Tractor safety: What works best in California?
Author: Western Farm Press

Byline: James M. Meyers California Farm Safety Program University of California

Tractor safety is undoubtedly an issue you have been stressing on your farm for years. Yet the national focus on tractor safety often fails to take into account many of the primary reasons for tractor-related injuries and deaths in California.

Nationwide, approximately 250 people die in tractor-related incidents each year. These deaths account for more than one-third of all of the annual agriculture-related fatalities. Rollovers are typically responsible for more than half of these tractor-related deaths. As a result, national tractor safety training messages often strongly emphasize rollover prevention, including equipping tractors with rollover protective structures (ROPS) and seat belts.

While rollovers do of course occur in California agriculture, our research over the years has shown that runovers appear to equal or exceed rollovers as the primary cause of tractor-related deaths in our state. In addition, California agriculture is vastly different than agriculture in most of the rest of the United States. More than 80 percent of our state's agricultural production occurs on very large farms, which use hired farmworkers. California farmers grow a wide diversity of high value crops on irrigated land, and the tractor rollovers that do occur most often involve ditches or ditch banks/creeks, versus hilly terrain.

As a result of these differences, it's important for California farmers to understand exactly how tractor-related injuries and deaths are occurring here. Then, it's critical that safety training programs take these issues into account and be presented in a manner that is most effective.