Pesticide Recording and Reporting in the floricultural industry in Kenya

Abstract

Pesticides covers a wide range of compounds including insecticides, fungicides, herbicides, rodenticides, molluscicides, nematicides, plant growth regulators and others. Understanding how floriculture industry uses and monitor their pesticide is appropriate for recordkeeping. The advantage of pesticides is that they kill or deter the destructive activity of the target organisms hence increasing farm production. Their major disadvantage is that they are toxic and posses’ inherent toxicities that endanger the health of the farmers, consumers and the environment. This leads to a need to study or assess the pesticides records and reporting patterns on floricultural farms. Such information has not been adequately documented in Kenya. This study assessed the scope of recording keeping, Evaluated the nature or types of records kept by farmers; Examined the different methods used by farmers in record keeping; determined why records are kept or nor kept and examined the problems associated with record keeping in floricultural farms. Data was collected from selected large scale (n= 18) small scale (n= 34) floricultural farms in Kenya where 422 pesticide handlers participated in the study. There were significant differences between large scale and small scale floricultural farms in the way they record and report on pesticide information with a p< 0.000. Large-scale farms were more likely to use electronic systems for recording pesticide use and were more likely to use the information for calculating and reducing production cost. Approximately 82% of the farms indicated that records were useful to help meet regulatory requirements and provide information for residue or spray drift queries. The ability to trace pesticide use to individual properties was considered important by 45.3% of the farms as long as there was industry control over access to the information. Conclusion: - Record keeping was not standardized since it ranges from old records methods to digital. There is need for development of a viable and effective system designed to report pesticide use data in floricultural industry Keywords: Pesticides, floricultural farms, pesticide recording, pesticide reporting, Large scale and Small scale farms.