There’s good and bad news on Canada’s farm injury front.
Deaths on farms or related to farming practices dropped an average of 1.4 per cent annually from 2011 to 2020.
However, there were 624 agriculture-related deaths in that period. Of those deaths, 26 were children ages one to four and 124 were people ages 70 to 79. These age groups came in second and first respectively in terms of overall farm fatalities.
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Colleen Drul, a representative of the University of Alberta Injury Prevention Centre, said there’s obviously work to be done to reduce those numbers. She made that point twice in her presentation on the report during a recent online annual meeting of the Canadian Agricultural Safety Association.
Children ages one to four were also disproportionately represented in the bystander runover category, which measures the number of fatal agriculture-related bystander runovers by age. There were 12 deaths in the 10-year period and a rate of 4.3 per 100,000 farm population.
“(The bystander category) is the one that really identifies we’re not doing a very good job when it comes to children,” said Drul, adding she has read the circumstances surrounding these fatalities.
“It’s really quite sad. The child is on a parent’s knee and then somehow something happens and the child comes out of the tractor and gets run over. Or children are sitting in the scoop of a front-end loader. It hits a rock and they bounce out and subsequently get run over.
“So it’s really quite tragic that these children are dying because of runovers.”
The report is a product of CASA and Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting, through an integrated national surveillance project.
CAIR was established in 1995 in response to the need for better information about fatal injuries and those requiring hospitalization in Canada’s agriculture sector.
What were the causes, otherwise known as the mechanisms of injury, behind the fatalities?
“Basically there are three main mechanisms of injury. (They include) machinery rollover, machinery runover and entanglements or being caught,” said Drul.
From 1990 to 2020, machinery rollover was a major cause of fatal ag-related injuries with 15 per cent occurring in the spring, 16 per cent in summer, 17 per cent in fall and 13 per cent in winter.
“This would be caused by such things as (travelling) too close to an edge or incline. And it’s often the tractor that is the machine involved in the actual rollover,” said Drul.
Fatal rollovers from 2011 to 2020 were further divided between the top three immediate causes. These included traveling close to the edge with a steep drop (26 incidents), traveling on an incline (17 incidents) and towing (seven incidents).
“There were 24 other fatalities in eight other categories that were not included in this. So this is just the high level and one of the main three causes of these rollovers,” said Drul.
Machinery runovers were another common cause of death, with nine per cent occurring in spring, 18 per cent in summer, 15 per cent in fall and nine per cent in winter, when there isn’t as much equipment-related farm work.
“This is where an individual is run over by a piece of equipment. This can include everything from unmanned tractors and cold starts to inadvertently running over children that are in the work environment,” she said.
The entangled/caught in machinery category only showed once in the top three mechanisms of injury between 1990 and 2020.
“There’s lots of moving parts on farm machinery and lots of opportunity for either clothing and/or the individual getting caught up in machinery,” said Drul.
“It was significant in the fall, where we have farmers going in to remove or impact things that are impacted in combines and augers and inadvertently get tangled or caught up in that practice.”
When it came to agriculture-related deaths by sex, males far outpaced females at 91 percent from 2011 to 2020. By age, 289 fatalities were men 60 and older, with another 186 among men 25 to 59.
Drul pointed out the difference between number of deaths and rate of death. For example, while those in the 70 to 79 age group experienced the greatest number of ag-related deaths at more than 120, they did not have the highest death rate, which was measured in deaths per 100,000 population.
For the 70 to 79-year-old cohort, that number came in at just under 30.
From that perspective, the 80-plus cohort had the highest rate of fatalities at around 45.2, even though the actual number of deaths was 57.
“When we look at that, in comparison to the population of those age groups, those 80 years of age and older had the higher rate,” said Drul.
Another category was fatal agriculture-related injuries by relationship to the owner/operator. Those numbers spanned 2011 to 2020, a time represented throughout the remainder of the report.
Owner/operators represented 288 injuries or 58 per cent of the total, followed by hired workers at 58 injuries (12 per cent) and children of operators at 57 injuries or 11 per cent.
Fatal agriculture-related injuries by relationship to agriculture-related work had 581 (94 per cent) work-related deaths. Non-work-related deaths in this sub-category made up the remaining 37 fatalities.
“Those (non-work-related fatalities) often involved more recreational-type activities such as driving around on an ATV or maybe horseback riding. Those are activities involved with being on a farm but weren’t work-related,” said Drul.
Most fatalities in this sub-category involved traffic-related deaths such as collisions with farm equipment.
The category also featured fatalities among victims that were working (531 people) versus victims that were not working (84).
Those in the latter statistic were often children, said Drul, and again activities such as riding ATVs, horseback riding and drowning in dugouts were among the causes.
“It was something involved in the hazards of being on a farm environment,” she said.
There were 410 machine-related deaths versus 214 non-machine. Tractors were by far the top machine involved in ag-related deaths at 180. This was followed by motor vehicles with 40 fatalities and off-road vehicles at 33.
