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Monday, July 23, 2007

New tractors, education, end of tobacco program help slash rollover deaths in Kentucky

Kentucky once led the nation in tractor deaths, 82 percent of them from rollovers, but only one Kentucky farmer was killed as a result of a rollover last year, "the lowest tractor rollover death toll in the state in recent memory," Jim Warren of the Lexington Herald-Leader reports today.

Warren got the story idea from information presented at "Children and Agriculture: Telling the Story of Risks and Safety," a workshop held this month in Kentucky by the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues and the National Farm Medicine Center and the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health and Safety at the Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation in Wisconsin. While the workshop focused on children's safety, broader information about farm safety was presented.

"Tractor rollovers traditionally have been a leading cause of farm deaths," Warren writes. "When Kentucky led the nation in 1994 with 28 tractor-related fatalities, 23 of them were caused by rollovers. "Safety officials think two main factors are behind the downward trend: Farmers are buying new tractors, which come with roll bars and seat belts as standard equipment, and they're following safety recommendations and putting rollover protection on more older tractors. And there are fewer small farmers, say the experts," because the federal tobacco program of quotas and price supports was abolished in 2004.

Melvin Myers, an associate professor in the University of Kentucky College of Public Health who works in farm-injury prevention, told Warren that American tractor manufacturers made roll bars standard on new tractors around 1985, but many farmers took the equipment off. "Also, many older tractors that lacked roll bars or seat belts remained in use on farms," Warren writes. "Now, that's beginning to change as old tractors wear out and farmers replace them with models equipped with roll bars." (Read more)

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