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National Farm Safety and Health Week 2020 kicked off yesterday 9/20/20 and will run through 9/26/20. Since Emily is the UMN Farm Safety and Health Extension Educator the episode fits perfectly.
Hosted by members of the University of Minnesota Extension Beef and Dairy Teams, The Moos Room discusses relevant topics to help beef and dairy producers be more successful. The information is evidence-based and presented as an informal conversation between the hosts and guests.
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Joe: Welcome to The Moos Room, everybody. OG3, three weeks in a row. Three weeks in a row.
Emily: Oh, right. Three for three, baby.
Joe: That's pretty good, lately. This week, we are talking about farm safety. Why are we talking about farm safety, Em?
Emily: Because this week is National Farm Safety and Health Week.
Joe: Awesome. I'm learning a lot. As some of you might know, I don't tell people this, I didn't grow up on a farm. I know. It's so crazy.
Emily: Oh, my gosh. Scandal.
Joe: I know. Big scandal. I didn't grow up on a farm, so there's a lot for me to learn in this episode. I really enjoyed it when we got into it in our potpourri episode with Michael J. Cruz PhD, and we talked about farm safety a little bit. I learned a lot there. I'm learning constantly more about it. Yes, we're going to jump into the farm safety. This week has been around for a long time. I didn't realize it. I thought it was something new. There's all these different days and weeks and, "Oh, this is National Donut Day, and this is National Dog Day," and I can't keep track of them all, but this is one of the OGs. It's been around since 1944. That's a long time.
Emily: That is.
Joe: What are we going to focus on today, Em? What's the overriding focus of all this today?
Emily: Well, in the past, we had our potpourri episode with Michael J Cruz PhD, and then we also had the episode potpourri. Bradley, let's hear it.
Brad: Potpourri.
Emily: Oh, you are no fun.
Brad: I'm never any fun.
Emily: Wet blanket over there. As I was saying, previously, we've talked about a mix of farm safety topics. We had an episode really focused on bull safety, and I think a lot of what you talked about with bull safety is applicable to livestock safety across the board, but I think today, we should really focus on equipment. Tractors, machinery, implements, all of those things. Equipment are the biggest cause of farm accidents, injuries, and fatalities in the US.
Of course, these different items are found on all farms, livestock farms, crop farms, everybody's going to have them. No one's exempt from it. I think that we could spend several episodes talking about this, but I will try to condense it down into one.
Joe: Well, I think it's good that we focus-- Like you said, we've done some episodes on some other things that involve safety and agriculture, including mental health episodes, which I know is one of your focuses when you're in your new job and in your old job as well. I think every day is going to have a different theme during this week. We're going to have tractor safety and rural roadway safety on Monday, overall farmer health on Tuesday, which would include mental health and physical health, and how they're tied together, which I've learned from Ms. Emily here.
Safety and health for youth in agriculture on Wednesday, emergency preparedness and agriculture on Thursday, and then safety and health for women specifically in agriculture on Friday. It's a full week. Full week.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. A lot of great topics, and some particularly timely ones. I think the emergency preparedness, we have had so many different forms of emergencies in 2020, this fabulous year. I think that that's a really timely appropriate thing to be talking about. Always important to talk about overall health.
Youth farm safety is critical. That's also a huge part of my job, and a lot of what Michael J Cruz PhD does, as he talked about on his episode, too. You start off day number one of National Farm Safety and Health Week with tractor safety and rural roadway safety. I think that tractor and equipment safety get a lot of attention, but the roadway safety, I think is not talked about as much as it should be.
Joe: Roadway safety, when I was in practice as a veterinarian, I was on the road constantly, and I saw some absolutely stupid things people trying to do to get around tractors and slow-moving vehicles on the road. I could see how that could be a big problem really quickly.
