Use of Agricultural Machinery and Equipment in Non-professional Vegetable Gardens

Abstract

Home vegetable gardens can be found in or near villages, or on fenced land bordering courtyards. Fifteen percent of these have an area of 50 square metres or less and are used solely for the family’s needs and cultivated with hand tools only. Another 40% reach 1,000 square metres in size, and are organised to produce not only vegetables, but also fruit, livestock and woods. There are about 20 million people working in vegetable gardens across Italy, of whom five hundred thousand are in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, contributing great economic and social value. A great deal of machinery of all kinds is used in these home gardens, as well as equipment for processing and preserving vegetables. It should be noted that sales of home gardening machinery increased significantly in recent years around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic; the items sold included chainsaws, blowers, motorised hoes, brush cutters, and others. One of the problems faced with this situation, is the safe and competent use of this machinery. As it does not have to be registered with any authority, no training is given in its use and no one checks whether Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is being used. These problems are highlighted by the unusually high number of accidents that occurred in FVG (94 deaths and 71 injuries) in the period 2003 to 2024, although it is difficult to directly link these numbers to work in the vegetable gardens as they are generally recorded as domestic accidents.