8 The Business of Prairie Agriculture Better Farming | May/June 2024 Agricultural occupations are hazardous with one of the highest rates of workplace injuries and fatalities. The manual and often strenuous nature of the work, combined with the use of machinery and exposure to environmental hazards create a challenging work environment. Understanding the nature and causes of injuries can help improve safety guidelines and policy measures. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of injuries is hindered by the absence of a central reporting system. Two new papers from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign provide a systematic review of academic literature on agricultural injuries in the U.S. and globally. “When it comes to agriculture, there’s no single source for injury data. In other occupations, work injuries in the U.S. must be reported to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), but farm work is often exempt from these requirements because many farms are small and have less than 10 full-time employees,” says Salah Issa, an assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering (ABE) and an Illinois Extension specialist at the College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences (ACES) at Illinois. ABE is also part of The Grainger College of Engineering at Illinois. “There have been a lot of grassroots efforts to track surveillance data, but they are based on different methods so it’s hard to get a complete look at agricultural injuries. Our work combines results into one large dataset, providing a comprehensive overview of previous research,” Issa explains. In the first study, the researchers conducted a systematic literature review of 48 academic papers published in the U.S. and Canada from 1985 to 2022. “We identified five different surveillance methods: Newspaper clippings, surveys, death certificates, hospital records and emergency medical services (EMS) data, and multiple sources,” says Sihan Li, a doctoral student in ABE and lead author on the first paper. The researchers also analyzed and categorized information such as the type and source of injury, the event leading up to it, and the gender of the victim. Overall, vehicles (including tractors and ATVs) were the most common source of injury, with over 55,000 incidents reported, as well as the leading source of fatalities. Other significant causes of injury included machinery, slips and trips, animals, chemicals, and tools. Men were more than twice as likely as women to be victims of injury. Age varied by surveillance method, with newspaper clippings skewed to younger victims (22 per cent of incidents) and death certificates skewed to older victims (30 per cent over 65). In the second study, the researchers REVIEWING INJURIES & IMPROVING SAFETY ‘Vehicles are the most common source of injury.’ By Marianne Figge Stein, University of Illinois Understanding the nature and source of injuries is important for developing educational programs and interventions. auremar - stock.adobe.com Research
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