ISSN: 2375-446X
Oladapo T. Okareh, Fayosi T. Olowu, Temitope A. Laniyan
The workforce in the agricultural sector is exposed to a wide range of work-related hazards which in turn affect workers’ health and ultimately their performance. Generally, workers in livestock sub-sector are prone to back-pain and other musculoskeletal problems, resulting from over exertion, wrong postures during lifting of feed bags and eggs crates. Therefore, this study aimed at assessing workplace conditions and factors that affect workers performance. A descriptive cross-sectional survey, including site observation was used to assess the working conditions and factors that affect workers performance among workers in selected poultry farms in Ido local government, Ibadan, Nigeria. Two poultry farms were purposively selected while total sampling was used to recruit the study participants. Data were analysed for descriptive statistics and chi-square using SPSS version 16 at 5% level of significance. The respondents show 63% males and 37% females with the mean age of 34.03 ± 7.27. Majority (98.7%) of the respondents were exposed to ergonomic hazards, 94.7% were exposed to chemical hazards, 91.3% exposed to biological hazards while 65.3% were exposed to physical hazards. Overall, 59.3% of the respondents stated that strain and stress affect their performance. Other factors reported included long working hours, lack of Personal protective equipment, monthly income and work related injuries. Introduction of shifts should also be considered as poultry work involves monotonous movement as stress has been shown to affect workers performance. There is a need to pay more attention to the human safety aspect in the poultry sub-sector as focus has always been on the bio-security of poultry birds.