Safety doesn’t start on the farm. It begins back in the factory where the farm machinery is made.
Last week, Canadian Agricultural Safety Association delegates toured the CNH Industrial manufacturing plant in Saskatoon to get a first-hand look at safety measures used in manufacturing the machinery and making it safe for farmers to use.
Thel plant produces planters, air carts, air drills, disc drills and pick-up headers for Case, New Holland and Flexi- Coil.
“What we’re trying to demonstrate is how different areas connected to agriculture can do things to be the difference and we know that the first way, the best way to prevent any injuries or incidents is to engineer them out,” said Marcel Hacault, CASA’s executive director.
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Seth L’Hoir, the plant’s operations manager, said customer quality audits are done on every machine once it reaches the end of the line to ensure it is leaving the plant in a safe and working condition.
“If people don’t like what we’re building, they’re not going to buy it so through (World Class Manufacturing) methodology and the quality improvement pillar, we’ve seen a lot of great improvements on what we’re giving our customers,” L’Hoir said.
L’Hoir said safety measures are paramount for workers also.
In every work area, there is a board listing the work to be done that day. He said the boards also give employees the opportunity to draw immediate attention to any issues they see.
“We try to empower our employees to be part of the solution as well too. We have an employee observation inform program where em-ployees are actually rewarded for finding unsafe acts and conditions,” L’Hoir said.
Feedback received from employees is collected and placed in a database that prioritizes what im-provements need to be made.
“From a safety perspective, obviously we want people coming here working and leaving safe, that’s our number one objective before anything else.…,” he said.
From 2008 to 2015, the plant had a 78 percent reduction in first-aid use and 86 percent reduction in injuries.
