Workshop offers tips to keep kids safe on farms; biggest injury-causers are falls (often from tractors), animals and machinery

By Melissa Patrick
Kentucky Health News

Growing up on a farm gives children the opportunity to play in ways that few others get to experience, and gain a set of useful skills, but agricultural safety experts caution that farm life also comes with safety challenges that all too often can result in injury or even death.

According to the National Ag Safety Database, 33 children sustain agriculture-related injuries every day, and every three days a child dies from an agriculture-related incident.

"A lot of these ag-related injuries, work-related injuries in ag, are related to the fact that children are doing work that does not match their capabilities or their abilities," youth agricultural safety specialist Marsha Salzwedel said at the Child Agricultural Injury Prevention Workshop in Lexington Aug. 6-7.

The three most common causes of non-fatal injuries are falls, animals and machinery, such as tractors; and the top three causes of fatal injuries are machinery, other vehicles and drowning.

Salzwedel, of the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, added that advances in technology are changing the types of farm injuries found in children. She told the story of a child who lost an eye after being hit by a drone.

Page from guidelines book; for a larger version, click on the image.

Salzwedel suggested that parents use the Agricultural Youth Work Guidelines to help determine whether a youth has the physical and cognitive abilities to safely perform a job.

The guidelines have a checklist for 51 ag-related jobs detailing what youth between 7 and 16 need to perform a job safely. The list also gives adult responsibilities, suggestions for the level of adult supervision, and hazards and protective strategies.

Salzwedel noted that tractors are the leading cause of fatalities for youth and children, but added that all-terrain vehicles and skid-steer loaders "are coming up fast behind them."

The National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety reports that tractors are responsible for more than 40% of unintentional farm-injury deaths of children under 15. It also reports that four out of five farm children regularly ride on them.

Tractors are notorious for turning over, but CultivateSafety.org says there are many ways a rider can fall and be injured while riding on a tractor, including "sudden stops, driving over holes, stumps and debris, or a sharp turn." It adds that tractors with cabs are no guarantee of injury prevention, because children have fallen out cabs after hitting a door than then opened.

The Childhood Agricultural Safety Network, a 60-member coalition that includes the American Farm Bureau Federation, has launched a "Keep Kids Away from Tractors" campaign with the message: "It's easier to bury a tradition than a child."

Dennis Murphy, a professor emeritus at Penn State University, said ATVs present a number of safety challenges when it comes to keeping kids safe on farms. For example, he noted that all too often young children are at risk of getting hurt on them because they are driving a machine that is too big for them, riding with passengers, not wearing helmets, operating on paved roads, which they are not designed for, or driving on slopes and uneven ground.

He added that a recent survey shows that upwards of 90% of youth say they drive an adult-sized machine and that another study found that 90% of kids have never received any training on ATV use.

Murphy also noted that 60% of child ag-related injuries happen to children who are not working, including infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers. He stressed that "childcare is the best option" to keep children safe on farms, but said when this isn't possible it's important to provide a "safe play area."

The National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety offers an online book that shows how to create safe play areas on farms. Suggestions include making sure the area has designated physical boundaries and is away from traffic and machinery; age-appropriate equipment for the children using it; and competent supervision.

Several speakers noted that some obstacles to a safer farming culture for children is that parents and farm supervisors often underestimate the risk of injury or assume that decisions about safety are "obvious" or are "common sense," and believe "It will happen to someone else."

Joe Grzywacz, a Florida State University professor who has researched immigrant farmworkers and their families, told the workshop attendees, "Families don't think of this as an occupational risk; they are thinking about this as . . . this is the way we live our lives."

3 children die, 33 are injured per day in accidents on U.S. farms; prevention workshop to be held in Lexington Aug. 6-7

The National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety will host a workshop will be held in Lexington Aug. 6-7 on preventing injuries of children on farms and ranches.

The workshop website says, "Learn how you can help safeguard children and youth who live, work and play on farms and ranches. This information can be used to develop and enhance childhood agricultural safety strategies for your organization. Interactive sessions will be facilitated by safety experts and leaders in the field of childhood agricultural injury prevention."

Registration is limited to 60 participants. Registration is $249. Click here for more information or to register.  Another workshop will be held in Hershey, Pa., Sept. 17-18.

Joan Mazur of the University of Kentucky, who is helping with the Lexington workshop, attended an earlier one in Iowa, and The Rural Blog asked her to write about it and her work. Here's her report:

By Joan Mazur
     I have been at the University of Kentucky College of Education since 1993 and have been associated with the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health & Injury Prevention with continual federal funding since 1994. The interdisciplinary nature of this center, housed at the UK College of Public Health, as well as its focus on solving real-world issues on family farms, has supported my research interests at the intersection of public education and public health. My husband and I also own a 70-acre farm in Washington County, Kentucky, so my interests in farm safety and health are also personal.

     Over the years I have developed with colleagues many educational programs, most of which involve technology and are targeted at a high at-risk group of teenagers from 14 to 19. Narrative simulations, digital games and other online interventions for preventing injuries and fatalities have been used at schools in farming and rural communities in the Southeast.

