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Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Joe and Jen Allen of Allen Safety LLC take their combined 40+ years of worker safety, OSHA, EPA, production, sanitation, and engineering experience in Manufacturing Plants including Harvest Plants/Packers, Case Readies and Further Processing Plants, Food Production Plants, Feed Mills, Grain Elevators, Bakeries, Farms, Feed Lots, and Petro-Chemical and bring you their top methods for identifying risk, preventing injuries, conquering the workload, auditing, managing emergencies and catastrophic events, and working through OSHA citations. They're breaking down real safety opportunities, safety citations, and emergency situations from real locations, and discussing realistic solutions that can actually be implement based on their personal experiences spending 40+ weeks in the field every year since 2001. Joe and Jen are using all of that experience to provide a fresh outlook on worker safety by providing honest, (no sponsors here!) and straight forward, easy to understand safety coaching with actionable guidance to move your safety program forward in a way that provides tangible results.
Safe, Efficient, Profitable: A Worker Safety Podcast
Farm, Feed Lot & Feed Mill Safety: More Than Animal Handling & Moving Trailers
Working at Farms, feed lots, and feed mills. They are absolutely an "if you know you know" type work place, which can create some risks if that person becomes a new hire! In this episode, Joe and Jen skip right over some of the more "traditional" Hazards and move right to things that make you go "huh."🤔 This was a fun one to make- we hope you guys enjoy it! Full episode summary below:
Key Points:
1. Biosecurity & Industrial Hygiene
Farm safety starts before driving onto the property—biosecurity measures require washing vehicles, showering in/showering out, wearing designated clothing, and sanitizing tools.
2. Safety Challenges in Farming Environments
Hot Work (e.g., welding, grinding) is unique on farms due to open spaces, uncontrollable factors like ventilation, and farm managers (rather than safety officers) issuing permits.
Training is often unrealistic—safety training (e.g., first aid/CPR) is typically taught in an office setting but must be applied in unpredictable farm conditions (e.g., near animals, in extreme weather, in remote locations).
Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) issues—farms have stored energy hazards (e.g., augers retaining power), which may not be adequately addressed through standard LOTO procedures.
3. Equipment-Specific Hazards
Leaf blowers pose a unique risk—they can catch long hair or loose clothing, an overlooked danger due to differences in PPE use on farms versus industrial sites.
Tractors and equipment can vary significantly—workers may have to operate multiple brands and models, requiring flexible and adaptable training.
Outdoor work adds risks—workers may be alone, exposed to extreme weather, or using outdated PPE/equipment.
4. Routine Tasks Can Be High-Risk
Pest control, handling chemicals, and general hygiene practices pose hidden risks—workers may unintentionally contaminate themselves (e.g., scratching their nose while wearing contaminated gloves).
People that have been at the faciality for many years may be accustomed to certain risks—they may develop unsafe habits over time due to familiarity with their tasks and environment.
5. Emergency Preparedness & Response
Fires, tornadoes, and medical emergencies require special planning since farms are often rural and lack immediate emergency response access.
During emergencies, animals must also be managed—creating additional logistical and safety concerns.
Returning to normal operations post-emergency is often overlooked—many farm safety plans lack a structured approach for resuming work safely.
6. Housekeeping & Sanitation Differences
Housekeeping expectations vary by farm type—some areas (e.g., mills) must be cobweb-free, while feedlots prioritize biosecurity.
Inspection routines should be tailored to each location—ensuring electrical panels, PPE, and equipment cleanliness meet site-specific safety standards.
Contractors & maintenance personnel need clear guidance—a well-planned inspection and task list can prevent biosecurity risks when bringing in external workers.
7. The Need for Better Training & Documentation
Farm safety programs should be location-specific, as no two farms operate the same way. The training should be accessible at the farm- and not just at the main office.
For more information, they direct listeners to AllenSafetyCoaching.com or Allen-Safety.com websites for training, evaluations, and audits tailored to farm safety.
This video is intended for educational purposes. Solutions offered are not designed to take the place of an attorney or medical professional, and should not be taken as legal or medical advice. It is recommended that viewers consult a safety consultant, medical provider or an occupational safety legal team as applicable to help navigate their specific circumstances.
All right, Welcome back everybody. This week is farm safety, feedlot safety, all of the above.
Speaker 2:I don't know why he's wearing that.
Speaker 1:That's not what anyone wears, but you look nice, it's great. I think you just wanted to wear your new outfit. I did.
Speaker 2:All right, welcome back.
Speaker 1:Welcome back to. I don't Know what this Is.
Speaker 2:We go to hog farms. People don't know. Don't wear that I can tell you that. And what about feedlots?
