Program Scoring and Rationale - Agriculture Forestry and Fishing Research at NIOSH - page 152

Involving Stakeholders
The Ag Centers use community-based approaches to identify issues deserv-
ing etiological or other exploratory research. These centers have established both
community-based program advisory structures and technical working groups to
enhance research, educational, and outreach efforts. Not surprisingly, some advi-
sory structures have performed better than others.
By using community-based methods designed to engage workers, several Ag
Centers have developed some successful programs to address occupational safety
and health concerns of hired farm workers. For example, the Western Center for
Agricultural Health and Safety (WCAHS), in collaboration with the California
Institute for Rural Studies, held a conference in 1990 that included hired farm
workers, farm labor advocates, and community-based medical providers (Villarejo,
1990). The success of this conference signaled the active and serious interest of
university researchers in engaging workers and their representatives.
Outreach
Early in the development of its outreach activities, the WCAHS partnered with
the Statewide Integrated Pest Management (IPM) Program staff of the University
of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources to initiate a project
to train workers in safe work practices in settings where restricted chemicals are
used. The two-stage “Train the Trainers” program focused on bilingual (Spanish-
English) training for supervisors, farmers, crew leaders, labor contractors, and other
human resource specialists in the California agricultural workforce (O'Connor-
Marer, 2000). Each participant who successfully completes this program becomes
a certified pesticide safety trainer, meeting U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
(EPA) guidelines. In turn, newly certified trainers provide training for hired farm
laborers. Key to the process is the trainer-worker relationship in which individu-
als may raise questions or otherwise bring workplace safety issues to the fore. The
most recent findings of the National Agricultural Workers Survey (NAWS) indicate
that 86 percent of California's hired crop farm workers interviewed in 2003-2004
said they had received pesticide safety training from their current employer, up
8 percentage points from the 78 percent who similarly reported receiving such
training in 1999-2000 (Aguirre International, 2005). There are no comparable
data available for earlier years. The “Train the Trainers” model for pesticide safety
training has been widely adopted elsewhere (Buhler et al., 2002), and the concept
is encouraged by the EPA (EPA, 2007).