Farm Implement Dealers Pushing Safety Along With Machinery

Bill Lewis knows first-hand the dangers of working with farm machinery.

As a teenager, Lewis was using a tractor to pull a baler when he discovered the hydraulics weren’t functioning right. While he stood on the rear of the tractor checking out the Power Take Off unit, a pin snared his coveralls.

“It went right through my coveralls, my boots and clear to the bone,” said Lewis, now president of Great Falls Tractor Inc.

The lesson, learned early in life, was clear. When it comes to farm machinery “you can’t be too safe.”

Like other farm implement dealers, Lewis spends a good deal of time preaching safety. Farmers, ranchers and other users of agricultural equipment appear to be listening, he and others say.

Most every ag operator has had a brush with a potentially serious accident. Stories of serious injuries or deaths are easily found.

“Anybody in the farming community around Great Falls can probably think of somebody whose life was taken” in an agriculturerelated accident, Lewis said.

For implement dealers and manufacturers, pushing safety makes financial as well as human sense. Those in the implement business need healthy, happy customers. They are also trying to limit liability claims by working to make equipment safer and encouraging customers to operate it properly.

“There are a lot of hungry lawyers out there,” said Kirk Summers, service manager at Taylor Brothers John Deere in Great Falls. Safety “is probably Deere’s biggest single issue right now.”

Lewis recently led a visitor to a faded red and yellow New Holland baler in for repairs, and quickly spotted potential problems.

“Look here, you haven’t got a shield here,” he said, pointing to the PTO unit and noting the operator appeared to have removed the device. “That needs to be fixed.”

Around the side, a piece of metal covering the machine’s innards is missing, probably removed to ease repairs. “That’s a hazard.”

Below the missing shield sits an exposed set of gears linked by a chain, also a safety no-no.

As a dealer, he will tell the machine’s owner of the safety shortfalls. If he were trying to sell the baler, Lewis said he would replace the missing shields or send the machine to the scrap yard.

“The bottom line is that person using it needs to be safe,” he said.

The well-used baler also represents a problem in Montana and other ag states. While new farm machinery may be loaded with safety devices and warnings, machines sold years ago, without the safety devices, are often still in use, dealers say.

Tractors, probably the most frequently used implement, are a good example. A gleaming new Ford on Lewis’ lot has a long list of safety warnings inside the door. There are all kinds of warning flashers on the dashboard. The enclosed cab includes a Roll Over Protection System. The comfortable, adjustable seat has a seat belt.

In contrast, Lewis points to an older, smaller tractor on his lot that has no cab, no rollover protection, no seat belt. If the machine sells, the deal will have to include who will pay for the rollover system that must be installed, he said.

In general, the addition of shields, devices that allow tractors to be started only from the tractor seat and rollover protection equipment and seat belts have made tractors safer, says Summers.

Nationally, there were 418 tractor-related deaths on farms last year. Rollovers were the leading cause of the deaths, according to the National Safety Council.