Ag Pesticide Handling

As of New Year’s Day, 2017, agricultural workers and pesticide handlers that work on agricultural establishments must be trained annually about pesticide safety and the Worker Protection Standard (WPS). Workers and handlers must be trained before they begin worker/handler tasks, EPA-approved training materials must be used, and trainers must be qualified. Oregon State University’s Casey Buhl gave me some reasons why this action makes so much sense. "The worker protection standard was first passed back in the early 90s so this is a 20 year update essentially. The update is taking place because farmworkers or their advocates indicated that farmworkers were not adequately protected. As an example, somebody might be reporting symptoms at a clinic and the clinician might ask them, have you been exposed to pesticides today and they might say I don’t know. Well, you should know. You have a right to know and it is an extension of that whole right to know regulation that applies more broadly in other industries. In other industries, if you work with a chemical, then they consider it right to know and you can always take a look at the material safety data sheet for that chemical. That federal regulation exempted agriculture, so this new regulation is really bringing agriculture into the same frame of reference as most other industries are already there where workers have a right to know what they are being exposed to in the workplace and their healthcare providers have a right to know so they can evaluate symptoms properly.”