Lloyd helps growers meet safety standards on their operations

By ANNA WILLARD

Capital Press

Working as an independent safety consultant was not where Kirk Lloyd saw himself when he graduated with an agricultural economics degree from the University of Idaho.

But after working for Farm Credit Services in Klamath Falls, Ore., for five years, Lloyd became friends with the owner of a workers' compensation insurance company who asked if Lloyd wanted to come work for him.

"He wanted a farm kid to work with him and this whole bizarre course of events led to where I am today," Lloyd said.

Lloyd grew up working on his family's farm south of Lewiston, Idaho, and has been immersed in agriculture his entire life.

Capital Press interviewed Lloyd recently about what he does as a safety consultant and how he helps producers with common issues. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Q: What is a typical day like for you?

A: There is no typical visit. It really depends on the grower's situation and what they need. I try to be responsive to them, sometimes it is somebody that is worried about OSHA and sometimes it's somebody that is worried about insurance costs.

So, sometimes I'm going out for a really short 15- to 30-minute visit to solve a really specific problem, and sometimes it can essentially be an all-day process and making a full day assessment.

Q: When you do a full day assessment, what do you look for?

A: When I start work with a new client, I write down the two words safety and compliance, because if you really want a short and sweet phrase of what I'm really all about, it's safety and compliance.

So a lot of times I talk them through that and then I say, "What are you worried about? Are you worried about the inspectors coming in and cleaning you out? Or are you worried about taking care of your people?" And usually they say both. Which is good. That's what I hope, but we just have to go at it from there, looking at both the culture of their company and the way they manage the organization as well as what would happen if an inspector showed up.

Q: As far as common problems, what do you see?

A: Problems come on two levels, what I would call surface problems -- the first thing that comes to your head when you go out to look at an accident and you say, oh, well, that happened because of fill in the blank. Well, that's the surface issue, it is sort of harder to see under the surface issues. I call them root causes.

So on the surface it's pretty much what you would think. Machinery, half the fatalities in agriculture are related to tractors and the other half are everything else.

Motor vehicle accidents, a lot of people don't think about that so much as being a farm safety issue, but if you're running down to change the irrigation or you're going to town for parts and you don't make it home again, to me that's a farm safety issue.

Large animals -- ranching has by far the worst safety record of any major ag industry in Oregon.

I put falls in there because we do get a fair amount of people falling off barns and falling off ladders, and in orchard country it's pretty obvious that falling off ladders is a big deal.

Actually, the most numbers of claims ... it's soft tissue stuff. It's backs, it's shoulders, it's knees, it's mostly related to repetitive use.

But I personally believe that what's really going on is the root stuff underneath the surface.

Stress and fatigue of farmers -- the times we're in right now, their brain is full of how do I keep the bank from taking this thing away from me? They're working 16 and 20 hour days, the finances is a big factor.

I go to farms and their equipment isn't as safe as it could be and the hard reality is they can't afford to upgrade it.

To be in agriculture you have to have a high tolerance of risk or you'll go crazy. You'll plant crops not knowing if there's going to be water or whatever. We're people that have become comfortable with risk or we couldn't do it. So, we've let this production risk slip over into a tolerance for human risk.

Q: What do you do to help producers with these problems?

A: Most of my work is just education and training. To go in and help them understand what they're facing and teach them about it -- especially if people are freaked out about OSHA. The OSHA code is 827 pages long and nobody knows what's in there. But I probably know it as well as anybody does because I live and breathe that document.

So I can go through a farm and usually what happens is they say, "Well I've heard I can get in a lot of trouble for that," and I'm either saying yeah that really is an issue, OSHA would cite you for it, or I'm saying no, that's nothing.

The one thing that I think I do bring to the table is I've been doing farm safety for 22 years and been in agriculture since I was three days old and really never left.

Q: Do you have a take-home message?

A: My first take-home message is safety pays, especially if you have a lot of employees. Workers' compensation is a big deal in Oregon. If you have a squeaky clean safety record, you're paying $20,000 a year in workers' compensation and you're easily looking at $100,000 a year to buy the same insurance if you don't have your act together. An $80,000 variable cost is the difference between whether you survive or not.

I hate the word accident. When you hear the word 'accident' what people sort of have in their mind is, well, there is nothing I could do -- it just happened to me. That doesn't happen very much, most accidents aren't accidents at all and that's a theme that I stress pretty heavily.

The third thing that I really work on a lot...farmers say to me, "Kirk, safety is just common sense." There's no common sense, that's a myth.

We all have a different pool of knowledge and experience that we draw from and ... we've got folks from all over the world and every different kind of background working in agriculture -- that term needs to be pitched out. Throw it away, just assume nobody has any common sense and start there.

Q: What is the difference between you and OSHA?

A: One of the big things is that I can create a confidential relationship for the grower. I can come in and it's just between them and me and ... if what they're worried about is OSHA, we can go through and do a fake OSHA inspection. I can tell them exactly where they would stand and what they need to fix ahead of time.

Q: OSHA can do confidential consultations, are you one of those consultants, or do they have their own?

A: OSHA has their own staff consultants that can come in and do essentially the same thing I do. It's a good service and most people have had good results with it, but most farmers don't trust the government. There are a lot of folks who just cannot bring themselves to call the enforcement agency to help them.

So, that ability to have a confidential relationship is part of why I exist.