Alumni Association Home > Minnesota Magazine > Past Issues > 2006 > January-February 2006	Print View

A Story about Hmong Farm Safety

When Michele Schermann (B.S. ’80, B.S.N. ’96, M.S. ’02) tells Hmong farmers that they really ought to wear shoes when they use a rototiller, they say, “Yes, we know, but the soil feels so good!”

A research fellow in the Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering at the University, Schermann has taught agricultural health and safety issues—including handling pesticides, protecting against the sun, and avoiding injury from lifting improperly—to new immigrants who are learning to farm. Now, some of her work with Hmong farmers has yielded a new book that employs traditional Hmong storytelling to illustrate the hazards that Hmong farm children face.

Orphan Boy the Farmer (Tub Ntsuag, Tub Ua Teb), by Hmong playwright Cha Yang and artist Kao Lee Thao, is a 90-page book written in English and the most common dialect of the Hmong language. The book includes three short stories portraying the life of an orphaned farm boy, a familiar Hmong folk character, to teach about farming safety, as well as the serious consequences of unsafe practices.

“There are probably 80 to 100 Hmong families in the Twin Cities metro area producing vegetables on 3- to 10-acre farms to sell at local markets,” says Schermann, who has degrees in nursing and horticulture. “The Hmong farmers have similar goals as white farmers but different ways.” For example, Hmong farmers also use knives to farm instead of machinery and entire Hmong extended families head to the field or garden together.

The book also addresses safety at farmers’ markets, which can be crowded and confusing with buses and other traffic and often no toilets, leaving children to wander in search of public restrooms. “The nice thing is that all of these families know each other or are related somehow,” Schermann says. “So even if the parents aren’t watching the kids, an aunt or someone else is.”

Traditional storytelling is a common and effective way to convey information in the Hmong culture. The book has been distributed in schools and Hmong organizations and at least one has found its way to California, which also has a large Hmong population. Farmers’ market managers promise to promote the book before spring planting, and KFAI radio station plans to feature it on a Hmong program.

“Any books written in both English and Hmong get worn out very fast,” says Schermann, who sometimes sells the books out of her trunk and gives copies to libraries. Next is a Hmong storytelling project to address forest fire prevention, especially important in California.

Orphan Boy the Farmer (Tub Ntsuag, Tub Ua Teb) costs $18 and is available by calling the U’s Extension Service at 800-876-8636 or 612-624-4900 or Hmong ABC at 651-293-0019.

—Shelly Fling

Overheard on Campus

"What counts most? What you will contribute in the future? What you contributed in the past? Should we try to save the most people possible? Which are the values that we think are the most important?”

—University of Minnesota bioethicist Jeffrey Kahn, who says deciding who gets care in an avian flu pandemic will be the hardest.

“We give them a hug, throw them a homecoming celebration, and think it’s just fine. But some of these problems can pop up a year later or five years later.” 

—University of Minnesota student Andy Davis, a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and president of the new, student-organized Veterans Transition Center on the Twin Cities campus. The center provides a refuge for veterans, assists in navigating Veterans Affairs issues, and coordinates mentoring and other programs to help war veterans adjust to postwar life.

“There’s a consistent, a significant number of biology teachers in public schools who are creationists. Despite decades of science education reform, these numbers have remained pretty consistent.”

—University of Minnesota biology professor Randy Moore, whose recent studies on “closet creationism” in public schools report that roughly 20 percent of Minnesota public schoolteachers consider creationism scientifically valid and that they emphasize the idea in their classes.