink and his team have funding to digitize every specimen they have from Texas and Oklahoma.

Next in today's episode, despite being home to 29 million people, Texas still has millions of acres of farmland, and much of it belongs to families handing down the business to the next generation.

But it's not easy, especially with rising costs and increasingly unpredictable weather.

(bright music) - If you were to drive through the countryside, just driving down the road and looking at farms that are dotting the countryside, most folks wouldn't realize that 98% of the farms in this country are still family-owned.

They're still family operations that are growing the food and fiber that feed and cloth this country.

- We talk about all the stress and all the pressure, and people might think, well, why in the world are they doing this?

I just think it's a love that they have and something that's sort of innate in them that that's what they're meant to do.

- We're not exactly sure 100%, I'm either fourth or fifth generation, so it's been in the family for a very long time.

When it came that time after college that I decided that it was something that I really, truly wanted to do with my life without any regrets or hesitancy, 2009 was my first year where I had land working on my own dime.

The goal is, as I go on in life, that my children hopefully have the same ideas that I did growing up and want to keep this thing going.

(bright music) We are mainly a wheat, corn, and cotton row crop, and we operate on 5,500 acres.

The equipment, as you can see just behind me, has become to the point of efficiency that we're able to tackle more acres with the same efficiency that used to be 60% of what we have now.

It definitely helps when you're a bigger farm, it helps you sustain through some rough years.

A lot of the new equipment that's coming out these days, especially when it pertains to harvest equipment, you're looking somewhere around $900,000 up to $1.2 million which you're investing in a piece of equipment that's gonna run for three weeks out of the year.

It's really hard to swallow that at the end of the day.

I mean, you look back in 1990s, equipment was relatively cheap.

And nowadays, just with the R&D development, the technology that goes into this equipment, the size and brevity of everything, it's a lot of money that you have to risk.

(bright music) - If your desire is to farm full time, agricultural producers in this country put a tremendous amount of money at risk.

And the upside, yes, the upside can be big, but the downside can also be big as well, and so it's extraordinarily risky.

They're growing a commodity where they can't control the price, they can't control the weather by any means, they're subject to this biological process where anything can happen in that large window.

And then, oh, by the way, most of their revenue comes at one point in time.

- You may look up and your bank account is full and you feel comfortable and you look up two weeks later and you're on a loan.

We're basically working our butts off every year just to make payments on stuff, make loan payments, to be able to spend all that money back into equipment.

I always tell people, I have a lot of friends that aren't directly involved in farming or agriculture for that matter, and they like to joke with us on, "Hey, you got a real nice pickup and stuff, you must be doing pretty good," and I'm like, "Well, I'm rich for half the year and I'm on a loan for the other half."

That's how a lot of farming is.

You spend, spend, spend for nine months out of the year to finally reap what you've sown, bring in the money.

It's a lot of money that you have to risk.

Land's more expensive, input's more expensive.

It's hard.

When you're reliant on weather cooperating correctly, whether it's getting a rain or missing a hail storm, and it's uncontrollable.

There are things that you can do in farming, you can make every perfect decision and it can still be taken away from you in a heartbeat.

- Increasingly, farm policy has moved into risk management.

It's helping deal with that litany of risks that farmers face.

We're asking producers to shoulder too much risk for this service that they're providing to the country.

Yes, it's a private business, but also it's providing food to feed people.

And so what you've seen is Congress step in repeatedly, which is one of the reasons why I do what I do, what we do.

And the role of federal policy is to try to help provide some risk management tools.

And so for our center here at Texas A&M, we're pretty unique in that we get to help advise on that for the entire country.

Not just certainly for Texas, but also for the entire country.

- So there's a variety of resources that Texas A&M AgriLife Extension provides to family farmers around the state.

We've got county extension agents located in every county in the state.

And so if you need somebody to come out to your farm and physically look at something with you, and I think that sort of boots on the ground, people who are actually living in your community, is a real strength that Extension offers.

(bright music) There are a lot of challenges involved in any farming operation.

For family farms, I think that that can be amplified in some ways.

I think a lot of times we view it not just as a job, but as a legacy as well.

It's part of our family legacy that we're now operating the farm that our grandparents or our great grandparents may have started.

And so I think that there can just be some added stress and pressure from that as well.

- You're gonna have to go through some tough years.

No matter where you farm, what you farm, how you farm it, the decisions you make, it's gonna get hard.

At the end of the day, if it wasn't for the people, the whole family being involved with it, it wouldn't be near as easy, and it makes it a lot more enjoyable, it makes it a lot easier.

In the traditional sense, it is purely family.

- The Texas farming industry makes about $4 billion a year after expenses.

It sounds like a lot, but it means some farms only make an average of $16,000 a year.

Next, I caught up with a Texas A&M difference maker for a one-on-one conversation.

Today that's Dr. Rebecca Fischer from the School of Public Health.

She's an infectious disease researcher who is earning accolades for the guidance she's been providing to Texans since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

I want to start with a broad overview of what you do.

You are an epidemiologist, an infectious disease scientist, investigator, and professor.

For people who might not know, can you explain all of those for us?

- Sure.

First and foremost, I consider myself an investigator of infectious disease patterns and distributions.

So think about why diseases occur, why infections occur, who gets them, why some people do and why some people don't, and how can we prevent those?

- You have been providing COVID-19 guidance to Texans since the beginning.

Take me through the moment you realized that this was going to be disastrous.

- Just reading the information of those very early days, I could see this could burn out quickly or it could not, and it could be really major.

But the thing that really left the impression on me was the great unknown.

And that has persisted, right?

So we have so many unanswered questions, even still today.

We have patterns that we can't yet describe about this disease.

- What were some things that maybe kind of flew under the radar, but were important to science?

- In one of those meetings with the epidemiologist of the state of Texas who said, "What are you doing in Brazos County?

Because whatever it is, you guys, something is really working and we all need to do it."

And this came in the context of, we talk about flattening the curve a little bit, and although we see these peaks and these cases happening, those waves in Brazos County were a little bit muted compared to neighbors and Texas and some of the other municipalities.

- What keeps you up at night now?

What scares you about the future of public health?

- We should not have outbreaks or increasing deaths due to diseases that are prevented with vaccine.

The more sort of hesitancy we see or not hesitancy, because hesitancy is okay to ask questions.

It's okay to be concerned about what you're putting in your body.

We should have those conversations.

But just as sort of a blanket, anti-vaccine sentiment is really troubling.

- Well, thank you so much for joining us today.

You can watch an extended version of this interview on our website.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of "Texas A&M Today."

We're back again in two weeks and hope you'll join us to meet more special members of our Aggie community.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)