On an annual basis, volunteers come together in the Humboldt, SK region to talk to school-aged kids about safety. The Progressive Agriculture Safety Days have been running since 2009, with the sole purpose of developing a culture of safety in the community. Shari Hinz, the executive director for Safe Communities Humboldt & Area, says that it’s always critical to address the hazards kids might encounter on farms in addition to general safety practices.

“There are a number of students that either reside on the farm or visit farms on a regular basis,” she explains.

The event sees children rotating through safety stations and while some of these may include local emergency response staff, others will feature a local veterinarian or a farm equipment dealer. “Our presenters are all volunteers, and a number of them are based within the ag sector,” Shari says. Hergott Farm Equipment has been a long-standing supporter, involved right from the first event she says. Chris Hergott gives credit to his uncle, who was general manager at the time, for initially starting with the program and being enthusiastic about getting involved right from the beginning.

“He likes children, he thought it was important, and so he started doing the presentations,” Chris recalls. Although they’ve always maintained a focus on equipment safety, the objective is general awareness rather than operational safety. “We’ve brought small tractors in, even yard tractors with three point lawn mowers, just to show how noisy they are, that it’s important to make sure the operator is aware of your presence, never to sneak up on somebody because they can turn quickly… that type of thing.”

Once he got involved, however, Chris says the students quickly became teachers for him. “I would start my presentation by asking the kids if they knew anyone who had been seriously hurt on the farm and, boom, the hands just went up,” he says. “That made me aware of how important it was for us to be out there.” Until it was pointed out to him by children, he says he just never noticed the injuries that accompanied so many of his customers as they visited the dealership. “A guy can come up to the parts counter, you’ve seen him a hundred times, and it’s not until he mentions it that you see that the end of his finger is missing, and you never know how many toes a guy has.”

Suddenly, he started to see how he did his job on a daily basis with fresh eyes. He admits that he used to grumble internally about guards getting in the way while he tried to repair pieces of equipment. Now he is grateful for the same guards he used to see as inconveniences. “PTO shields are phenomenal now, to the point where if you need to work on them, it’s a real pain to get them off but I appreciate that type of thing now.”

He never expected to learn so much from these kids and laments that you can never really know if you made an equally strong impression. But Shari Hinz confides that in Humboldt, they know their event has saved lives already.

“We know they’re taking away positive messages from the day because we had a situation where a family was visiting relatives, the kids were at home by themselves, and they had a fire break out in the home.” Shari says the visiting children called 911 and evacuated everyone from the house safely. When asked by members of the responding fire department how they knew what to do, those same kids explained that they had been at the farm safety day in Humboldt more than one year before and that’s where they had learned exactly what to do. “Their experience saved lives that day,” she says. †

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Jim Wassermann, an engineer with the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute (PAMI) in Saskatchewan, is a member of the team of farmers, engineers and machinery experts that produced the guidebook. He says, “Over the years, PAMI received so many questions from farmers who wanted to hitch up their older equipment safely that we decided to put all the answers into a new guide.”

Wassermann encourages farmers to obtain a copy to use as a supplement for their tractor and implement operator manuals. The 42-page guidebook is farmer-friendly and features color photos, illustrations and tables of data.

Featured hitching connections are: drawbars, three-point hitches, power-take-offs (PTOs), hydraulic and electrical. And there’s a safe way to do them all based on knowledge of the equipment being connected, an understanding of the procedures required for a safe tractor-to-implement connection, operator skill and respect for personal and public safety. The guidebook provides a checklist of all these safety concerns.

In general, before hitching a tractor to any implement, check the safe hitching guide’s hazard assessment and safety plan. You’ll find a list of questions. Answer them and you will be able to identify, estimate and evaluate risks and develop a safety plan.

Here are a couple of the questions: Does the operator have sufficient knowledge and skill? What are the potential risks to the operator, bystander, public, equipment, property? What severity is associated with the risks? Slot the answers into a safety plan and you’re ready to get hitched!

The information in the guidebook is all practical and useful. Not surprising because it’s based on information from farmers and engineers as well as the Canadian Standards Association (www.csa.ca), the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (www.asabe.org), the American National Standards Institute (www.ansi.org), Occupational Safety and Health Association (www.osha.gov), and the International Organization for Standardization (www.iso.org).

