Tractors and all-terrain vehicles that can roll over. Machines with fast-moving parts that can tear off a limb. Animals that can gore, crush or bite. Chemicals that emit toxic fumes.
It's no wonder that farming is considered one of the most dangerous professions in the United States.
The weekend death of former State Sen. Ron Raikes of rural Ashland, Neb., demonstrates the hazards farmers face daily. Raikes, 66, was killed while he was working on a hay-grinding machine on his farm late Saturday.
The tub of the machine, where the hay bales go, can be lifted hydraulically to give the operator access to the grinding mechanism, which can get clogged. Hydraulics can hold up the tub, but a mechanical arm, which must be put in place manually, keeps the tub from dropping if the hydraulics fail for some reason.
In this case, the mechanical arm wasn't up, and the frame holding the tub came down onto Raikes, who was alone at the time, said Lonnie Buller, who manages the grain operation on Raikes' 2,400-acre farm.
Raikes was an experienced farmer, Buller said, who understood the risks inherent in the job.
Similar hydraulic lifts can be found on front-end loaders, the headers on combines and folding cultivators, said Chuck Schwab, a safety specialist with Iowa State University Extension. All typically have mechanical locks that must be engaged, he said.
Farmers can perform potentially dangerous tasks many times over the years and not get injured, Schwab said. All it takes is one instance of not following a safety procedure for a person to run into trouble, he said.
“These are smart individuals — they've made their livelihood in farming for years and years,” Schwab said, speaking in general terms. “They've probably done multiple tasks. What happened this time? It likely was several things that came together and created this injury situation.”
One of the biggest risks farmers take, he said, is operating tractors that don't have rollover-protection structures, or ROPS. Newer tractors come with rollover protection, Schwab said. Older ones can be retrofitted, he said, but many farmers decide not to spend several hundred dollars for safety equipment on a tractor they have operated without incident for years.
Overturned tractors and machinery have been the leading cause of farm-related deaths in Nebraska for years, said Dave Morgan, safety specialist with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension.
On Monday, a 70-year-old Iowa City man was killed when he was pinned under a utility tractor mower, the Johnson County Sheriff's Office said. On Tuesday afternoon, an 18-year-old Lincoln man suffered broken bones and internal injuries when the 1965 open-seat tractor he was driving along a road rolled on top of him in a ditch, said Lancaster County Sheriff's Sgt. Andy Stebbing.
Roll bars usually stop tractors from tipping more than 90 degrees, Schwab said. “Fatalities usually happen at 180 (degrees),” he said, because tractors roll on top of the operator and crush them.
The use of rollover protection and seat belts in tractors could drastically reduce the number of tractor-related injuries and deaths, said Dan Neenan, manager of the Iowa-based National Education Center for Agricultural Safety.
Farmers also need to remember that attaching equipment to ATVs, such as sprayers or hay-bale racks, changes ATVs' center of gravity, Neenan said, and makes them unstable.
And ATV-related deaths are increasing, Morgan said. Six people have died in ATV crashes in Nebraska so far this year, he said, and three of those were farm-related.
Schwab said his big concern for this fall's harvest is if grain comes in wet and farmers try to break up clogged grain as it is being transferred into a bin. “I see a spike in suffocation,” he said. “You don't enter the bin with the auger operating.”
Neenan said busy farmers need to slow down and pay attention to everything happening around them.
“Nobody wakes up and says, ‘I'm gonna have a farm accident today.' You don't get to call that,” Neenan said. “We need to be prepared for that every day.”
Contact the writer:
444-1109, bob.glissmann@owh.com
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