Safety starts with speaking up

About the time this issue reaches your mailbox, MFA’s team will be deep into Safe + Sound Week, an OSHA-inspired program that our entire company has participated in for several years now. The event isn’t a revolutionary new approach to safety—it’s a focus on the power of making safety routine.

That gets to the root of MFA’s philosophy about safety. The point isn’t passing an inspection. We measure a good day one way. It’s one that ends with everyone accounted for and home safe to their families.

For the past 20 years, we’ve focused on a program called SHIELD, short for Safe Habits Improve Employees’ Lives Daily. Since it launched in 2015, MFA employees have logged more than 210,000 safety conversations. In addition to identifying unsafe behaviors, a key component is recognizing and reinforcing safe behaviors in a positive way, while minimizing risk exposures and promoting a “think-before-acting” mindset. In an observational program like SHIELD, the point isn’t to write anyone up—we don’t even record names in those conversations. The goal is to notice a hazard, talk about it and fix it before anyone gets hurt.

I believe the same thinking belongs on the farm. Every farm family has a handful of stories about near misses. We seem to share those freely. We’re less free with the stories that end in tragedy.

Here at MFA and on the farm, we ought not to wave off the near miss. Lock it out before it has an opportunity to become part of our family stories. Have the conversation, even if it’s with yourself, before the job, not after the accident. That ounce of prevention prevents a pound of harm—and the anguish that serious accidents bring to a family.

While there has been more focus in recent years, I’d be remiss not to mention other farm hazards that we have traditionally avoided in conversation—stress and mental health challenges. We should manage those hazards the same way we’re told to manage any other health issue. Notice it. Talk about it. Deal with it early.

If you think about it, the same culture that lets a coworker flag a hazard without fear of blame is a culture that lets a farmer admit he’s struggling or gives implied permission for a neighbor to ask how he’s doing. We’re not quite there yet. Men, especially, tend to keep it quiet. It’s a silence with haunting echoes. Rural Missouri’s suicide death rate climbed 5% between 2019 and 2023 while the rate in urban areas fell about 5% in the same period. Men account for about 80% of those deaths. Researchers say that stigma keeps roughly 1-in-5 people from asking for help.

For several years now, the MFA Foundation has supported MU Extension’s Show-Me Strong Farm Families program and its free, confidential telehealth counseling. You can access it at muext.us/PSCFarmRanch or call 573-882-4677. That team focuses on live, one-on-one counseling as a first step for farmers who need to talk.

Rural communities have a truly generous culture of helping when others are in need. Let’s put recognizing mental health needs in our toolbox of neighborly attention and help to ensure we have good days ahead—ones that end with everyone accounted for and home safe to their families. 

For more articles from the August/September Today's Farmer Magazine, CLICK HERE.