Harvest Hazards: Manure Management and Farm Safety

Dan Andersen shares essential manure safety tips for Iowa’s fall harvest season, focusing on road safety, health and wellness, and confined space hazards. He emphasizes proper equipment lighting, rest and hydration, gas detection, and PPE to prevent accidents and ensure worker safety.

Show resources:

Upper Midwest Agricultural Safety and Health Center (UMASH)

Hydrogen Sulfide Safety - Monitoring

Hydrogen Sulfide Safety - Manure Agitation

Hydrogen Sulfide Safety - Swine Barn Ventilation

Hydrogen Sulfide Safety - Barn Ventilation at Cattle Facilities

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Talkin' Crap, a podcast by Iowa State University Extension and Outreach. This institution is an equal opportunity provider for the full non-discrimination statement or accommodation inquiries, go to www.extension.iastate.edu/legal. In this podcast, we discuss insights into the science technology and best practices surrounding manure management. Our objectives are to build awareness about the challenges farmers and the broader agricultural industry face around manure and to demonstrate solutions and areas of innovation. Hello and welcome back for another episode of Talkin' Crap. I'm Dan Andersen, and today we're going to be talking about staying safe with manure. So it's fall in the Midwest. You can smell the harvest in the air. The weather's gotten a little cooler, and if we're a little unlucky, maybe we'll smell that manure too. So in the big picture, manure is extremely valuable in this state. We use it as a great nutrient source, but it does come with some safety risks, and especially now, fall is a busy time of year, busy harvest season, and for me, a busy manure season. For you, many of you as well, super busy. We end up working some long hours, long days, pushing that midnight oil, burning the candle from both ends, and safety is a critical issue when we try and push that hard. So over the next 20 minutes or so, we're just going to walk through some of the key hazards that come with manure handling, whether that be on the road, in the barn or with ourselves, and try and just highlight some of the things that we need to be thinking about. So where I wanted to start was with road safety. So 1000s of loads of manure hit the roads every year in Iowa. They're big, they're slow, they're heavy, and that, unfortunately, is often a recipe for conflicts with cars. I know we don't move all our manure with tank systems. Oftentimes you're using drag systems that still ends up with some slow moving vehicles on the road. And I'll even go so far as to say a lot of it isn't us, right? It's a lot of other drivers who don't anticipate how slow we're moving with some of this equipment that leads to some trouble. So from 2005 until 2010 there was a Midwest data set of farm equipment crashes, and they recorded about 7000 different farm equipment crashes. And there was really two types that were prevalent. The first was single vehicle accidents, so getting too close to the shoulder, rollovers, losing control for whatever reason, soft shoulders, narrow roads, big equipment, you know, sometimes those just don't mix. And then the second one was rear end crashes, so the slow moving vehicle getting hit from behind. So when we think about the things we can do, the risk factors that are out there, obviously high speed roads, where people might be driving the speed limit, maybe some days, a little quicker, can lead to some of those issues where they don't anticipate how quickly they're going to close up on us. The other ones is just knowing that road that you're working with. Does it a narrow road? Are there some shoulder issues that you have to be aware of, where the place is if you meet an oncoming car or someone else with a tanker coming the other way to get another load, that you can actually make it over the shoulder and have space for both of you to pass? So just paying attention to those things, really learning your route, what works best for you and your crew, about how you're getting there and getting back, to make sure that you can yield some of that roadway to each other is extremely important. And I'll admit safety, especially in this respect, isn't something that I deal with a lot. So I looked up some safety standards and some information on safety that's out there, and one of the studies that I found really highlighted that proper lighting and marking, and especially compliance with the American Society of Agriculture and Biological Engineering standing standards cut crash rates. So they did some work around states in the Midwest, how close to encouraging or requiring the ASABE safety standards the state was and how that related to the number of crashes they had. And they found that really, those things did make a difference. A couple other things that we we can pay attention to, just avoiding the road during peak commuter hours, if at all possible. Sometimes that isn't possible, right? We have to work the hours we're working. We need to get those 16 billion gallons of liquid manure applied every year. It's critical that we get it done in the window that we have so livestock can keep going in those barns and keep growing, that we're getting those nutrients out to the field where we can take advantage of them. But if you can think about what some of the road conditions are when people are really traveling or commuting in that area and trying to work with sort of those time frames that can be helpful because, well, we're a risk on the road oftentimes it's the other drivers that really don't anticipate what's happening with us? I think one of the things is manure tanks are big, right? People pull up on them fast. They don't really realize how big, how slow they are. Sometimes going and a glance away and you're right on top of them. So it's not something that we can necessarily control, but the part that