Farm Safety Week
March 14-20 is Canadian Agricultural Safety Week. So it’s the perfect time to revisit the topic of workplace safety. This year’s theme: developing farm safety plans. Here are some of the efforts being made across Canada to promote farm safety:
Manitoba
The province will launch the Safe Farms Check program this spring to offer Manitoba farmers a safety and health plan template that can be customized to individual farms and help them identify and control hazards, create emergency preparedness plans, identify safety and health responsibilities for people working on farms, conduct inspections, develop safe work procedures for all tasks and identify the causes of injuries.
In addition, the WCB awarded Keystone Agricultural Producers a grant to develop a pilot project to provide occupational health and safety services to individual farmers and farm workers, including one-on-one safety and health education and health tests. Trained Farm Safety Specialists will conduct on-site farm safety reviews of potential hazards from machinery, livestock facilities and chemical storage and propose measures to mitigate these risks.
Nova Scotia
To support improved awareness and education about farm safety, the Nova Scotia Federation of Agriculture has been developing a business model for the Society of Farm Safety Nova Scotia, which will be implemented later this year.
Prince Edward Island
The WCB reminded farmers to use the Farm Safety Code of Practice, which provides tools and checklists designed to assist farmers in safety plan development.
Québec
The CSST reminded farmers that it has fact sheets available on various farm hazards, including tractors and other agricultural machinery, falls and respiratory problems.
Farms & Workplace Safety
Considering that a whole week has been devoted to farm safety across Canada, you’d think that hazards on farms would be highly regulated by the OHS laws. But that’s not the case. Alberta essentially doesn’t regulate farm safety at all. ON and PEI only brought farms under their OHS laws in the last few years. And even though most jurisdictions’ OHS laws technically apply to farms, they don’t specifically address the safety issues and hazards unique to farming. [Click here for more on the regulation of safety on farms.]
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