By MARK BUTZOW
Associate Editor
MARSHFIELD, Wis. — The modern dairy operation is full of opportunities for accidents and injuries, and there also are standards to be met to ensure the safety of the milk produced and the health of the cows.
In the top-producing states, the largest dairy farms have more than 15,000 cows, though farms with 1,000-5,000 animals are more common, and in the Midwest and Northeast there are still many farms with 100 cows or fewer. As a dairy consolidates beyond the size that a family can handle alone, about 40 percent of the added workers are Hispanic immigrants, according to Jill Harrison of the University of Colorado-Boulder.
The language barrier can be a hindrance to effective employee training – things such as teaching dairy workers the dangers of working with cattle, good hygiene to prevent diseases, chemical and confined spaces training and how to safely use a skid steer or other heavy equipment.
"Dairy workers have a high rate of occupational injury," says Amy K. Liebman, director of environmental and occupational health with the Migrant Clinicians Network (MCN).
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) isn’t usually involved in ag enterprises because most operations are small, but an OSHA field office in Eau Claire, Wis., grew concerned about the rapid growth in dairy size and the dependence on Hispanic workers, many of whom don’t speak English well or at all.
According to Matt Keifer, director of the National Farm Medicine Center, OSHA announced a "local emphasis program," basically deciding "we would like to start inspecting on dairy farms." Dairy farms with at least 500 cows and at least 11 unrelated people are now subject to inspection in Wisconsin.
So, NFMC, which is based in Wisconsin, partnered with MCN, the Professional Dairy Producers of Wisconsin and three other partners to create Seguridad en las Lecherias (safety in the dairies) to address this need on Wisconsin dairies.
"The Seguridad project shows that for a huge problem like work-related health and safety on dairy farms, collaboration between workers, producers, researchers and health and safety practitioners is an effective approach to ensure worker protection," Liebman said.
After conversations with dairy operators, workers and cultural advisers, NFMC decided to test the idea of using a promotore (promoter, sponsor, patron) in the training it developed. So for a year, some farms’ workers received five hours of bilingual instruction, while another group of farms in the study had the same training, but in addition, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking dairy employees were trained to be promotores (rudimentary experts) who will be ongoing resources after the training and will educate new workers.
"After a year, we’ll see if there is a difference in safety," Keifer said. "If this proves to be an effective method over just training once, then the farmers may be interested in having this continue."
The project finished its third year in 2014 with 456 workers trained on 36 farms. Participating workers show a clear increase in safety knowledge. Free trainings conducted in Spanish will continue to be offered to eligible dairy farms until 2017.
Keifer believes the dairy owners will see reduced turnover, decreased absences and lower worker compensation costs. He envisions for-profit entities springing up to offer the safety training around the country rather than the NFMC getting into the business of providing it long-term.
The National Safety Council honored NFMC and its partners May 19 with the inaugural Stakeholder Collaboration in Occupational Injury Research Award, for its effort to provide dairy farms with health and safety training that reaches the non-English speakers in the dairy workforce.
"They’re complimenting us for having a community-oriented program that we developed from conversations with farmers and focus groups to see how they wanted the training to work," Keifer said of the award. Those focus groups included immigrants working in Wisconsin dairies, and 54 percent reported they had no previous farm experience prior to arrival in the United States, although 62 percent reported some work with large animals (horses, cows or pigs) before emigrating from their home country.
"You can surmise," he said, "there’s some assumption among farmers that these workers are coming from an ag background into an ag background, and that may not be true." He is confident the use of promotores will be effective.
"The concept of the promotore is a growing cultural force," he said. "It morphed over time to provide individuals in rural areas who provide rudimentary medical care – maternal, childcare, nutrition – and in a few cases has been used in work settings."
