UTICA (New York) OBSERVER-DISPATCH

January 14, 2008

Farmers say 'si' to Spanish lessons

By CATHERINE KURTELAWICZ

Observer-Dispatch

Scott Burrington admits he is no linguist. 

But the dairy and sheep farmer from the town of Danube said he now has a reason to learn Spanish. 

Burrington isn't planning a trip to South America anytime soon, but he is looking at the possibility of hiring Spanish-speaking farm workers in the future. 

 “We may look in the direction of migrant workers only for the fact that finding local help that is willing to accept a salary that a farm can afford to pay is very difficult,” he said. 

That's why Burrington is participating in Spanish classes offered to farmers through the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Herkimer County. 

“The reason why we instituted the class is that there are a growing number of Hispanic workers on dairy farms in the county and surrounding counties,” Herkimer County's Cooperative Extension Executive Director Bernie Armata said. 

Tom Maloney, senior extension associate in the applied economics and management department at Cornell University Cooperative Extension, helped conduct a survey of Hispanic farm workers in New York state in 2004. 

He said the results showed overwhelmingly that the majority of Hispanic farm workers in the state did not speak English very well, or at all. 

The Herkimer class has a capacity of 15 members, and runs for 10 consecutive Thursdays at the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Herkimer County in East Herkimer. 

Though there are no statistics available, Armata said more Hispanic workers are being utilized, and the need for communication between employer and employee has become more obvious. 

Armata said he knows of more than a dozen local farms that have used Spanish-speaking workers. 

“We were thinking maybe there was a gap here in communication here,” he said. “The better a farmer or manager can communicate with their help, the more efficiently it is going to run.” 

Burrington said he wants to make sure he is able to express the expectations of the job to his employees. 

“If or when I do decide to go with migrant help, it's not fair hiring somebody who doesn't speak English and expect them to automatically be able to communicate with me,” he said. “I would prefer to be able to communicate.” 

Burrington said he found the first class to be informative and easy to understand.
“It's geared toward people who don't know a thing about the language,” he said.