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Ag Expo Draws Diverse Crowd to See Its Wonders

Posted on: Thursday, 16 February 2006, 18:00 CST

By Diana Marcum, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

Feb. 15--A world-drawing bazaar of latest-greatest, paint-barely-dry farm equipment opened Tuesday in the heart of California's farmlands.

Clydesdale horses added nostalgia even as environmental regulations and bio-terrorism filtered through shop talk. Pot-bellied old farmers in flannel shirts brushed shoulders with Nigerian investors wearing Italian sunglasses with their African robes. Sixty Japanese students paraded through the grounds, an effort by their government to encourage youth to consider farming -- much like in America's Midwest, Japanese farm towns are dying as the children of farmers bolt for city jobs.

But perhaps the most poignant mix of home-grown and universal connection at the 2006 World Ag Expo in Tulare came when Khalil Al-Gailani and a few other members of the Iraqi delegation bumped into a local woman and her sister over a bowl of American Indian stew.

"They were so funny. So nice. Typical country girls. She told us she used to pick cotton with her hands and now there's this machine with a computer and she didn't know what to think of it," Al-Gailani said.

He thinks her name was Kathy or maybe Kate. It's the only detail he's fuzzy on.

He knows she is 50. That her son spent two tours in Iraq, but finally came home safe. That she has always lived around here and that her father's a farmer. She was wearing red because it's Valentine's Day.

The group of them made jokes all through lunch.

"The two sisters liked a good laugh."

Their parting was warm, and came after a fighter jet from nearby Naval Air Station Lemoore made an ear-ringing noon fly-by over the farm show, reminding many of the war.

"Both sisters kissed my friend's wife and told the rest of us, 'Take care, take care,'" Al-Gailani said. "Everyone here keeps telling us to take care."

The Iraqi delegation was supposed to number 50, but only 17 of the affluent, educated members of the Iraqi American Chamber of Commerce and Industry could get visas from the U.S. Embassy, something that frustrated group leader Raad Ommar, an Iraqi-American who lives in Baghdad.

"Here's the irony," Ommar said. "People here say, 'It's not going well in Iraq. They hate us.' Then we have a group of private-sector Iraqis who want to come here and shake hands and do business, and the bureaucrats say no."

The delegates had to camp a week in Jordan even to be interviewed for a visa. Then those who could leave were trapped by a sandstorm in the Baghdad airport for three days. Just driving to the airport was dangerous, but Al-Gailani figured every aspect of life right now in Baghdad carries risk. His wife was mad that he would miss Valentine's Day; it's not an Iraqi custom, but the couple adopted it as their own special day years ago.

Al-Gailani came to Tulare anyway, though he has no personal interest in tractors and harvesters or the world's largest disc harrow. He's an engineer who owns a swimming pool construction business and he says that even now, in Baghdad, business is good. People build swimming pools even in a war-ravaged city.

He said he came to this marketplace of irrigation and fertilizer and power tools to foster hope.

"This is the thing you have to do. Whether I benefit or not, I carry the information back and tell the minister of agriculture or who else needs to know, 'This is where the world has reached. These are the possibilities.' Agriculture must depend on strong machinery."

He will carry back the manufacturers' brochures and pamphlets and "a red American rose so my wife will not be unhappy."

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Fresno Bee, Calif.

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Source: The Fresno Bee

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