Development of Spanish Language Educational Materials to Manage Pests in Immigrant Farmworker Housing

Abstract

The Cornell Farmworker Program’s mission is “to address the needs of farmworkers and their families through research, education and extension”. This IPM effort explored how to assist farmworkers in safely and effectively managing pests in their living quarters. Pest management in this setting may be complicated by several factors, including poor physical infrastructure, language and literacy barriers, and constant fluctuations in the labor force. To address the pest management needs of farmworkers, we set out to identify resources that are currently available for Spanish speaking, low literacy populations. In the absence of appropriate educational materials, our goal was to develop new, highly visual outreach materials and engaging workshops to help farmworkers manage pests. We discovered that limited educational materials exist to assist Spanish-speaking farmworkers in pest management, and we created an annotated resource list of these materials for reference. On-site farm visits revealed a perception that pest management by farmworkers themselves was not possible, making this an important, but overlooked topics for educational outreach. Farmworkers requested that the Cornell Farmworker Program (CFP) create Spanish language skits to outline the life cycle and control of common pests such as cockroaches and bed bugs. These skits have been used by the CFP in the past during on-farm emergency planning workshops to give life to communicated ideas. To this end, the CFP developed both Spanish (“Las Plagas Molestosas”) and English (Those Pesky Bugs) language educational skits recorded to DVD to show to farmworkers, farmers, and health educators. These skits are supplemented by handouts on bed bugs and cockroaches, which include information about management options.