ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- A few years ago, when a hay baler in Brookings, S.D., jammed, the farmer tried to kick out the glop that was clogging the machinery.
The baler grabbed the man's leg and pulled him in.
``The bar had rubbed a lot of muscle tissue down to the bone and there were crushing-type injuries,'' Brookings Fire Chief Darrell Hartmann said. If the victim had gone in any farther, ``it would have been death.''
But Hartmann and the other emergency personnel who responded were specially trained by the Farmedic program. Rather than cutting through the machine, in what might have been a time-consuming and ultimately unsuccessful attempt, they knew how to release tension on the baler, freeing the leg and saving the farmer's life.
``The knowledge I gained from the Farmedic program was invaluable,'' Hartmann said.
Farmedic works by getting rescuers familiar with dangers posed by the tools, buildings and materials they could encounter on a rescue and then teaching them to be flexible in their approach to the rescue.
They have to know, for example, that crops stored in a silo, often corn, give off nitrogen as they ferment. The nitrogen mixes with air to create nitrogen dioxide, a potentially lethal gas. Rescuers unaware of that danger could inhale the gas, which turns to nitric acid in the lungs, causing shortness of breath, burning and chest pain.
``It's potentially lethal and certainly damaging,'' said Ted Halpin, a former fire chief in Canandaigua, N.Y., who started Farmedic after a series of accidents where rescuers died responding to farm accidents. ``You often get a delayed reaction, so we train EMS personnel to recognize the symptoms.''
The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health reported 196,000 injuries on U.S. farms in 1995, the last year for which data is available. In 1994, agriculture had a fatality rate of 26 per 100,000 workers, compared with 4 per 100,000 for all industries combined, according to the National Safety Council.
Since its inception in 1981, Farmedic, part of Cornell University's Agricultural Health and Safety program, has trained more than 22,000 rural firefighters, emergency medical workers and other rescuers in the United States and Canada.
For a successful farm rescue, first responders have to be willing to adapt, not rigidly stick to a plan that could be faulty, said Bill Campbell, an associate professor at University of Nebraska in Lincoln who has trained about 200 people in farm rescues.
``A very important part of the training is to think, `What might work? What might be the positives or negatives of what we're trying to do?' Don't put blinders on,'' he said.
While training in Georgia earlier this year, Halpin used a mannequin to simulate a farmer trapped by a grain auger, a 50- to 60-foot-long piece of farm equipment weighing several hundred pounds used to move grain.
Rescuers sawed through the outer part of the auger, but were stymied by its cast metal inner layer. The rescuers tried the Jaws of Life, the hydraulic tools they use to cut victims out of a car wreck.
``It didn't even put a dent in it,'' said Halpin, 46, who later gave the trainees other rescue options that would be more successful, like finding tools to take the machine apart.
There are about 37,000 farms in New York. More than 100,000 people live in a household whose head is the primary operator of a farm and another 62,000 work on farms, said Christopher LaRoe, spokesman for the New York Farm Bureau. There are 2.1 million farms in the United States, according to the National Agricultural Statistics Service. Around 5.7 million people live in households headed by a farm operator.
Besides tractors, combines and augers and other farm equipment, structures themselves can pose serious dangers, from toxic gases that build up in silos to unmarked manure pits.
Farms aren't required to follow the same Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations as other industries so emergency personnel responding to a farm accident won't likely find the safety instructions, building plans or marked exits they would at a factory or office building.
And the buildings they encounter aren't like the houses, offices and warehouses they're used to working in.
Silos that limit oxygen also pose a danger of exploding. If a fire does break out, firefighters who open a hatch to extinguish the blaze can suddenly find themselves engulfed in a backdraft explosion.
``Carbon monoxide has a very wide explosive range and when silos explode, typically the roof blows off,'' Halpin said. ``If a firefighter is on the roof, typically they're killed.''
Last October two firefighters were killed at a New Knoxville, Ohio sawmill silo when air rushed into a cavity of burning wood chips, setting off an explosion that blew the top off of the structure.
``We encourage (the trainees) to go out on the farms to see these structures themselves,'' Halpin said. ``We want them to get out there, look at the structures and practice some of these things. Farm accidents don't happen as often as car accidents, but when they do happen, they can be very difficult.''
