A 54-year-old farmer was killed last week near Westbourne, Man., after getting pulled into a round baler.
Thomas Dinwoodie was working alone in a field when the accident happened shortly after noon Aug. 31. It’s believed he was trying to fix a malfunction on the baler when he got drawn into the machine.
The power take-off and baler were running when Dinwoodie’s body was discovered. RCMP and a provincial workplace safety and health officer are investigating the accident.
The mishap was the fourth farm-related fatality this year in Manitoba. Close to 30 people have died in farming accidents across the three prairie provinces since the start of 1998.
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The majority of the victims are male. They range in age from pre-school children to seniors.
“Common sense tells us that the majority of farm workers are male,” said Solomon Kyeremanteng, manager of the farm safety program for Alberta Agriculture.
“I hate to say this, but they are the ones doing the dangerous work. That doesn’t mean females don’t get killed.”
The fatality total in Alberta was seven as of the end of August.
In Saskatchewan, 16 people have died in farming accidents this year. Three of those deaths involved people driving tractors on slopes. The tractors rolled killing the drivers.
There were also two accidents in Saskatchewan this year where round bales tumbled out of front-end loaders onto the operators.
“They put them on the front-end loaders and they raise them too high,” said Kathleen Mohr, farm safety consultant for Saskatchewan Labor. “The bales fall back and crush them.”
Machinery has been involved in most of the farming fatalities on the Prairies this year. However, the causes of death are many.
One man died after getting crushed by cattle, while another suffered a lethal kick to the chest from a horse. Others have been crushed by trucks, entangled in p.t.o. shafts, suffocated in grain and fatally injured by burns and in falls.
Busy but tired
Farm safety experts say most farm accidents happen during seeding and harvest, when farmers are most hurried and more prone to fatigue.
Farmers should pace themselves to avoid fatigue during the harvest, said Kyeremanteng. He noted, however, that such advice may be hard to follow when there are bills to pay and fields to be combined.
“I don’t think anyone sitting in an air-conditioned office can honestly give a farmer advice as to how he paces himself. But common sense tells you that if you know you are tired, take a break,” he said.
During the past five years, there has been an average of nine deaths per year involving farm accidents in Manitoba. The average for Saskatchewan is 19 farm-related deaths during that time. In Alberta, the average is 17 deaths between 1993 and 1997.
That doesn’t mean farmers in Saskatchewan and Alberta are more careless than their counterparts in Manitoba. The difference in death tolls is mainly because Manitoba has fewer farmers than its western neighbors.
