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Farming is the most unhealthy lifestyle

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Well-known Member
We all know that farming is dangerous due to working with equipment that is inherently dangerous and often allowed to degrade slightly. (sometimes degrading tremendously). It is well known to be up close to forest products related positions in workers comp ratings. I just saw on the news where there is a startling tendency towards various cancers due to the chemicals used in crop production. Guys, watch out for your workers in personal protection procedures and keep those cab seals tight. I am sure that congress will soon be enacting more laws to protect farm workers.
 
I was at a farm machinery auction at the weekend....The auctioneer
announced that all the health and safety officers should be very
careful that they don't trip over any equipment!!!!!!!
Sam
 
I wonder what the real figure is for farming i
have worked in factories and farmed . a lot of
times you get hurt on the farm you tough it
out and in factories you go to the doc for
every scratch i worked at one where you
wernt allowed to remove a splinter.
On chemicals i got into some thimet once
didnt go to the doc either been using no or as
little chemicals since
 
One of the biggies is Farmers Lung. Comes from
working around musty or moldy grain. Symptoms like
flu. Stay out of the dust. It's not fun to deal
with.
 
2 years ago I got histoplasmosis, fungus found in chicken, bird, bad poo. They discovered I have many tiny black spots in my lungs and a 1 inch tumor.

I hope people are more serious about protecting their lungs from everything.
 
Wife's family has been hit with an abnormal amounts of cancer in the only branch that farmed. Uncle, aunt and cousin have all had it and are survivors. Her cousin was in her 20's when she fought it. But he used a lot of chemicals when they first started getting popular and people didn't know or understand the dangers. My BIL and 2 other friends have farmers lung. All fed/feed a lot out of concrete stave silos. That's where the docs think most of their exposure to mold were from. Add those dangers to other dangers like a cow wanting to tap dance on your butt and machinery and no, I guess farming isn't what you would call a real safe occupation. Glad the government got that figured out.

Rick
 
It's a sign of the times. If someone walks around back of their truck and slams their leg into the trailer ball they forgot was there it's an accident and they whine for a couple days about the bruise. If the truck is being auctioned then they figure in some way the auction company should pay for a doctor to look at their leg and compensate them for not being able to feed the hogs as easily the next day--well maybe week as they want to be good and healed. What's the problem the auction company makes plenty of money and they're insured right?

Seriously, I believe it's not just the fear of having that person sue for some made up permanent damage but instead the reality that there are a lot of people that figure in such a situation there is no harm requesting medical care and payments they would never have requested if they had to pay for it themselves.

I have to wonder too if the auction company making such statements kinda raises the bar in people's minds too. As this company warned them they start expecting others to warn them as well and if they don't they must be negligent if something happens. Kinda like, if you can fit 30 airbags in a car and make it safer than with just 2 then aren't you kinda required to do it? Some people think so--especially if they lost a loved one in a car with only 2.
 
Farming has typically been a family operation, which is exempt from OSHA. I expect that to change as corporations are the primary owners now, and employees are the workers.

I know some will complain, but those laws are there to protect employees from corporations that really do not care.
 
My nephew's neighbors are 3 brothers that farm together. One brother was the designated "sprayer man" that kept current with all the chemicals and sprayed the crops. Now the "sprayer man" has cancer; the 2 other brothers are cancer free.
 
Knock on Wood but I'm about the healthiest person I know and been on a farm all my life last Dr's visit the Doc said my heart sounded better than many 1/2 my age.But I have never used the Ag chemicals many use.Also worked and in the concrete industry and they use a wide assortment of chemicals so who knows.Many health problems are diet related and also genetic.
 
I am the 5th child of 6 my folks had .When I turned 13 we went
from 50 acres of cotton to 600 acres of soybeans.This was in
the early 70's.After all the beans were planted and up my dad
done all the cultivating and I done all the spraying.We used a
product called Dynap and I can remember starting on one end
of the field turning around and on the way back the cockleburrs
on the first half of the rows I started on were already
wilted.Today anything you spray takes a couple of days to
begin wilting .Out of all our family I now have all kinds of health
problems heart,lungs,stomach.I against a lot of gov. regulations
but some are needed.
 
Some of the problems are the result of downright ignorance. Thankfully there's a greater awareness/caution today. When I was a kid, we'd run along behind the orchard sprayer and play in the mist and wind from the fan. It won't hurt you, they said. You can't even buy the chemicals they ran through that thing in 1957. And we'd swim in the spray pond. It was mainly a water source for the sprayer, but it was in the center of the orchard, and all drainage flowed to it. And I don't know if they rinsed the sprayer and dumped the rinse back into the pond, not that it would matter if I knew. Today we are using chemicals that are declared safe by whoever has the most money, but what will we know about these same chemicals in the future? I know it's a taboo subject in the farm community.
 
I had skin cancer which I blamed on Persuit herbicide.
It was my faiult for not wearing a shirt and bending under
the booms instead of walking around. Now I have a good
case of prostate cancer from being a hard headed a hole.
 
