OSHA Training Requirements: Is Your Farm Safety Ready?

With so few official OSHA training regulations for agriculture, you might think that you have covered all your bases in your farm-safety training and meeting OSHA's training requirements. On the contrary, staying current on all OSHA requirements is an ongoing project for you and your safety team.

Safety issues must become a top priority. That means creating a strategy that safeguards your employees’ and managers’ safety and fosters a solid expectation for everyone’s complete compliance with OSHA guidelines. These goals will help establish the foundation of a safety culture that, in turn, could lead to higher productivity and profits for your farm. 

A Brief Review of OSHA’s General Duty Clause

Because OSHA and other organizations offer so much information on safety compliance, it might not hurt to brush up on some essentials, such as OSHA’s general duty clause, which falls under OSHA’s Section 5. Duties. It features two basic provisions: 

• Each employer’s responsibilities:
  • Each employer shall provide all employees with a workplace free from recognized hazards that could cause death or serious physical harm. 
  • Each employer shall comply with occupational safety and health standards that fall under this act. 
• Each employee’s responsibilities:
  • Each employee shall comply with all occupational safety and health standards, rules and regulations, according to this act, especially how it applies to his own actions and conduct.

With these key factors in mind, as well as a review of how your team is doing in meeting OSHA training requirements, you can take a closer look at your operations to assess your overall progress toward creating and fostering an ag safety-conscious farm.

OSHA Training Requirements: Is Your Farm Safety-Ready?

Working with your farm’s safety personnel and trusting their commitment to researching safety regulations and creating a safety culture for you and your employees comprise the best step you can take toward ensuring your farm is safety-ready and consistently meeting OSHA training requirements. You and your entire team’s diligence in following your safety team’s lead will help ingrain the concept of safety compliance into the framework of your farm, becoming second nature to everyone.

Below is an abbreviated list of basic training requirements that will help you recognize your farm’s safety readiness, so you can feel confident that, as time goes forward, you can anticipate fewer workplace injuries and illnesses that cause discomfort and pain for your employees, as well as fewer productivity issues and more profit making.

Farm-Specific Training Requirements:

• Roll-over protective structures (ROPs) for agricultural tractors
• Confined space-rescue training
• Guarding of farm-field equipment, farmstead equipment and cotton gins
• Field sanitation

General Industry Training Requirements:

• Hazard communication
• Specifications for accident-prevention signs and tags
• Logging operations

As you and your safety team work together to incorporate these OSHA training requirements, among many other regulations and requirements already in effect, as well as tracking OSHA’s ongoing additions to safety-training requirements, you will start to gain a stronger sense of how safety-ready your farm is and how much work lays ahead of you to reach your safety goals.