Tractor Certification Not Right Intervention to Keep Youth Tractor Drivers Safe on Roads

By Jane Fyksen, Crops Editor
Thursday, August 23, 2007 10:01 AM CDT

After studying 10 years of youth tractor crashes on public roads in Wisconsin, a National Farm Medicine Center research scientist concludes that Wisconsin’s tractor certification course doesn’t cover the major factors contributing to highway mishaps involving youths on tractors.

Barbara Marlenga thinks Wisconsin roadways are a dangerous place for tractor drivers - adults and especially youths. She thinks youths without driver’s licenses (and knowledge of the general “rules of the road”) are risking injury and death - even having had a tractor safety certification course.

Marlenga has a doctorate in nursing from UW-Milwaukee. She grew up on a dairy farm near Catawba, which her brother now farms. She drove tractor as a kid. She understands how farm families value working together and the pressure they face to get crops up.

Nevertheless, she says public roads are hazardous for experienced adult tractor drivers - in large part because the general public no longer has a good understanding of farming and farm machinery. Those roads are even more dangerous for youths who haven’t yet gone through driver’s education to attain their licenses.

Wisconsin’s mandate that they must take a tractor safety certification course to drive tractor on public roads isn’t keeping them out of harm’s way, Marlenga discovered in her in-depth study of tractor highway crashes. That’s because, in part, the course isn’t covering the factors contributing to those accidents, cited by law enforcement on the scene.

Marlenga thinks Wisconsin might reconsider its youth tractor law - to require teens to have a regular driver’s license before they’re allowed to take to the roadways on tractors. In the meantime, she urges farm parents to “reassess” whether they want to send their unlicensed children out on the road on a tractor. Maybe young teens should stay in the farm fields and dad, mom or some other more-experienced adult should be in the tractor’s seat on town, county and state roads.

“Send someone with the best skills out there,” she stresses.

The results of Marlenga’s research at the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield were published last year in the journal Injury Prevention. She’d gleaned law enforcement accident reports involving youth tractor drivers on Wisconsin roadways for the years 1994 through 2003. She studied the contributing factors and then evaluated Wisconsin’s tractor safety certification course to see whether or not those factors were adequately addressed. They weren’t.

The Wisconsin Legislature passed a law in April 1994 that all youths under age 16 must go through tractor certification to operate on public roads. It was originally to take effect April 1996, but was amended to start July 1, 1997, in order to get all the kids certified who needed to be. There was one additional amendment made; in April 1998, the Legislature also specified that youths needed to be at least 12 years old to enroll in tractor certification. That essentially eliminated kids under 12 on tractors out on public roads. Until Marlenga’s work, the effectiveness of this Wisconsin farm safety initiative hadn’t been scrutinized.

Prior to this law, less than 50 youths a year statewide were certified. The federal hazardous occupation law plays into this, she notes. If youths are to be hired on farms (other than their parents’ farm) they need certification to operate a tractor at 14 or 15.

In 1996, when the law was supposed to take effect, 2,400 kids were certified. From 1998 through the remainder of the study years it ranged from 800, to 1,000 a year. She admits there’s no way of telling the number of kids who aren’t certified and are out on the road on tractors, doing so illegally.

There were 146 crashes over the 10-year period involving injury, fatality and/or property damage over $1,000. Thus, it’s unknown how many more incidents and close calls occur every year that don’t make it into Department of Transportation files. “Thankfully,” she notes, there weren’t many fatalities. Five youth tractor drivers lost their lives in the 10 years of road accidents studied.

Most of the youth tractor drivers were male. Two-thirds were ages 14 or 15. Over the 10 years, 12 kids under age 12 were involved in crashes.

She found such accidents were more likely to happen in the summer, probably, she surmises, because youths are called upon to transport forage. Inclement weather wasn’t really an issue, she notes, adding that the crash reports didn’t contain information about the size of tractor or equipment being towed, or whether the tractor had Rollover Protective Structures (ROPS) and accompanying seatbelts - something farm safety experts have long advocated be retrofitted onto every tractor without a cab.

She looked at highway tractor incidents involving youth under age 16, and also looked separately at kids under 12 out on roads. She pinpointed trends in these crashes, zeroed in on contributing circumstances and examined whether or not those contributing circumstances related to the content of Wisconsin’s tractor safety course content.

