: This project will implement and evaluate the effectiveness of an intervention in the workplace intended to prevent and reduce traumatic agricultural injuries. We plan to build on our on-going intervention among the 21,000 dairy operations in Wisconsin that constitute 20 percent of the nation's operations and employ over 73,500 workers. Since there is no effective workplace safety regulation for most of this industry, our intervention strategy focuses on encouraging the adoption of production practices that are more profitable as well as safer. Our principal outcome measures are those which monitor our intervention's success at the population level (i.e. what percent has adopted for each innovation, what percent is aware). In this application, we plan to accomplish three specific aims: 1. Continue, for three additional years, a community-based, information-dissemination intervention among Wisconsin dairy producers that will reduce traumatic injuries by persuading operation managers to adopt safer and more efficient work methods. We will reduce hazards (and thereby injuries) by improving information flow to dairy operation managers to persuade them to adopt production methods that are both safer and more profitable. We will begin continuing the intervention in the first year of this application when other funding ends (Mar02). 2. Conduct annual, large sample, mail questionnaire-based scientific evaluation of the information dissemination intervention that includes both process and outcome measures. We intend to: 1) determine if our materials are reaching the target audience and which intervention aspects are most effective, 2) determine whether dairy producer adoption and awareness of each production method have increased, and 3) determine whether dairy farmer perceptions of each hazard-reducing production method's relative safety or profit advantages are improving (mail questionnaires administered Feb03, Feb04, Feb05). 3. Add one or two traumatic injury-reducing production methods to the intervention in each of the three additional intervention years. We will seek out reports from farmers and others about emerging production methods that could improve both safety and profits and add one or more of the new production methods to the intervention to promote statewide at the start of year 6 (Mar02), year 7 (Mar03), and year 8 (Mar 04). This work will begin at the start of this project (Sept01).
