In order to determine the capacity building needs of farmers for safe agro-chemical use in Niger State, the study examined awareness of safety measures for agrochemical usage, sources of awareness, practice of safety measures and training needs of farmers. One hundred and twenty farmers were randomly selected from three local government areas in the state. Validated interview schedule with reliability coefficient of 0.89 was used to collect data. Data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics and correlation analysis. All the respondents were aware of wearing of protective clothing and avoiding drinking/eating during spraying, safety measure such as avoiding off label use (7.50%) had low awareness level. The major sources of awareness were friend/relatives (55.00%). The most widely practised safety measure was avoiding ingesting or inhaling chemicals (91.67%), while the least practised safety measure was avoiding off label use (2.50%).Reasons given for not practicing some safety measures include heaviness of protective clothing (17.50%) and unreadable nature of instruction labels (14.17%). Major areas of training needs of the respondents were application (61.67%) and handling (52.50%) of agro-chemicals. A positive significant correlation existed between education (r = 0.461), farming experience (r = 0.337), farm income (r = 0.307) and practice of safety measures. It was therefore recommended that enlightenment campaign should be carried out in the State to raise awareness level for safe use of agro-chemicals in the agricultural transformation programme, while the characters of the instruction labels should be boldly written to facilitate reading and practice of safety measures.

The broad objective of the study was to assess farmers' awareness and practice of health safety measures in the use of agrochemicals in Niger state, Nigeria. The specific objectives were to describe the socioeconomic and demographic features of the farmers, identify the common agrochemicals being used by the farmers, determine the farmers' awareness about safety measures in the use of agrochemicals and ascertain the regularity at which the farmers' have put these health safety measures into practice in their agricultural activities. A total of 150 farmers were randomly sampled from the three geo-political zones of the State, (that is. Interview Schedule was employed for primary data collection. Data collected were analyzed using Descriptive) and Inferential Statistics (Chi-Square and Analysis of Variance, ANOVA). Findings showed that majority of the farmers (81.4%) were within 21-50 years old, mostly male (92.0%), with low level of formal education but most of them (70.7%) had more than 20 years farming experience. Results also showed that Yam and Maize crops were being cultivated by majority of the farmers. All the farmers used N.P.K. fertilizer, while between 41.3 and 74.1 percent of them did use Atrazine, Weed off, Apron Plus, Fernasan-D and Urea. Results on farmers' awareness showed that at least 56.7percent of the farmers were variously aware of 70 percent (seven out of 10) of the health safety measures. Also, at least 62.7 percent of the farmers practiced each of the first seven most aware health safety measures, while at least 36.6 percent of the farmers practiced 60 percent of the health safety measures always. Chi-Square test indicated significant relationships between both educational attainment and farming experiences of the farmers, and their awareness of health safety measures (X2= 7.84, P < 0.05 and X2 = 6.52, P < 0.05 respectively).This suggests that the higher the educational attainments and farming experiences of the farmers, the more their awareness about health safety measures and vice-versa. Also, Analysis of Variance results showed statistical significant differences between actual practice (F = 4.81, P < 0.05), regularity of practice of health safety measures (F = 3.34, P< 0.05) and farmers' awareness of the safety measures. It could be concluded that despite farmers' awareness of health safety measures, not many of them practiced most of these measures always. It is recommended in addition to creating more awareness; farmers should be given adequate orientation about the importance of health safety measures.