Supporting Those Who Sustain Us: How Extension Promotes Farmworker Health and Safety
go.ncsu.edu/readext?1085387
en Español / em Português
El inglés es el idioma de control de esta página. En la medida en que haya algún conflicto entre la traducción al inglés y la traducción, el inglés prevalece.
Al hacer clic en el enlace de traducción se activa un servicio de traducción gratuito para convertir la página al español. Al igual que con cualquier traducción por Internet, la conversión no es sensible al contexto y puede que no traduzca el texto en su significado original. NC State Extension no garantiza la exactitud del texto traducido. Por favor, tenga en cuenta que algunas aplicaciones y/o servicios pueden no funcionar como se espera cuando se traducen.
Português
Inglês é o idioma de controle desta página. Na medida que haja algum conflito entre o texto original em Inglês e a tradução, o Inglês prevalece.
Ao clicar no link de tradução, um serviço gratuito de tradução será ativado para converter a página para o Português. Como em qualquer tradução pela internet, a conversão não é sensivel ao contexto e pode não ocorrer a tradução para o significado orginal. O serviço de Extensão da Carolina do Norte (NC State Extension) não garante a exatidão do texto traduzido. Por favor, observe que algumas funções ou serviços podem não funcionar como esperado após a tradução.
English
English is the controlling language of this page. To the extent there is any conflict between the English text and the translation, English controls.
Clicking on the translation link activates a free translation service to convert the page to Spanish. As with any Internet translation, the conversion is not context-sensitive and may not translate the text to its original meaning. NC State Extension does not guarantee the accuracy of the translated text. Please note that some applications and/or services may not function as expected when translated.
Collapse ▲Agriculture is a vitally important profession. North Carolina farmers feed their local communities, the state and the world. They are the backbone of an industry with an $111.1 billion impact statewide.
It is also an inherently dangerous profession. Farmworkers are at high risk for fatal and nonfatal injuries from hazards including working around heavy machinery, pesticides and other chemicals, heat stress, and agriculture-related diseases including green tobacco illness.
NC State Extension cares about the health and well-being of the agricultural community, including farmers, farm labor contractors, farmworkers (seasonal, migrant and those holding H-2A visas), and their families. Extension’s Farmworker Health and Safety Education Program provides educational opportunities and resources that benefit workers and help growers comply with industry standards and regulatory agencies.
“A core belief of the program is that a successful farm community begins with healthy people,” said program manager Cintia Aguilar. “By preventing injuries and diseases, a farm can maximize production and protect the health and the overall well-being of the workers.”
Farmworkers are exposed to a number of health risks, including heat stress from working in the field. NC State Extension’s Farmworker Health and Safety Training program educates the agriculture community and helps keep everyone on the farm safe.
Farmers, farm labor contractors, farmworkers and their families receive essential health and safety information, often through on-farm bilingual interactive training sessions.
“To have somebody from Extension do the training in Spanish, it resonates more,” said Roberto Rosales, NC State Extension’s farmworker health and safety educator and program coordinator. “There are a lot of communication barriers due to language. Our program is focused on bridging that gap. When farmworkers see the farmer bring somebody on to do the training in their language, it elevates the trust.”
Supporting those who sustain us takes trust, collaboration and care. We spoke with Aguilar, Rosales, Extension field crops agent Mikayla Berryhill, and Bryce Berryhill, a grower in Person County and Mikayla’s husband, to learn more about the program’s role in supporting North Carolina agriculture.
Q1: What are some of the challenges facing farmworkers, and how is Extension responding?
Cintia Aguilar: The agricultural community faces many challenges. Both farmers and farmworkers are impacted by social and economic conditions, with some workers experiencing difficult working and hiring environments. We acknowledge these realities, and we focus on solutions. One of the things is to promote communication. The growers should know what happens with their workers. Our approach is, how can we build that communication? How can we help to promote that culture of health and safety? The fact that we are grant-funded limits the reach. Three years ago we had four different grants and we had four educators with Roberto as the coordinator. At this moment, we have only one grant and only Roberto as an educator.
Roberto Rosales: There’s so many challenges both on the farm as well as off the farm. Extension is able to go into that space and create the biggest impact with the funds and human capacity that we have. We work with state agencies, health clinics and community partners that can address some of the needs that both farmers and contractors and workers have. We work with the Agromedicine Institute, we work with nonprofits to host events such as health fairs. We do a lot of surveys and ask a lot of questions so we can stay relevant to the needs of the farms and the workers.
NC State Extension’s Farmworker Health and Safety Program trains farmworkers about how to prevent green tobacco illness, one of the hazards of harvesting the crop.
Q2: What makes the Extension program unique?
