At The Farm Gate

October 2011

By Joanie Stiers



Kids help make safety stick



My kids have encouraged grown men to collect stickers in unlikely places, including tractor cabs and the dashboards of big trucks.

Since age 2, the kids have delivered sandwich baggies of chocolate chip cookies, cereal bars, trail mixes and kid-frosted sugar cookies to the corn and soybean harvest crew on our family farm. To each bag of home-baked goodness, we affix a homemade sticker with a photo of the kids and their message of the day. The phrases are threaded with a common theme: safety.

Harvest is ongoing for corn and soybean farmers throughout Illinois and without proper precautions, this rewarding time of year also can be one of the most dangerous ones. Farm families have the highest exposure to large, powerful equipment during harvest with concerns of being in the way of this equipment or becoming entangled in it. The sticker messages are a subtle reminder to avoid shortcuts for routine tasks and perhaps take a mental break with a cookie.

Time means money in the fall, a corn and soybean farmers’ “annual paycheck” so to speak. Farmers often sleep less than in other seasons and take fewer breaks during this six- to ten-week period of fall fieldwork. They also increase the pace, symbolic of the energy of the season. Harvest frustrations, whether in the form of machinery breakdowns, unfavorable conditions or disappointing crop production, stress farmers operating the equipment.

Exhaustion and impatience can affect alertness or impair judgment, increasing the likelihood of an accident. The most basic missteps can happen just getting in and out of the tractor or combine, where farmers enter and exit dozens of times a day at heights about a single-story off the ground. Operators even have to be cautious and alert while sharing the road with motorists.

Safety and farm hazards were taught to most farmers in childhood. Like any mom with her kids, I often talk to my kids about safety: How to cross the street. Not talking to strangers. Carefully chewing food. Or how to carry scissors to and from the craft drawer. On the farm, we extend the conversation to topics about big equipment, electricity, animals, water sources, augers and power take-offs. Life is different out here and so are the dangers.

Every time we step into the barnyard, the kids and I talk about what equipment we see, what the guys are doing, when to stay away from their work and how to approach them. We calmly walk near the livestock and stay back from any spinning or rotating areas on a machine.

I didn’t understand worry until I became a mother. The men give the “I know, I know” response at the frequent safety reminders from us farm moms. But I’ve heard someone say, we need to be reminded more than we need to be instructed.

So I let the kids do the reminding at harvest.