Farm safety is a year-round job that protects the bottom line

Two years of monthly safety columns by a University of Nebraska Medical Center researcher rest on a single argument: the future of a farming operation depends on the health and safety of the producer working it.

Ellen Duysen, research assistant professor at the UNMC College of Public Health and coordinator of the Central States Center for Agricultural Safety and Health, writes the For the Health of It column for Nebraska Farmer and Farm Progress. Her November 13, 2026 installment, framed by Nebraska Farmer editor Curt Arens, makes the case that safety deserves attention in every month of the calendar, not only at harvest.

Harvest and planting rank among the most dangerous periods on the farm. The reason, Duysen notes, is hurry: operations compress when bad weather approaches, and rushed work near machinery raises risk.

Why do farmers postpone their own care?

The column addresses a familiar excuse directly. Farmers and ranchers care about their families, yet they often put their own safety in jeopardy or defer their own health care in favor of keeping at work and covering expenses for other family members.

"Staying safe and healthy takes too much time and money, they might say," Arens writes. Duysen answers that the survival of the operation and the family frequently relies on the health and safety of the producers themselves.

The economics support her position. Downtime for a farmer costs the operation money, whether the injury or illness strikes the producer, a family member or an employee. Health issues that remove anyone from the payroll or the chore rotation translate directly into lost working days.

What does the column actually cover?

Over the past two years, Duysen has covered many health topics that farmers routinely ignore. Arens observes that these subjects may not be the first items farmers open from their inbox, but spouses and children rank them as the most important, because the farmer matters to them and to the operation.

The articles serve a second purpose beyond reading. Every piece from the past year is available for download in a Spanish version. That makes the columns usable as training material for both English-speaking and Spanish-speaking employees, or as general wellness information for producers, their families and their staff.

The 2026 topics, Arens writes, may prove helpful through the coming winter, when safety training can be scheduled away from fieldwork pressure.

Is safety a business decision?

Duysen does not claim that health and safety topics directly move a farmer's bottom line. Her argument is indirect but concrete: downtime and health problems within the family or workforce carry real costs. A producer who treats safety precautions and proper training as recurring investments, rather than seasonal afterthoughts, protects the enterprise alongside the people in it.

That framing matters for how safety gets budgeted. If downtime has a price, then training time has a calculable return, and year-round coverage beats a single pre-harvest briefing.

Arens brings his own credentials to the framing. Before joining Farm Progress as a field editor in 2010 and becoming editor of Nebraska Farmer in 2021, he spent 27 years as a freelance farm writer while farming fourth-generation land near Crofton, Nebraska. The family raised corn, soybeans, wheat, oats, alfalfa, cattle, hogs and Christmas trees, and Arens graduated from the University of Nebraska in 1986 with an animal science degree.

Producers and farm managers should watch for the continuing monthly installments of For the Health of It, and download the Spanish-language versions when planning employee safety training for the season ahead.