Farmscape for June 29, 2017

The Director of the Manitoba Farm Safety Program suggests a change in attitudes related to safety on the farm will go a long way toward reducing the number of farm accidents.
The Manitoba Farm Safety Program provides free of charge safety services, including training, on farm safety inspections and farm safety program development, to Manitoba farmers to help them manage safety on their farms.
Keith Castonguay, the Director of the Manitoba Farm Safety Program, says there's typically been a lack of awareness among farming groups that safety legislation in place for every other business in Canada also applies to agriculture.

Clip-Keith Castonguay-Manitoba Farm Safety Program:
In the last 40 years, anybody that's as old as I am will understand that when we first started driving we didn't wear seatbelts.
Now very few people get into a car without putting on seatbelts.
If you worked on a construction site nobody wore steel toed boots or hard hats or high visibility clothing.
Now they wouldn't even think of going onto a construction site without it.
Farming unfortunately has lagged a bit and it's the perception of risk.
What we're finding is that a lot of time farmers think that it's inevitable that people are going to get hurt because of the high risk that's involved.
Most industries won't accept that that so there's a long way to go with farmers to understand that there are things that can be done to prevent injuries.
The statistics are showing that farming is one of the highest risk occupations in Canada.
Interestingly enough it's not just Canada.
We're seeing Ireland and New Zealand and looking at the things they put on their web sites they're identical.
There's no difference.
It's a large community that seems to accept risk as part of business.

Castonguay acknowledges the uniqueness about farming is that, while in most industries a worker will have one or two jobs to do in a day or a week or even a career, farm workers are typically asked to do a multitude of different jobs.
For more on the Manitoba Farm Safety Program visit manitobafarmsafety.ca.
For Farmscape.Ca, I'm Bruce Cochrane.

       *Farmscape is a presentation of Sask Pork and Manitoba Pork