Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health

Imperial County, California, is a high-need, medically underserved area that has some of the worst overall health outcomes of all California counties. Given this and the high depression and anxiety rates in agricultural occupations, Imperial County farmers and ranchers may be at an increased risk of stress and poor mental health outcomes. An exploratory mixed methods assessment was used to collect information from 24 farmers and ranchers in Imperial County. Survey topics included questions about farm or ranch operations, farm-related stress, mental health, community support, and health behaviors...

In 2006, Cole et al. (2006) reported on tractor overturn-related injuries in Kentucky from a random sample of farmers that numbered 6,063 respondents. The highest number of people who experienced tractor overturns were operators 16 to 20 years old. In 2007, at a National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) Tractor Safety Initiative meeting in Colorado, John Myers of NIOSH presented a map of the states with the highest overturn fatality rates: Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois...

Forestry activities, such as tree cutting and harvesting of forest resources, have been documented as dangerous tasks with increased risk of injuries and fatalities. These hazards are well known in the professional logging community, but less attention is given to farmers who perform occasional tree trimming and cutting activities, especially for the older farmer population. This study examined Indiana farm work-related fatalities from 1988 to 2017 involving farmers 55 years and older who performed occasional wood cutting activities...

Based on earlier studies, farmers have poorer work ability compared to workers in most other occupations. The aim of this study was to explore if organic production has a positive effect on producers' work ability while controlling for demographic and production characteristics. This study used telephone interview data collected by the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in 2014-2015. The material consisted of 2,164 farmers: 231 in organic production and 1,933 in conventional production. Work ability was measured with a single question regarding the farmers' current work ability compared with their lifetime best on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 meaning unable to work...

There is limited research exploring agricultural workers' own perspectives on the relative importance of the hazards and stressors they experience. There is also a lack of evidence on whether this reporting differs by method of elicitation. Finally, very little research exists on how to improve mail survey response rates among agricultural workers. We examined health and safety concerns and psychological stressors among Midwestern farmers. We assessed whether these reports varied by survey mode (mail survey versus in-person survey)...

This article presents data for agricultural work-related fatal injuries to non-working youth (> 18 years old) in Pennsylvania. Cases were identified from the Pennsylvania Farm Fatality (PA-FF) database for the period 2000-2018. The circumstances of the death in each incident were reviewed from news clippings, death certificates, and other reports available to determine the victim's status as a bystander, passenger, or other non-working child. The study identified 69 agricultural work-related fatalities to non-working youth in Pennsylvania...

Each year, many fatalities result from rollovers of agricultural tractors in Japan. In addition to rollover protective structures (ROPS) and seat belts, a warning device that alerts the operator of impending rollover based on the tractor stability index is a measure used to prevent rollovers. The stability index requires inertial parameters, which have been measured only for the single body of the tractor, to calculate the warning threshold. In this study, the center of gravity (CoG) and lateral stability angles of three agricultural tractors were measured, and lateral stability angles were also calculated and compared with measured values for three tractor-tiller combinations to analyze the effect of the attached implement on the tractor stability as well as to verify the accuracy of the calculation methods...

Agriculture technology is moving toward automation, placing operators in a supervisory role. This change in operator workload may lead to increased stress and higher mental load, resulting in reduced attention and hence greater risk of illness or injury to humans and damage to equipment. This study investigated the use of easily applicable equipment to measure mental load. Three methods were used to measure the mental load on machine operators: heart rate monitoring, two types of electroencephalograph (EEG) evaluation, and an assessment protocol...

We are writing in response to the editorial "ROPS Are Not Homemade" by W. E. Field, R. Tormoehlen, S. Ehlers, C. Cheng, A. Talbert, G. Deboy, D. Haberlin, and C. V. Schwab, which was published in the July 2019 issue of the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health (Field et al., 2019). The editorial warns secondary school teachers and FFA advisors about the potential liability of fabricating and installing low-cost rollover protective structures (ROPS) as service learning projects for agricultural education students...

Transportation-related incidents are the leading cause of occupational fatalities for all industries in the U.S., including the agricultural industry, which suffers thou- sands of crashes involving farm equipment each year. Simulated driving studies offer a safe and cost-effective way to conduct driving research that would not be feasible in the real world. A tractor driving miniSim was developed and then evaluated for realism at the University of Iowa among 99 Midwestern farm equipment operators. It is important for driving simulators to have a high degree of realism for their results to be applicable to non-simulated driving operations...