Emily: Absolutely. You're right. I think a lot of what we see is with other drivers on the road not being respectful of this equipment and what its capabilities are, but also I think that sometimes, what happens, we are in a rush, we're cutting corners, we're trying to do things as quickly as we can. I think it's also a good reminder for those of us in agriculture to think about too when we are on the road in a tractor, a combine, a skid steer, even just an ATV, that we need to be really cautious of what we're doing and aware of what we're doing and making sure that we have the different safety equipment in place for those situations.
Joe: Everyone thinks about tractors. Tractors are a big piece of equipment that probably involved in most of the accidents, right?
Emily: Yes. The most common accident is a tractor rollover. Hopefully, a lot of you listening have heard of ROPS, rollover protection systems, or structures. A lot of the tractor rollovers we see are where there's fatalities or severe injuries are tractors that don't have a cab, and also a lot of those older row-cropping tractors where the front tires are really close together.
Brad: Narrow front tractor.
Emily: Narrow front, yes. Those ones are the highest risk of rollovers because they can roll over in several ways. Then they came along, and now there are ones with wider fronts, but still, if you don't have that cab there, and the tractor rolls over, that can easily crush you. With ROPS, with these rollover protection systems, they are systems that can be retrofitted onto tractors. It basically is two main components, a roll bar that goes up and over the top, and then a seatbelt, so that if you were to roll over and then the tractor was being held up with the bar, and then you'd have the seatbelt to keep you in place.
Joe: Well, that seems super important. I've rolled much smaller vehicles. I rolled an ATV on myself and got out of it pretty good, actually, a bunch of stitches, concussion, but I couldn't even imagine rolling a big piece of equipment like that. I could see how it could be crazy dangerous. Crazy dangerous.
Emily: Yes, and sometimes very tragic. That's why we do this, why we have this week, why I do this work.
Joe: Rollovers being the big one, what else comes to mind right away? What are big safety issues when we're talking about tractors specifically?
Emily: With tractors, I would say a lot of it is also including implements. Anything that gets hooked up with a PTO or a power take-off shaft. PTOs are another very, very common cause of farm accidents, injuries, and deaths. Whenever you are working around a PTO, making sure that it has a guard on, and those guards need to be replaced. I know that on our farm, my dad has had to replace our guards because they're plastic. They wear and tear, they get old, and so just having a guard doesn't do you any good if it's not attached correctly, or is broken, or still spins with the shaft. The purpose of the guard is that it doesn't spin.
Making sure those guards are on. I always tell people for tractor, any sort of equipment or machinery, if you need to get out of it, get out of the cab, get out of the seat, turn off the power. I know that for a lot of people, they want to leave it idle, it's a time saver, it's this, it's that, but especially if you have implements hooked up, weird things can happen.
I know that that is what happened in my family with my brother. He lost his arm in a piece of equipment with an auger and he thought that it was powered off, and when he got the clog out of the auger, that's what he was doing, he was clearing up a clog, it started to rotate. It was still attached to its power. It was still getting power. That's why I tell people, disconnect, turn everything off, wait for everything to stop moving and spinning and chopping and slicing, dicing, and then approach.
Joe: Yes. It makes a lot of sense. Same basic rules that we learned in shop class. Don't be messing around with any internal components or anything unless everything is unplugged and off and all of that. Like I said, I don't know a ton about this, so this is really good to hear. I think about PTOs, especially on a dairy or on a beef operation, especially with our vertical mixers. We're leaving those sit and mix sometimes unsupervised for quite a long time. It's something that's going to be accessible and something need to be thinking about all the time.
Emily: Yes, absolutely. We talked about at the beginning that also during this week, there's one day, Wednesday that's focused on youth farm safety. You just said a really big key there, Joe, is these things are left running unattended, unsupervised. If you have a child on your farm, children on your farm, yours or somebody else's, that's a hazard to them. That's a risk. With farm kids, they're so used to it and so they don't always recognize things as hazards, and for kids that aren't from farms, they don't know what the hazards are, because they aren't familiar with that environment.
