Summer Pesticide Research project

This past summer, one other professor and I advised a group of our students in an independent research project. All of our students are expected/highly recommended to do at least one or two projects like this over the summer (plus an internship).
One of the awesome things about teaching here is that we have students from 12 countries, so conducting surveys and collecting similar information across various countries, languages, cultures, religions, etc. can be very powerful. It can also make data very messy.

So, here are some photos to liven up the discussion of our project. They were taken at our poster session held this weekend where all the summer project students presented their work.
I had a great time and the various topics, disciplines and results were interesting and diverse.

First, a shot of me and the entire group (minus one--she was on another trip to Dhaka)

We had 8 students from 3 countries (India, Bangladesh and Cambodia). We designed questionnaire surveys for farmers, retailers that sell farm supplies/pesticides and also any local universities or agricultural research centers in the regions.
We presented 3 posters--an overview of the entire project and two 'general results' posters.
These students made the 'overview' poster. All the students traveled in their home regions and interviewed farmers (rice, sugarcane, spices, fruits and vegetables) and local retailers about their knowledge of pesticides, how they decide what to use on pests, if they're aware of health effects, their usage of pesticides and their disposal.
In order to do this, we had to ask many questions of the farmers and we still have yet to finish really looking at all of the data.
The above students made this poster about how farmers get their information, what kind of safety or precautionary information is contained in pesticide/fertilizer packaging and how they store/use/sell/dispose of pesticides.
The students did a pretty great job of pulling out some major trends/general results. I would probably have done it a bit differently, but this was a truly student-led project and I just gave them a couple of ideas and basically no further guidance.

Also, due to "normal" developing-country crappy equipment, we had no access to any sort of printer for one of the posters and no color printer for the other posters, so the students did all of them by hand with markers, colored paper and some black and white 8x11 print-outs. The poster that had color images was because some students went all over town looking for a place to print these (on a Friday morning when EVERYTHING is closed).

The above two students are engaged in explaining the project to Professor Meghan. The students had very different reactions to all the explaining and questions from people. One of them said it was 'so hard' and she hated it. Another one was so excited and inspired afterwards because she enjoyed explaining it to others so much.

Here is another one of our group explaining the project to some interested students. The session was well-attended and I think people asked great questions and it was a good learning experience for everyone.
Some of the interesting results I saw coming out of the project include:

• there are banned pesticides being sold/used
• disposal practices are dangerous
• personal protective gear is lacking
• one of the largest challenges for all of these farmers to be successful was extreme weather, which I suspect will only get worse in the coming years.
• pretty much the only source of information that farmers have regarding pesticide use is from the retailers themselves. The retailers were found to have little or no training in agricultural practices/professional training/knowledge of pest identification, diagnosis or proper treatment.
  
• the labeling of chemicals was very inconsistent. In some places, all the farmers could read, the labels were in an appropriate language and seemed professional/correct. Some places were not in the local language or the users were illiterate, but often there were pictures of safety precautions, etc. that the farmers understood. Other places chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides were just sold by the kilo in open, unlabeled burlap sacks.
• unrelated to the project, but did you know that 99-100% of Kerala (southern Indian region) population is literate? That means all the farmers and the farmhands/lowly workers, too!
  

I think we'll have some more/interesting results for the upcoming Board of Trustees meeting at AUW so maybe I'll do a follow-up post!