FARM SAFETY ZONE
Farm safety articles and information about our Farm Safety Day Camps.
Are Your Kids Learning
Safety?
Several other states have laws and programs
similar to those in Wisconsin. Contact local 4-H or Extension
offices for information that could save your child's life.
Students must drive a tractor course that simulates road and field conditions. Photo: Jim Patrico"I'm supposed to help save kids' arms and legs and lives. What a great job!"
Lee Cunningham, a Walworth County Extension ag/agribusiness agent, likes his work. He is in charge of a unique tractor safety course run by University of Wisconsin Extension and 4-H. The twice-a-year event is for kids ages 12 and up from three southeastern Wisconsin counties.Most of the kids take the course because their parents are concerned about safety. Children under 15 make up 29% of all farm fatalities in the state, Cunningham says. And 41% of them are killed by tractors.
Wisconsin law bars kids under 16 from driving a tractor on public roads unless they have earned a tractor safety certificate. Federal law similarly forbids kids 14 and up from driving tractors as employees, unless they have a certificate.
Liability concerns are another reason for certification. "Insurance companies are beginning to ask if they should have to cover an accident involving a kid who is not certified," Cunningham says.
The Walworth County course spans 24 hours, broken into four-hour sessions held twice a week for three weeks. By the time it ends, kids are prepared to take a test that certifies them to drive a tractor on public roads.
Much of the course work is in the classroom. But there are at least six hours of hands-on lessons: driving tractors, operating skid loaders and learning how to put out on-farm fires.
Cunningham and the staff also challenge students with unusual at-home assignments. For instance, the kids get cameras to take photos of things at home that could cause accidents. Their pictures of pto's without safety shields, rusted outdoor electrical boxes, and tractors and carts with faded or missing slow-moving vehicle signs are displayed on boards in an open-air classroom.
"We get calls from parents saying, 'Maybe you ought to lay off this safety bit some, huh?' " laughs Sue Fredrich, Walworth 4-H program assistant and class instructor. "But that's good because it means the adults are learning something from the kids."
In the past three years, 117 kids have gone through Cunningham's course. "I think we're making a difference. I really do," he says.
But the course doesn't eliminate risk. During one recent winter, a graduate of the course lost control of a tractor on an icy road. The tractor flipped, and because it didn't have a cab or a rollover protective structure the boy was crushed to death.
Cunningham won't let himself or his students forget the incident: "At the right time during the course-and there always seems to be a right time-I tell the kids that there are only two things that will make me mad at them. One is to have to visit them in the hospital because they were in a tractor accident. The other is to have to go to their funeral. Believe me, they pay attention from then on."
First published October 1998.
