A Summary of Lone Agricultural Worker Injuries and Fatalities

The frequency and severity of lone agricultural worker fatalities is unknown and was found to be higher than expected. Agricultural workers frequently take on complex or hazardous tasks perceived to be doable alone. Of the 368 lone agricultural worker cases documented and reviewed, 74% resulted in a fatality. The leading cause of lone worker incidents analyzed was tractor rollover.

Research was conducted to explore the nature and magnitude of agricultural injuries and fatalities where the victim was determined to be working alone at the time of the incident. Underreporting of lone agricultural worker injuries and fatalities as an incident classification was identified as a gap in current data collection methods, and discussion of the problem was lacking in the literature. Current incident reporting strategies have fully negated data regarding whether the victim was alone at the time of injury. Approximately 1,000 individual agricultural injury and fatality incident reports from several states were analyzed over a five-year period from 2016 to 2021. A total of 368 incidents were documented in which the agricultural worker was clearly identified as working alone at the time of the injury. Incident causes, age range and sex of the victim, time of year, and hours before the victim was found were analyzed from available case data. Contributing factors identified in these incidents included: (1) the frequency of agricultural workers completing recognized hazardous tasks perceived to be doable alone; (2) distance from emergency medical or rescue services (EMS) in remote areas; (3) lack of communication between the worker and their supervisors, coworkers, or family members; (4) difficulties in physically accessing communication devices if entangled, entrapped, or otherwise impaired; and (5) non-existent or poor cellular coverage due to a lack of towers and a lack of signal in remote, or hilly or wooded areas. Victims working alone were often not found for hours or even days after the incident occurred, resulting in the 74% fatality rate of the sample being significantly higher than situations in which others were present at the time of injury.