Speaker 1:We're also doing an episode or not an episode, but we're going to do a compilation of things I wish I knew, and this is one of those things that I wish I knew we're going into safety. I wish I knew I was going to have to shower in, shower out and wear other and not dress like this.
Speaker 2:I was thinking I'm doing a farm today, I'm going to look good.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I don't think you ever thought that. No one's ever worn that at a ranch. But I didn't know I was going to have to wear this television shows about it. That's why they don't. Yeah, they don't wear that either. All other people's clothing? I didn't know.
Speaker 2:It doesn't look like that. So the first one is farm safety. Is industrial hygiene, training, cleaning any of the stuff you got to do the first 20 feet in there? So that's things people don't think about.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so for biosecurity is the word there's a certain set of things that have to happen before people and items walk in and, as you do, that people aren't thinking about, because of the timing of the biosecurity, how hard it is to do normal tasks. So from a safety manager standpoint, it's not just, oh, go, get a tool or do this task, there could be 15 other steps. You have to do a part of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this task. There could be 15 other steps. You have to do a part of it. Yeah, including like can the stuff we use to clean whatever item we're bringing in that gonna adversely affect the item? That's correct some stuff leaves a residue, so we've got to clean stuff. We kind of put, put them in like a fogging chamber at some locations and is it going to make everything sticky?
Speaker 1:how is it? Ppe? Is that going to make it weird? What do we have? Ppe? Is that going to make it weird? What do we have to like? Wash it off again when it gets on the other side. What are we doing with it?
Speaker 2:That's correct. One of the things we looked at is that you'll do normal tasks, so maybe it's going to do hot work today. Well, hot work in a farm, different than hot work everywhere else, because it's the amount of people you have, the knowledge you have. You can't. You can't on the permit. Because there's the one sign in the permit, right you can't, on the permit, close all holes you know and cover all hole openings. Really, there's thousands of them.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So you got to look at the process a little bit when it comes to the farm safety side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean.
Speaker 2:It's not just hot work.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so some different steps. Are you putting down blankets? What are we doing? Because again, there's slats in the floor?
Speaker 2:equipment you're going to use and the training is going to be different. You go to most manufacturing but have a small set of people that could do maintenance tasks or and there's a certain set of people who are signing off where you go to the farm side.
Speaker 1:It could be or any of those. It's that manager that manager and they are kind of having to be cleaning up all things because they're having to sign all permits because there is. They are kind of having to be cleaning up all things because they're having to sign permits because there is. They are the manager there that does all absolutely so.
Speaker 2:That's a couple of things people don't think about.
Speaker 1:Same thing goes really if you think about it, for feed meals too, I'm absolutely feed mill managers having to sign off on all this stuff and it's like and this kind of goes back to trends of 2024, we give them the support and the training to really be able to sign off on those documents.
Speaker 2:Leaf blower. That is one that people don't think of. That I kind of Agree.
Speaker 1:I'm not sure where you're headed on this A leaf blower.
Speaker 2:a lot of people have them. They have a motor and they wear them as backpacks as they go to the farms and that motor guarding on it, but the guarding's not enough. If you wear your hair like yours, you don't watch it and you get people pieces that are hanging down. It can get caught in the leaf blowers.
Speaker 1:That sounds awful.
Speaker 2:Because of where your body position is. Those are things. So we'll have a job task and we'll say go do this task.
Speaker 1:They're not wearing a hard hat in a lot of those places and they won't be like oh, you need to have your hair up at this moment. Well, yeah, I mean when I, when I just got done washing my hair, it doesn't look like this.
Speaker 2:Well, you did because you just took a shower coming to the farm.
Speaker 1:Word in my hair is down. That's correct ponytail. I usually don't put it up.
Speaker 2:So that's a risk you wouldn't have in a normal place. Normal place, we'd have hair nets, we'd have place. We'd have hairnets, we'd have hard hats, we'd have certain job tasks like that. We don't wear ties on a lot of the plants for the same reason. So cause you don't want to get caught in anything.
Speaker 1:I've never seen anyone wear a tie in a plant.
Speaker 2:They wear a nice outfit like this, all right. So the next one is, I think, this is a like wishful thinking. Yeah, it is. You just want to bring that vibe back. Another one about the farm safety is um, are we going to train on what we're really going to do like? Here's my best example epr first aid.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we train in the offices of it to be amazing and clean and perfect, not usually even at the farm, we do it at the office right.
