Farming is a dangerous job.
It’s a sentence most of us have heard so often that it doesn’t resonate the way it probably should.
The sector involves a lot of heavy equipment, powerful livestock and in many cases a farmer working alone, far from help and in areas with patchy cell service if something goes wrong.
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Data is hard to come by, but a survey by the Canadian Agriculture Safety Association in 2020 found that 72 per cent of respondents in Manitoba have had a close call or serious injury on their operation. For 24 per cent, that injury or close call happened within the last year.
In 2017, a months-long investigation by the Globe and Mail put agriculture third on its list of industries with the highest average fatality rate for traumatic injuries between 2011-15. It was seventh on the list of industries tallying the highest number of deaths from traumatic injury.
The Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting initiative noted 624 ag-related deaths from 2011-20, about 62 a year. It put the overall ag fatality rate between 2011-20 at 10.7 per 100,000 of the farm population.
I suspect most of us know, or know of, at least one person who has died or been seriously hurt due to an accident on the farm. Most of us probably have our own stories about close calls.
Some of those near misses may have arisen from unforeseeable factors. Other times, maybe we were in a rush. Maybe we were frustrated because the object or animal we were trying to wrangle wasn’t co-operating.
But I’d wager that most people who have worked on a farm for any length of time have stood in the yard after near disaster and thought, “Wow, that was dumb. That could have ended badly.”
The danger with national awareness campaigns like Canadian Agricultural Safety Week (which ran March 10-16 this year) is that it may come across as preachy. Farmers may feel they’re already trying their best.
They certainly don’t want anyone to get hurt on their farm. They don’t want to be hurt either. But the crop still has to get in. The machinery has to get fixed. The cattle have to be shipped, and producers may find themselves justifying a risk, especially one perceived as a calculated risk only to themselves, to get it all done.
The same survey by CASA in 2020 found that 83 per cent of Manitoba respondents thought their farm work was being done safely most of the time, and 12 per cent figured it was being done safely all the time. Almost three-quarters said they were highly motivated to improve safety on their farm.
Yet 25 per cent admitted they didn’t have a farm safety plan, written or unwritten, and 66 per cent said that old habits were likely an obstacle to adopting safer practices. And again, almost a quarter had suffered an incident or near incident in the previous year, despite feeling they took precautions.
The point of a national safety week is not to nag or attack. How can it be? Almost all of us have been there.
But it does ask farmers to acknowledge and respect the risks inherent in the industry that may be encountered so frequently that they become background noise.
Things are getting better. While 62 deaths a year are tragic, the number was 135 in 1990, according to CAIR. There have been concerted efforts to make farming safer.
Things like grain entrapment are being addressed by groups including CASA. There’s more awareness around official farm safety plans and resources, and access to advice from organizations like CASA, Keystone Agricultural Producers, SAFE Work Manitoba, Farm Credit Canada and others.
There are webpages upon webpages of reports, newsletters, checklists and fact sheets about farm safety. KAP has dedicated farm safety staff whose role is not to shame, but to support.
But there’s no getting away from the fact that risks exist in agriculture. It doesn’t hurt to remind ourselves of that every year — or even every day.
