On-farm safety program.

Rates of fatal occupational injuries in New York agriculture far outstrip the average for all American workers. Among its various approaches to this problem, the New York Center for Agricultural Medicine and Health (NYCAMH) sponsored an On-Farm Safety Program that sought to reduce farm worksite hazards and to enhance understanding of safe farm practices through a two-step process. First, an on-farm hazard survey identified hazards that may lead to farm injury and suggested improvements to correct those hazards. Second, on-farm safety training sessions were offered to increase safety knowledge and influence adoption of safe work practices. Over a 2-year period, 124 farms were surveyed and 187 safety training sessions were conducted on a total of 271 New York farms. Follow-up phone surveys were conducted with 97 (78%) of the on-farm survey sites at roughly 6 months. Of the 97 survey farms that completed the telephone survey, 77 (79%) reported having made safety improvements. Hazards resolved tended to be less labor intensive and expensive than some of the other hazards observed. Ninety-six (99%) of the farms that completed the telephone follow-up survey found the on-farm visits useful and said that NYCAMH should continue to offer the On-Farm Safety Program. No data were collected to assess the impact of these efforts upon occupational injury and illness. This appears to be an effective means of outreach to heighten safety awareness of the farm population and to address some of the observed worksite hazards. It is unclear whether this approach substantially impacts the elevated risk of injury in agriculture.

"Safety for agricultural educators": evaluation of an intervention to enhance awareness of agricultural hazards.

Safety for Agricultural Educators (SAGE) is a two-sided fact sheet on agricultural hazards that has been distributed by the New York Center for Agricultural Medicine and Health (NYCAMH) to Northeastern high school agriculture educators over the past six years. It was intended to supplement and stimulate the teaching of safety principles in agricultural education classes and thus enhance the awareness and knowledge of young people working on farms. This paper describes an evaluation of SAGE's success at achieving these goals. Postal surveys from 29 teachers who had not previously received SAGE gathered data on class demographics and the amount of class time devoted to a variety of agricultural topics including tractor operation and agricultural health and safety. Teachers were asked to assess their students' awareness of safety and health issues and also to estimate the number of students working in the farm environment. Following a year of SAGE mailings, the same information was gathered from the 24/29 post-SAGE responders. Comparison of pre-post responses from the 24 matched responding educators showed: limited increase in the teachers' knowledge of basic agricultural safety information; a decline in the amount of class time devoted to health and safety; a marginal increase in estimated student awareness of health and safety and very little evidence of teacher awareness of SAGE as a safety resource. Most notable was the fact that only 8% of all students were currently working on a farm and teachers estimated that only 6% would be working on farms in five years.