The timing of those great "months" is always important. Farm Safety Month has just ended, but now the real dangerous work is cranking up. The delayed harvest of 2009 will be one for the record books. Let's just hope it's a year where you also end up safe and snug at home when it's over.

It's so difficult to write about farm safety without getting preachy. Wear a seatbelt with open-station tractors that have ROPS. Keep riders off those same tractors - there's one seat there and it's for the driver.

For cabbed equipment if there's a 'training seat' it's a part-time position - yet we know who's riding there. It's an issue you need to keep in mind.

My good fiend Marilyn Adams at Farm Safety 4 Just Kids has told her story hundreds of times to thousands of people. The loss of a child is just too painful to consider. And I don't want any of our readers to have to feel that pain.

Yet stop by any farm picnic and count the hands with missing fingers, or the stubs where hands used to be. While modern farm equipment is going a LONG way toward ending these kinds of mishaps; they are reminders that farming remains one of the most dangerous professions.

So as I end this short sermon today on the need to keep safety in mind when farming, just remember. We all want great food, produced by this modern system; but it should not kill you to make it happen.

Have a safe harvest for 2009.

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