That is a really important piece to remember is anything unsupervised that it's not just about the one person working on that equipment or in charge of the feed mixing, it's about anybody who may be on that farm.
Joe: I know there's lots of training opportunities for youth and that Mike talked about that a little bit, sorry, Michael J Cruz PhD talked about that a little bit.
I think about firearm safety, we start that so early. My dad was teaching me that before I was 12 years old and can take the class and you end up knowing about it and respecting the danger of it really early in life. That means that the same thing that goes with getting these kids trained around the safety stuff right away?
Emily: Yes I definitely think so. I would say one of the most common responses that we see from this is kids actually going home and calling out their parents on, "Hey, we shouldn't be doing that this way. We should be doing it like this." That's always my favorite thing, empower the people, empower the youth to speak up and be champions for safety on our own farm.
Joe: I bet you Brad has never had his kids get on his case or anything like that for ever.
Brad: No, never, never, never.
Joe: Never? They never call you out on something like that?
Brad: No, not at all. Never driving too fast. Never whatever.
Emily: Yes. Well, Bradley J. Heins is perfect in every way so there would be nothing for his kids to criticize.
Joe: I know and he's got tenure anyway, so.
Emily: Right, nothing to worry about. Have you see the milking parlor at their county fairgrounds?
Brad: Exactly, grant dollars, grant money,
Joe: Grant money, grant money.
Emily: Grant money, grant money, grant money.
Joe: I'm not aware of all the different things that are out there and one of the things I see a lot is that with youth, a lot of the kids are super, super good at driving a skid steer, absolutely, unbelievably skilled at doing it. I don't know if video games plays into that or what, but they got it figured out. Talk about that for a second. There's got to be some safety concerns there.
Emily: It's difficult because as somebody who grew up on a farm, and you may need to cut this, Joe, I was driving the pickup to grab loose bales when I was eight, should I have been doing that? No. I'm somebody that I know kids love to be able to help on the farm, and I know that it's useful labor for their parents, and their parents like it when their kids are taking an interest in farming. I just cringe every time I see a kid on a skid steer. I will share a quick story here.
There is, it shall remain nameless, but I follow a lot of farms on Facebook. There was one farm, one day on Facebook, they posted a video of the five or six-year-old granddaughter learning to drive the skid steer. While her uncle who's on the farm too, he was in front of the skid steer, walking backwards facing her as she was driving it towards him. I just could not believe my eyes because the number of things that could go wrong.
They were in a freestyle barn. They were in a pen I believe had cows in it. I get it and I get wanting to make those memories and create those experiences and get kids excited about farming, but I am just a really big proponent of you need to think about a lot of things with kids and farm safety.
We talked about this when Michael J. Cruz PhD was here, thinking about their maturity levels, their ability to make decisions on the fly, even just their physical capabilities. There are some kids that they are too short to operate a skid steer safely and you just hear about all these tragic accidents of kids trying to drive these different things or even just an ATV or a quad or a golf cart, whatever, and tragedy strikes.
It's really hard and I just think these things can be prevented, and I know it's really hard to have to say no and so I do grant that some of it is up to the parent's discretion and what they think their child is capable of. It takes a second for an accident to happen, less than a second.
Joe: We talk a lot about tractors and tractor safety, what are some other things on a farm that maybe people don't think of that you might flag or might think of as not being safe or things that we should maybe think twice about when we're thinking about safety?
Emily: I'm going to hone in on an important thing you said there, which was things we don't think about. Yes, tractors are big ones, we think about grain bins, manure pits, those are big ones we think about. Things that we don't think about, slips, trips, and falls. Is there a place on your farm where water goes and freezes in the winter, and you have a really dangerous slick spot. Again, less than a second, and somebody can be injured. You also need to think about keeping the people on your farm safe too.
