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This week is National Farm Safety and Health Week. This year’s theme is “Don’t Learn Safety by Accident”.
Dan Neenan of the National Education Center for Agricultural Safety, notes the word “accident”, though, is a bit of a misnomer.
“Because ‘accident’ in most people’s mind means that there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent it. So, we’re trying to get the words across of ‘preventable incident’.”
Neenan explains the daily themes for National Farm Safety and Health Week.
“Monday is equipment and rural roadway safety. Tuesday is health and wellness. Wednesday is generations- talking farming from kids to grandparents. Thursday is confined spaces- grain bins, manure pits, and Friday is actually reporting ag injuries.”
Speaking of confined spaces, Purdue just recently released their annual report of U.S. Agricultural Confined Space-related Injuries and Fatalities. It showed no fewer than 55 cases in 2023 across the US, including 29 fatal and 26 non-fatal cases.
Neenan says they’ve partnered with the Agrisafe Network on a series of safety webinars this week with two per day.
The latest recorded annual numbers for farm fatalities, 417 in 2022, is the motivation for Neenan and others in the farm safety space.
“I first started doing this in the year 2000 and we were averaging 730 fatalities per year. So, getting down to 417 is a good stride, but we’re never going to get down to zero during my working lifetime.”