By STAN MADDUX

Indiana Correspondent

GOSHEN, Ind. — A 3-year old Indiana girl was killed in a farming accident six weeks after a young farmer in the same community died fixing a piece of machinery.

These casualties in the northern part of the state are the latest examples of why safety on farms, particularly those run by Mennonites and the Amish, remains a concern. Mary Ann Lienhart Cross, an educator with the Purdue University extension office in Elkhart County, said Amish farmers, though, have responded favorably in recent years to being more proactive.

She expects her office to reach out soon to the Mennonites about doing things to improve safety. “It’s always a tragedy when a child is killed,” she added.

According to the Elkhart County Sheriff’s Office, Bethany Martin was run over by a farm tractor May 25 as a piece of farm machinery was being hooked up to the tractor on the family’s farm outside Goshen. She died four hours later, it said.

Brian Martin, 19, was killed on April 12 when pinned by the cab of a skid loader he was working on, also near Goshen. He was also a Mennonite. (He and the girl were not related.)

Lienhart Cross said the girl’s family raises green peppers and other produce. Much of it is sold at the produce auction in nearby Wakarusa and in stands on their property. The family belongs to the Old Order of Mennonites, a group quite conservative and more primitive in how they lead their lives than other sects of Mennonites and other Anabaptist religious faiths.

For example, Lienhart Cross said farmers in the Old Order of Mennonites still use tractors with steel tires on their land, and do all of their traveling in horse-drawn buggies. “They don’t really have a lot to do with the rest of the world,” she explained.

The third annual Amish Farm Safety Day is scheduled on June 6 at the United Christian School in Nappanee from 4-8 p.m. (EST). Not just safety on the farm, but safety while traveling by buggy, will be among its focus.

Lienhart Cross said it can be difficult for the Amish and Mennonites, because of their beliefs, to adjust their style of farming to make things safer. The Amish have been receptive enough to partner with extension in hosting the safety event.

“They’re very caring, but they realize that there’s an ongoing challenge sometimes in people getting hurt, and especially children,” Lienhart Cross noted.

Another reason the Amish agreed to co-host the event is to alert the traveling public to watch for horse-drawn buggies on the roads to reduce the number of often fatal or serious injury collisions with motor vehicles. According to Purdue, there were 44 farm-related fatalities in Indiana in 2016 – the third-highest total in close to 30 years.

Among them were five Amish people killed that year in collisions between horse-drawn buggies and motor vehicles. There were also 95 Mennonite and Amish deaths identified as farm-related from the 1980s into the 2000s, according to Purdue.

A vast majority occurred in Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New York, where people of that faith are heavily populated. Ten of the deaths occurred in Kentucky, Illinois and Wisconsin.

Bill Field, a Purdue farm safety expert, said cause of death ranged from being run over or falling off wagons and tractors to entanglement in farm implements, to motor vehicles crashing into buggies or getting kicked by a horse or some other animal.

Solutions include safer farm equipment sensitive to the beliefs of Mennonites and the Amish that will reflect their traditional agricultural practices, and reaching them with safety information in schools and other places like livestock auctions, he explained.

Electrical dangers

Another recent farm-related accident in northern Indiana that could have been tragic had a happy ending. Brian Amor, 31, of Hanna was operating a Miller Nitro 5240 spreader May 29 on 600 East, south of Indiana 2 near Mill Creek.

He told police one of the booms on the commercial sprayer hit a low-hanging power line. Police said he knocked down three poles before coming to a stop, with electrical lines tangled in his machine.

He didn’t exit the cab until employees of American Electric Power Co. made the fallen electrical wires safe more than a half-hour later. “He did the right thing,” said Frank Gasperini, a safety manager with the Agricultural Safety and Health Council in Leesburg, Va.

LaPorte County Sheriff John Boyd said the investigation indicates all of the booms on the spreader were down like they’re supposed to be while traveling. He said he didn’t know how far the line was above the road, but it had to be low enough to make contact with one of the folded-in spray applicators.

Rubber tires, because of grounding, help insulate cabs of farm machinery in contact with power lines against the current. Any attempt to climb out may be fatal because of metal doors and the ground below possibly being electrified.

Gasperini said jumping across electrified ground is also not a good idea because of the potential for arc flashes, similar to a lightning bolt, and not clearing the electrified area. He said flashes are more likely if there’s enough moisture in the ground and voltage in the lines.

“Someone can actually be standing 2 or 3 feet from away from a high tension line and if they’re well-grounded, the electricity will jump to them and still kill them,” he pointed out.

Gasperini said the accident should serve as a reminder to farmers not to take safety for granted even on the road, where encounters with power lines might seem almost unheard of. “You always have to keep your eyes open and expect the unexpected. Thank goodness (Amor) was okay.”