Hobby farms causing more injuries, deaths
INDIANAPOLIS — Phil Jacobs was just a teenager when his parents bought a scenic Kentucky farm with hayfields, forests, creeks, trails and a view of the Ohio River. Decades later, he still spent time there, maintaining the property as a second job and using its campsite for family getaways.
The Lawrenceburg, Ind., anesthesiologist was removing dying ash trees in June 2015 when his tractor overturned as he was pulling a tree up a hill. He died instantly, at age 62. The tractor, which dated to the early 1960s, had no rollover protections.
“The farm was a very important part of my husband’s life,” said Jacobs’ widow, Joyce. “If he had any time off, we went to the farm.”
The risk of serious injury or death has always been a part of farming. But the nation’s growing embrace of small-scale production of local and organic crops is drawing more amateurs into the field, and inexperienced growers are increasingly getting maimed and even killed, often by old, unsafe machinery. Experts say some novices have little appreciation of the occupation’s dangers.
Up to a quarter of Indiana’s 115 farm fatalities over the past four years have been on small operations that include socalled hobby or lifestyle farms, which are often run by people who entered farming from other lines of work, according to research by Purdue University farm-safety expert Bill Field, who has tracked farm fatalities for nearly four decades.
Those deaths — nearly 30 between 2013 and 2016 — represent a disproportionately high percentage of Indiana’s total farming deaths, given the state’s widespread commercial farming operations, Field said.
Over the years, Field has served as an expert witness in more than 100 lawsuits that included the deaths of a surgeon, an FBI agent, a lawyer and several other professionals who traded white-collar careers for farming. Many were rookie farmers killed in accidents that people raised on farms and mindful of farming dangers likely would have avoided.
Tractor rollovers are the leading cause of death on smaller farms, said Frank Gasperini, executive vice president of the National Council of Agricultural Employers, and some beginning farmers who buy older tractors have little or no safety training.
Many new retirees are drawn to small-scale farming by the allure of a bucolic life and the independence of setting their own schedule, said Roger Sipe, editor for Hobby Farms, a national magazine that documents the trend.