Provided

Extension specialist Mario Miranda Sazo, with 10 Spanish-speaking workers from Mexico, after finishing a Honeycrisp harvest at an orchard in Wayne County in September.

Cornell Cooperative Extension agents are always trying to make their expertise more accessible to the people they serve. So for the first time, the 2012 Empire State Fruit and Vegetable Expo and Direct Marketing Conference in January will feature 11 sessions in Spanish.

Approximately 2,000 people are expected to attend the Jan. 24-26 conference at Syracuse's Oncenter; it is the state's largest annual horticulture conference, according to expo officials. There is space for 100 people at the Spanish sessions, and extension associate Mario Miranda Sazo is hoping it will attract employees across the fruit, field and vegetable industries, including many of the nearly 8,000 workers from Mexico and Central America who participate annually in the harvest of some of New York's most important agricultural assets.

Led by Miranda Sazo and several Cornell faculty and staff members, the sessions will address issues of "working smarter not harder" and provide basic information about plant physiology so employees will understand why farmers are asking them to do certain tasks.

"We ask them to do so many things: how to plant a tree, how to prune a tree, how to spray a tree. But the fundamentals, the physiological fundamentals and the reasons behind each of the things we ask them to do, they don't know that. They haven't received any basic training," Miranda Sazo said.

Often orchard workers will diligently pick every last apple from a tree, but their employers would prefer they leave some apples and pick the good ones more carefully.

"I say, 'Guys, we don't need every apple. If there are bruises already on those fruits, we are already losing money. Just leave those fruits on the tree or on the ground,'" he said.

Miranda Sazo and his colleagues first offered training for Spanish-speaking farm workers through the Lake Ontario Fruit Program last January, and the feedback from employers was immediate and positive, he said.

"The growers said, 'Mario, I see them working again in the orchard, and I saw right away the value of the training. I see them doing what I was asking them to do before, but I didn't know how to explain it,'" Miranda Sazo said.

Mary Jo Dudley, director of the Cornell Farmworker Program who will be presenting at the expo on emergency planning, said the sessions will be a good complement to the Spanish workshops her program has conducted for years. Those on-farm training sessions cover topics such as chemical safety, emergency planning, driving in New York and English as a second language.

"Having some Spanish language presentations at the expo will open up possibilities for expanding the on-farm activities we're already involved in," Dudley said.

The expo will also include a panel about partnerships between New York agriculture and applied research and extension, and will feature: Kathryn Boor, the Ronald P. Lynch Dean of Agriculture and Life Sciences; Tom Burr, director of the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station; former agricultural commissioners Patrick Hooker and Nathan Rudgers; and several industry leaders.

Krisy Gashler is a freelance writer for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.