farmgate: Will You Have A Collision With A Motor Vehicle This Harvest Season?
Look in your tool box for your tape measure, and measure the width of most of the rural roads that you will be traveling on from field to field this fall. If they were part of the rural road building programs in the middle of the last century, they are probably 16 to 18 feet wide. Now, measure the width of your combine header and calculate how much room is left when traveling down that roadway. Oh, you are wider than the road! No wonder farmers get a lot of unusual waves from motorists.
The fall harvest season brings many problems related to safety. The stress of long days in a combine cab are bad enough, but then you have to move equipment from one field to another. Sometimes that is like trying into your old military uniform or that suit you wore on your wedding day, or putting on that favorite belt with your name stamped on the back 20 years ago. Today’s farm machinery just doesn’t fit where it needs to go.
The National Agricultural Safety Database, which is a function of Extension at USDA, points to many problems that are causing increased problems.
1) There is an increased urbanization of traditional agricultural production areas. More non-farm folks live where you farm and there are more motor vehicles on the roads where you move farm equipment.
2) There is a greater tendency for you to farm over a larger area, and not have the opportunity to move equipment from field to field without encountering other traffic.
3) With current farm economics and the need to maximize efficiency, your equipment has become larger.
Of fatal crashes, nearly 54% occur in rural areas, and nearly 43% of those occur on rural roads like the one you are moving a combine on this harvest season. Most farmers realize the problem, and a group of farmers in North Carolina who reported an increase of traffic on rural roads were surveyed and said their need to drive equipment on rural roads was their number one workplace hazard.
The owner and operator of the farm equipment have responsibilities as well, “In 23% of the cases where the farm operator was issued a citation, lighting and yield violations were noted. In at least 11% of the cases where the farm operator was cited, the crash occurred in the evening and the tractor was not utilizing adequate lighting.”
The most common type of accident is the rear end collision, where a motor vehicle will collide with the back end of a piece of farm equipment, which is traveling slower than the motor vehicle. With a 15 mile per hour tractor and a 55 mile per hour car, “it only takes five seconds to close a gap the length of a football field between the car and the tractor.” The next most frequent types of accidents occur when a motor vehicle attempts to pass farm equipment that is making a left turn; followed by collisions that occur because the farm equipment is too wide for the car to pass safely, either from the same or from the opposite direction.
So how can farmers improve the safety of operating on rural roads? 92% indicated they used signal lights and 88% had slow moving vehicle placards. But the American Society of Agricultural Engineers also found several other ideas when ASAE surveyed farmers: “A majority of respondents agreed that an effective way to reduce crashes would be to ensure that: a) all farm vehicles had blinking or flashing lights; b) road officials placed diamond-shaped caution signs showing a tractor ahead on roads with heavy farm traffic; and c) roadway shoulders were wide enough to allow farmers to drive totally on the shoulder. Finally, the study found that most farmers believed that driving their tractor on rural roads was more dangerous now than it was five years before.”
While road markers and pavement extensions are not going to be made before you head to the field for the 2009 harvest, lights, reflectors, and placards can be put on farm equipment to protect yourself and your employees from the non-farm motoring public who just does not pay much attention to slower moving equipment.
Summary:
Today’s farm equipment has likely outgrown the width of rural roads, leaving little or no room to encounter non-farm traffic. Fatalities frequently occur when there is a collision between farm equipment and motor vehicles because of the differences in speed. Rear end collisions are the primary mishap, but others are related to the width of the equipment in relation to the width of the road. Farmers can protect themselves as much as possible with the required lights, reflectors, and placards.
Posted by Stu Ellis on September 28, 2009 12:58 AM to farmgate