Consistent advice on preventing grain bin tragedies is lacking, safety trainers say

New technology, from drones to tractor rollover detection transmitted over several miles, is being introduced to keep farmers out of dangerous situations.

Drones, modified from their current military use, could be flying soon over Iowa corn fields, allowing farmers to check on growth from comfort and safety. Devices installed in tractors could warn farmers when they are in danger of overturning and send alerts to loved ones and rescuers when it happens.

"The future is exciting in production agriculture,” said Paul Gunderson, director of the Dakota Precision Ag Center at Lake Region State College in Devils Lake, N.D. “It's a new vista and it is going to be amazing to look back in a decade at 2013 and where we're going to be in 2023.”

These new technologies could help protect farmers, who work in the most deadly occupation in Iowa. Farm fatalities represent more than 30 percent of all occupational fatalities in the state, according to data from the Iowa Fatality Assessment and Control Evaluation program.

Between 2001 and 2011, tractor rollovers made up 35 of the 280 farm fatalities. Grain bin accidents accounted for an additional 35 deaths.

“It's devastating and it's sad. And it can be prevented,” said Chris Petersen, an Iowa farmer from Clear Lake who serves on boards of multiple farming organizations.

Engineering and industrial design students at Iowa State University are trying to tackle the challenge of tractor rollovers. They created a small device that could be added to tractors to warn farmers when the vehicle begins to tip. It also would send an alert message to family and emergency response departments when a rollover happens. That alert can reach up to 40 miles from the scene of the accident.

John Pritchard and Mitchell Hinrichsen presented a prototype of the device, which they called ET, during the 12th Annual Midwest Rural Agricultural Safety and Health Conference hosted by Iowa's Center for Agricultural Safety and Health, I-CASH, and attracting roughly 80 people held in Ames on Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov. 19-20.

“People can basically put it anywhere on the tractor,” Pritchard, a doctoral student in electrical engineering, said. “We want it to be non-intrusive. In the future, we want to make this smaller, really compact, and be able to put it anywhere with minimal installation.”

The alert could reduce drastically response times.

Rollover protection structures, ROPS, are required on all tractors built after 1985. They can be added to older tractors but many farmers continue without them because the farmers don't like the look or because the added height wouldn't allow farmers to store the tractor the same way.

It sometimes can take hours before the family or friends notice a farmer's absence and are able to locate a farmer who has been in an accident, meaning emergency responders sometimes don't get to the injured person until long after the accident happens.

“We really need to create a safety device people are going to want,” Hinrichsen, a masters industrial design student at ISU, said.

That means being less intrusive and less noticeable. “They don't want the big ROPS. They don't want to take away from their baby, their favorite tractor,” Hinrichsen said.

Work being done on drone technology could give farmers safer access to fields that have pesticides and other chemicals, he said. Drones can allow them to assess crops without stepping foot into fields, using video equipment that can cover 150 acres in 15 to 22 minutes, he said.

Other devices already on the market include sensors that can be placed in grain bins and out in fields to keep farmers out of dangerous situations, Gunderson said.

Grain bins are a source of concern for agriculture safety specialists who say a lack of research makes it difficult to provide consistent advice to farmers about working in the bins. That leaves safety experts “dropping the ball,” LaMar Grafft, a rural health and safety specialist, said.

“There aren't really clear answers about grain bin entry,” Grafft said.

Grafft and William Field, professor of agriculture and biological engineering at Purdue University, presented a course called “Train the Trainer” during the Ames conference.

“We have people saying, ‘Why are farmers in the bin?' Well, because for 50 years we were telling famers to get in there and check on it, because there's a lot of money in there,” he said.

This story was produced by Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch.org, a non-profit, online news Website that collaborates with Iowa news organizations to produce explanatory and investigative reporting.