Farm Life | Summer 2010
'Certified Safe Farm' comes to Canada.
By Gerald Pilger
In an attempt to reduce the agricultural death and injury rate, Iowa State University introduced the Certified Safe Farm program in 1998. Unlike most farm safety programs which simply try to educate farmers about farming risks and dangers, Certified Safe Farm is a comprehensive package that includes occupation health screening, an on-farm safety review, actual certification of farms that meet safety standards and cash incentives and discounts for participating farmers.
"The program is intended to keep farmers alive and well. Our mission is to reduce farm injuries and illnesses and pass the associated cost savings back to farmers and agri-businesses," says Dr. Kelley Donham, a professor at Iowa State University. "Simply relying on education to prevent farm accidents was not working. Farmers already knew what would hurt them and they understood how accidents can happen. Injured farmers admitted ‘they did a stupid thing.’"
For a safety program to be successful, Donham points out, it has to recognize that: farmers are under pressure to get the crop in and off quickly; are very independent and work alone; and are under heavy economic pressures. "It is very difficult to get to these real causes of most accidents."
The Certified Safe Farm program uses a multidisciplinary approach to address these factors. It puts real value on farm safety. It sets farm safety goals for farmers and when those goals are met farmers are rewarded with incentives such as decreases in insurance costs.
According to Donham, this voluntary program is working. Six hundred farmers have received safe farm certification and surveys have found these farmers have a much higher rate of use of protection equipment, fewer serious injuries, lower rates of occupational illnesses and even improvements in airway (breathing) function. It is estimated insurance payouts to farmers who are certified safe are 47 per cent lower than for the general farm population. It is savings such as these that can be passed back to farmers.
The success of Certified Safe Farm in Iowa has resulted in the program expanding to other states including Wisconsin and North Carolina. The Canadian Centre for Health and Safety in Agriculture is looking at introducing this program in Saskatchewan in the near future. And other incentive-based farm safety programs are already being piloted in Manitoba, Quebec and British Columbia.
