CSU ADDS SPANISH TO VET CLASSES
Graduating students learn the language to talk to workers on ranches and farms.
Cows at the 1,000-acre Kraft dairy farm east of Fort Morgan are tagged, measured, gauged and otherwise cared for on a roundthe-clock basis by a crew of about 82 people, most of whom speak little or no English.
They monitor the cows’ pregnancies and medications and are overseen by longtime owners Robert and Mary Kraft, who speak fluent Spanish and help train the workers. But on an operation with 6,000 head of cattle and up to 30 calves born a day, the Krafts can’t be everywhere to help a worker deal with a potentially deadly medical emergency with one of their cows.
“It’s like giving someone keys to a Porsche without teaching them how to drive,” Mary Kraft said last week. “My cows are my Porsches, and we have to do what we can to keep them happy and healthy for as long as we can.”
That’s why Kraft, the past president of the Colorado Livestock Association, is backing a new undergraduate certificate at Colorado State University that gives graduating students in veterinary and animal science Spanish language skills to communicate to Spanish speakers on a farm and ranch.
The course — Spanish for animal health and care — teaches veterinary students specialized medical language that covers everything from disease diagnosis and treatment to feeding, milking, birthing and preventive medicine.
The program is needed because about 75 percent of the workers on Colorado’s 120 dairy farms are Latino, and many don’t speak fluent English, Kraft said.
A veterinarian well-versed in Spanish medical terminology can spread knowledge that better ensures the health of animals and consequently protects this country’s food supply, said Noa Roman-muniz, a professor in CSU’S department of animal science.
“Communication in animal care is important, because you might be talking about where you give a cow an injection, and that
affects how long the medicine is in the cow’s system, and how well that medicine will work,” Roman-muniz said. “So it’s about human and animal health and safety, as well as food quality.”
Roman-muniz noticed the gaps in communication between English-speaking bosses and Spanish-speaking workers while interning at CSU’S Veterinary Teaching Hospital in 2001 and visiting local dairy farms. The managers were giving instruction to workers in English, but many of the employees were foreign-born Spanish speakers who clearly didn’t understand, she said.
Sometimes a Spanish speaker who knows a little bit of English — or an English speaker who knows some Spanish — will get designated as the farm’s translator, but if they’re not fluent in both languages, misunderstandings can happen, Roman-muniz said. She said she once witnessed a farm manager attempting to explain employee benefits such as health insurance and vacation time, but the translalocation was inaccurate and workers were getting ready to quit until Roman-muniz — who is bilingual — stepped in to translate.
“We should not be relying on a workers who happen to know a little bit of English,” she said. “For example, if there’s only one translator, that person has a lot of power. He might not translate the message accurately, and there can be distrust among co-workers.”
Miscommunication can lead to an exodus of Spanish-speaking workers, she said.
“I’ve gotten calls from farms asking if we at CSU can help find people to milk their cows because several workers just walked out due to a misunderstanding.”
CSU vet students, she added, are good at science. But to be most effective, they have to impart that knowledge in an understandable way to people who care for animals daily.
“Students sometimes think they can just use Google Translate during their careers, but you can get into trouble doing that,” Roman-muniz said. “Our students need to be equipped to deal with multicultural populations.”
Workers at Kraft Family Farms are trained in a bilintion gual setting in the basics of animal care. But the CSU program will be an improvement because some medical terms are not easily transferable from English to Spanish.
“We have brought in Spanish interpreters to help, but they didn’t know the word for uterus,” Mary Kraft said. “The workers all nod their heads to show they understand something, but they really don’t.”
“These workers are not dumb,” Kraft said, adding most come from Central America. “They just don’t have that medical background. I don’t think their high schools, and I know high schools here, don’t teach basic animal husbandry.”
Kraft supports the idea that migrant workers to the United States should learn English. “But what do we do in the meantime?” she said. “There are a lot of things happening on this farm and others on a daily basis, and the best way to handle things is giving them the knowledge they need in Spanish.”
The new certificate is being offered by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures beginning this fall and will be available in an online format as well as in person. It will take about two years to finish and is the brainchild of instructor Shannon Zeller and Professor Maura Velazquez-castillo, who were introduced to the problem by Roman-muniz.
The certificate program will teach specific language functions and then branch out to equine care and dairy and cattle operations. The final course looks at culture and workplace dynamics.
The course is ideal for CSU because it allows language arts to be used for on-the-ground practices, Velazquez-castillo said.
“As a land-grant university that houses prestigious veterinary and animal science programs, CSU is uniquely positioned to be a pioneer in these types of … partnerships, which cater to the real-life language needs of future professionals in those fields,” she said.