we do have some influence on that is really making sure that we're as visible as possible. So making sure your lights are working. Slow moving vehicle sign uncovered, clean enough that people can see it, just doing the things that make us visible in those areas to help as much as we can. So the second area that I wanted to cover was sort of health and wellness and fueling up while going going hard for long hours. So I'm sure you all know manure application isn't a nine to five job. Sometimes it might be a nine to nine job, right? Not 9 am to 9 pm but 9 am to 9 am the next day, depending on what you're doing. And many days you're going to try and do that back to back, unless the weather gives you a break, and those are hard things to do. So there's been a lot of research on this, but fatigue slows down reaction times. I'm not going to say it's as dangerous as alcohol, but a lot of research says that if you get tired enough, it does make your reaction time similar to being drunk, and I think that's something that we need to be cognizant of. Are we taking appropriate breaks? And I'm not saying you can never push hard, obviously we're going to have to but what are the time constraints that we need to work with? Know yourself, know your crew, so that you're making sure that you're giving them the breaks they need to refuel, get that rest in and move forward. The other thing is making sure that we're eating as well and staying hydrated at least as well as possible. There's a lot of work out there. I don't do any of it, so I don't want to belabor it too much, but the UMASH, U-M-A-S-H, has put out some great resources on healthy eating habits. It's things you can do, how to plan ahead so that you have those energy rich snacks that aren't just sugar that you burn through. And then the other thing about that is, stay hydrated. It takes a fair amount of water to keep things moving. I know when I was a kid, they'd give me a water bottle or two and say, Go start raking hay, and then you come back hours later and you'd have both your water bottles empty. But it was important. It was useful for my parents to say, here's your here's your water bottle. Get to work on it. And one of the things they did was we'd freeze it half full of ice the day before, so it was nice and cold the whole time we were out there. But it also made sure that you could continuously drink, but didn't drink it all at once right at the start, right because it was frozen. So it just sort of made you pace yourself at appropriate paces for consuming that water. But little things like that can go a long ways. If you're so lucky to have someone deliver snacks, the right snacks, the right meals to the field. Even better, that is definitely a an important part of the operation. But just planning some head, knowing what meals are available that day, what your options might be to eat, and making sure you have some of that fuel to keep yourself going, extremely important. So I mentioned a little bit about I grew up on a farm. Did farm work. Was lucky enough to drive some tractors, maybe not the the newest ones, with GPS, but still got a chance to learn. And I think one of the things I still love about the agricultural industry, and about many of the manure pumpers I see, is it is a family business, right? It's you involved. Your family's involved. And a lot of us want to work with our kids in some capacity, or give them the experience of having a chance to drive that tractor. There's lots of opportunities to get them involved, but we do want to think about their safety as we are working there. So if you are letting your kid ride along, do you have a jumper seat for them? Is it appropriate? How long are they going to be there? What are we doing to take care of them and manage them. I know I have a young daughter these days, and she's mesmerized by tractors and equipment, and I'm thankful for that, and I'm thankful for the experiences when I get to get her in once, that she can go for a ride, but maybe more so than when I was a kid and happened on the fender of a 3010 as we're going from field to field, I think a little bit more about her safety as we're doing that. And I think we all need to do those things. So especially with manure, we know there's some gas risks as we agitate, and we'll talk about that later in a little while, but that's probably not a place where we want one of our kids hanging out in around. If it's a tractor ride during application or at the right times, I think that's something that you can definitely work in, but making sure that we're thinking about their safety, not keeping them out there for too long, but giving them some of those opportunities and chances to see what we're doing, learn what we're doing, and then still make sure that they're getting home and doing the right stuff. I think the other thing I wanted to mention that is that safety really is a culture. So if we're getting them out there, making sure that we're doing the right things, training them and showing them how we take safety seriously is important, right? So making sure that they just see that safety matters to us and we're paying attention to it. And I mean, I loved growing up on a farm was a great experience. I feel like I learned a lot, and it serves me to this day. So it isn't something I would give up, but really thinking about some of those opportunities and what it means for safety. And I wrote in my notes that I'm supposed to tell a story here, and it's one of my father one of my father's favorite stories. So I don't know, I'm like, five or six years old, and we go out to start evening chores, and the first thing we always did was get cows up. So you're just walking behind them, and most of them stand up. And every now and then you had to step closer or tap one on the back to get it to stand up. And I reach across to tap one on the back, and the gutters right in front of me, and I fall face