Cintia Aguilar: This program offers an alternative to train workers. An objective of our program is to promote the message that the farmworker community includes everybody involved. We build relationships with the growers and then we do training on the farm in collaboration with the grower. We create an environment that promotes knowledge and behavioral change. Our training is face-to-face. It is intentional in engaging workers in a manner that helps them to prevent any issues.
Roberto Rosales: Some farms do their own training, but a lot of farmers like to use our program. It’s coming from a different authority, a different organization and it provides a different perspective on the topics that are being discussed.
Mikayla Berryhill: It’s so much more interactive than other training programs. If you attend the farm safety training, you can see that the workers are interacting with Roberto. He is very good with them. It’s the same thing when I do pesticide safety training with my growers. They could come in and watch a video, but if I do the presentation myself, they absorb it more. They are going to be more likely to enact it.
RELATED: Keeping Workers Safe on the Farm
Q3: What topics are covered?
Roberto Rosales: We meet the [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] EPA Agricultural Worker Protection Standard, which is related to pesticide safety, heat stress prevention and safety. The rest are not necessarily tied to regulatory standards but are for the health and safety of the workers, helping create behavioral change. We provide green tobacco illness training to tobacco farms. We’ve added basic CPR. We’ve also added other topics related to crop quality, food safety, and worker health and hygiene training.
Mikayla Berryhill: In the United States, tobacco farmers are required to be GAP Connections certified in order to sell their crop to most of the companies now. You can pay someone to come and do the training on your farm. Extension is providing the service for free. So it’s just providing another option for farmers. Then there’s some farmers that I’ve talked to who want the workers to have the training, whether it was required or not. Farmers want the workers to be safe. They want them to understand how to take care of themselves and how to manage an emergency, because they do happen. We’ve had farmworker deaths in North Carolina in the past, so it’s something that needs to be talked about.
Q4: How has the program evolved?
Cintia Aguilar: When we first started the program in 2014, the training was 60 minutes during working hours. At the time, people said, “this is crazy, it’s not going to work.” It did work. By the second year, we found that we needed more time to focus on quality and not just check boxes, and we extended it to 90 minutes. Today we have a manual of six different trainings. The training can be four hours if we do all the topics. In the course of the years, we also added other components including community education, because we also thought about how important it is to educate the children, the community about the work on the farm. And then we added training for farm labor contractors. We also did a health fair for farmworkers. The program has grown based on the needs that we’ve identified.
NC State Extension farmworker health and safety educator Roberto Rosales conducts a training session for migrant workers.
Q5: Why is this work important to you?
Cintia Aguilar: I’m originally from Costa Rica, and I have a background in psychology. When I moved to North Carolina, I worked in an outpatient mental health center in Pitt County. One of my clients was the child of farmworkers. That opened my eyes to what farm work means. I started learning about the different challenges on the socioeconomic and political level. I then worked with the migrant education program with Pitt County Schools, which helped the children of farmworkers cope with the challenges of being migratory students. In 2001, I came to work with NC State Extension as the outreach coordinator for migrant education. In 2013, Philip Morris International approached our tobacco specialist and said they wanted to invest in community engagement with Extension and work in the farm community. I wanted to provide something that was a win-win for everybody, for the workers but also for the growers.
Roberto Rosales: My parents are from Mexico and were seasonal farmworkers who migrated up and down the East Coast. I envision my uncle, my sister, my dad or my mom when I do these trainings. That is in the back of my mind. What would I have wanted my parents to have known? On a personal level, that’s what motivates me everyday. It’s a lot of work, a lot of coordination. But it helps the farm, and it helps the people doing the work.
Q6: From the perspective of an Extension agent, why is farmworker safety training important?
Mikayla Berryhill: The workers are vital to the success of our farms. Labor is one of the biggest issues that farmers face, and one of the biggest challenges they face is getting them trained, making sure they’re safe, making sure that everything goes well out in the field. Having Extension providing that service is vital, especially in Spanish. The workers have someone at Extension they can relate to and they can talk to. Previously, it has been a population that we have not reached. The program has done a great job in reaching those people and providing a service.
Q7: Why is Extension’s farmworker safety training important for you as a producer?
Bryce Berryhill: The biggest thing is keeping an accident from happening, preventing sun problems and heat stroke. They spend many hours a day out there in the sun and it’s very, very important that they know about keeping themselves hydrated and any other sun-related issues. We are a tobacco farm, so it’s also important that they know about green tobacco sickness.
[Extension] actually cares and they want us to be able to succeed. They go over so many different topics, ranging from health and safety to first aid, CPR and machinery safety. They’ll hit on almost every type of subject you can think of. They can interact with people who speak Spanish, and that makes it very, very easy for us. They’ll bring in other farmers in the area too. There might be 20 growers represented, which makes it a whole lot easier for everybody to do all the training at one time.
Learn more about the impact of North Carolina agriculture, and how NC State Extension’s Farmworker Health and Safety Education Program is supporting our agricultural workforce.