Officials hope that farmers will take time out to make a safety plan this week to avoid fatal accidents.
March 14 to 20 is Agricultural Safety Week in Canada, and provincial officials are once again hoping to get the message out. Agriculture is the third most fatal job in the country, says provincial farm safety co-ordinator Laurel Aitken, and farmers need to make plans to stay safe. “There are a million different tasks you can do on a farm, and you might do any number of them in a particular day.”
Farmers often work alone in situations where occupational health and safety rules don’t apply, says Don Voaklander, who tracks agricultural injuries with the Alberta Centre for Injury Control and Research. “There are no legal consequences if someone gets hurt in a farm operation.”
Three-quarters of all farm fatalities involve machinery, his research suggests, with half of those involving rollovers or run-overs. Tractors were the number one cause of death, accounting for 44 per cent of fatalities.
The Canadian Agricultural Safety Commission is starting a three-year campaign this year called Plan. Farm. Safety., Aitken notes. This year’s theme is planning. “Most farmers jump on their tractor without giving it a second thought,” she says, but they should have a formal plan to make sure it’s safe to use. Guards should be inspected, for example, and roll-cages in place.
“You can’t plan for safety if you don’t know what kind of hazards you’re dealing with,” Aitken says. Farmers should take the time to catalogue the hazards they could encounter on their farm and create written plans to avoid them. The province is piloting a training course to teach farmers how to recognize these risks.
Keeping safe is often just common sense, Voaklander says. Long hours put you at risk of nodding off, for example, while long sleeves can get yanked into machines. “I don’t know how many injury reports I’ve read where someone was kicking something out of a baler or combine and their foot got grabbed because they didn’t turn the damn thing off.”
Plenty of farm safety tips can be found at agriculture.alberta.ca/farmsafety.
Ranchers may have to put fewer cows out to pasture if climate change stays on its current course, says a B.C. ecologist.
Lauchlan Fraser, an ecologist at B.C.’s Thompson Rivers University, will give a talk on climate change and grasslands at the University of Alberta this Friday.
Fraser and his team have spent the last five years testing the effects of climate change in Kamloops by building small greenhouses over patches of grass, tweaking the temperature and precipitation rates in each to simulate future climate conditions.
The results varied depending on the type of grass, he says; some grew more, others less. Generally, they’ve found that warmer weather will mean less quantity and variety of grass to eat. “The big change is going to be stocking density,” he adds; farmers will likely have to field fewer animals to keep grasslands from dying out.
A 2007 report from Natural Resources Canada predicts that Alberta could be up to two degrees warmer than it is now by 2050, and up to six by 2080. Longer summers, shorter winters and less snow are also expected, which could cause more summer droughts.
The exact effects on grasslands need more research, Fraser says. Some grass species appear unaffected by warmth or water changes, while others shrivel. Farmers may have to start grazing earlier in the spring to avoid dry summers.
Fraser’s talk is at the university’s Aberhart Centre at noon March 19. Call 780-492-5339 for details.