first in the gutter, so covered in manure. Luckily, I still turned out to love it and appreciate it. But he, he was right there, so he scoops me up and gets me washed off. And it's really funny story when he tells it later, because he tells me about the only thing I could see is your eye, white eyes when you open them after you're had a face full of manure. But just it was good that he was there, good, that he was watching me, probably maybe not so good, that I was thinking I could reach across the gutter at that age, I wasn't quite ready, but it was still a useful experience for me to learn a little bit about safety on the farm. The other story I have about that is people used to hang something called the trainer, just a little piece of metal over their cow. They pulsed electricity to it to try and make it step back and poop in the gutter. When it was working, and I didn't know what it was, right? So cow would arch and touch it, and then they'd always step back. And I hadn't observed that enough. And one day, I was sitting on a stall divider while the cows were out on pasture, and we were getting ready to feed them, and I reached up and said, Dad, what's this? And got a nice little shock, and learned that, you know, well, that's what it is. It gives you a nice little shock. So there are lots of ways to learn some of these things, but thinking about what might happen and how to handle some of these safety messages to make sure that you're putting your kids in safe places is extremely important while we teach them the responsibility and the joys of working on a farm. All right? The next one is confined spaces and gasses. And this is one where, if you want more information, Brett Ramirez and I did a Talkin' Crap last year specific to hydrogen sulfide ventilation, how it off gasses from manure. And if you want real in depth tune ups of that, I encourage you to give it a listen. But when we think about sort of what's happening here manure, especially when it's breaking down or stored in the liquid form, is making really four types of gas, four different gasses that that we often think about in terms of safety. So we have methane, carbon dioxide, ammonia and hydrogen sulfide. Of those four gasses, carbon dioxide is probably the least dangerous. It's present in the air all the time that we're breathing. It's not really toxic, but it does displace oxygen. So if we get enough of it, it's heavier than air, it displaces oxygen, and we go down into a sump or something. It could be that there's not enough oxygen there for us to breathe. Generally, that's not something that we see a whole lot of with manure, but in theory, in the wrong conditions, we could see something where that happens. The other ones are, as I mentioned, ammonia, methane and hydrogen sulfide. Ammonia. It might in especially in low ventilation conditions in the winter, if you go into a barn with a manure storage underneath, maybe it will give you a raspy voice. Might cause your ears, your eyes to water, if it's at high enough concentrations, it's not something we normally think about as being deadly to us, right? It's not that gas, but there are some potential indicators that you've been in conditions with high ammonia in them, and I really think about it as a winter ventilation sort of constraint or issue. The other two are the ones I really want to talk about from a safety issue. Methane. Last episode, we talked about foam, and that covers a lot of what we think about for methane, right? It's lighter than air. Generally, it comes off of liquid manures when it's decomposing. But long term, we don't have too much of a challenge. Maybe, if we have that foaming condition there, that's when we worry about it, because we've accumulated in the barn, and methane is a fuel, so if we get a spark and there's oxygen, next thing you know, we have a fire and explosion, and that's what we talked about in that episode. But that is something that we want to pay attention to. When we're thinking about manure removal, manure agitation, really, this time of year, I always think about hydrogen sulfide, and that's the one that is most dangerous to people and animals. Hydrogen sulfide, you might think, well, we've all been trained that those sulfur compounds smell like rotting eggs. So if there's a problem, I'm going to smell it and I'll just react accordingly. Well, unfortunately, you smell it at really low concentrations, and you go nose blind when it gets sort of marginal levels, even before it gets dangerous to human health. So our nose is a terrible detector for what safety is with hydrogen sulfide. Don't rely on that. They make relatively cheap $100, $200 meters that you can use as a hydrogen sulfide detector. So if you're curious about what the conditions are, Am I doing something that's changing hydrogen sulfide? What are my animals being exposed to? If you have one of those and walk around the barn, they sell ones that have a readout on the screen. You can see what the concentrations are, hold it by exhaust fan for a short period of time, and lets you know what it's at. They also have alerts on them, so they beep. You might think that's annoying, but it is a safety warning, right? So when you hit certain thresholds, 10, 25 parts per million, beep, beep, beep, beep, and next thing you know, you should take a few steps away. Hydrogen sulfide, again, heavier than air, so it tends to pool also. Most liquid manures are filled with hydrogen sulfide. It sort of sits in that manure until we do something to disturb it, like agitation. So if we start mixing that manure, the hydrogen sulfide is dissolved in there. Some of it's stuck to solid particles that are in the manure. So as we move those around and start knocking them together, the bubbles coalesce, move to the surface, and it's released from the manure. As we do that, we get higher and higher hydrogen sulfide concentrations. Generally, we're trying