The monitoring of organic micropollutant contamination in water bodies and the determination of reliable concentration estimates have become challenging issues in Europe, since the Water Framework Directive (WFD, European Commission, 2000) has aimed to improve and protect european rivers by 2015. For the determination of the concentrations of micropollutants such as pesticides, several sampling techniques can be employed. The pertinance of grab sampling can be questionable in case of temporal variations of these concentrations in rivers, when it is performed at low frequencies. Automated or active sampling allows more reliable estimates of the contamination because averaged samples can be taken over a large time period. Nevertheless, this technique is often time-consuming and expensive for the purchase, as well as for the utilization and the maintenance. Integrative or passive sampling has recently been developped in order to obtained, at lower cost, realistic estimates of the contamination levels of the aquatic environment. The polar organic chemical integrative sampler (POCIS) is one of the main devices used for the passive sampling of the moderately polar organic compounds. Its efficiency in the determination of time-weighted average concentrations of hydrophilic pesticides has been reported in the literature. Stir bar sorptive extraction (SBSE) is a solvent free sample preparation technique dedicated to organic compounds in aqueous samples. It is composed of a magnet enclosed in a glass tube coated with a thick film of polydimethysiloxane (PDMS). The in situ application of this technique has also been reported in the literature. Stir bars and POCIS were deployed for two weeks in two rivers of a french agricultural watershed. The aim of this study was to assess the performances of the SBSE applied in situ, and to compare them with the POCIS results, regarding the passive sampling of agricultural pesticides in surface waters. Good repeatability and sensitivity of the in situ SBSE have been obtained for the hydrophobic pesticides, and increasing concentrations of micropollutants have been determined from the up-stream to the down-stream of the rivers sampled. Differences in the nature and the amount of the target compounds accumulated on the two sampling devices have allowed the authors to suggest the SBSE as a complementary passive sampling technique for the monitoring of more hydrophobic pesticides in the aquatic environment.