Parents and grandparents everywhere want to protect their children and keep them safe.
Yet, for parents and grandparents involved with agriculture, keeping kids safe can present challenges. Each farm and ranch is unique and so is each child. Addressing hazards to children in the agricultural environment requires an individual approach.
That’s where the new Child/Youth Agricultural Safety Checklist comes in.
Developed by the National Children’s Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety, the checklist gives parents a tool to perform customized safety checks.
“Who doesn’t want kids on a farm? It’s a great way to grow up. We just want them growing up safe. Protecting our children on farms needs to be a priority. A youth dies in an agricultural incident about every three days in the United States,” said Marsha Salzwedel, M.S., youth agricultural safety specialist at the National Children’s Center, part of the National Farm Medicine Center at Marshfield Clinic Research Institute.
“Taking 10 minutes to read this checklist will give parents safety strategies to help ensure that their children reap the many benefits of farm life while staying safe,” Salzwedel said.
The National Farm Medicine Center has developed other safety checklists for farmers and ranchers, but this new checklist is unique, Salzwedel said, because it goes directly to addressing children at different stages of development and whether or not they perform work on a farm or ranch.
“We’ve developed safety checklists for adults and agritourism over the last few years. The agritourism checklist has been well received and highly utilized,” Salzwedel said. “We figured it was time, for many it was probably past time, to develop a safety checklist for children.”
The single-sheet Child/Youth Agricultural Safety Checklist is divided into three sections: Non-Working Children, All Children and Youth and Working Youth.
“The checklist went through a lot of different iterations and was created over several months of work by a team of people who have expertise in a variety of different areas,” Salzwedel said. “This includes farm labor, child psychology and physiology. They did a good job of pulling it all together to create this checklist.”
For an outside critique, we sent the checklist to Kerri Ebert, Extension assistant on the Agricultural Safety and Health Program staff in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering at Kansas State University. Ebert said the checklist, which was prepared by people she said are among the best in the field, takes safety to the highest level you can get.
“Looking through the checklist, I found things either I’ve done wrong or I know someone else who has violated most of these on the checklist. We talk about using common sense, but sometimes, in the heat of the moment, we don’t use that common sense, especially with kids.
“It’s important to see this all put down on paper, prepared by a set of experts, because if we follow this checklist and correct each error as we find it, our farms and ranches will be a whole lot safer.”
Ebert noted that allowing small children into workspaces is likely No. 1 in her own list of errors.
“Just go down any country road where there are farms with little kids and you could find this,” Ebert said.
Working to create as comprehensive a checklist as possible for as many different kinds of kids in farm and ranch country was a challenge, since crop operations and livestock operations, while similar in many respects, each produce their own sets of hazards, she added.
“We had to also look at the adults, too, and whether or not they model safe behaviors,”Salzwedel said. “Kids model adult behavior, they will watch what an adult does before they do what an adult does. The adults take the child to the work site and assign the task to the youths.”
It’s those incidents with young kids that often prove most fatal, Salzwedel said, simply because they’re in the wrong place—the workplace—at the wrong time.
“The research tells us that a lot of the injuries occur with children 6 years of age or under who are not working,” Salzwedel said. “These younger children end up being in the worksite, because this is also where many of these children live. This is their home. Sometimes, they’ll be playing in the yard and wander into work areas. Often, being small, they’re not seen. “A worse-case scenario we read about was the driving of a skid-steer loader had a large hay bale on the front end. The limited visibility has a child being run over. We see stories of kids on board tractors and combines and falling off of them and being injured and killed.
“There was a case of a child wandering into a barn and he pulled on some loose panels and they fell on top of the child. Children aren’t working, they’re just ending up in these worksites and getting hurt.”
Older children who come to visit a grandparent or aunt and uncle on a farm or ranch to work harvest, branding or other activities, are also often victims of accidents.
“That’s because farm and ranch life isn’t a part of their daily activities and they aren’t always as aware of the hazards of working there,” Salzwedel said. “They may not understand how everything works as a part of the routine of the operation of a piece of equipment or being around an ornery animal that needs to have different handling.”
The best way to start in using the checklist is simple: Be honest with yourself and really survey hazards on the farm and ranch and knowing how and when to assign age-appropriate tasks to youths working with the land and beasts.
“There are lots of actions parents can take that don’t cost anything, for instance assigning tasks that are appropriate for their age and ability, or not taking young children into the farm worksite when parents are working, or taking the keys out of equipment when the day is done,” Salzwedel said.
That’s why the NFMC is working on an updated set of guidelines for agricultural youth work.
“These guidelines help you understand what sort of abilities does the youth have, not just physical abilities but cognitive abilities,” Salzwedel said. “Are they impulsive? Do they take risks? Are they tall enough to have the ability to see everything while driving a tractor or combine?
“When you get past those questions it gets into the adult’s capability as a supervisor in order to do these jobs. Are they able to properly train the youth? Have they insured the equipment is sound?
Salzwedel thinks the checklist works well with the guidelines as children grow.
“When you put the checklist together with the guidelines you can help children as they grow, from giving young ones adequate play space away from the work place to making sure older children are taught to be safe as they begin to work around equipment and livestock.”
Ebert, who says she’s seen and has used Marshfield’s work in promoting safety, has used the guidelines in working with 4-H groups.
“It starts off with how young and capable must a child be to handle things like working with a bucket calf and it goes from there,” Ebert said. “That was a huge document. The checklist makes this a lot easier for everyone and it’s an obvious progression from the guidelines.”
The guidelines are available at www.cultivatesafety.org.
Larry Dreiling can be reached at 785-628-1117 or [email protected].
