Worker Safety in Agricultural Systems

Dear Colleagues,

We are organizing a Special Issue on “Worker Safety in Agricultural Systems” in the journal Applied Sciences (MDPI).

Accidents at work are a complex phenomenon linked to a multiplicity of causes, whose analysis is certainly difficult. As any survey carried out on this topic shows, workers of agricultural and agro-industrial sectors remain among the most exposed to the risk of accidents and the causes are varied and difficult to investigate and to interconnect. Certainly, they are structural, organizational and environmental in nature, and the organization of work itself plays a key role. Indeed, agriculture is a sector where the difficulty of structuring environments and procedures is particularly high, unlike in industry and indoor activities. Staff training also plays a decisive role, bearing in mind that a significant proportion of the staff employed are seasonal, temporary and self-employed workers, the latter too often willing to accept situations of risk due to underestimation or other reasons.

Risk situations occur due to the scarcity of information and training. Consequently, it is often believed that the risks often materialize due to the subject's lack of ability, rather than being due to a set of factors now well studied by ergonomics, which should finally be understood as an interdisciplinary technique aimed at analysis, evaluation and design of the interactions of the human operator in complex systems. In addition, the reduction in the number of agricultural workers and the increase in their productivity, obtained with growing mechanization, often leads to work in solitude, so enlarging the conditions of risk. Beside structural and social factors, the training factor is therefore extremely important. It very often leads to the underestimation of important causes of injury, among which is the need to keep the machines adequately efficient, to eliminate obsolete machines, to avoid making inappropriate changes, and to avoid using machines improperly (or for purposes other than those envisaged by the manufacturer).

The lack of knowledge of risk factors and their spreading in relation to working conditions makes an approach aimed at remediation and prevention very difficult. The proposed Special Issue intends to contribute to the collection of information, case studies, improvement proposals, innovative solutions and aspects of the accident prevention problem in relation to the activities examined, useful for improving the safety conditions of agricultural and agro-industrial workers.

So, the topics of interest for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to, the following (in alphabetical order):

• Agricultural machines safety
• Agro-industrial plant safety
• Legislation and surveys on worker safety
• Worker safety during agricultural and agro-industrial activities
• Worker exposure to chemical agents (pesticides, VOC, etc.)
• Worker exposure to physical agents (noise, vibration, dust, etc.)

Dr. Giuseppe Manetto
Prof. Dr. Emanuele Cerruto
Dr. Domenico Longo
Dr. Rita Papa
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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