Safety should be a major concern for all farmers during harvest, but as the season goes on, it can be easy to miss details or neglect safe practices that can put you or others at risk. Here are six simple safety tips to maintain throughout the season to keep yourself and your crew out of harm’s way.
1. Keep your machine’s safety features, mirrors and windows clean both in and out of the field
Safety should always be at the forefront of your farming operations, and harvest is no different. When operating large equipment such as combines and grain carts, overhead power lines pose an increased risk to farm safety. An average of 62 people each year are electrocuted when their farm machinery contacts a power line.
To avoid potential incidents on your farm operation, follow these tips and those in the video below. ISU Digital Ag and ISU Extension and Outreach wish you a safe and productive harvest season.
While the weather is working in our favor this year for grain harvest, the crop is drying down quickly and mold and dust are prolific. Dust and mold cause significant respiratory issues that range in symptoms from minor discomfort to more serious illnesses. Protecting yourself from exposure to respiratory hazards should be a priority anytime but especially when working with grain dust or potential molds.
While drought is still widespread, rainfall blanketed most of the state last week, providing some welcome relief to pastures, hay fields, newly-seeded cover crops, and later maturing soybeans. The rainfall caused some standability concerns with corn. Other issues noted by field agronomists include the start of harvest, harvest safety, cover crop seeding, and improvement in the condition of hay and pasture. Read on for more specifics for what’s happening in different regions across the state.
Safety should be a major concern for all farmers during harvest, but as the season goes on, it can be easy to miss details or neglect safe practices that can put you or others at risk. Here are six simple safety tips to maintain throughout the season to keep yourself and your crew out of harm’s way.
1. Keep your machine’s safety features, mirrors and windows clean both in and out of the field
Before working in or around your combine, it’s important to go through proper shutdown and lockout/tagout procedures to ensure safety for yourself and those around you. Refer to this list for a reference on how to safely shutdown your machine, and use these practices every time you perform maintenance on the combine.
It’s always difficult to forecast weather, but if dry field conditions persist, potential for combine and field fires this fall could be a problem. All it takes is a single high-temperature source in the engine area, or an overheated bearing to ignite dry plant material.
During harvest periods with increased fire potential, fires cause millions of dollars in property damage in Iowa, including loss of machinery, crops, and time. Injuries to farm workers and firefighters are also an unfortunate outcome in some instances.
The recent massive rains in the northern third of Iowa will complicate the need to move quickly on deteriorating grain. Here are some specific impacts from wet field conditions and tips for grain handling and storage.
From a non-farm citizen perspective, safety on the roads is imperative. We have to be aware that during harvest and fall field work season, there will be a lot of large and slow moving equipment on the roads. There will also be a lot of grain trucks on the roads, and it is a tough job to drive those things! They don’t accelerate or stop like a car or SUV, so hopefully we can help spread the word to help our non-farm drivers remember to watch for them and try to help them out when we can.
Objectives when setting and adjusting the combine are to harvest all crop available in the field while maintaining grain in quality condition for storage. Past field measurements show that field losses due to the combine should be able to be held to one bushel per acre or less if the crop is standing reasonably well. Each two kernels of corn per square foot or four soybeans per square foot, or 3/4 lb corn ear per 1/100 acre equals one bushel per acre loss.
