First Ag Certificate Graduate Has Big Plans, High Hopes for Future

By Luciana Chavez Special to Merced College

Please understand that UC Merced graduate Adamaris Alvarez has lived her life working to honor her parents, Cristobal Alvarez and Alicia Maldonado.

When we spoke to her about being the first graduate of Merced College’s Agricultural Systems Certificate Program—which she completed while also earning her bachelor’s degree from UC Merced—sure, she sounded happy for herself.

But she was more eager to first credit her parents, in their shared language.

“Quiero decir gracias a mis padres por siempre apoyarme y ser mis rocas,” Alvarez said. (I want to say thank you to my parents for always supporting me and being my rocks.)

It’s the deep respect of a 22-year-old woman who learned to love the land while trailing her father on his tasks as a ranch manager and field designer in Watsonville.

And it’s the land that now triggers her practical side, the side that knew she’d need all the book learning and real-world experience she could claim to eventually take over her family’s strawberry business.

For example, whenever she deals with a water pump these days, she feels twice as confident as she was six months ago.

That’s because she perfected the Lockout-Tagout (LOTO) procedure, an Occupational Safety and Health Administration-regulated protocol, while studying for her certificate at Merced College.

“Before I started the certificate, I knew it wouldn’t hurt to learn a bit more,” Alvarez said.

Hands-On Learning

The kicker? Alvarez completed the certificate—the initial offering from Merced College’s Competency-Based Education initiative—last spring while also working on UC Merced’s Experimental Student Farm, interning at Delhi-based fertilizer startup Nitricity, and completing her B.S. in Environmental Sciences.

“It turned out to be so useful and fun at the same time,” Alvarez said of the certificate program. “I made a wooden toolbox and drove a tractor. I showed the professor I could hook up a scrape box to the tractor. Doing all of those physical, hands-on things was amazing.”

Alvarez was approached by her UC Merced professors to try the program. Her background made her a perfect candidate to beta test the curriculum.

“They wanted me to give it a test run and tell them what I got out of it,” she said.

The program can fit any schedule. You take the time you need to prove mastery of each skill, and then you check it off and move on. If you need to practice something, you do. Alvarez actually stalled a bit while learning to back up a tractor with a trailer attached.

“It’s all backwards, so in order to back up to the right, you gotta go left,” she said. “It was hard for a while, with me going the wrong way, wrong way, wrong way. My smart farm supervisor Danny Royer and my Merced College professor Karl Montague helped me figure it out. They were so supportive.”

On Her Way

The thought of working in an office cubicle gives Alvarez the heebie-jeebies. She loves the outdoors. Sunshine fuels her. She loves feeling useful, as if the land needs her.

It makes sense since, at age 6, Alvarez was running after her dad, carrying the little flags he used to mark areas as he designed layouts for the organic fields he managed.

When she was 10, and her family first began cultivating their own strawberries, her job was to load flats onto the trucks, until the crates got too high and her dad would jump up to finish off the load.

At 15, she was helping her father set up an entire drip irrigation system.

Working in agriculture, managing the family farm, and becoming a leader are all the weighty, challenging, big-picture things Alvarez is attacking now. She’s ready for it.

So she goes back to gratitude, this time for her father.

“Quiero agradecer a mi papa en especial porque no solamente ser mi mentor de vida,” Alvarez said. “También por ser mi mentor y maestro en esta carrera dominada por hombres, guiándome para ser una persona mejor cada día.”

(I want to thank my father especially, because he wasn’t just my mentor for life. He’s also been my mentor and teacher in this career that is dominated by men, guiding me to be a better person each day.)

The future of agriculture might end up looking just like Adamaris Alvarez—an educated, passionate, bilingual woman who chose to grow food for the world.

Alvarez thinks the industry already knows it has to welcome anyone with a passion for ag.

“I’m like so many immigrants, including my parents, except I got the opportunity to work for a higher-paying job,” she said. “I could have chosen any career. But I decided on my own to study agriculture and bring that education back to the fields.

“Ag doesn’t have to be some industry filled with people who didn’t have a chance to get educated beyond high school. Whoever wants to be involved in ag should pursue higher education and then go for it.”