I read somewere there were more residential lawns sprayed
with poisons than all the ag land in the US, don't know if it's
true, but many of my lawn cutting customers have fertilizer
company's plow them 8 month a year to have poison spread
all over there yards, the company's put yellow signes along the
road saying, pesticide treatment, do not enter property for 24
hours, it's funny, everyone on a given street has yellow signes
in front of there houses telling not to go on there property, looks
like posted signs in the woods. Lol, half the cidiots don't even
pay attention, they let there dogs run around the lawn, walk
across the lawn to the pool, ect. There's a reason why there
putting up warning signs. I wonder how the applicators are
going to be health wise down the road, none were respirators?
 
RedJA,
I too am the 5th in a family of 6. I have 2 older brothers. One died of cancer, he had lung problems. Other brother, after the farm, is a retired heavy equipment operator. He has about 25% lung capacity. Dr asked if he was a coal miner.

I have black spots and a tumor in my lungs.

One may say there is no proof that farming or operating diesel powered heavy equipment has anything to do with my family's lung problems. None of us smoked.

It took 50 years to prove smoking caused lung cancer.

It's your decision not to protect your lungs.

My uncle was a farmer, he died from lung cancer. Never smoked.

Sorry to say, we need the EPA to tell us how to stay healthy. Then some will pitch about it. Resort to name calling.
 
First of all, I farm just like everyone else in the neighborhood. I think a lot of guys take shortcuts when they are busy and that leads to problems later on in life. All of our seed has treatments on it to kill various diseases or bugs, our soil has all sorts of junk in it from years of applying chemical, and our water supply comes from whatever percolates down through the fields. So it is no surprise to me that cancer has taken so many in my area. Even if we all stopped applying this stuff, there is enough of it in the ground and our water to last for a long time. There is a very good reason why beekeepers shy away from row-crop country, they have figured out what the rest of us have denied for years. Where the regulation is needed is on the development end of things, not in trying to control it on the farms, because then it is too late. Farming gets in to your blood, that's for sure...
 
Yes--my uncle was a long island potato farmer and he died around age 55 of cancers---and his wife died of cancers a few years later. I always wondered of the potency of the chemicals that killed the potato plants in a day or two!
 
Probably depends on what you wish to prove, some study will
eventually prove it.

Farmers tend to have a longer life expectancy, from getting
more exersize.

As we modernize and implement more EPA and OSHA
regulations, we have less exposure to dust and work, but we
are getting fatter and lazier now. Hydro licks set everything,
auto steer drives everything, electro-hydraulics move
everything. Farmers sit in the cab munching chips.....

Then the chemicals used back in the 1960-1980s were pretty
harsh, today we use less harmful, and lower doses of them,
but it is all the products that people complain about - gmo
crops and shorter lasting herbicides. I guess we are supposed
to go back to the harsher chemicals of the past.....???

So, well, what are the answers?

I presume we will always have more questions than answers.

I have found that most studies on ag seem to involve studies
dating back to the 1960s for their 'current data' and that kind of
troubles me, a lot has changed in ag in the last 30 years. Back
then the insecticides were pretty harsh and in open containers,
you applied herbicides by counting the gluggs as you poured,
you used open station tractors and self propelled tractors, etc.

Are we studying 2010 stuff to get the real scoop?

Paul
 
Yep, lets ban all agriculture, business, corporations ect, ect, and sit back and let the great government god create everything we could ever want out of thin air.
 
I had skin cancer which I blamed on Persuit herbicide.
It was my faiult for not wearing a shirt and bending under
the booms instead of walking around. Now I have a good
case of prostate cancer from being a hard headed a hole.
 
Life is all about the "risk vs gain" ratio and everyones acceptable ratio is different. We better just be happy some still see an acceptable ratio. When we fall for the crap that the Feds can remove all the risk and everyone will have just "gains" then we are on a death spiral. Did I mention the word "abundant" here?
 
Soooo, then, how pray tell, did my father live to be 96 years old by farming all his life? His father died of natural causes at age 90. Also farming all his life. My maternal grandfather died at age 98 after farming all his life. I might remind you, those were the days of Holstein bulls, steam engines, fast moving belts, unprotected drive shafts, no seatbelts, Fordson tractors, no abs brakes, orange triangles, etc. What has happened? It's called, plain and simple, "dumbing down". On the other hand, I remember my grandfather buying a .38 cal revolver for personal protection in case the bull (Holstein) charged him. (My grandfather obviously knew nothing about ballistics and the thickness of the skull of a charging Holstein bull) One day, the bull charged him in the barnyard. My grandfather by that time had forgotten all about his revolver and was at the mercy of the bull except for one thing. The snoozing Collie. That Collie, according to my grandnmother who was hanging clothes on the line, was thru that fence like lightning and was all over the face of that bull in less than two seconds. Luck? Devine Intervention? Who knows?
 
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