New Booklet Promotes Age Appropriate Work On Family Farms

The National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety is providing new safety booklets in an attempt to lower the number of injuries and deaths of children each year on the farm. According to the organization, more young people have died this decade working in agriculture than all other industries combined.

National Farm Medicine Center’s Scott Heiberger said it’s very common for young people to work in agriculture, especially at family farms. But he noted that blur the line between work and home.

"Another side to that is especially very young kids who are not even engaged in work. They are susceptible to being injured, sometimes fatally, by just being in the workplace. If a parent takes a very young child to "keep an eye on them" into the work place, that can set up for a hazardous situation. Kids are just curious. They wander around, and if there's not fencing or there's not some way to keep them out of the dangerous work that's going, they can just wander in or get backed over."

Heiberger said their three new safety booklets were developed by the National Children's Center as a way to provide guidelines regarding youth and ag work for parents and supervisors. The guidelines are pulled form the center's Agricultural Youth Work Guidelines and cover more than 50 commonly performed tasks.

The hope, Heiberger noted, is adults will use the guidelines as a way to assign age and ability appropriate tasks to young people. The booklets are also meant to challenge sometimes dangerous old traditions.

"Depending on how old we are, we probably remember back to where we were taught to drive the tractor sitting in Grampa's lap. Especially in thinking about tractors, and being the extra rider on a tractor, these are actually among the traditions that we challenge parents to think through and say, 'Is that really a good idea?' We have a news clippings database that we can pull out any number of situations where the child was six, seven, eight years old, fell off the tractor and was run over by Grampa or the parents."

Click Here for more information on the booklets.

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