Promoting Farm Safety for Kids

Marilyn Adams was in shock for months after losing her 11-year-old son in a farming incident. As Adams rebuilt her shattered life, she and her daughter began a local campaign to safeguard other children from farm-related accidents.

Marilyn Adams of Earlham, Iowa, (pop. 1,298) was in shock for months after losing her 11-year-old son, Keith Algreen, in a farming incident in 1986. As Adams rebuilt her shattered life, she and her daughter, Kelly, began a local campaign to safeguard other children from farm-related accidents.

Within a year of her son’s death, Adams founded a national organization aimed at promoting farm safety and preventing future tragedies. This year, Farm Safety 4 Just Kids (FS4JK) will celebrate its 15th anniversary of teaching about the risks children face when playing around or operating farm machinery.

Adams learned that painful lesson when her son stayed home from school on Oct. 15, 1986, to help with the harvest. Keith’s dad, Darrell, was running a combine in the field, while Keith’s job was to run the auger that moved corn into a storage bin from a side door in the wagon that Darrell filled.

“For some reason Keith got up in the wagon while it was unloading,” Adams recalls. “The gravity-flow wagon worked like quicksand pulling him to the bottom. When Darrell got back, he saw that Keith was missing and the wagon was mostly full. He ended up pulling Keith out from underneath 2 tons of corn and driving him to the hospital. Twenty-four hours later they took Keith off life support.”

Healing came in the form of a FFA (formerly Future Farmers of America) project Kelly had proposed on Keith’s accident. Darrell made a working model of the wagon using popcorn kernels and a toy person to demonstrate the danger. Adams helped Kelly with the research. “It gave me something positive to focus on,” Adams says.

Soon, Adams decided to design a warning sticker for gravity-flow wagons. Media attention and funding from the University of Iowa allowed her to establish the nonprofit FS4JK in October 1987.

The wagon model spawned the organization’s safety resource catalog, which features puppets, videos, puzzles, posters, and safety packets. Today, FS4JK has 151 chapters with more than 3,000 members in 36 states and four Canadian provinces. Volunteers do everything from lobbying for safety shields on machinery to conducting hazard hunts and farm safety day camps for kids.

Adams believes the program is saving lives. Between 1990 and 1993, 104 children died annually in farm-related accidents in the United States, down from 300 deaths in 1986, according to Dr. Frederick Rivara, director of Harborview Injury Prevention and Research Center at the University of Washington.

Most of the accidents were attributed to unsupervised children, children tackling tasks inappropriate for their age or ability, and parents unaware that some traditional farming practices are highly dangerous—the same dangers FS4JK is trying to reduce through education.

FS4JK also has helped other families who have lost children on the farm. Cindy and Jeff Gerard’s son, 6-year-old Colin, had been warned to stay away from a tractor being used to grind hog feed. In the few minutes that Jeff left to answer the phone, Colin became entangled in the machinery and died. The Gerards, who live in Pittsfield, Ill., joined FS4JK several months later. Cindy was elected president of the western Illinois chapter.

“This helped us channel our pain in a positive manner,” Cindy says.

Since then the Gerards have helped create four new Illinois chapters.

Adams is grateful for—and empathizes with—parents such as the Gerards and hopeful that together they can make farms safer for children.

“At some point in the healing process I realized I couldn’t bring Keith back,” Adams says. “So the second best thing I can do is use our family as an example to help prevent other children from losing their lives.”

Karen Karvonen is a freelance writer in Englewood, Colo.

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