     While many of our more horrifying statistics on youth injury and fatality and injury in agriculture are decreasing, one segment of the at-risk younger population has resisted efforts. Every day on farms in the U.S., three children die and 33 are injured. These injuries and fatalities are preventable, and there are guidelines and best practices to assure that children can take advantage of the many benefits of living or working on family farms in safe and healthy ways.
     Recently I attended a Childhood Agricultural Injury Prevention (CAIP) Workshop in Iowa hosted by the National Children’s Center for Agricultural Safety & Health, whose national mission is to prevent agricultural injuries and fatalities to children. Many of us in all fields over the years have attended workshops, even entire conferences that disappointed despite a promise of improved professional learning. However the CAIP Workshop was excellent!

     Every session was highly informative -- delivered to the entire group, with many interactive small-group components to practice and absorb the various techniques and approaches to engaging stakeholders in preventing injuries to children, whether working or non-working, on farms or even in specialized settings such as agritourism sites (orchards, farms, petting zoos etc).

     We have now scheduled a CAIP for Lexington Aug. 5-7. I hope some of you can consider going, as journalists, teachers, counselors and other educators or others such as insurance personnel, FFA, bankers or other community member in positions to influence individual families and policy makers in decision making that can promote the economic, social, educational and personal mental and physical health of rural farm families and children.
     This KY-CAIP workshop is also a partnership between the National Childrens Center for Ag Safety & Health, the North Carolina Agromedicine Institute and the Florida Coastal Center for Agricultural Safety & Health, which will be providing expertise for regional agricultural safety and health issues.

UK nurse creates Farm Dinner Theater as a way to remind farmers of safe practices; has some unexpected benefits

Deborah Reed (UK photo by
Mark Cornelison)

A University of Kentucky nursing professor has come up with a novel way to remind farmers about farm safety: dinner theater.

At Farm Dinner Theater, farmers watch each other perform funny skits with a serious message. At a recent show at the Lincoln County Extension Office in Stanford, Thelma Blair asked her husband Jack if he remembered to wear ear plugs before working on his loud farm machinery. The audience laughed as Jack yelled, "WHAT?" in response. "While they delight in Jack's feigned deafness, it serves as a reminder to use ear protection when working with machines, Hilary Brown reports for UK Now. The Blairs are respected farmers in their community, and were excited to participate in the program when their extension agent asked.

The skits may fill a need because health and safety standards don't apply to small family farms. Lectures aren't effective, and pamphlets are easy to ignore, so Reed, who grew up on a nearby farm, wanted to find another way to help farmers recognize farming hazards and practice safety measures, Brown reports.

"Based on our research, we found that farmers learned best from watching each other and stories based on real situations," Reed told Brown. "They like humor. From observing farmers and how they choose their work behavior we know they learn from an apprentice model where role modeling is so important." And a free dinner doesn't hurt.

Reed says the program has helped in ways she didn't expect, such as "how the farmers would come together and work out issues among themselves," Brown reports. "At one event, a farmer mentioned how his father, who was grappling with Alzheimer's, kept trying to get the keys to the family tractor. Their solution was to move the tractor out sight. Once they did that, he stopped trying to drive it."

Another unexpected benefit: Attendees say the program has helped relieve their stress. Farmers are under a lot of stress these days because of bad weather, the trade war, low crop prices and more, and depression and suicide among farmers has increased greatly in recent years. Farm Dinner Theater "gives farmers the opportunity to come together, discuss their situations, and to support each other," Reed told Brown. "Non-farm people in the community come to these events and have a better understanding of the stressors that farmers face and can support them better."

Brown reports, "The results of these events have been remarkable. Fifty percent of the farmers who attended reported to have incorporated changes in their habits and on their farms within two weeks. Sixty percent made changes within two months. The program was so successful, Reed, who has won numerous awards for the program and was named by Oprah Magazine as "One of Five Nurses Who Might Just Save the World", was appointed UK's first agricultural nurse, the first at a land-grant university. Her position is funded by UK's College of Agriculture, Food and Environment, and marks the beginning of a unique partnership" with the College of Nursing.

The project is funded with a grant from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

UK researchers develop video game to teach agricultural safety to college and high-school students

Screen shot of "Hazard Ridge" video game

Researchers at the University of Kentucky are using a video game to educate young people about the dangers of agriculture, a line of work that has one of the highest rates of workplace fatalities in the U.S., Olivia McCoy reports for UKnow.

Since 2013 researchers at the UK College of Education and the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention, in UK's College of Public Health, have been teaching agriculture students and high-school students ag safety using a 3-D game called Hazard Ridge, which "simulates an injury that has occurred in a small rural town where teens are disappearing and the town is going bankrupt," McCoy writes.

"Players serve as the investigator of this issue and learn how agricultural injuries have negative effects on the town’s economy and citizens," McCoy writes. "The game teaches investigative skills and educates on how to conduct a financial analysis of injury."

Jennifer Watson, research coordinator for the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health and Injury Prevention, "said one of the goals for the game is to 'overcome the culture of comfort'," McCoy writes. Watson told McCoy, "Spending their entire lives around dangerous equipment lulls those working and living on farms into a false sense of safety and lessens their belief that they are at risk for injury." She said preventive measures, such as the game, reduces the risk of injury or death. (Read more)