Farming is apparently one of the most dangerous professions.
What are the sources of danger?
https://www.ufkeslaw.com/blog/2019/august/the-7-most-common-farming-accidents/
- Overturning tractors and heavy machinery.
- Falls.
- Toxic chemical exposure to pesticides.
- Suffocation.
- Heat Stress.
- Limbs crushed in agricultural machinery.
- Animal-related injuries
https://nasdonline.org/1241/d001045/a-review-of-farm-accident-data-sources-and.html
Most traumatic injuries occur during interactions with machinery, especially tractors (Bean, 1991). Injuries also result from poor building design, electric power, livestock handling, and weather conditions. The activities that victims were most often performing when injured are machinery maintenance, fieldwork, and caring for animals
Tractor Rollover Protection
So I’ve seen one issue is tractors rolling over, and they have rollover protection designs that can be retrofitted on old tractors. Maybe some farmers, having thin profit margins, have skimped on buying the new safety designs, so they continue to operate tractors that can rollover and be a danger. But that seems like one solution to fixing the problem of most deaths.
Animals Versus Tractors
So interacting with animals is high on the list of what causes harm, as well as tractors. Presumably in order to prevent some animal harms (like with horses), tractors were thought to be able to be used. I guess what I’m getting at here is, would it be safer to use horses instead of tractors, or tractors (with rollover protection) instead of horses?
Cutting Technology Out
Roughly half of the issues in the first list are technology related: tractors and heavy machinery, toxic pesticide exposure. Again, would it be possible to trade off some productivity and to make farming more labor intensive, to gain some safety?
High Technology Solutions Instead
On the other side of the spectrum, I guess “autonomous tractors” or remote controlled ones come to mind, that couldn’t flip over, and maybe robots could be used to interact with animals to prevent dangerous animal interactions. I suppose in starting to write this I assumed the low tech direction would be more viable, but does farming need a “high tech revolution” instead to become safer? More programming of farming-related robotics, and less dangerous manual interactions?
Conclusion
I’m curious if anyone has thoughts on how to improve the safety of farming today, with possibly making trade-offs of less or more technology for less yields, or if a lot of the dangers might be mitigated in other ways.
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Safer for everyone involved and also gentler for the land.
Big machines invite you to work against the landscape. And ultimately fighting a war against the landscape. Instead: you must respect where the water wants to flow, where the soil wants to sit, where trees want to grow, to a point. You can nudge the landscape along with little, small, consistent, manual effort, the help of different animals.
If you don’t have piles of stuff so large you can suffocate it’s also safer. So: turn huge mega-farms back into human sized pieces of land, farmed by people not monster-machines.
You don’t really lose efficiency, because the supposed additional efficiency of mechanized agriculture is due to the input of artificially cheap fossil fuel, and subsidies favouring these kinds of systems over traditional methods. This kind of shitty agriculture ruins the soil, kills all life, needs to be turned back into something more diverse again.
Around animals, you need to be slow and take things easy - not what you get in a highly-industrialized, high-profit, high-pressure environment, so injuries will happen in these environments. You have to think, predict what the animal will do, and most importantly give the animal a decent treatment, ample space, as much freedom as possible, company of its own kind…
yeah I’ve heard of some things like permaculture and no till agricultural methods that make me wonder how productive low tech approaches could be; on the other extreme are hydroponics / aeroponics systems in controlled environments. It seems like we could probably experiment and find more ways to do things than our current system does things
Permaculture and modern regenerative methods build on the setup of the traditional small scale farm, which is similar in many places of the world. Their defining feature is biodiversity. The problem is, it’s very hard to compare productivity alone, because you would be comparing something like tons of wheat per hectare with an amount of a range of different products. And for this comparison to be honest, you would have to take into account the sustainability of each approach and the actual energy input.
Edit (hit the send key too soon): An example could be corn. Growing it alone might yield you x ton/ha. Growing it in combination of corn/squash/beans (technique adapted from Native American horticulture) might yield less ton/ha total in produce, but you will spend less pesticide, herbicide, fertilizer and/or mechanical work and your soil might remain healthier in the long term.
