Pesticide Use among Farmers in Sokoto, North Western Nigeria: A Descriptive Study

Abstract

Aims: The study aimed to assess the pattern of pesticide use and application practices among farmers and factors influencing such practices in Sokoto, North western Nigeria. Study Design: It was a cross sectional descriptive study. Place and Duration of Study: it was carried out in April 2017 among crop farmers in the 4 agricultural zones of Sokoto state. Methodology: A two stage sampling technique was used to recruit 220 farmers. A semi-structured interviewer administered questionnaire was used to collect data which was imputed and analyzed using SPSS IBM version 20. Results: The mean age of the respondents was 35.95 ± 14.37 years. Only 10 (4.5%) were females. Most 143 (65.3%) used pesticides in the past year with 63 (45.7%) using it occasionally. More than half 83 (60.1%) attested that when purchasing pesticides, they were supplied with safety instructions but only 37 (26.8%) followed the instruction. Of the 220 respondents, only 19 (13.8%) mixed pesticides with hands wearing gloves while majority 131 (94.9%) applied pesticides by Original Research Article

Practice towards pesticide handling, storage and its associated factors among farmers working in irrigations in Gondar town, Ethiopia, 2019

“…In this study, the level of good practice of disposing of empty pesticide containers was in line with a study conducted at Rift Valley in Ethiopia (97%) [3]. On the other hand, the good practice of empty pesticide container handling in the current study is lower than that of a study in Zimbabwe (20.2%) [22], in El Salvador (63%) [6] and in Nigeria (55.8%) [23]. This problem could be associated either with their limited level of knowledge about pesticide containers that residual chemicals still present in the container or lack of hazardous collection site easily accessible by the farmers.…”

Use of Herbicides among Rural Women Farmers in Abia State, Nigeria

“…This practise is important because herbicides are chemicals that can cause severe damage to humans and livestock if ingested (Gupta, 2016) Table 3 also shows that they disposed their unused herbicides in ponds ( =0.50), containers of used herbicides was disposed by wrapping and burning ( =1.57). This is similar to the findings of Okafoagu, Oche and Lawal (2017) which shows that 55.8% of the respondents sampled stored empty pesticide containers in their homes and 42.1% used the empty cans to store water at home. Such practices are dangerous and should be prevented for herbicides though beneficial to farmers in weed control could also be harmful to the users and the environment (Iyagba, 2013) especially if the containers are not properly disposed.…”

Criteria of pesticide selection in shallot pestdisease control in Brebes Regency, Central Java

“…In response to reduce shallot yield losses by the pest/disease attacks, farmers in Brebes depend heavily on pesticides as the main pest management strategy. They view pesticide use as the best means to protect their crops against pest/disease as such pesticides can provide the only form of crop insurance available [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Worldwide experiences suggest that pesticides have taken a significant part in viably improving crop yield and quality [11][12][13][14].…”