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Though incidents are few and far between, farm kids are more likely to be killed or hurt compared with their urban counterparts, writes Carrie Tait
Connor Pearce is 13. He is a farm kid, and drives a big New Holland tractor when spreading pig manure on his family’s fields. The Pearces call the tractor Big Foot, and when Connor is in the cab, he goes slow, maybe 10 kilometres an hour. He is allowed to load and spread manure only when he is within an adult’s eyesight.
Connor’s two younger brothers, Ethan and Owen, work on the farm, too, although they are not allowed to drive Big Foot on their own yet. The Pearce boys are careful and know the house rules. They know one little slip can kill someone.
One little slip killed their sister Lyla Dawn in June, 2013. She was four-and-a-half, climbed onto a hay wagon when her grandpa was not looking, and fell under a wheel when the tractor pulling the wagon jerked a bit. Lyla had dimples, a flurry of freckles just below her blue eyes, and dirty blond hair with bangs. Her ears were pierced and her favourite job was to help feed the pigs, Michelle Pearce, the kids’ mom, said this week.
“She had a stuffed kitty cat that she took everywhere, that she slept with every night,” Ms. Pearce said.
Lyla finished a farm safety course in kindergarten shortly before the accident on the family farm near Leamington, Ont., and her mom believes governments should put more money into education programs like those.
But Ms. Pearce does not believe legislation should impose rules such as a minimum age to operate machinery. As farm deaths across Canada drop for adults, they have remained flat for children, and governments everywhere have been reluctant to legislate tighter rules for kids working on farms.
That includes Alberta, where the governing NDP is revamping farm safety legislation, but remains vague about what, if anything, it will do when it comes to children. The government on Tuesday announced a handful of consultation meetings, but any changes that would tell farm families what to do with their offspring will meet resistance.
The consultations come one month after three young girls – Catie Bott, who was 13, and her 11-year-old twin sisters, Jana and Dara – were killed in a farm incident in Withrow, Alta. They fell into a grain truck and were buried in canola. The RCMP deemed it an accident and the investigation is closed.
Ms. Pearce gets nervous since Lyla’s accident as her sons take on increasingly dangerous jobs on the farm, but she allows it. Farmers, ranchers and politicians across North America applaud – or at the very least, respect – the Pearces’ approach.
“They want to be farmers and that’s part of the life,” she said. “So, I need to teach them to be safe.”
Alberta’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner counts 11 farm deaths so far in 2015, with four of them children. One person under 18 died in a farm-related incident in the province in 2014, according to the OCME’s preliminary statistics, updated on Nov. 18, on deaths it investigates. Sixteen adults were killed in farm incidents last year, the OCME said.
Farm kids are far more likely to be killed or hurt compared with their urban counterparts. In Alberta, for example, farm children under 18 were 83 per cent more likely to suffer severe injury or death than city kids between 1999 and 2010, according to a comprehensive doctoral thesis by Kyungsu Kim at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health. Children living in rural areas, excluding First Nations, were 73 per cent more likely to be severely injured or die than city kids, while the risk for First Nations children living in rural areas was nearly three times higher.
Lori Sigurdson, Alberta’s Minister of Jobs, Skills, Training and Labour, said the government is concerned about the disparity between farm kids and city children, but has not fleshed out how it will address the problem.
Family farms, she said, are “an essential part of our culture here in Alberta,” but employees and families must be kept safe. The government must be sure it is “respecting family farms … but also making sure that there is safety and fairness. So it is very much a balancing act.”