For Immediate Release: Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018
DES MOINES – Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig today encouraged
Iowans to keep safety in mind whether working on the farm or traveling through rural
Iowa this harvest season. National Farm Safety and Health Week is Sept. 16 to
22 and the theme is “Cultivating the Seeds of Safety.”
“Fall is an exciting time with lots of activity on our
farms and traffic on our rural roadways. It is important that everyone is
taking the steps to ensure we have a safe and successful harvest season,” Naig
said.
The National Education Center for Agricultural Safety
(NECAS) has additional safety information for the week available at www.necasag.org/nationalfarmsafetyandhealthweek/.
Daily topics to be highlighted include:
·
Monday – Rural Roadway Safety
·
Tuesday – Health/Suicide/Opioids
·
Wednesday – Child/Youth Health and Safety
·
Thursday – Confined Spaces in Agriculture
·
Friday – Tractor Safety
“National Farm Safety and Health Week is a great way to
focus more attention on these devastating injuries, especially during harvest season
when we often see an uptick in incidents. But, it’s also important to remember
that agricultural safety and health is an issue all year,” said Brandi Janssen,
Director of the Iowa Center for Agricultural Safety and Health (I-CASH). “Improving safety on any jobsite requires
constant attention to ensure that everyone gets home safely at the end of the
day.”
Unfortunately, accidents and injuries remain too common
within the agriculture industry. Surveillance by the Iowa Department of Public
Health shows that while agriculture accounts for just 5 percent of Iowa’s
workforce, ag workers sustained 32 percent of the occupational injuries. In
fact, about 8 percent of Iowa’s agricultural workforce suffered a non-fatal
injury in 2016.
I-CASH works to improve safety and health on Iowa’s farms
by establishing and coordinating prevention and education programs. Their
efforts include seasonal safety campaigns with information distributed
quarterly through Iowa State Extension and Outreach and Farm Service Agency
offices, grants to community youth groups for farm safety-related projects,
seminars and workshops to diverse rural audiences on a variety of agricultural
safety and health topics and a number of other programs.
I-CASH is a collaborative effort between the University
of Iowa, Iowa State University, the Iowa Department of Public Health and the
Iowa Department of Agriculture and Land Stewardship.
More information about I-CASH can be found at www.i-cash.org.
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For more information, contact Dustin Vande Hoef, (515) 281-3375 or (515) 326-1616 (cell) or Dustin.VandeHoef@IowaAgriculture.gov
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