to run exhaust fans on the barn to emit that hydrogen sulfide, hopefully at about the rate that we're releasing it at. But there are certain times we get bursts of hydrogen sulfide, and things like adjusting your agitator so that you hit a new area, or if we have surface agitation, where the bubbles can get released more easily, those things elevate hydrogen sulfide really quickly. A couple things on it. So most of the time when I've taken hydrogen sulfide meter to a site where they were working with manure, it tends to be fine at the pig level, at the applicator level, most of the time, if my alarm does go off, I've tended to see that if I take a step or two away, I'm back into air that's just fine. So if you do have those hydrogen sulfide meters, you're using it as a personal safety device, clip it up on your collar, so it's close to the air you're breathing, so you're getting an accurate representation of your safety if you put it on your pants pocket, clip it to your pants pocket or your belt, you tend to see some higher concentrations, right? The other thing that I tend to see is, if you put it on a pole and lower it down into the manure storage, results go up, right? So a couple things on that. It's denser than air. So as we're moving that manure around, it's coming out, and all of it isn't up in that animal zone right away. It's sort of pooled on the manure surface. And if we get weird ventilation conditions, like, Hey, I'm pumping out here, and the wind's coming from this direction, and I no longer have a cover on this pump out, and it's blowing right there. And it's cool today, that air settles on the manure surface because it's cold and dense, and it displaces some of that hydrogen sulfide, maybe lifting it up into the animal zone. And that's where we tend to see maybe more of our livestock safety concerns. So if you stick that meter down there, though, you will tend to see elevated hydrogen sulfide concentration levels, sometimes not to the danger zone, sometimes above the danger zone. But it's really when that gets up into the animal environment that we see adverse effects. There are a couple things you can do. One, think about what pump-outs you're opening, what the ventilation setup is. In the previous podcast, we talked through the details of that. So I'm not going to I recommend having a pump-out cover, or a pit cover, basically a tarp that you can drop down to try and block some of that air exchange between outside and the manure storage, if possible. I know some of you say that slows me down. Why are we really doing this? Well, the work I've seen on it says it does help limit some of that air exchange. And I'll admit that sometimes you can get away with not having one. Nothing goes wrong. Things are great, but I think they do reduce risks, especially in certain conditions, about some of that air exchange and maybe removing some of that hydrogen sulfide. So every year we do see multiple deaths from hydrogen sulfide. This year, it wasn't in Iowa, but we did see a recent news issue where a dairy in Colorado, a couple individuals, six of them, ended up going into a confined space, being overcome, presumably with hydrogen sulfide, and dying from that that condition. So it is something that we see far too often, and unfortunately, we normally see multiple deaths when it occurs. We have one person go in, they collapse. Someone else says, I can rescue them. I'll just hold my breath go in after them. And from the articles that we see, where we have these issues, oftentimes that doesn't work. So if we have to be really cognizant of that safety, if you're agitating manure, don't go in right? Those conditions are prone for these types of issues. Every now and then, we have some of them develop in other places. If you use a slurry store and have a sump between your barn and that slurry store that you're pumping from confined space right, there might be bad air in there. Occasionally, we'll see some issues where someone needs to do some maintenance on that pump. They go in and don't come back out. So those are the types of things that we just really want to be cognizant of confined space, small, not great, air exchange, more risks of some of these types of issues happening. And then the last thing I want to say on that is manure gasses. Don't really care how experienced you are, right? They'll take down a 40 year veteran farmer, 40 year veteran of manure application, just as quickly as a new farming and with the manure gas issue, it is often hit or miss. I think there's a couple of things that maybe have made it more risky these days than it has in the past. Water conservation is a great thing on our barns. It also means that we've increased the sulfur concentrations in many of our manures, from maybe historically, two to three pounds of sulfur per 1000 gallons to a deep pit swine manure these days maybe eight, nine pounds, so there's just more there, more concentrated, and that means it's more likely to come out when we mix it or agitate it. So just something to be mindful of. You might say, well, that's not my problem. I have an outdoor manure storage. Agree. I think outdoor manure storages tend to be less risky because we get better air exchange. But we have seen some issues where with out of barn manure storage, we might see the same problem if you set up downwind of that storage. So all the hydrogen sulfide is blowing back at you. It is heavier than air, so if we have cooling atmospheric conditions, right? So going into night, maybe that hydrogen sulfide doesn't warm and lift away from us as we're doing work around that storage, so it is less likely in some of those outdoor storages, but we have seen some issues in the past where we have some of those safety concerns show up. And then the last thing I wanted to talk about was just general safety reminders. So manure is does have biological materials in it, bacteria, viruses, certain