The Rural Voice, 1978-10, Page 3Inside this month
SPECIAL FEATURES
Art on Barns P. 5
Absentee Owners P 9
Erosion Solutions P.11
Lambton farm deaths P.14
REGULAR FEATURES
A Matter of Principle P.13
Up & Coming P.18
Voice of a Farmer P.20
Rural News in Brief P,21
Advice on FArming P.3O
The Young Farmer P.37
The Rural Family P.39
Perth Federation News P.45
Necessity is the Mother of Invention .. P.47
Mailbox of the Month P.48
Farming Around The World P.49
Classified Ads P.51
Bruce Federation News P.53
Huron Federation News P.56
Cover Photo by Sheila Gunby
the rural
Voice
Published monthly by McLean Bros. Publishers Ltd., Box 10, Blyth, Ontario,
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Hamilton, Adrian Vos and Susan White. Advertising representative: Barbara
Consitt, Telephone 527-0240. Staff reporter: Debbie Ranney. Authorized as
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To the editor:
City reader likes Rural Voice
The "Rural Voice" has been coning into our home for our son
Ralph Neeb. Enclosed is $2. for a subscription for me. I love this
paper and am enclosing some apple recipes.
Mrs. Henry E. Neeb
Stratfora
Opinion
Farm safety is
more than a slogan
One third of all farm accident death victims in Ontario
annually are under 20.
Although any farm fatality or any farm accident involving the
loss of a limb or other permanent injury is a tragedy, it is
particularly heartbreaking when it involves a child.
In industry, safety precautions are of major concern.
Industries have found that devoting extra time and money to
educating their workers on safe practices around the plant pays
dividends in reducing the time employees lose from the job
through injury.
Unfortunately, the agricultural community has tended to take
a more fatalistic attitude to farm accidents - if it happens, it
happens. Yet only too often, the accident could have been
avoided with a little more care and co?nmon sense.
Although the provincial government is contemplating a
number of measures in Bill 70 to make the agricultural workplace
safer, legislation alone won't solve the problem.
Farmers themselves, and farm children, must be made more
conscious of safety. Preventative measures beforehand surely in
the long run save time which can be lost through injury. For
example, installing a roll bar on a tractor doesn't seem so
expensive when you realize that two-thirds of the fatalities
involving farm machinery happen on a tractor.
Also, one doesn't see children employed in the industrial
workplace. We don't see children driving motor vehicles until
they are 16 years of age and have passed a driving examination
which tests their skill at the wheel.
In the past, the farming community has been exempt from
these rules. and children are often used as supplementary labor,
working with machinery they aren't mature enough or big
enough to handle.
The father of an 11 year old boy recently killed in a tractor
accident said his son had been driving the tractor since he was
nine. The father apparently thought his son had enough
experience to operate the machine, despite the fact that a
spokesman from Massey Ferguson, the company who
manufactured the vehicle, said he was skeptical that anyone the
size and weight of the child could safely manoeuvre a tractor of
that size.
Other farm accidents involving children who have just hopped
on to a tractor or hay wagon for a ride are almost as common.
Children are excluded from the industrial workplace, and
although it is more difficult to do, parents should give serious
thought to excluding them from the farm workplace, at least until
they are mature enough to know how to react around dangerous
farm machinery.
Today, agriculture trails only mining and forestry as the third
highest frequency -of -injury occupation in Ontario. That fact
should alarm all of us.
It's time the farming community started taking more
responsibility to educate themselves about safety and to educate
their children.
THE RURAL VOICE/OCTOBER 1978 PG. 3