URBANA, Ill. – University of Illinois Extension’s Salah Issa’s mission to track and help prevent agricultural workforce injuries has gone viral. Issa, an associate professor in the U of I Department of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, is convinced that a thorough understanding of the physical risks of agricultural production is key to preventing accidents and promoting safety. With that in mind, Issa and a research team developed the Agricultural Injury Dashboard, an interactive, online platform that allows users to obtain customized information about agricultural injuries.

“Most agricultural injury reports are published yearly, and those are very, very helpful. But the user is really constrained by what the report is telling them; they are not actually looking at the data but a summary of the data. What this dashboard does is puts all of the data in the hands of the user,” said Issa. “Users can access data by (demographic categories including) geographic region, counties or states, gender or age. It really puts the power of analysis directly in the hands of the user.”

The data also includes codes for the Occupational Injury and Illness Classification System and the Farm and Agricultural Injury Classification. “Everything is interactive,” said Extension outreach associate Sihan Li, who helped develop the dashboard as a doctoral student. “If you click on any given year and a certain type of injury, every chart will highlight that specific injury type and provide the age, gender, and fatality distribution. These charts work in tandem, which allows you to hone in on the data according to your needs.”

The Agricultural Injury Dashboard was populated using AgInjuryNews data from Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota and Wisconsin from 2016 to 2024. The database represents what Issa refers to as “stage one” of the dashboard’s utility, with plans underway for “community engagement” as step two. This means future updates will be populated by the researchers’ own data, aided by various sources and partnerships.

“I’d love to build out the project to where the community is contributing data about ag injuries but also about things like where ag workers are at and climate data.

“Injuries are not happening in a vacuum, and I’d like to build out a system where we are gaining a better understanding of the factors that are contributing to injuries,” said Issa, who hosts a series of Extension farm safety webinars, Cultivating Caution, that can be viewed at farmdoc.illinois.edu/webinars.

“An example would be with grain entrapments. My own analysis shows correlation between weather conditions at planting and harvest and whether there will be many grain entrapments the next year,” he explained.

Illinois experiences between two and 10 cases of grain entrapment per year, according to Issa, with the chance of a repeat entrapment in the same location standing at next to zero. This is likely due to the fact that once safety training is conducted in a specific location or region, the training sticks.

“I feel like by knowing the data beforehand, we can in a sense predict what areas might be (susceptible) and offer training there before any incidents,” Issa said.

Though the dashboard is primarily focused on Illinois, it will be easy for users from other states to adapt it to their purposes by adding their own datasets, according to Issa. “Accidents, especially fatal ones, happen rarely enough that you may not notice a pattern in your own community. Therefore, it’s important to stay abreast about what’s going on in the wider region. If you see trends of incidents occurring across communities, you can launch various programs to educate farmers and address these issues before they grow bigger,” he said.

Readers can request a link to the Agricultural Injury Dashboard from Issa at salah01@illinois.edu.