Speaker 2:So the mill, the l and m area outside land management area, you've got the farm itself. You got to feel none of the conditions are what you were trained on. You're unloading animals in and out of trailers next. No, yeah, that's not. That's not first day CPR. You got to have 17 or 25 or 50 animals around you and you go down. You're at my old plant. Not a person that had a medical event, we had cattle, store cattle everywhere. Yeah, we used to have to medically treat that person with all the cows around. What are you going to?
Speaker 1:do so. Now you're bringing in other people to help support moving the animals out of that area, whether it's poultry, hogs, so it's the training of that.
Speaker 2:How are we going to really do it?
Speaker 1:To create space.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:To treat the person.
Speaker 2:It's not animal movement, as in people get caught in. How are we going to move it? It's how we're going to manage that event for that person.
Speaker 1:It's scene. Stabilization is what it really is. And I have to move the animals to stabilize the scene.
Speaker 2:That's correct. So the training part is what I want you to think about. I want you to think about we get caught up, we train you know, item one yeah, and item one is do all that like lockout. Maybe we say, for lockout, we're going to check for residual energy. That's great. In a farm where you have an auger, you can have different energy sources even after locked out. Oh, absolutely, Because you've already checked it and there's no power. But there is power. The reason the auger is not working is the store power.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's the stored energy factor, right, so we'll follow lockout and still have a weird injury like that. Yeah, Cause we don't understand and again this goes back to some of the trends we saw in 2020 is that we haven't documented some of those things take place and that we have to release that stored energy energy because it's not electrical driven, it's other, you know and so we we haven't captured some of those things, we haven't passed on some of that in our training documents, whatever it may be.
Speaker 2:I have an outside equipment. We talked about that in another episode but yes, you have a lot of outside work here by yourself. So you kind of have a loan protocol and you have an outside protocol a little bit and then you're wearing different PPE. Now you have the weather conditions. You have a lot of factors going on that people are working outside towards the end of the day, that other people aren't being involved with, and a normal job at a normal plant, you wouldn't think about it.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think, in addition to that, you also typically aren't fortunate enough to maybe have all the same equipment at every location, same manufacturer, same-.
Speaker 2:You could have seven different tractors easily.
Speaker 1:And they're all a little different, so you have to now make sure your pre-checks capture all of that.
Speaker 2:That's correct.
Speaker 1:Because each one has its different and the training has to capture all of that. That's correct.
Speaker 2:Another one is the routine tasks. But are there really? So, for example, I'm going to walk through today and I'm going to wear gloves because I'm going to handle bait for animals like rats or mice or something.
Speaker 1:Okay, okay.
Speaker 2:Pest control. So I go carrying this all the way out there, but I sweat, sometimes my nose itches and I'm not always changing my gloves after I'm doing that task because I'm so far out there.
Speaker 1:I'm just trying to get it done well, you could take that, the, the what's on your hands there you go and just multiply that across things like lime when we have to depopulate that's correct you do it across. You know any of our ai stuff that's great we are.
Speaker 2:Or touching the animals themselves oh, you put. You put your hand out to the right, you touch something you don't realize by the way, for from the outside, ai means something different yeah everybody else but. But the point of it is is that it's, it's, it's a routine task, but it's. But you don't think about how nobody would do that, but somebody else would change their gloves multiple times, like in a doctor's office but on a farm, because of the travel distance you are. You just don't think about it well.
Speaker 1:In addition to that, you also need to evaluate how comfortable folks are, so so we see some of the least amount of turnover in the farms because they're in smaller communities. That's the main employer for the location and so they're just not having all kinds of. So people become very, very used to.
Speaker 2:Even if they own their own farm, at their house, they do the same thing.
Speaker 1:The number of times I've seen people do something where they're touching something that's not really sanitary and then put their hand or their glove or like a pencil in their mouth. I'm thinking like you know, needle caps and stuff like that, pencils from writing different stuff down when we're doing different tasks on the farm. Then you want to go and you're like well, why are like, tell you why? So uh, another about what?
Speaker 2:you're putting your hands another non-routine, but it is routine because people get. The news is, whenever they have an outbreak, yeah, and they have animals, and you'll see all over the news that somebody had to take the animals and do something with them or depopulate it. Well, that process change over history, how we're going to do that PPE-wise and how we store it and what's the chemicals.
Speaker 1:What the process is itself.
Speaker 2:That's correct.
Speaker 1:Which no one ever really wants to discuss that.
Speaker 2:But it is something that we have.
Speaker 1:And so we have to have that process, and then we've got vets involved, and then we've got to train people on it, and sometimes things don't always go to plan, so it doesn't work the way we thought.
Speaker 2:So you've got to have a plan for that.
