REFUGEE MILKER TRAINING

The Agriculture program of Cornell Cooperative Extension of Wyoming County is the recipient of a grant from the Genesee Valley Regional Market Authority to train refugees as milkers for the regions dairy farms.  The grant will be used to fund a pilot project to train refugees from the Catholic Family Center based in Rochester to milk and potentially relocate a small group of Bhutanese refugees to Wyoming County.   

In addition to Catholic Family Center of Rochester, the grant includes collaborators such as Wyoming County Community Angel Action, the North West New York Dairy, Livestock and Field Crops Team (NWNY Team) and Alfred State College.  Joan Sinclair Petzen, Agriculture Issue Leader, serves as Grant Director for this initiative.

Refugees are legal immigrants to the United States.  A refugee is someone who "owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality” according to the United Nations.  Rochester is home to a large population of Bhutanese refugees that have been expelled from their native country of Bhutan due political unrest.  The training concept was developed collaboratively by these organizations to hire a bilingual Key Community Leader from among the Bhutanese population in Rochester, who would then assist in the recruitment, training, transportation, and eventual relocation of individuals to Wyoming County to work on dairy farms in the region.

Manoj Rai, a native of Bhutan, lived 19 years since the age of 17 in a refugee camp in Nepal before moving to the United States.  Since 2013 he has been working with this project as Key Community Leader.  He has translated milking protocols into Nepalese, recruited others from the Bhutanese community to be trained and begin working on dairies as milkers.  Training of the refugees is done by a dairy experts from the Northwest New York Dairy, Livestock, & Field Crops Team, along with faculty and staff from the dairy program of Alfred State College. 

Last updated March 5, 2015