The equipment came with a shield – but the farmer had taken it off and not gotten around to replacing it. He was in the field and alone when a vulnerable limb crossed the barrier that was no longer there.
Engineers work to develop safer systems but farmers get around the safeguards and accidents happen.
Neil Enns knows all about that: he lost his arm in a farm accident. Now, as co-ordinator of Farmers With Disabilities Manitoba, he is focusing on the role human error plays in farm accidents.
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Last month he spoke to 200 industry representatives, mainly engineers, at the Association of Equipment Manufacturers product safety seminar in Chicago, Illinois.
He’s challenging designers to come up with features that will out-think the tired and frustrated farmer, as well as other farm conditions that lead to accidents, injuries and deaths.
“There were 60 companies represented,” said Enns. “They were there from far and wide, most of them from the U.S. and Canada, but from Europe and Japan as well. John Deere, Bobcat, Kubota, you name it, the names were there.”
Enns asked the farm equipment companies to come up with machines that would remove the human factor of farm accidents. He wanted:
- A sensor in the tractor cab to warn the operator before the rollover point happens.
- A spring-loaded remote control so that when an operator goes out front to see why a header has jammed and gets caught somehow, the header will stop again.
“My point is, ask them if they could come up with some kind of idea to run that machine from the ground level.”
Some newer combines have a sensor that stops the header when the operator gets off the seat. But farmers now put a weight on the seat so the header will keep moving.
- A hitch-pin operated from the tractor cab to pick up an implement would prevent the need to have someone standing behind the tractor to line up the hitch and drop in the pin.
- Rounded corners inside combines would make it easier for dust to move out of the machine and prevent it from compacting in the corners, eventually causing fires.
- Dealers could offer courses in the winter to teach producers how to handle the more complex computerized side of modern equipment.
- Safety shields should be easy to replace. Shields today come off readily but are often difficult to put on, so farmers won’t use them when they’re busy and frustrated.
“After the formal presentation, we had about half an hour of very interesting discussions, brainstorming on ‘how can we do this?’ They were very receptive to what I had to say on behalf of the farmers we visit all the time when we do our shows. They felt we should be looking at the big picture instead of working in departments with one not knowing what the other is doing.”
