By Chris Aldridge
Kentucky Ag News

The No. 1 cause of death in agriculture and logging in Kentucky is transportation.

That was the finding of three years of data compiled by the Southeast Center for Agricultural Health & Injury Prevention at the University of Kentucky College of Agriculture, Food, and Environment in Lexington. The center’s director, Dr. Wayne Sanderson, shared the sobering numbers with the crowd at the 2022 Louis Crosier Farm Safety Symposium March 11 in Elizabethtown.

The symposium’s topic, Share the Road, was appropriate since a third of those deaths involved farm and logging equipment moving on public roads. Farm tractors, planters, and tillage equipment will become a common sight this month on Kentucky roads as spring planting gets underway.

Joe Nichols, of Seven Springs Farm in Trigg County, vividly remembers a traumatic accident he encountered 40 years ago as a 16-year-old farm worker. “I had to dig 6-year-old and 8-year-old little boys out from under a flipped-over water truck,” he recalled. “The lady driving the truck, who I worked for, sat and watched in shock while I dug her son out with my fingernails with 2½ gallon busted jugs of atrazine and Lasso (herbicides) all over me and them.”

Nichols vividly remembers carrying the boys over to a shade tree on that hot June day knowing they wouldn’t live.

Both of the boys died.

“That mother has had to live with it,” he added, his voice breaking. “I’ve had to live with it.”

In an effort to prevent fatalities at his farm, Nichols started a farm safety day, which has since been renamed “What If Day.”

“We hope what Dale and his team teaches us annually will never need to be recalled,” he said, referring to Dale Dobson, the Kentucky Department of Agriculture’s (KDA) Farm and Home Safety Program coordinator. “I assure you though, if it has to be recalled, the person on the other end will be thankful to you, the Lord above, and Dale Dobson for his lifelong goal of trying to stop a ‘what if.’

“Safety is understanding the ‘what ifs’ and managing the outcomes,” Nichols explained. “It is so much easier to manage the output if you control the input variables. You do this by preparation, training, and thinking to limit what can go wrong.”

New farm equipment is growing bigger every year, while many of Kentucky’s backroads remain narrow. Sixty percent of the state’s major roads, excluding interstates, have a lane width of 10 feet or less – the third-highest percentage in the nation.

Sgt. Jason Morris of the Kentucky State Police has seen his share of accidents involving oversized farm equipment.

“How wide is that double yellow line?” he asked the farmers in the crowd. “Just shy of 12 inches. That’s all that separates you and another motorist.

“The thing is your equipment is wider, right? But can you legally cross that double yellow line? You can legally put your vehicle in that other lane. However, if you meet somebody … you are required to be in your lane of travel. If you make contact with that individual (in their lane), it is all on you.”

Morris said there are three “be’s” to sharing the road:
• Be visible. If your equipment is relatively new and well lit, Morris advises moving your equipment at night if possible. If moving during the day, “always assume that they don’t see you,” he said. “I hear it too many times: ‘I thought they saw me.’”
• Be cautious. “Out here on the road today, is anybody paying attention?” Morris said. “No, they are not. What’s most everybody doing? That cell phone.”
• Be patient. If you are moving in the daytime, preplan around the morning and afternoon to avoid school busses or high traffic congestion.

“You have to ‘what if’ for every scenario,” Morris said. “You always have to think about what’s next, what’s coming, what’s around the next bend. Is this guy going to get over? Does he see me?

“You’ve got to be careful,” he added. “We want to get to where we need to be, but we want to get there as safe as possible.”