Safe Handling of Agricultural Pesticides in Minnesota: Results of a County‐wide Educational Intervention

Abstract

Safe pesticide handling in a group of Minnesota farmers, aged 40 years and older, was influenced through the use of a multifaceted, countywide educational intervention. Two intervention counties and two control counties were involved in this effort. The intervention consisted of mailed pesticide information to farm households, educational programs on pesticides for county physicians, elementary school training modules on pesticides and the use of safe pesticide handling displays in key business areas by agricultural extension agents. Five hundred eight farmers were identified as pesticide users (186 in the intervention counties and 322 in the control counties). The use of gloves and other protective clothing while handling pesticides increased in the intervention group. Improvement was greater in those who had used protective equipment the least before the intervention. From these results, it appears that a broad-based educational intervention might have a modest impact in how farmers protect themselves when using pesticides.

Training and other predictors of personal protective equipment use in Australian grain farmers using pesticides

“…Although the cross-sectional study design limits our ability to detect temporal causality of the observed relations, our results do suggest that across all pesticide types and pesticide-related tasks, older farmers and those without specific farm chemical training are the least likely to use PPE and this is consistent with findings by other researchers 14 32 33. Other researchers undertaking intervention studies have shown that farm chemical training is related to increased use of PPE 5 32.…”

“…Other researchers undertaking intervention studies have shown that farm chemical training is related to increased use of PPE 5 32. Also, farmers’ risk perception and knowledge have been found to be strongly associated with risk protective behaviour on the farm 2 4 33…”

Effectiveness of an educational program to promote pesticide safety among pesticide handlers of South India

“…WHO has mentioned the importance of educating the public as well as agriculture and health-care workers about health risks. Public education programs have been found to increase the farmers' realization of the serious health consequences associated with the irrational use of pesticides (Mancini et al 2005); raise awareness of farmers on hazardous pesticide use and encourage them to use low toxic pesticides (Food and fertilizer technology center for the Asian and PaciWc region 2004); reduce the total number of pesticides used; increase the use of PPE (Perry and Layde 2003); read the pesticide label before pesticide application (Prochaska 1998); and create awareness among pesticide users on the potential hazard associated with indiscriminate use of pesticides (Mandel et al 2000). The "Safe Use Project" aims at prevention and treatment of pesticide poisonings, distribution of better safety equipment and proper waste disposal for pesticides (Eddleston et al 2002).…”

Use of protective equipment among California farmers

“…Educational efforts to encourage protective equipment use should be broadly based in view of a lack of a single risk-taking profile derived from the type of data obtained in this study. Recent work suggests that educational and other intervention efforts may have a positive impact on protective equipment use, but more work is needed to confirm the effectiveness of such efforts [Mandel et al, 2000;Landsittel et al, 2001].…”