The local campaign to improve Spanish-language pesticide education across Oregon

“Statewide, there essentially is nothing for Spanish-language exam preparation and very few in-person trainings,” said Kris Schaedel, conservation program manager at the Hood River Soil and Water Conservation District (HRSWCD). “We’re kind of it.”

While a known need for many years, HRSWCD, Oregon State University (OSU), Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers and several other partners facilitated their first Spanish trainings in 2017, and have kept expanding since as more grant funding rolls in: exam preparation for the private applicators license, classes on air blast sprayer calibration, field scouting for both harmful and beneficial insects, worker protection standards, a crash course on Oregon pesticide law and more.

This year, they even hosted two days of fit testing for respirators, an annual requirement that prevents workers from inhaling pesticides while on the job, in partnership with Providence Hood River, Skyline, One Community Health and agricultural chemical company G.S. Long. With very few occupational health nurses nearby, Providence also provided on-site medical evaluations.

“There are a lot of compliance requirements that are placed on us constantly, and it feels like there are new ones every year as circumstances change. To have a program that supports us meeting those requirements is really beneficial,” said Lesley Tamura, a fourth-generation orchardist and chair of Columbia Gorge Fruit Growers. “Especially in Oregon, where a lot of people are small farmers. We don’t have HR departments — I’m crew leader, bookkeeper, HR and manage housing.”

Over the past two years, HRSWCD and partners have held 41 total trainings primarily in Spanish, serving just over 1,200 people. Schaedel noted they’ve had folks from Medford to Portland to Milton-Freewater, and across industry, including forestry and seed cultivation. Their model, however, isn’t necessarily sustainable.

“The reason we can do what we do here is because we’re an adjacent county to Washington State, and we can access their training programs,” said Schaedel. “Trainers, specifically from the Washington State Department of Agriculture, are gracious enough to come down here with us, and they see the need and see the value.”

WSDA has a far more robust pesticide licensing and education program than Oregon, largely because of consistent state funding. People from WSDA lead the majority of trainings offered in Hood River, with HRSWCD acting as the sponsor, and WSDA may not always have that extra capacity. In several respects, Washington’s pesticide applicator license exam is also less prohibitive than Oregon’s.

“The Oregon exam is 100 questions in two hours. It’s a lot of questions,” said Ashley Thompson, an associate professor of horticulture at OSU. “There’s this issue of the pedagogy behind the test, the way the test is written, the number of questions and then how it’s administered.”

By contrast, Washington’s exam has 60 questions with an allotted time of three hours, is offered on paper (not only on a computer) and utilizes more plain language, according to Thompson. From 2020 through 2023, Schaedel said, between 10-30 people attempted the Spanish exam annually in Oregon, and while passage rates peaked at 20%, most were in the single digits. During the same period, 250-300 people took the English exam annually, and 70% to 78% passed.

In 2022, 673 Spanish speakers took Washington’s exam, and 40% passed without an exam preparation class, double Oregon’s admittedly not representative baseline.

Before HRSWCD and team came along, Oregon wasn’t producing any physical or online exam preparation materials in Spanish, or classes either. Additionally, Columbia Gorge Community College, which stopped administering the exam and had just three computers, used to be the only local testing site, so Schaedel and Thompson established a site at OSU’s extension center in Hood River with 20 computers.

Oregon’s Department of Agriculture was planning to adopt the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) pesticide training and test-prep manual, and publish it in Spanish this summer, but that’s been halted by EPA budget cuts, according to reporting by Uplift Local. Schaedel and Thompson aren’t pushing to make the test easier, but to make it fair and more congruent with Washington’s, especially since the licenses are reciprocal, meaning they’re valid in both states.

Farmers are dependent on these licenses for compliance, so reasonable access to the education, the exam and securing a license has been a main objective of the team’s work.

“When we came to realize how the system is really not built for the people who are reliant on it, that became a core focus of our work, and our accountability to the grower community,” said Schaedel.

“They took this very limited resource, this very limited opportunity for professional development, and just exploded it open and are continuing to do that,” said Tamura.

To keep moving in that direction, Schaedel and the Oregon Association of Conservation Districts pushed for HB 3010 and about $750,000 in state funding to house two full-time Spanish-language educators in OSU’s Pesticide Safety Education Program for the next two years. With dedicated staff, Oregon could expand training opportunities beyond Hood River, and Schaedel intends to advocate for HB 3010 again during the 2027 legislative session. 

“I think we’ll just take the next year to really work on doing the education and building relationships in the legislature so that we help people understand the need, the status of where we’re at in Oregon and the reality of how modest of an ask it is with such a meaningful impact to a proudly agricultural state,” said Schaedel.

If you are interested in learning more or about upcoming opportunities, please reach out to Kris Schaedel at kris@hoodriverswcd.org, Ashley Thompson at ashley.thompson@oregonstate.edu or Lesley Tamura at office@cgfg.org.