A warming climate has been linked to an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, including heat and cold waves, extreme precipitation, and wildfires. This increase in extreme weather results in increased risks to the health and safety of farmworkers.

Worldwide, the number of quad bike-related injuries and fatalities has increased over the last 30 years and, although quad bike safety has become increasingly important over the last decade, greater understanding of the risks associated with these vehicles is required. This study aimed to improve understanding of the interrelationships between risk perception, risk management, and the use of safety technologies in quad bike operation. A total of 70 quad bike riders were interviewed in two sets of interviews: one targeting riders visiting two forestry fairs, and the other targeting riders with quad bikes equipped with ROPS...

Solitary work is common on farmsteads and is often a key contributor to delayed responses to life-threatening incidents. This research focused on applications, system components, mounting considerations, and configuration of automatic video alert systems for agricultural safety and security. This technology can be used to monitor and alert farm managers of workers in high-risk locations and potentially reduce the frequency of fatal or serious-injury incidents. Video monitoring of these sites could also reduce the need for in-person inspections, decreasing direct exposure to such locations...

Annually, tractor accidents are estimated to account for more than 100 deaths in South Korea. Periodic accident surveys have served as an essential means for the National Institute of Agricultural Sciences (NAS) to develop strategies to prevent tractor accidents. In this study, hazards leading to accidents were identified, and their risks were assessed based on survey results to establish a more effective accident prevention strategy. Risk assessment for hazards proceeded as follows: hazard identification, frequency estimation, number of equivalent fatalities (NEF) estimation, and finally risk evaluation...

Safety professionals should speak up when secondary school teachers and FFA advisors consider fabricating and installing low-cost rollover protective structures (ROPS) as service learning projects for ag education students or as a service to the farm community. These projects are often motivated by the desire to address the continued occurrence of tractor rollovers, which are the most frequent cause of farm-related fatalities (NIOSH, 2018). These projects have also been made feasible by the availability of online plans for ROPS fabrication, including plans from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) that are designed for specific makes and models of tractors...

Several studies have shown that males are at greater risk of agricultural injuries than females. We investigated if gender division of farm work helps explain this risk difference in the self-employed Finnish farming population. We used insurance claims data and postal survey data charting the relative division of farm work between male and female farmers. Over the five-year study period (2009 to 2013), the average number of farmers was 75,893 (67% males and 33% females). A total of 22,648 occupational injuries (77% males and 23% females) were compensated during that time...

This study describes tasks that middle school and high school youth, ages 13 to 18 years, completed during the 2015-2016 academic year as part of their supervised agricultural experience (SAE). The overarching goal was to collect information useful in directing classroom instruction to better prepare youth prior to engaging in agricultural tasks identified as hazardous by the U.S. Department of Labor. Using a list of eleven tasks currently identified as hazardous and 17 tasks proposed as hazardous, teachers were asked how many of their students engaged in each of the 28 tasks as part of their SAE...

Potential inhalation exposure of agricultural workers and bystanders to aerosolized particles emitted by typical agricultural spray nozzles is influenced by the particle size distribution (PSD) of the spray. However, inhalation risk assessments do not currently factor in the human-relevant PSD that may be inhaled during pesticide handling activities. This study was conducted to characterize the PSD of aerosols collected with OSHA Versatile Sampler (OVS) tubes, which are monitoring devices commonly used for inhalation risk assessment in worker exposure studies...

One contributor to agriculture's high death rate is confined space fatalities caused by entrapment in grain. Over 1,000 grain-related fatalities have been documented by researchers in 43 states, and states with the largest grain storage capacities have been shown to experience a proportionally larger number of suffocation fatalities. Several researchers have measured extraction forces in specific conditions, but a reference standard is needed for estimating the extraction forces for grain suffocation victims in common conditions...

The purpose of this study was to assess and compare 2015-2017 Pennsylvania agricultural fatal injury data and methods from two separate sources: the Pennsylvania Farm Fatality (PA-FF) dataset and the national AgInjuryNews (AIN) dataset. Between January 1, 2015, and December 31, 2017, a total of 104 agricultural fatalities were identified in Pennsylvania across both systems. Differences between the two systems included coding, such as victim age and demographics, as well as inclusion criteria, such as the time between the incident and victim death...