GrainsWest Spring 2020

GrainsWest: How did you come to work for AgSafe? Jody Wacowich: Aside from looking for a new challenge, I was also a director for my dad’s tree watering business after he retired from the farm. The business was required to complete a safety certificate. My dad couldn’t deal with that, so I attended the sessions with him. I sat down with the books and we developed his safety plan. This is where I have experience with farmers who don’t really want to discuss safety all that much. GW: What obstacles keep farmers from updating safety practices? JW: I think it’s that we’ve asked farmers to be experts in everything on the farm. You need to know how to market your products, how to navigate food safety and quality, you need to be a mechanic and a welder. Every time we turn around, there’s something else that farmers need to know. GW: Implementing anything new on the farm can be a challenge. What can make it easier? JW: The challenge is trying to find a way to make safety plans practical and easy to start. That’s what we’re trying to do with AgSafe. We’re helping farmers start with small pieces, like emer- gency response. I’ll ask farmers how many of their kids have fire drills at school and know what to do, and of course everyone puts up their hand. But if I ask how many people on the farm know where to go and what to do in an emergency, they realize they hadn’t even thought about that. GW: How can safety plans be less intimidating? JW: A full safety plan seems overwhelming but, in some cases, farmers have done things that are in the plan. If they’re doing the Environmental Farm Plan, they’ve probably designed an emergency plan at the gate for responders. That’s a great start. Quality assurance and food safety plans are another good one. Farmers will have operating procedures in place to meet those plans. Sometimes it’s as easy as tweaking what you have to include all employees, and it’s ready to go. For the quality assur- ance, they may have a procedure in place to ensure food quality, Spring 2020 grainswest.com 15 L ike most farmers, Jody Wacowich’s parents made efforts to be safe at their Redwater cow-calf operation. But when she was growing up on the family farm in the ’80s and ’90s, the safety culture of the day didn’t go above and beyond. She saw her share of preventable accidents and understood the difficulty in convincing those set in their ways that there was room for improvement. An agrologist who holds anMBA in agriculture from the University of Guelph, Wacowich has worked in business management and agricultural riskmanagement and as an Olds College instructor. She also helped her father launch a new tree watering business with a heavy safety component. If she could get him to take safety to the next level, she said with a laugh, anyone could be convinced. Now serving as the executive director of AgSafe Alberta, she continues to assist farmers inmaking their operations as safe as possible. BY ELLEN COTTEE • PHOTOS BY ROB McMORRIS AgSafe’s Jody Wacowich helps farmers make practical safety plans SAFETY FIRST