pathogens, and it's just something we want to be cognizant of, for both ourselves and the potential to move diseases from site to site. So make sure you're taking along and wearing your PPE. So gloves, safety glasses, if there's any chance for manure splashing, boots, things like that, in some cases, respirators, if it's going to be a dusty environment, solid manure that you're working with, where there might be a lot of that dust in the air, and then hearing protection. I know a lot of people don't always wear their hearing protection. I think a lot of farmers, as they've gotten older, have said, I wish I would have wore them when I was younger and and I think that's something that with time and experience, we've become more cognizant of what's really happening there. I know I grew up, we milked cows, the milker pump you walk by it all the time when you're pumping and milking and thought, Man, that's loud, but I still didn't wear my hearing protection. And as I've gotten a little older, I've started wearing hearing protection all the time in my workshop, my wood shop, just to make sure that I'm protecting my hearing and doing the right thing. So I think it matters. It adds up. Oftentimes in agriculture, it's not one isolated event, right? It's not like a loud rock concert where we went 10 times in our life and it impacted our hearing. It's just a little bit every day of that constant hum. So just making sure that you're wearing your hearing protection when appropriate, when you're working around some of that louder equipment is critical and just useful to do. A couple other things, making sure that you have that you have that emergency response plan. Let people know when you're working, have your cell phone charged up and ready to go. Don't be on it all day, draining the battery down when we need it for calling for help, it has to be there, has to have a charge with us. Make sure that all the workers know the emergency numbers and where the first aid supplies are, so if we do have an issue, we can respond quickly and appropriately to what's happening. And then at the end of the day, safety sometimes does slow us down a little bit, but it's not about slowing down. It's making sure you can come back tomorrow and keep doing that great job that you do. So it is doesn't always have to be hard, but it is making sure that we build it into how we prepare for the day, what we're thinking about for the day and keep that moving forward. And then there's plenty of other risks that I didn't cover today, right? So there's power takeoffs and moving parts on many of these pieces of equipment that we have to think about manage. We're greasing them up, making sure that we're not getting caught in them is always critical. If you're using the dragline system, blowing out the hose, blowing that compressed air through there is probably the most dangerous portion of the job. That's high pressure. If the pig gets stuck, the bullet gets stuck in there, you're building up pressure behind it in the line before you push it through. And I think people underestimate how vivid or graphic and much energy is really stored in that. One of the things that if you attend the North American Manure Expo, you get to see is they trigger an explosion of a line as they're blowing it out with air. And this year, they set a dummy on it, and you blow them 25, 30 feet in the air, and the hose flips around violently as that air comes out, and the pressure discharges right. So it is a violent experience of being cognizant about where you're standing, what's happening. And the other part of that is, many of our pumps these days are really good, really nice, and they have sort of some setups to clean out the pump, blow a pig through it, but oftentimes you'll have those closed up. If you didn't get that pump all the way emptied out at the end of the year, and you're starting to get it ready for the season, just be thoughtful about what was capped, what wasn't. Is there any potential for pressure from that decaying manure and the gasses it makes to build up behind it? So I think I don't have a lot of safety messages. It's important for us to think about. It's important to do. There's some small steps that we can take trying to make ourselves as visible as possible to the other people on the road, thinking about the routes we're using, knowing that our family is important, letting them see what we do, letting them sometimes be a part of it, but being appropriate about that, doing our best to get some sleep, getting good meals out to the field, to take care of us, making sure that we're staying hydrated, are all important. And then really think about those specific manure gasses that that might be of danger, and what are you doing in your job to help eliminate or reduce some of those risks? So be smart on the road. Take care of your own health and rest when you can. Never underestimate the importance of manure gasses. And if you really want some some other safety information that is more specific or in depth, I really do recommend that those UMASH sort of articles or checklists to work through it and sort of look where you're going. So manure is one of our most valuable fertilizers. It's definitely something that we want to take advantage of. But no crop, no acre, when no deadline is worth pushing our safety limits, so just make sure that you're taking care of yourself and your crew, and stay safe out there during this hauling season. Thank you for joining this installment of Talkin' Crap. Be sure to take a look at the show notes on our website for links and materials mentioned in the episode. For more information, or to get in touch, go to our website, www.extension.iastate.edu/immag/. If you found what you heard today useful or it made you think, we hope you subscribe to the show on your podcast app of choice> Signing off from a job that sometimes smells, but never stinks, keep on talking crap.