It’s no secret that agriculture is a dangerous occupation. The National Grain and Feed Association is celebrating Harvest Safety Week on August 19-23. Jess McCluer is vice president of safety for the National Grain and Feed Association.

“The National Grain Feed Association is a national trade association that represents member companies that operate over 8,000 facilities in the grain feed and processing industry. Safety is one of our cornerstones, and we have always worked to ensure that safety is one of our primary areas of effort as we strive to cultivate healthy workplaces in agriculture. Each year, at the end of August, we dedicate a week to sharing these safety resources, and NGFA’s fifth-annual Harvest Safety Week is August 19 through the 23rd.” 

The NGFA has some new safety resources to share.

“We’re going to be sharing some new safety training videos focused on shuttle loading and rail safety, bin sight entanglement hazards that are specifically designed to be easily watched in a couple of minutes and are based on the NGFA safety tip sheets that are available on ngfa.org, forward slash safety. In addition, there’s going to be a live webinar with People Smart Consulting on employee onboarding that will be on August 20. And we’re also going to be recording a video presentation with M and M Specialty Services on grain bin entry and grain quality management.”

He talks about how people can participate in Harvest Safety Week.

“Anyone can sign up to receive marketing emails from NGFA at ngfa.org, and once you create an account with us, you will receive all of the Harvest Safety Week emails. We also encourage everyone to share these emails, the webinar, and individual resources with their customers and networks. In addition, on social media, we can share these tools or any of the safety resources with the hashtag Harvest Safety Week and tag NGFA.

It’s all about helping to keep people in agriculture safe.

“We hope initiatives like Harvest Safety Week will make agriculture a safer industry. Employees of our member companies and their farmer customers work every day to transform our harvest into food, feed, and fuel, and we’re obligated to do whatever we can to boost effective safety awareness training and implementation to help keep our agriculture community safe and healthy. I think one of the most important parts is all of the resources that are not reserved for NGFA members at ngfa.org can be shared throughout the year, and the National granular seed foundation makes the development. Of many of these tools possible. So the more we can boost our awareness and encourage the use of safety best practices, the more our workers will arrive home safely at the end of the day.”

NGFA encourages its members to share harvest safety resources throughout the industry and with farmer customers.