09/25/08 National Farm Safety & Health Week Part 2

National Farm Safety & Health Week Part 2. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture. National Farm Safety & Health Week wraps up tomorrow. Safety practices on the farm have been the cause for some 715 fatalities and over 80-thousand disabling injuries in the last year. Dan Neenan with the National Safety Council's Agriculture Division puts in quite a few miles and hours talking to people about farm safety. NEENAN: We service three key core groups. We do safety programming for farmers and ranchers, we do safety programming for agri-business; in fact we have a group of folks in here today dealing with LP issue before the heating season getting trained on how to do that and then we also do rescue programming for fire and EMS teaching responders how to deal with someone who is trapped underneath a 4000lb tractor or that's caught up in a PTO shaft  how do you get those folks out without doing any more injury than what's already been done. Farm safety in a lot of ways just boils down to some common sense. Wearing protective gear where necessary and treating that 4000lb tractor with the utmost respect and caution. Neenan talks about other things to think about. NEENAN: Number one thing is you need to take an inventory of your equipment especially as it gets before harvesting season - take a walk around and make sure all the lights are working, that the markings slow moving vehicle emblems, one, they are up to date, they're not faded with the sun. Make sure that if you are taking medicine that as you get into the fall harvest season that you are taking your medicine at the correct time and that you are eating to go along with that. And speaking of harvest season, there is a good chance your may get a bit tired out there. NEENAN: Farmers are going to be under some pretty heavy hours here coming up in the next couple of months as the fall harvest gets in gear throughout the states. We had problems with flooding and getting the crops in late and if we get a fall where we get some rain patterns we're going to have some farmers putting in some pretty long hours so we need to make sure they are taking care of themselves physically. Agriculture extends past the traditional farm these days into the burgeoning wine industry. NEENAN: That's actually one of the niche markets that we are starting to work on here in the Midwest as we are starting to get a lot of small mom & pop vineyards so we actually spent some time in Napa Valley in January getting some of the safety aspects that they already have in place For additional information on their website at www.nsc.org. That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.