SAY What? A New Source of Agricultural Safety Information for Youth

 

 

For media inquiries, please contact:
Dave Hill – SAY Project Manager
 

A new initiative provides one-stop shopping for agricultural educators who seek resources and training programs aimed toward youth.

The Safety in Agriculture for Youth (SAY) project homepage (http://extension.org/say) is an umbrella compilation that includes many different curricula, programs, projects, and activities that have a common purpose of increasing safety and health knowledge and reducing hazard and risk exposure to youth on farms and ranches.

For years, agricultural safety workers have been developing youth-oriented educational materials. Still, more than 2 million youth under the age of 20 are exposed to agriculture production related hazards in the United States, partly because these resources have not reached the hands of educators within the school systems and other agricultural youth educational settings such as 4-H .

All educational resources located on the SAY Clearinghouse are aligned to the 2015 Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources (AFNR) standards.  The Clearinghouse also includes a search engine feature for users to search for a curriculum or resource by a specific topic. Beyond the search engine, users can navigate through the clearinghouse by clicking on different AFNR standards on the right side of the webpage to see all of the educational products which align to a particular standard.  Each educational resource has a page that provides a description, type of resource, language (English and/or Spanish), website link to resource, and alignment chart to AFNR standards. 

The AFNR Standards provide agricultural educators (both formal and informal) with a high-quality, rigorous set of standards to guide what youth should know and be able to do after completing a program or educational event. The SAY Clearinghouse lists formal curriculum and other educational resources. Formal curricula are those products that have stated objectives, educational materials that support those objectives and an evaluation component. Other educational resources lack one of the three components listed above, but still have an alignment to AFNR.

“We want these resources to be dispersed to high school students who are receiving formal agriculture classes within their school system, and we realized that if the agriculture teachers are going to use these resources, the resources need to be tied to the standards that the teachers use in the classroom,” said Dave Hill, SAY project manager.

Safety in Agriculture for Youth is a grant project funded by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), National Institute for Food and Agriculture to develop a sustainable and accessible national clearinghouse for agricultural safety and health curriculum for youth.

Website take 'FReSH' look at Agricultural Safety and Health

eXtension logo
 
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
December 30, 2015
 
CONTACT:
Aaron Yoder, aaron.yoder@unmc.edu
Linda Fetzer, lfetzer@engr.psu.edu
 

           Website takes ‘FReSH’ look at agricultural safety and health

A plethora of agricultural safety and health information is available by typing a few key words into a search engine, but trying to synthesize and validate the masses of content can be difficult. The Farm & Ranch eXtension in Safety and Health (FReSH) Community of Practice (CoP), www.extension.org/agsafety, gathers and disseminates practical, research-driven information.

FReSH obtains most of its content from the Cooperative Extension system based at land-grant universities, and from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) agricultural centers. But FReSH also works with smaller organizations such as Farm Safety for Just Kids and AgriSafe Network to disseminate their resources as well.

The CoP is a collaborative effort between universities, industry, and government, with more than 100 individual members from multiple regions of the country who review and produce agriculture safety and health information. These members work to provide usable resources such as videos, publications, online safety courses, and webinars to the general rural population, agricultural producers, and agricultural safety and health professionals.  Financial support for the project is provided by the United States Department of Agriculture, National Institute of Food and Agriculture; eXtension; and CHS Inc.

“The aim of eXtension is to summarize the health and safety information that is out there.  We don’t want to duplicate anything.  The goal is to get the information all in one place where people can find it and be brought to the original sources,” said Aaron Yoder, the CoP Leader of FReSH.

FReSH is currently working to integrate ag safety and health information related to food systems and climate change, including information on wearable technology throughout the food system. Wearable technology such as smart watches and fitness technology have the potential to provide safety to field workers, including the ability to detect heat illness. Members of the CoP are examining the entire system of food production to determine where useful messaging for safety and health can be distributed.

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Ag Safety & Health Community of Practice (CoP) eNews

 

Recent editions of the CoP’s eNews:

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April 2020 – Part One and Part Two
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