Farm safety training is not for the faint of heart—even when the person being trained is 6 years old. So much work on the farm involves risk. Tractors and augers have motors and blades, chemicals can burn, tools can slip, animals can bite and pull, so safety training can’t beat around the bush about the dangers.
Luckily, in the hands of the experienced EMTs and Firefighters of Rural Rescue, that training can also be fun.
On May 10, around 60 children and a dozen adults converged on the Grand Agricultural Center of West Michigan to learn how to stay safe on the farm and how to react when accidents happen. Each group rotated through 6 stations over the course of 5 hours:
- Tractor Safety
- Farm Shop Tool Safety
- Flowable Grain Awareness
- First Aid for the Farm Kid
- Decontamination for the Farm Kid
- Animal Handling
In Tractor Safety the children clambered all over a small tractor to put stickers on the places they thought were dangerous, then the trainer talked through every spot that could cause an injury and how to avoid getting hurt.
Farm Shop Tool Safety had a table full of tools for the kids to identify and learn about. I wasn’t at the First Aid station, but I heard the laughter and saw kids working with wraps and bandages. The Flowable Grain Awareness station included a tour of the inside of an empty grain silo and a demonstration of the mini auger they brought.
Decontamination was an entertaining station with serious training. When we walked up we saw six five-gallon buckets in a line on the ground. After an introduction by the trainer, the children took turns rolling a huge die and sticking their hand in one of those buckets to retrieve a golf ball. Their job was to look for the label, determine whether the chemical had a WARNING, DANGER, or CAUTION sticker, read the first aid instructions and then follow them. Some buckets were easy: water dyed green, ice water. The bucket with flour taught them that some chemicals react with water to create burns, so if they get contaminated to not use water to clean it off. The maple syrup bucket was fun, with some epic stickiness. But the two that got the biggest reactions were the Jello with peaches and corn, and the oatmeal: so many squeals. This was a memorable station, but also provided the repetition of how to react that means the lesson had a good chance of sticking.
It’s not a surprise that Animal Handling was many kids’ favorite station. They brought a chicken, a rabbit, a dog, a pygmy goat, a mini horse, a beef cow, and three kittens. There were many important safety lessons, the main one being to approach most animals from the side so they can see you better. A lot of the children showed animals at fairs, so they knew a lot, but many of them still wound the lead around their hand—a habit that is fine most of the time, but could lead to injury if the animal bolted.
That was the theme of many stations: “I know we all do X sometimes on the farm, and it’s often fine, but if anything goes wrong, serious trouble will result.”
Matt Kemp of Rural Rescue opened the Safety Day with his own story of being a safety trainer yet on his own farm, inviting his children to hop into the tractor bucket for a ride. His kids reminded him how dangerous that was, and there were no bucket rides that day. But that week, his rescue unit was called in for a child who was hurt while riding in a tractor bucket. It was his hope, and ours, that the children who were at Kent County Farm Kid Safety Day will spread best practices to the adults on their farms and everyone will be safer.
Thank you to Matt Kemp and all the first responders who spent their Saturday morning teaching us how to be safe and how to respond when accidents happen. Thank you to last year’s Kent County Farm Bureau President Kylee Zdunic-Rasch for connecting us with Rural Rescue. Thank you to our Promotion and Education Committee for opening this event to non-Farm Bureau members to increase the community impact and show the value of membership. Thank you to Kara Schut and Renee McCauley for organizing this event. Much thanks to our adult volunteers for leading groups: Board members Annie Link and Nicole Zaagman, Farm Bureau member Chris Tomic, and Sparta FFA teacher Kerry McKinley.
We wish everyone an accident-free spring and summer!