Agrochemicals Use Practices and Health Challenges of Smallholder Farmers in Ghana
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Globally, Africa is one of the continents that uses the lowest quantity of agrochemicals in farming. However, unsafe chemical use practices are high among farmers in Africa, posing serious health and environmental consequences. This study seeks to address three questions: (1) What factors motivate/compel smallholder farmers in Ghana to use agrochemicals? (2) What safety precautions or unsafe chemical use practices can be found in the communities? (3) What are the health implications of agrochemical use among smallholder farmers in Ghana? METHODOLOGY: The study used purposive and simple random sampling techniques to select 136 individuals for the survey, out of which 31 individuals were eliminated, and 105 participants were selected for in-depth interviews and focus group discussions. Additionally, participants' observations were collected, workshops were facilitated, and documents analyses were conducted. Qualitative data were analyzed using NVivo software and the quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS version 23.0. FINDINGS: The study found that environmental challenges, activities of NGOs, government policy, lack of or high cost of labor, and competition among farmers were major factors influencing farmers' decisions to use agrochemicals. Present agrochemical use in Ghana poses a risk to health and the environment. Finally, the study discovered chemical poisoning and low self-reported health quality as major health implications of agrochemical use in the communities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".