Safe Implement Hitching is available as a free, downloadable PDF. Go to www.planfarmsafety.ca and type ‘hitch’ in the search box. Safe Implement Hitching was produced with financial support from the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (CASA) and the Association of Equipment Manufacturers (AEM). †

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If your business runs on a profit margin of five per cent, and if the total uninsured costs were $5,000, then your business will have to generate $100,000 in sales to pay for this incident.

The bottom line for any business is profitability. An important part of maximizing profits is minimizing losses — and that includes losses due to injury, illness, or death of the farmer, farm family, or farm workers.

“Plan. Farm. Safety” is the theme of this three-year Canadian Agricultural Safety campaign. Each aspect of the theme will be promoted over the next three years. This year the campaign will promote “Plan” with safety walkabouts and planning for safety. In the second year, the focus will be on “Farm” including implementation, documentation and training. In the third year, emphasis will be on “Safety” including assessment, improvement and further development of safety systems.

The year-long “Plan” campaign will be launched with Canadian Agricultural Safety Week (CASW), from March 14 to 20. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) and Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (CASA) deliver CASW in partnership with Farm Credit Canada (FCC) and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.

“Farm safety is a choice, not an act of fate,” says Greg Stewart, FCC President and CEO. “It’s up to each of us to make informed and safe choices in our workplace because in agriculture, even taking small risks can have dire consequences.”

On average, 115 people are killed and another 1,500 are seriously injured by farm-related incidents in Canada each year — and many more minor injuries are never even reported. The cost to our economy for agricultural injuries is estimated at between $200 and $300 million annually, shows a study by the Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting program (CAIR).

Through provincial worker’s compensation board programs and private insurance you can partially protect your business from losses incurred from injuries, illness and death. Although it varies from province to province, most provincial worker’s compensation board programs require that employees be covered for benefits that include medical aid, payment for lost time, rehabilitation, permanent disability awards, pensions to dependents, and funeral benefits. An employer’s claim history is factored into premium rates with higher claims demanding higher premiums.

However, farm owner-operators and their related workers (children, siblings, and parents) do not necessarily require this coverage in all provinces. This is significant considering that in Canada, 61 per cent of farms are owned and operated by one person, 27 per cent are partnerships, 10 per cent are family corporations, and only two per cent of farms are non-family corporations, says Statistics Canada.

From a business perspective, it is imperative to make an informed decision as to what a farm-related incident could cost your business, then have a plan as to how the situation could be handled. Keep in mind that it is estimated that for every one dollar of insured costs there will be five dollars of uninsured costs. Whether it is an insured employee or an uninsured family member, some of the hidden costs of injuries may include:

Wages to the injured worker not covered and lost time wages on the day of the injury.

Wages to uninjured workers who stopped to watch or assist the injured, or who depend on the output of the injured worker to complete their task.

Wages to the person caring for the injured worker including stabilizing the scene and waiting for emergency medical services or taking the worker to the hospital, filling out forms and incident reports.

An ambulance if the injured worker needs to be rushed to a hospital.

Damage to product, property or equipment. If these are insured then a deductible may apply.

Costs associated with instructing, training and repositioning workers, or in some cases hiring new employees.

Cost of lost production while retraining a replacement, or when the worker returns to work.

Cost of investigating, processing of claims and related paperwork, telephone calls and follow-up.

If you calculated the costs of each of these considerations — what would the total uninsured cost be?

Now consider this: If your business runs on a profit margin of five per cent, and if the total uninsured costs were $5,000, then your business will have to generate $100,000 in sales to pay for this incident. Likewise, if your business runs on a two per cent profit margin, then your business will have to generate $250,000 in sales to pay for this incident. Wouldn’t it make better business sense to just prevent the injury in the first place?

As you can see, it makes good business sense to minimize losses through injury prevention. This can be achieved by doing a safety audit on your farm, keeping all machinery in good repair with safe guards in place, having adequate accident insurance coverage, training workers in safe practices, leading by example, and making safety a priority on your farm.

Thanks to the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association for this article. For more information on Farm Safety Week, visit CASA’s website at www.casa-acsa.caor contact Theresa Whalen, CFA Farm Safety Consultant, a 613-822-0016 or email farmsafety@cfafca.ca

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