Don’t learn safety by accident. While the theme of this year’s national farm safety and health week, Dan Neenan of the National Education Center for Agricultural Safety, notes the word “accident” is a misnomer.
“An accident in most people’s minds mean that there’s nothing that could have been done to prevent it. So we’re trying to get the word across a ‘preventable incident.’”
Hence, “preventable incident” is also part of the theme for Farm Safety and Health Week, the third week of September. The 2024 edition is but the latest in a series of annual observances.
“It’s one of the longest running presidential proclamation weeks. Actually, FDR signed the first one back in 1944.”
And while “don’t learn safety by accident, preventable incident” is the overarching theme of National Farm Safety and Health Week, each day offers a theme or subject of education.
“Monday is equipment, rural roadway safety. Tuesday is health and wellness. Wednesday is generations, talking from kids to grandparents, farming. Thursday is confined spaces, grain bins, manure, pips. And Friday is actually reporting ag injuries.”
So in terms of types of programming offered during the week…
“We partner with the AgriSafe nurses network on a series of webinars. There’s two webinars per day that are set up throughout the week. We get a lot of calls from co-ops wanting to use the logo, the theme. We’ve got some FFA chapters that borrow some of our props to be able to do some of that. And we always get folks that like to do some trainings during that week as well. So we will be out doing some grain bin rescue, some anhydrous ammonia emergency response.”
The latest recorded annual numbers for farm fatalities, 417 in 2022, is the motivation for Neenan and others in the farm safety space.
“I first started doing this in the year 2000 and we were averaging 730 fatalities per year. So getting down to 417 is a good stride, but we’re never going to get down to zero during my working lifetime.”
More information is available online at necasag.org.