The Strategic Advisor for Agriculture with Workplace Safety and Prevention Services says the key to maintaining a safe agricultural work place is to have a plan and to make sure everyone believes in that plan and follows it.
Workplace Safety and Prevention Services is responsible for occupational health and safety awareness in agriculture, manufacturing and service industries in Ontario.
Dean Anderson, the Strategic Advisor for Agriculture with Workplace Safety and Prevention Services, told those on hand last month for Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2022, the sectors that face the greatest risks tend to be those that have the largest equipment but don’t have a formal health and safety program and agriculture falls in that category because of its large equipment and two seasons, planting and harvest, that tend to get very rushed.
In agriculture as a whole 50 percent of our fatalities are tractor related, roll overs and runovers then entanglements within the equipment we’ve got. When it comes to injuries it tends to be injuries that involve working around animals and entanglements.
In the pork sector our biggest overall concerns for injuries tend to be things related to the biologicals. We’ve obviously got things like flues and we have things like COVID which could go to animals and back to people. The other one is that we have a lot of dangerous atmospheres, so such things as hydrogen sulfide gas, methane gas, carbon monoxide tends to be a big one in swine operations and then dust is another big one. Noise would probably be the biggest one of them all. Once you get hearing loss it’s permanent so you need to make sure you protect yourself all the time from hearing loss. Then there’s muscle skeletal, those injuries that everyone knows in agriculture. Every farmer 60 years old will complain about his knees. It’s long term over exertion and too much repetitive motion. Joints give out.
~ Dean Anderson, Workplace Safety and Prevention Services
Anderson says the key to improving farm safety is to have a plan, put that plan in place and make sure everyone believes in that plan and follows it.
