OBJECTIVE To evaluate the potential for the North American Guidelines for Children's Agricultural Tasks (NAGCAT) to prevent the occurrence of pediatric farm injuries. This evaluation focuses upon farm injuries experienced when children were engaged in farm work. DESIGN Novel outcome evaluation involving primary review of three retrospective case series. SETTING Fatal, hospitalized, and rest...

In an offshore wind farm, the turbines are connected to a transformer by cable routes which cannot cross each other. Finding the minimum cost array cable layout thus amounts to a vehicle routing problem with the additional constraints that the routes must be embedded in the plane. For this problem, both exact and heuristic methods are of interest. We optimize cable layouts for real-world offsho...

Satisfactory results of automatic guidance of farm vehicles have been achieved in previous works as long as vehicles move without sliding, but unfortunately in agricultural applications, sliding always occurs inevitably which causes loss of accuracy. In this paper the problem of path following control of autonomous farm vehicles subject to sliding is addressed. To take sliding effects into acco...

PROBLEM Although a myriad of research illustrates the safety issues related to farm fatalities in youth populations, very little empirical evidence exists that includes work and non-work related farm fatalities to all youths under 20 years of age at the national level. METHODS This research will use death certificate data for the six years from 1995 to 2000 that were collected by NIOSH from a...

Introduction The livestock industry creates jobs and income in, mostly rural, communities and can be an important engine of economic growth and development (e.g., Seidl and Weiler, 2000). Animal agriculture can also generate impacts beyond the boundaries of the farm, ranch, or feedlot, including flies, odor, water pollution, farm vehicle traffic, and noise, for example. The impact of these pote...

Ted Keen, a farmer from Wilson County, lost his life when a tractor trailer truck traveling 70 miles per hour rear-ended his tractor in the spring of 2003. This incident was the catalyst for addressing the issue of highway safety with farm equipment. Research data also indicated that this was a need for farmers in Wilson and the surrounding counties. The University of North Carolina Highway Saf...

This plenary talk at the eighth annual Midwest Rural Agricultural Safety and Health Forum, November 2009, described a conference held earlier in the year focusing on the hazards and risks associated with moving agricultural equipment on public roads. The Farm Equipment-Motor Vehicle Crash Prevention Conference (FEMVCPC), March 2009, Des Moines, Iowa, drew 54 participants representing 13 states ...

A cross-sectional study was carried out in 2005 and 2006 in three geographical areas of Madagascar to investigate and differentiate swine farm management and biosecurity practices in smallholder farming communities. Questionnaire data from a total of 709 pig farms were analysed using multiple factor analysis (MFA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Variables describing management and bios...