Gazette Online, IA
10-10-07
Farming remains deadliest pursuit
By David DeWitte
The Gazette
The death of 45-year-old Doug Mikel in a livestock accident on his Grinnell area
farm in August left three children, a wife, and about 1,100 acres of unharvested
crops in the field.
As Mark Hendrickson recently organized this week's volunteer harvest for Mikel's
family, the longtime neighbor also mulled the prospects for the 80-year-old father
of a fellow church member who lay unconscious in a hospital after a on-farm
accident.
"They don't know for sure what happened until he wakes up," Hendrickson said.
"He fell and had some internal injuries. He was out in the field on his tractor and
something happened."
Farming is the nation's most dangerous mainstream occupation virtually every
year not marred by a terrible mining tragedy, according to Professor Charles
Schwab, Iowa State University farm safety specialist.
The fatality rate in farming in 2006 was 28 deaths per 100,000 workers, nearly
eight times the fatal accident rate for all occupations combined.
After years of decline, the fatality rate in farming has shown little improvement in
most of this decade, according to Murray Madsen, a program consultant for the
Great Plains Center for Agricultural Health at the University of Iowa.
The number of deaths has hovered around 40 in each of the three years,
according to ISU's research, which relies heavily on newspaper accounts.
Accident frequency is highest at planting and harvest. The level of field work
means more stress on farmers and their equipment than at any other time. The
peak seasons also send more farm equipment onto public roads and highways,
where they are vulnerable to conflicts with fast-moving traffic.
Experts worry that this year's huge corn crop will produce conditions that could
generate even more accidents than usual.
Unsafe handling and storage of grain, particularly, worry ISU's Schwab.
"A lot of corn being harvested means that if we don't have all the storage ready,
we might do improvisations for that, and those might lead to trouble," Schwab
said.
Mikel's age and the three children he left behind have made the accident more of
a safety reminder than it otherwise might have been, according to Hendrickson,
53.
"This accident has opened a lot of people's eyes to the fact that this is a
dangerous job and a lot of us are looking at it a little different, especially those
guys who have a bull out there that is a little risky," Hendrickson said.
Middle-aged farmers like Mikel, who are at the peak of their occupation's
demands, are the most likely to suffer accidental death or injury, Schwab says.
Mikel was rammed in the chest by a bull that had literally been a family pet in a
field on the family farm where he grew up.
"He was a 4-H bottle calf I think," Hendrickson said. "He would come up to them
for food. But he'd been frisky lately, and they had talked about getting rid of him."
Brenda Mikel, Doug's wife, says the shock that everybody felt about Mikel's
death was partly due to his reputation for caution.
"He was always thinking about safety," Brenda said.
The kindergarten teacher described her husband as the kind of farmer who
would postpone harvest for a day to fix a grain augur that had been behaving
erratically rather than risk working with unsafe equipment.
Farm equipment is statistically much more likely than livestock to be at the root of
a serious farm accident.
Overturned tractors without rollover protection are by far the largest cause of
farm fatalities, Madsen said.
Older farmers are disproportionately likely to be killed in tractor rollovers because
they have slower reflexes and are more likely to use older tractors without
rollover protection, Schwab said. The most common cause of injuries that are
non-fatal is working on farm equipment.
Attacks by livestock or accidental injuries from livestock handling are less
common.
"One or two animal maulings a year is not unusual in Iowa," Madsen said.
Livestock injuries tend to be less serious than machinery injuries, which often
lead to permanent disability.
Even though farmers generally minimize exposure to bulls, they are still manage
to cause injury on a fairly regular basis because of their size, strength, and
aggressive nature.
Safety bulletins often advise farmers not to work around bulls unless they have
some kind of large equipment or object to seek shelter behind if the animal
attacks.
Many observers think that farm safety is compromised because farming is not
regulated by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). That is
a widespread misconception, Schwab says.
Under federal regulations, he said farms with fewer than 10 employees are selfinspected unless an incident occurs on the farm warranting inspection.
With many farmers expecting a good harvest and good prices this year, Madsen
hopes more farmers will use the extra revenue to retire unsafe older farm
equipment and replace it with newer equipment with safer designs and more
safety features.