AgriSuccess
Safety on the farm - Put extra thought into safety measures for young and old
Mark Cardwell
Theresa Whalen knows how wonderful it can be growing up on a family farm. But she also knows how dangerous farms can be, particularly for children and the elderly.
“No parent would let their child run around freely on a construction site, yet we don’t think twice about letting them loose on a farm,” says Whalen, who was raised on a dairy farm near Ottawa and was a farmer herself for 25 years.
She is now a certified occupational health and safety expert and a farm safety consultant with the Canadian Federation of Agriculture.
Citing statistics from the Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting (CAIR) project, Whalen notes that 217 kids aged 14 and under were killed on Canadian farms between 1990 and 2005. Notably, 99 of those deaths were children under the age of five.
Most of those deaths resulted from children falling off moving farm machinery and being run over, or from rollovers. Drowning and fatal injuries from animals were the other leading causes.
“Never allow extra riders of any age on equipment,” Whalen says. “And if you let a six-year-old loose on an ATV, you’ve got to know you’re responsible for what happens.”
She also recommends that manure pits and water holes be fenced off.
“A young child sees a crust on a manure pit and thinks she can walk on it,” Whalen says.
Farming parents, she adds, should do regular walkabouts with young children to show them dangerous areas and explain why they are out of bounds.
“The very young should have a fenced area to play in,” Whalen says. “They should not be roaming freely on the farm.”
Whalen also cautions parents against seeing teenagers as young adults who are ready to assume responsibilities on the farm.
“They need to decide if their child has the size, age and dexterity for certain tasks,” she says. “There should be proper training for every chore. You don’t want to push them too far too fast.”
That’s why she recommends the North American Guidelines for Children’s Agricultural Tasks (www.nagcat.org), a free online resource produced by an American research clinic.
Whalen thinks elderly farmers should also stop and think about how they work.
CAIR studies show that farmers aged 70 to 79 represent only 3.2 per cent of the total Canadian farming population, but they account for 18 per cent of farm deaths and 20 per cent of injuries requiring hospitalization.
Whalen blames most of those accidents on age-related factors like fatigue, reduced sight and hearing, and reduced mobility and reaction time.
“The stark reality is that people at 79 can’t do what they did at 39,” Whalen says.
Elderly farmers, she adds, need to take precautions to stay safe. This includes regular check ups and getting enough sleep and nutrition to stay alert during the day.
“You have to know your limits and not push yourself beyond them.”
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