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NRCS Conservation Programs in Mandarin Chinese


Barriers

One of our responsibilities/duties as state AA/PI SEPMs is to “ensure that all NRCS activities are free from discrimination and that barriers to the recruitment, employment, and advancement of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are addressed.

Click here to find out how you can identify barriers.


Promotion Secrets - What Mom Never Told You

The real rules of the promotion game.  Some tips to help you get ahead, provided by Phuong Ly.


NRCS Conservation Program Information Available in Mandarin Chinese

Thanks to some hardworking employees, the NRCS publication, Conservation practices and programs for your land, is now available in Mandarin Chinese.

2008 农业法案

您土地上可用的环保实践项目 助人以助地

Click here to download the pdf version.

 


Marketing to Asian-Americans.

Julia Huang runs InterTrend, a marketing company in southern California that focuses on Asian-Americans.

"We say Asian-American markets, but it's really not one market," she said in a recent phone conversation. "It's so many markets. It's so many!"

For proof of that, look at the advertising campaign for last year's census. It ran ads in Japanese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Cambodian, Hmong, Hinglish and Taglish. Those last two are combinations of Hindu and English and Tagalog and English.

"You're not really talking about one specific language — like, for example, for the Hispanic market, accents might change but it's still Spanish," Huang said.

http://www.npr.org/2011/05/05/135985502/corporate-america-take-on-multilingual-pr


MAY is ASIAN HERITAGE MONTH 2010

Stunning crop art has sprung up across rice fields in Japan

Submitted by Elyse Benson, AAPI SEPM, South Carolina

But this is no alien creation.  The designs have been cleverly planted.
 
Farmers creating the huge displays use no  ink or dye. Instead, different colors of rice plants have been  precisely and strategically arranged and grown in the paddy fields. As summer progresses and the plants shoot up, the detailed artwork begins to emerge.
 
 


A Sengoku warrior on horseback has been created  from hundreds of thousands of rice plants,
 the colors created by using different  varieties, in Inakadate in Japan.

The largest and  finest work is grown in the Aomori village of Inakadate , 600  miles north of Toyko, where the tradition began in  1993. The village has now earned a reputation for its  agricultural artistry and this year the enormous pictures of Napoleon and a  Sengoku-period warrior, both on horseback, are visible in a pair of  fields adjacent to the town hall.

More than 150,000 visitors come to Inakadate, where just 8,700 people live, every summer to  see the extraordinary murals.

Each year hundreds of  volunteers and villagers plant four different varieties of rice in late May across huge swathes of paddy fields.
 


Napoleon on horseback can be seen from the  skies, created by precision planting and months of  planning between villagers and farmers in Inkadate
   



Another famous rice paddy art venue is in the town of Yonezawa in the Yamagata  prefecture. his year's design shows the fictional 16th-century samurai warrior Naoe Kanetsugu and his wife, Osen, whose lives feature in television series Tenchijin.



Smaller works of crop art can be seen in other rice-farming areas of Japan such as this image of Doraemon and deer dancers.

The farmers create the murals by  planting little purple and yellow-leafed kodaimai rice along with their local green-leafed tsugaru roman variety to create the colored patterns between planting and  harvesting in September. The murals in Inakadate cover 15,000  square meters of paddy fields. From ground level, the designs are invisible, and viewers have to climb the mock castle tower of the village office to  get a glimpse of the work.

Rice-paddy art was started there in  1993 as a local revitalization project, an idea that grew out of  meetings of the village committee.
 


Closer to the image, the careful placement of  thousands of rice plants in the paddy fields can be  seen
 
 


The different varieties of rice plant grow alongside each other to create the masterpieces. In the first nine  years, the village office workers and local farmers grew a simple design  of Mount Iwaki every  year. But their ideas grew more complicated and attracted  more attention. In 2005 agreements between landowners allowed  the creation of enormous rice paddy art. A year later, organizers used computers to precisely plot planting of the four  differently colored rice varieties that bring the images to  life.


In the saga of American immigration, the Chinese experience is relatively unknown. But it's a dramatic story of struggle and triumph, progress and setbacks, discrimination and assimilation.
Check out this great website to learn more.

 

"Suffering under a Great Injustice"

A photographic documentary of the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese Americans interned there during World War II.


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