No single source for farm injury, fatality data

URBANA, Ill. — Calculating the number of severe injuries and fatalities surrounding agriculture in Illinois is largely yeoman’s work because there is no single government agency report or public database that tracks and compiles the incidents.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration through its Fatality Analysis Reporting Systems releases annual data on deaths that occur on roadways, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics through its Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries each year publishes data on workplace deaths by industry.

Both reports code for deaths related to farm equipment and industries that relate to agriculture, but often lag a year or two behind and don’t capture every incident.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration provides annual reports on non-fatal, severe injuries stemming from employers within the ag industry.

But those reports are self-surveys and remain specific to companies with 10 or more employees, meaning most farm operations are not required to report a severe injury that takes place.

An online repository of news reports of farm fatalities and severe injuries has been managed since 2015 by the National Farm Medicine Center at the Marshfield Clinic Research Institute.

The Purdue University Agricultural Confined Space Incident Database since 2012 has tracked by year the number of fatal and non-fatal incidents around grain bins and other confined spaces.

While the latter two are credible sources, they also rely on self-reporting and other aggregators of the data.

The issue compounds further for non-fatal injuries, news of which usually doesn’t make it off the farm unless public safety agencies release information.

“For non-fatal incidents, it’s a lot trickier,” said Salah Issa, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois who specializes in agricultural and industrial safety and health.

“At this moment we are not as certain what the trends are,” Issa said. “It’s a lot harder to capture non-fatal injuries — so, that’s one area of research that we’re trying to explore and better understand.”

To get there, Issa has been cataloging fatal and non-fatal data through the government reports, news stories and other channels, like death certificates. His goal is to create an online dashboard showing incident data at the county level.

“My ultimate goal is bringing farm injuries and deaths into the hands of people who need them,” Issa said, noting that while studies and reports are interesting to academics, they’re “not actionable for communities that are impacted by these incidents.”

Armed with regional data on farm injuries, Issa said entities like health departments, county Farm Bureaus and local governments could then take action to address trends.

That action could take shape in several ways.

“It could be more that this county or this region needs more safety training; it could be that it’s just the equipment; it could be that you need standards; it could be that you need regulations; it could be that it needs policy changes,” Issa said. “But to start all the action, you need to raise awareness.”

This story was distributed through a cooperative project between Illinois Farm Bureau and the Illinois Press Association.