BACK in the 1980s, when I worked full time doing radio news, I reported from time to time on farm accidents and deaths. The message was much the same, whether I got my information from the province’s Department of Labour or the Saskatchewan Safety Council or the fledgling Centre for Agricultural Medicine at the University of Saskatchewan.
Farming is a dangerous occupation, given the nature and size of equipment being used and the settings in which producers work. Every year, adults and children are killed, maimed or injured on prairie farms in events related to the business of farming.
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The Centre for Agricultural Medicine is now the Institute of Agricultural, Rural and Environmental Health. It recently released numbers that help to tell the story of agricultural danger.
From 1990 through 2004, 234 people died in agriculturally related accidents on Saskatchewan farms. That’s an average of 18 per year. During that period, there was a wide variation, from 29 in 1998 to nine in 1996. Eighteen people died last year.
It bothers me that these numbers stay relatively the same while several other things have been happening. First, the number of people on Saskatchewan farms has been steadily decreasing. Between 1991 and 2001, Statistics Canada data shows Saskatchewan’s farm population dropped from about 160,000 to about 123,000; that’s about 23 percent.
For the number of accidents to stay the same while the population decreases means the actual incidence of work-related farm death is rising. I’m told that increase is not statistically significant. Yet the trend bothers me.
The average age of farmers keeps climbing. Not by a lot, but some. The average age of farmers is about 50. I’m told that there are some folks still farming in their 80s and 90s.
As people age, reflexes get slower, eyesight isn’t as good, fatigue comes more readily. These factors affect everyone.
As we age, for example, we have more falls and more traffic accidents. But when you link these aging factors with the already dangerous nature of working with farm equipment, should we be surprised if there are more accidents?
As farming becomes less profitable, people are inclined to try to do more with less. That means working longer hours and working alone or farther away from others.
Fatigue becomes a larger factor. The temptation to cut corners and speed up increase. Those realities further raise the risk of death or serious injury.
Farming will never be completely safe, but it seems to me that factors such as aging and financial challenge increase producers’ chances of killing themselves or others. Is that one more price that farmers have to pay as they work to feed us?
Rob Brown is a United Church minister now engaged in graduate studies on ethics. The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Western Producer.