Another one is hand tools. If you're using a grinder and the plate breaks, because you've used it too long, or something, those pieces can go flying up, people have lost eyes, that kind of thing. Saws, if they're not sharp enough, or you're using a saw that you know was broken, anything. Those little hand tools I think are the ones that really get people a lot as far as a, "Oh, I never thought of that." Because we think of the big things that can crush us, kill us, but the small things too can be just as dangerous in some situations.
That's a big one for me and we talked about livestock before, bull safety, and general stockmanship and all of that. I think that we sometimes get far too comfortable around our animals and we let down our defenses and we let our guard down. We've heard stories, we all have of the most docile cow on the dairy, has a calf and then goes crazy and breaks several ribs and wrists and ankles and everything. Livestock is another one for me and I had a third one and now naturally, I can't remember it, the fourth one.
Joe: Four-wheelers.
Emily: Oh, four-wheelers. [unintelligible 00:17:06]
Joe: A whole lot before but four-wheelers there. ATVs.
Emily: Four-wheelers, a lot of those kind of convenience vehicles, especially if your farm site is very large, or maybe spread out on multiple sites, you might hop on a four-wheeler to go to where the heifers are, or go to that other pasture, something like that. Those are big cause of accidents. Something that again, you get very comfortable using, very used to, and many, many things can go wrong very, very quickly.
Brad: Wear your seatbelt while you're in an ATV. A lot of people do not wear their seatbelts. They do have seat belts in them and we try to wear them around the farm here. Sometimes you're just buzzing around quick and you don't ever think about it. It's one of those things you don't ever think about but you should put your seatbelt on in an ATV.
Emily: Right. No different than when you're driving your car.
Brad: Exactly.
Emily: It's a vehicle and I think just also those simple things, making sure the lights and the blinkers work, those little things that just again, help you stay safe, but also help you make sure that other people around you can stay safe as well.
Joe: I know that this week was really it's all about harvest, that's why we see so many accidents this time of year. It's getting everybody to remember that this isn't always a safe activity that we're dealing with. What about stuff that happens in the field? We've talked about being on the road, being at the farm. In the field, the one I always think about is when tractors are getting stuck because people are trying to push things a little hard, the fields too wet, however you want to-- They're trying to combine something that's a little too steep, those kinds of things. How do you stay safe, especially when these guys are running nonstop? You're tired, and you're stressed and all of that?
Emily: Oh, man, that's a good question, Joe, that I wish I had a good answer to. I have an answer, but it's probably not a good one. Yes, I think with a lot of those things, what we see is-- I'll back up and say, to me, there's absolutely a correlation between our amount of stress and how safe we are and that's not just on the farm, I think that's with anything in life but specifically on the farm.
When we are under a lot of stress, it impacts our mental health, which impacts our cognitive function, poor decision-making skills, lack of focus and concentration, not being able to think really quickly or think on our feet. Those types of things can lead to those types of incidents that you talked about, Joe.
Yes, it's go, go go and we got to get it done, but also, do you have enough people on your team that people are able to get breaks and they are not in a tractor for 18 hours in a single day.
Joe: Do some of these newer tractors and things-- I was in one with a friend, it looks like a UFO at night. There's all sorts of dials and buttons and GPS and all these things, but the overall look of a tractor doesn't look to have changed much. Has there been improvements and safety things along the way to accompany all these other improvements?
Emily: Yes, I would say some common ones I think of are, again, the introduction of cabs and being able to retrofit old tractors with roll bars. I think that those cabs, they've done a good job of making sure they're well reinforced. That's a big one. Also, and I know that this is something a lot of farmers disengage, and so I am telling you all right now listening. You have it disengaged, fix it, reengage it, the kill switch for when your butt leaves the seat.
That's on lawnmowers, a lot of different things, and I know that it is annoying, but why do they do that? It's so that if you're getting off to look at something, inspect something, fix something, the power to it is killed, and it's turned off. When you disengage that, again, I get it's all down to time. Time is money, baby. I get it, I respect it. However, if you get hurt, if you're killed, you have not saved anyone any time.
