OBJECTIVE To explore the various perceived reasons for farmers' suicides in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, their common factors, and to suggest solutions. METHODS The present formative research was undertaken in the 23 villages surrounding the Anji Primary Health Centre, located in the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra, India. A triangulation of free list and pile sort exercises was used. T...

The study investigated the effect of Community-Based Paid Extension (CPE) on vulnerability reduction of smallholder dairy farmers. Randomly sampled 255 farmers were interviewed together with 15 key informants’ interview. Both statistical analysis and thematic approach were employed to achieve triangulation. In about 68 % of cases, CPE reduced vulnerability to a degree experienced as ‘moderate’,...

BACKGROUND Farmers are exposed to multiple air contaminants that may interact with tobacco smoking in the development of respiratory diseases. Farmers are currently considered to smoke less than non-farmers, but precise data in different categories of age and farming activities are lacking. METHODS Smoking habits were studied in a cross-sectional study involving 4105 farmers and 996 non-farmi...

BACKGROUND The continuing urbanization in China has resulted in a loss of land and rights among farmers. The social security of landless farmers has attracted considerable research attention. However, only few studies measure the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of landless farmers by employing scientific standardized scales. By using five-dimensional European quality of life (EQ-5D) scal...

RATIONALE AND OBJECTIVES Farmers experience airway obstruction, which may be attributable in part to endotoxin inhalation. CD14 is a receptor for endotoxin. MATERIALS AND METHODS Based on our findings of increased circulating CD14 associated with the CD14/-159 T allele, we hypothesized that carriers of this allele would have decreased lung function among endotoxin-exposed individuals. CD14/-1...

Objective To elucidate the association between non-specific low back pain (NSLBP) and spinal X-ray findings in Korean farmers: Farmers' Cohort for Agricultural Work-Related Musculoskeletal disorders (FARM) study. Methods A total of 835 farmers (391 males, 444 females; mean age, 56.6±7.4 years) without red-flag signs of specific LBP were recruited. Presence of LBP more than one week or once a ...

A questionnaire-based survey on veterinary herd health and production management services was conducted on 194 specialist dairy veterinarians and 466 dairy farmers. The farmers were randomly selected from greater than 6,000 farmer clients of the surveyed veterinarians. This paper reports these survey findings and the findings of an earlier survey conducted among the veterinarians. The survey in...

Adoption of agricultural technology is often sequential, with farmers first adopting a new technology on part of their lands and then adjusting their use of the new technology in later years based on what was learned from the initial partial adoption. Our paper explains this experimental behavior using a dynamic adoption model with Bayesian learning in which forward-looking farmers take account...