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Helping dairies, Hispanics, youth

BUHL, IDAHO —A robotic voice signals Mireille Chahine to turn right near the Castleford saloon and left onto a gravel  road that stretches out across a vast arid plain. When  UI Extension’s Lebanese-born dairy management  specialist              moved to Twin Falls from Spain, she couldn’t pinpoint Idaho on the map.

Calf-raiser Josefina Estrella, 32, feeds one of her 200 hungry "babies"
at the Kows 'R Us Ranch as UI dairy management specialist
Mireille Chahine looks on.

In fact, she still doesn’t know where she is  sometimes, she admits, nodding toward the GPS unit on her dashboard. Her co-pilot, Mario De Haro Marti, 36, isn’t much help. An unassuming Argentinean from Patagonia, De Haro Marti began working this summer  as a UI Extension educator in Gooding. “No, I’m from the city too,” he says with a laugh when asked if he was  raised on a farm. “I’m a fake gaucho.”

But what the two lack in sense of direction they make up for in improving careers.

Both teach Spanish-language UI Extension courses to Idaho dairy workers, 80 to 90  percent of whom are Hispanic. Chahine teaches dairy management, while De Haro Marti teaches environmental awareness techniques through the Hispanic language Vaca Verde (Green Cow) program, among others.

“We teach pasteurization, emissions reduction, and  how to take laboratory samples from storage lagoons so the farmers know the nutrient content when it is applied to the fields,” he explains.

Chahine is quick to credit other UI colleagues for  writing the curriculum, but her approachable manner  and fluency in Spanish (and French and Arabic) has helped make these classes a ringing success—reaching more than 700 farm workers in the last two years.

Beep, beep. Chahine’s GPS unit signals the last right before her destination—Kows ’R Us, a dairy ranch perched on a high plain near Castleford, not far from the bluffs of Balanced Rock and rugged lava canyons of the Idaho-Nevada border.

KOWS ’R US RANCH. IDAHO —The hot sun beats down on Josefina Estrella, 32, as she holds an oversized bottle up to her  hungry “babies,” 200 Jersey calves she tends each day. Nearby, a pregnant cow rests on hay in the stable. The  cow struggles, then becomes suddenly still, her feet poking straight out like a tipped-over toy.

Estrella glances over and excuses herself from the interview. “Un niño! It’s a Boy,” she said, pointing down at a newly emerged calf, still sticky from birth. She clears its mouth, something she learned in Chahine’s calf-raising class, and pats the mother cow, encouraging her to stand. In a few hours, milkers will bring Estrella the cow’s first post-birth milk, colostrum, crucial for building young calves’ immune systems.

Since learning the importance of getting colostrum to newborns, Estrella has noticed an improvement in the herd. “I used to spend an hour-and-a-half a day tending to the sick ones,” she said. “Now it is just 15 minutes. I have learned a lot.”

Dairy owner Harry Hoogland is a big man with an even bigger pickup. “Yep, she did a good job,” he agrees, nodding toward Chahine. Hoogland’s dairy benefits when workers apply knowledge they’ve learned in UI Extension courses. Healthier calves help lower the overall herd mortality rate. That also affects Estrella’s salary, as bonuses are based partly on percentages of healthy calves.

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