Joe: Again, like you said, it's time and everyone's hustling to get done, but yes, you can't be taking chances like that, especially if you have kids around too.
Emily: We're in September, and then it's probably mostly done now but chopping silage, and think about, you drive past places that are doing silage, how crazy that is? All the moving parts, all the things that are going on, and then you get to the farm, and you got people dumping it into the bunker. People driving over the bunker, people trying to cover the bunker, people running every which way. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night, is thinking about that.
I've spoke out on that for a long time of just simple things like making sure everybody is in a safety vest. Make sure everybody has safety glasses. I'm sure you've had silage or something flying to your eye. It's the worst.
Brad: Never. Never. Never.
Emily: [laughs] Well, we're not all perfect like you, Brad.
Joe: Oh, yes. That kind of stuff is important. The simple stuff that you shouldn't take for granted, wearing safety glasses is a big one.
Emily: Those things are so cheap. If you get one for everybody in your crew, that is such an inexpensive way to ensure a little bit more safety.
Joe: I think this is the last question I had because it happens a lot. I don't know how much I see it talked about is fire. Between equipment fires, hay fires, all these different ways that we can have fire involved in the farm. When we're talking about these things, they're not small fires, they're out of control quickly. Give me the rundown on fire.
Emily: All right. I got a lot for this, so I'll try to go fast, including a very embarrassing story about me.
Joe: Those are the best stories.
Emily: First, I'm going to start with saying that that was the thing before that I forgot when we were talking about the what are things people never think about. I was going to say electricity, and bad electricity causing fires. I am so glad you brought that up, Joseph. Thank you.
Joe: I'm amazing.
Emily: You are. You are.
Brad: Me too. Me too.
Emily: Yes, all right. Everybody gets a gold star today. Good job, guys. Back to fire safety. Yes, that happens, and it is one of those things that we don't often think about happening. There's just simple things like having a fire extinguisher a couple different places around the farm. One of the little ones in the tractor with you, because yes, absolutely, if it's been a dry year and there's a spark, and something on your tractor or equipment catches fire, you can light up a field real quick.
Now, I will tell my embarrassing story about fire. Anybody who is listening, never do this. This is a big like, "Kids, don't try this at home." I am here to tell you that this incident was the result of just sheer stupidity. All right.
Joe: Well, start out with how old you were because that can frame it too. Was it last week? It was last week.
Emily: No, no, no. It was before I was a "expert" in farm safety. I was, I want to say 12, 13, 14, somewhere in that age range, and I was helping my brother, my middle brother Jake, so he would have been, say 17 or so. We were both teenagers and kind of the dumb ones in our family. There's five of us, so not everybody gets the smarts.
Joe: I'm sure he'll be really happy to hear that.
[laughter]
Emily: No. We did have a burn pile in the back. We were burning some things, old feed sacks, what have you. It wasn't super dry at that time. It was a little bit of a windy day, and so that's another thing with fire. Really be aware of wind and think about the wildfires in California right now, how much they're saying the wind is impacting that. We also had some old moldy hay. God, we might need to cut this [unintelligible 00:25:55]. I don't know if I want people at large knowing this. We had some hay and then there was some old broken-up bales on one of the hay racks.
Jake's idea was like, oh, he'll drive that hay rack over there, and then I can just push off the loose hay for burning. Can you guess what happened next?
Joe: No, unpredictable. I don't know what could have possibly happened.
Emily: The flames jumped onto the hay rack, which had metal sides, but had a wooden floor. The entire thing goes up in flames. Jake unhooks the tractor, which I mean, that was the smartest thing either of us did in this whole situation. Jake unhooks the tractor and moves it. I start running to the milk house to get a bucket of water because I thought that that would be really useful.
Joe: That would fix it.
