You may not hear about accidents that involve farm equipment, but just about every day in North Carolina they are happening on farms throughout the state. Simply by the nature of the work, farming can be a dangerous profession. If you grew up in the farming industry you probably learned how to do the job. However, sometimes, what you learned may not have come with as much safety training as is really needed to prevent accidents when you working with large and dangerous farming equipment. Preventing accidents requires more safety training, but also, improvements to safety features on the equipment could help.
An article in Modern Farmer notes that there are changes that can be made to equipment that could make them safer, and those changes would help prevent farming accidents.
Monitoring technology to equipment can be quite helpful, especially if a tractor rolls over, because getting help while you are out working can be difficult. Some of the same technology being used to make vehicles safer on the road can go into farm equipment. However, there is a need for specialized safety features made just for farm equipment because you have different concerns on the farm than you do on the road. If you have some type of monitoring or automatic system that sends a distress signal in the event of a roll over, it could save your life.
There are experimental autonomous tractors being tested right now that could really change farming. This is still in the early stages, but this technology would be huge in accident prevention. So as you can see, vehicle technology can be just as useful on the farm as it is on highways.
Finally, remote operation systems can be a wonderful tool. They could include kill switches that allow you to respond to an incident immediately no matter where you are in location to the accident scene.
Hardee, Massey and Blodgett provided this blog simply for education purposes. This is not legal advice, but if you’d like the advice of an injury attorney after a farm accident, contact us for a free case evaluation at 252-378-2525.