VICTORIA, B.C. (Staff) – In most of the Olds College courses where Sally-Anne Downes teaches farm women about machinery, there is usually one who has to cancel because her husband won’t let her come.
Whether that is caused by the husband’s fear or arrogance Downes isn’t sure. But she and other safety advocates at a conference here say everyone on the farm should know how to handle the machinery or at least how to turn it off. It could save a life.
Children are especially susceptible to injury and that’s why rural child care is an issue for farm women. In meetings last winter across the Prairies, Nikki Gerard of the Centre for Agricultural Medicine gathered comments from women about their lives.
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One of the women told her: “Farming is one of the most dangerous occupations and we have no choice but to take our children along because there is nowhere to take them.”
While stress, isolation, intergenerational conflict, domestic violence and lack of support services were all noted by Gerard as raised in the consultations, the issue that inflamed women at the safety conference was the lack of child care.
Linde Cherry, head of the Canadian Farm Women’s Network said, “women and children are still subsidizing our food chain and that’s not good enough.”
The choice is yours
Pat Morgan, president of Ontario’s Farm Safety Association Inc., said in a discussion with the new social services minister, one woman representing a for-profit day care was told: “You chose to live in the country and you have to put up with the services you get.”
And Lois Hole, a greenhouse operator from St. Albert, Alta., described the farm as an arsenal and urged farmers to get liability insurance to cover city visitors, hunters and snowmobilers who think farms are safe places to play.
When it came to solutions, Gerard suggested using the media to highlight the problems and then being creative in making the politicians uncomfortable until they do something.
Hole suggested using rural schools as day-care centres which would create jobs in the country, while Morgan suggested making standards more practical to fit rural solutions.