Speaker 1:So we've got to figure out what we're going to do, in case we've got to do a plan B on some of this depopulation. And then again, what PPE are we having? Is it one person, two person? How many people are involved? Now we're moving from point A to point B and out of the facility and somewhere else, and what that looks like it's a lot of steps, and then everything emergency related.
Speaker 2:For example. I've got a fire at the location A rule a lot of times. What are we going to do or not? We're going to take care of the animals that are still alive. You're going to have a tornado why don't you know? There's these events that happen in a normal setting. But when you have this farm whether it be a personal farm or a company farm, whatever it is you still have to deal with the level of risk that's different in that environment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, and I think part of it is managing things and situation during the emergency.
Speaker 2:Correct.
Speaker 1:Then what's the plan if we have structural damage, things and situation during the emergency Correct, then what's the plan if we have structural damage or some issues and how are we going to navigate that?
Speaker 2:Because we've been involved with a lot of those kinds of events and I tell you it is interesting.
Speaker 1:What are we doing with animals when we've got an immediate risk to them as well as ourselves. That's correct, potentially.
Speaker 2:What are we not going to do?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, exactly Where's the line and that's the thing that I don't see in any EAPs generally when I go and look at farm EAPs is that we don't have a great return to normal operations plan.
Speaker 2:And then my very last one is the most interesting is housekeeping, because that word is so general. Well, housekeeping for sanitation plant means something completely different. Some places, like a mill, they don't want a lot of cobwebs. You may have the cobwebs at the farm, but you got to watch where the cobwebs are because they can still be around equipment, they can get hot or they can be around or other products. Housekeeping moves and out so you can have a program as a company and call that program, but you got to really tailor to what you call it for that particular area, because there's certain things you can and can't do.
Speaker 1:Well, do you think what? What housekeeping really we need to keep in mind is, again, you know we have biosecurity at play and we're having to have people shower and shower up, sanitize tools, sanitize anything that's coming in. We've got to really be intentional about our inspections that we're catching all that stuff so that anytime we do have someone from maintenance come in or a contractor come in to do fixes, we're getting everything taken care of.
Speaker 1:I mean like getting the electrical let's not have open electrical and no blanks missing and of I mean like getting the electrical, that's correct. Let's not have open electrical and blanks missing and stuff. I mean we've really got to be detailed in those inspections so that when people show up we're ready to go. Here's your list.
Speaker 2:So I think you've got inspection. Yeah, you got some planning and you got some.
Speaker 1:How many days should they really be here? Maybe it's not just two hours on a Thursday afternoon, that's correct.
Speaker 2:And the other part I think you're talking about as part of the solutions is kind of another episode we talked about. You've got to have that procedure and training for that location's job task.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:It's got to be that one.
Speaker 1:It is not job tasks for farms, because farms all have different things going on. They're not all the same.
Speaker 2:They're all set up differently, even just the tractor itself. We've been to some great places that had five different training programs because they had to. We want that risk to be mitigated and brought down with the farms, and the reason we bring this up to everybody is years ago we heard a lot about the animal movement was a lot of risk, but the people that are involved there's other things that happen besides moving the animal. That's what we want to do.
Speaker 1:we want you to think about these other things was so much it's kind of like the, the ppe and the plants, like there was so much focus on the word animal movement correct we've got real strong procedures at most facilities around training and how to do that in the animal welfare side.
Speaker 1:Absolutely, I think that that that is and that's, that's farms, plants, mills, feel everywhere we go like that has been addressed quite well, I feel, and I'm not seeing a lot of gaps in that. It's all the support functions doing that, that aren't that everything. But that, basically, is where we now need to start evaluating it and open up the scope of what's being evaluated during our inspections. Absolutely, you know, some of these exterior outlying rooms include those. You know things like that absolutely.
Speaker 2:That's what we got today all right.
Speaker 1:Well, if you want more information on this, you can hop on over to alan at safetycoachingcom. That's a great resource. Otherwise, we do lots of ag side stuff so farms, feedlots, feed mills or poultry, hogs, cattle. So if you want us to do some in-person stuff, then give us a shout and you can go to alan-safetycom for that or all of our list of in-person services, whether it be audits, evaluations, training.
Speaker 2:These are all of our opinions. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Training procedures. And then, yeah, as Jim mentioned, these are all our opinions. Take them for how you want. Make sure you're doing a thorough risk evaluation. It's not that everything applies to every location, so we're just trying to give you some quick food for thought over a bite-sized 10-minute episode. Here. There's inevitably going to be some things we missed.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:Feel free to drop them in the comments. We would love to hear from you and otherwise, take care everybody.
Speaker 2:Have a safe week.
Speaker 1:Thank you.
