Most holiday celebrations here in the United States are bound together by a common thread.

They all include a feast of some kind, and as you begin to enjoy those wonderful Thanksgiving leftovers, it might be a good time to recognize the agricultural producers that not only make these holiday festivities possible, but also provide us an abundance of food year round.

“Families can feed themselves, they can go to the grocery store and buy the ingredients and make a Thanksgiving meal themselves from scratch, they can go to the store and buy the meal already made, they can go to a restaurant and sit down and eat a meal that’s already made, but it is symbolic of the relationship that the agricultural producers have from start to finish with the consumers.”

Bobby Kurten is a Brazos County beef producer.

“Somebody has to, before the cornbread is made to make the dressing for Thanksgiving, somebody had to plant a seed, somebody had to make sure that it came up and fertilize it and water it, grow it and cut it and get it to the mill and the mill had to mill it, and then it had to be distributed to the grocery stores. Everything that we eat came from the ground.”

And as an ag producer Kurten has a Thanksgiving message for those of us who are only consumers.

“I would tell the consumer to be thankful that there are agriculturally inclined people out there raising things, people who have made it their way of life. It may have been for generations, maybe several generations deep. It may be the first generation, but there are a lot of people out there that love and appreciate agriculture enough to invest their time and their money into growing crops. Not everybody’s inclined that way, but there are enough of us that are inclined that way to keep the rest of the people fed.”

I’m Kailey Carey, tracing the journey our food makes from the farm and ranch to our plates, From The Ground up.