National Pesticide Information Center Reaches Out to Hispanics, Latinos

The National Pesticide Information Center (NPIC) at Oregon Sate University has launched a new Spanish version of its Web site. Last year, NPIC made services available over the phone in more than 170 languages and disseminated NPIC brochures and fliers in Spanish.

Now that its Spanish Web site is operational, the organization’s next goal is to translate original NPIC publications (fact sheets and common pesticide questions) into Spanish. This is important because 41 percent of the 680,000 landscape services workers identified in 2006 were Hispanic or Latino in comparison with 16 percent of the total U.S. workforce, and that number has increased as the landscape industry has grown.