Table 1 shows the social and demographic characteristics of the studied populations. The average
age of the farmers was 37.7 years (±12.5), most of whom (54.6%) were between 21 and 40 years of
age. Almost half of respondents (49.1%) had not completed primary education, and 6.3% were
illiterate or had never attended school. The preferred word to designate pesticide products was
“poison” (65.4%), followed by agrotóxico (26.1%), the legal term used for pesticides in Brazil [29],
which may be translated as agrotoxic. Most farmers worked as sharecroppers or employees, and 38.4%
worked in a family agricultural setting (all from Taquara). Most of the respondents (76.8%) had been
using pesticides for at least 5 years, and 21.4% for over 20 years. Most of the farmers declared being
consumers of alcoholic beverages (Table 1).
Table 2 shows the knowledge, attitudes and practices regarding pesticides among the farmers. Most
of the respondents (53.6%) work over 8 hours a day. For almost 80%, there was a special room for
pesticide storage, and only five individuals (4.5%) reported storing these products inside their homes.
At least 40% used a manual backpack sprayer, and 36.6% used an automated static sprayer. The great
majority (82.1%) reported turning over the empty pesticide containers to the government container
disposal program, and 16.1% buried and/or burned the containers. No significant