MEDIA RELEASE – JUNE 6, 2025 – R0071

William Pickett is still haunted by stories he’s read while studying farm fatalities over the past three decades.

From children killed by farming equipment to toddlers who have drowned on expansive properties, the tragic cases have lingered on the mind of the Brock University Professor of Health Sciences.

“You go into the coroner’s office, and you get a bunch of files of all the deaths on farms,” Pickett says. “Included in those is a large stack of children and toddlers. Most of the kids who are being killed are preschoolers. It’s sad — they can be really vulnerable.”

Supported by a Project Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Pickett and his national research team are studying farm environments to better understand factors contributing to child death and major injury.

Through various records, researchers have insight into the deaths of more than 500 children killed on farms in the past 30 years as well as “10 times as many” children seriously injured, Pickett says. But less is known about farm culture and the deeper reasons why these tragedies occur or what can be done to standardize safety protocols, especially within farm family units.

Knowledge about farming culture and social norms may help to develop injury prevention programs that will be adopted by the farming community, Pickett says. In the past, top-down approaches from public health and medical communities haven’t worked consistently, so a new method is needed, he adds.

“Farms are generally independent businesses where the workplace and home are often one, so a lot of occupational health and safety rules available to other industries can’t be applied,” he says.

Added to that challenge is society’s tendency to view incidents as isolated “freak accidents,” often leading to no further investigation as “everyone has suffered enough and there is nothing to be done,” says Pickett.

Pickett’s team, which includes Brock Associate Professor of Health Sciences Valerie Michaelson and researchers from the Universities of Saskatchewan and Alberta, will conduct in-depth interviews with 80 people from four groups: teens living on farms, owner-operators who are parents, young adults who grew up on farms, and rural health-care and safety professionals.

The focus of these interviews is to explore social norms, traditions, beliefs and practices underpinning farm work and life. These would include how children are supervised as they learn about, and contribute to, farm operations, the extent to which they’re protected from risks they might be exposed to, and how farming communities view outside protocols and safety measures.

The research team will then code and analyze injury reports from across Canada to document the connection between social norms and injury events. They aim to map out how often and why injuries occur, who is at most risk and — from a grassroots perspective — what can be done to address norms that put children at highest risk.

“Respect for the perspectives of the farm community and our study participants is central to our plans,” says Pickett. “Our hope is to develop a new, and badly needed, knowledge base that supports innovative, evidence-based strategies to prevent these unacceptable tragedies.”

The Government of Canada’s CIHR Project Grant Program supports research with the greatest potential to advance health-related fundamental or applied knowledge, health research, health care, health systems and/or health outcomes.

For more information or for assistance arranging interviews:

*Sarah Ackles, Communications Specialist, Brock University [email protected] or 289-241-5483

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