Noise-induced hearing loss in farm workers is a common but often ignored problem, say farm safety specialists.
“Studies have shown that most agriculture workers have experienced (some) hearing loss by the age of 17,” said Raelyn Peterson, Alberta Agriculture’s farm safety co-ordinator.
However, Louise Hass, who wrote a study about hearing loss in the dairy industry that was published in the Journal of Rural Health, said the issue tends to be ignored.
“It is a very important subject, and yet often neglected due to other priorities in managing a demanding farm business and the invisible nature of hearing loss,” she wrote in an e-mail interview.
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Much of this hearing loss occurs without a worker realizing the damage.
Peterson blames the prevalence of hearing loss partly on the nature of the work. Farm workers are exposed to a wide variety of machinery, most of which is loud when running.
Tractors, combines, squealing pigs and chainsaws are the biggest culprits, but any noise with a decibel reading higher than 85 has an increased risk of causing hearing damage.
Kenda Lubeck, a farm safety specialist with Alberta Agriculture, said most people don’t realize how much damage a small amount of work with a loud item can cause.
“Some people, you know, they just think, ‘oh, I’m just going to do a little bit of work.’ So they get working on the chainsaw and afterwards their ears are ringing, which indicates that they’ve done damage.”
This damage cannot be reversed, she said, so it’s best to prevent it happening in the first place. The easiest way to do this is by wearing hearing protection devices.
“It’s just making sure that you do something about it all the time, so protecting your hearing all the time, not one day today and then not doing anything for the next week,” Peterson said.
The devices are becoming more widely used, but Lubeck said many farm workers still come up with reasons why they shouldn’t wear them, discomfort and inconvenience being the main ones.
Hass said many of the farmers she surveyed mentioned a risk of not hearing other important sounds.
“They already knew they had a degree of hearing loss and were (hesitant) about missing possibly important sounds.”
However, Lubeck said this risk decreases with the increased use of hearing protection devices.
“It’s better to get accustomed to wearing them. Then you can start to decipher other things,” she said.
“You can hear a little bit with them, and it depends on what kind of hearing protection you have as to how much other stuff you can hear, but it’s more important in the long run, in the big picture, to protect your hearing.”
She said hearing protection devices, which range from foam earplugs to full earmuffs, are available from most hardware or agricultural supply stores.
She also recommended buying a decibel reader, available at most electronic and some agricultural supply stores.
