Slowing down a key component to farm safety

Fontanelle Fire Chief Tyson Sickles said recently that most farmers are good about being careful and preventative around their operation, but there are a few safety tips he can share as a first responder to help make sure they stay safe this harvest season and beyond.

Sept. 22-27 is National Farm Safety and Health Week, which is held annually to bring increased awareness to the risks associated with working in agriculture and to promote life-saving health and safety protocols aimed at reducing preventable injury and death.

Fontanelle Fire and Rescue recently took a tour of 21st Century Cooperative’s Fontanelle location with manager John Baudler. Sickles said the tour was helpful in many ways, a couple being that responders now know employee meeting places for emergencies, know where electrical shutoff points are around that facility and have a better general mental picture of the facility, its layout and what types of things are stored there.

General safety tips

While there are specific risk factors associated with a business like 21st Century, there are many farm safety tips that come to mind that are more general, Sickles explained.

The first tip is that farmers are caught up on sleep, especially during busy seasons like harvest.

“I know harvest is a time crunch and it’s easy for me to sit back and say everyone needs to get caught up on their sleep, but farmers can and do push things to the limit,” Sickles said. “When you’re tired, you probably sometimes don’t use the precautions that you should.”

Another precaution farmers should take is to shut down a piece of equipment upon leaving the cab to adjust or fix something.

“You really need to shut the equipment all the way down so there’s no chance of you getting caught in a PTO shaft or an auger. The big thing is we can get too comfortable. When you get too comfortable, that’s when you can get in trouble,” Sickles said. “You also need to make sure you don’t have any loose clothing where you can get caught.”

The general public should also note that there are more pieces of slow-moving equipment paved and rock rural roads this time of year. One of the biggest safety hazards can be other motorists who feel they’re in a hurry and a secondary accident occurs separate, sometimes completely separate of nearby farm equipment.

“There’s equipment out there on the roads that doesn’t move as fast as a car,” Sickles said. “It goes back to that you want to get from Point A to Point B. You want to pass that slow-moving vehicle as fast as you can but you didn’t see that person in your blind spot. We have to be as mindful as we can about what’s on the road in front of us.”