Farm injuries fail to decline

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Published: December 9, 1999

Farming isn’t getting any safer.

Though governments have boosted farm safety funding and farm families know about the dangers they face, injuries are happening at the same rate as before.

“There’s been no change (in the injury rate). It’s flat,” said Louise Hagel of the Centre for Agricultural Medicine, who has just completed a study of farm accidents in Saskatchewan.

Between 1990 and 1996, there were 2,442 serious injuries on Saskatchewan farms. One hundred forty-seven people died.

Farm people spent 13,311 days in hospital recovering from accidents.

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“These aren’t numbers. These are people,” Hagel said at the Saskatchewan Farm Injury Control Summit held in Saskatoon.

Hagel said the most worrisome trend the study revealed was that people in farm families were still suffering as many injuries in 1996 as they were in 1990.

The only apparent improvement is that there are fewer injuries overall, but that’s because there are fewer farmers. The injury rate isn’t falling any faster than the population, said Hagel.

The study, which was based on hospital admission statistics, also challenged some ideas many farmers have about farm safety, Hagel said.

Highest proportion

Though many adults think children and visitors to the farm are in the greatest danger of being injured, statistics show that almost 60 percent of all serious injuries happen to the farm operator. Men are 11 times more likely than women to be killed in a farm accident and six times as likely to be seriously injured.

Unlike many other industries, where younger workers have higher injury rates than experienced workers, older farmers suffer more injuries than young people.

The study found the most common form of farm accident is entanglement, where a farmer gets caught in machinery.

But it is not the most lethal type of accident. Getting run over or rolled over by a large piece of machinery is much more likely to kill a farmer than entanglement, even though it happens less often.

Falls are also a common source of injuries, Hagel said. This is especially true for older farmers.

She hopes studies like hers, which detail not only how many injuries are occurring but also what types of injuries and to whom, will enable farm safety experts and farmers to do more to avoid them.

“This allows the farm community to identify the patterns of injury, because there are patterns,” said Hagel.

Jim Wasserman, manager of the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute, said he wants to know more about when and where farm injuries occur because then PAMI may be able to make machinery safer.

He was alarmed at the lack of improvement in farm safety over much of the 1990s, even though people have worked hard to prevent accidents.

“It’s surprising, because over the years there’s been significant work on standards – to improve the guards, the shielding and the rollover protective structures – and the standards have become more stringent,” said Wasserman.

“One would expect that the numbers would decline.”

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Ed White

Ed White

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