Emily: I'll spill the five-gallon pail, we'll be fine. Again, the entire hay rack is engulfed in flames. Black smoke torn into the sky. Then I was like, "No, wait, that won't work." Then I turned around and was going back to the hay rack and to my brother who was coming towards me. Then he goes, "Turn around," because again, I was facing the hay rack. He yelled at me to turn around, and I did, and as I did that, the tires blew. There was some shrapnel that hit me in the arm and that kind of thing. That could have just as easily hit me in the face. I don't know if I actually want this in the podcast. [laughs]
Joe: It's too late now. Too late now.
Emily: Now, everybody knows.
Joe: You're protected by youth. You were young and dumb, and everything doesn't-- It takes too long to do everything. You were just trying to rush. It's the same concept as everything else. "Oh, that couldn't possibly happen to me," that kind of thing, but funny. I enjoyed the story. I'm glad everyone was okay.
Emily: Yes, me too. It was the talk of the neighborhood for the week.
Joe: Of course, what else were they supposed to do?
Emily: Everyone was very excited about it. Bradley, if you had to sum up your farm safety feelings in one rule for the dairy at Morris, what would it be? What would your one rule be for farm safety?
Brad: Slow down and wear your seatbelt.
Emily: Love it. Love it. All right, Joe, what would your one farm safety rule be?
Joe: Bradley took mine. I was hoping he was going to say that, because I think that's a big piece of it, is just slow down, think about things a little bit ahead of time. Nothing's ever as big a rush as you think it's supposed to be or whatever it is in your head. Assess the situation, do all those kinds of things ahead of time, and don't take the shortcuts. That's a big thing.
There are shortcuts that aren't safe, and the probability might be low that something is going to happen, but if you do it enough, it's going to happen. I think slow down, don't take the shortcuts if you can avoid it.
Emily: Yes. Absolutely. For me, I sum up farm safety in six words. This is what I say on the [crosstalk]--
Joe: You only gave us one.
Emily: I gave you one rule-
Joe: Fine. Okay, whatever.
Emily: -and you both said a mouthful. Well, no, Bradley didn't.
Joe: No, Brad didn't.
Emily: Joe did. No, mine, six words.
Brad: That's because I'm sitting here swatting flies all day long.
Emily: Yes, that's true.
Brad: I'm trying not to eat them.
Emily: For me, for farm safety, and this is what our Twitter page says. Find us on Twitter @UMNFarmSafety, and that is slow down, think twice, be safe. That is to me the overarching guidelines that you should follow, and there are things that you guys, you hit on all of them, right? Slow down. Like you were saying, Joe, think twice, think through things. The result of that is being safe and just thinking with a safety mindset.
Joe: Oh, good. I think that's the way to end it. We keep all that in mind. Look for National Farm Safety and Health Week 2020 kicks off September 20th, runs through the 26th. Look for all the stuff coming out from the University of Minnesota Extension. We'll be on Facebook. We'll be on Twitter. Like Emily said, there is now a YouTube channel specifically Farm Safety and Health. Search for it on YouTube, University of Minnesota �xtension, Farm Safety and Health YouTube channel.
Emily: Subscribe.
Joe: Subscribe. We need that subscription. If you have questions, comments, scathing rebuttals, send them to themoosroom@umn.edu.
Emily: That's T-H-E-M-O-O-S-R-O-O-M@umn.edu.
Joe: Catch us on the website, extension.umn.edu, and on Facebook @UMNDairy and @UMNBeef. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll catch you next week.
Emily: Bye.
Joe: Bye. Bye.
Emily: Goodbye. Goodbye. You can do it like a barbershop quartet thing.
[music]
Joe: Goodbye.
Brad: Exactly. Grant dollars, grant money, grant money, grant money, grant money.
Joe: Grant money, grant money, grant money.
Emily: Grant money, grant money, grant money.
Joe: [laughs]
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[00:31:35] [END OF AUDIO]
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