She found that Wisconsin’s law requiring youths under 16 to have tractor safety to drive tractor on public roads hasn’t made any significant impact on the number of crashes involving kids driving tractor out on the road. The number of such accidents every year was very similar before and after the law.

As for factors leading to those crashes, the most common is youthful tractor drivers trying to make left-hand turns.

She discovered that 40 percent of the time, the youth tractor driver was solely at fault. The other driver was solely responsible only 20 percent of the time. Otherwise both contributed to the accident. When the driver of the vehicle was culprit, Marlenga says he was doing things like trying to pass the tractor in a no passing zone or zooming up behind the tractor (often driving over the speed limit), perhaps not recognizing that tractors don’t go as fast as vehicles do.

Besides turning left, what else were the youths doing? Often they were just going straight, she notes. Some were rear-ended. While the majority involved another vehicle, there were other possible types of accidents, like the tractor dropping a wheel off the shoulder.

The major contributing circumstances for the youth tractor driver were: Failure to yield (i.e. things like making a left turn with the tractor in front of an oncoming car, not stopping at a stop sign or shooting out of a driveway or field in front of an oncoming car); improper turn (for example, a left hand turn without signaling); and inattentive driving. During left hand turns, the other vehicle was either trying to pass or came upon the tractor too fast and too late to avoid colliding with the turning tractor.

Officers rarely noted in the reports whether or not the tractor and/or equipment being towed had a Slow Moving Vehicle sign, tail lamps or turn signals. She suspects law enforcement is really trained to take note of such important tractor safety features. It’s also interesting to note that over the 10 years, only two citations were written for violating the tractor certification law. Either officers aren’t issuing citations or youth tractor drivers having accidents have all been certified in tractor safety.

As for Wisconsin’s tractor certification course, there’s only one chapter in the manual dealing with driving on public roads and that chapter “didn’t directly speak to the contributing circumstances” of the crashes she examined, says Marlenga. Again, those were, on the part of the youth tractor driver: Failure to yield, improper turn and inattentive driving.

Having talked to tractor safety instructors, Marlenga says it’s a “mixed bag” in terms of what they recommend when making a left turn with a tractor. Some say to first get over to the right to check the traffic behind. (Drivers might think, though, you’re making room for them to pass or that you’re going to go right.) Others think it’s better to turn the tractor slightly left to see behind what you’re towing. There’s no good answer to which one is safer.

The content “did really well” addressing tractors - the need for a SMV and lights (i.e. safety checks) and such things as the risk of uneven balance, stopping distance and so forth. Marlenga stresses that she’s not saying that’s not “useful information.” It’s just that in the case of youths driving tractors on public roads, the course isn’t adequately equipping them to be out there. What they appear to need is driver’s ed, she says, stating her personal opinion.

Marlenga concludes from this study that the course content isn’t covering the problem the law wanted certification to prevent. The farm safety “intervention” (i.e. certification course) wasn’t really designed to prevent tractor crashes on public roads. That leads her to state that what farm youths really need is “driver’s education” and training in general “rules of the road.”

Tractor certification “wasn’t the right intervention for the problem, she reemphasizes.

The other facet Marlenga highlights is that tractors are well-known to be a leading cause of farm-related fatalities. Overturns and no ROPS are the big cause. In contrast, very few youth operators are killed on public roads. The issue wasn’t that grave, yet the Legislature passed the youth law. It “didn’t target the right problem with the law,” she says, explaining that public policy uses “compromise” and it seems that in this instance, lawmakers targeted a facet of tractor safety that wasn’t a priority problem. (The larger problem seems to be lack of ROPS on tractors in this state - operated within fields as well as on roadways.)

Also, as noted, lawmakers coupled what appears to be a compromise law with an incorrect intervention - a certification source that was generally “palatable to farmers” and “cost-effective” to policy-makers. Very few state dollars needed to be allocated. The course, by federal mandate, has to be available and it was already being taught.

It’s her personal opinion that it’s unrealistic to expect a 12-year-old who hasn’t taken driver’s ed to know general rules of the road - even after having gone through tractor certification.

There’s no movement afoot in Wisconsin to redo the tractor certification curriculum either. Marlenga has visited at length with instructors, who “don’t see their role as teaching rules of the road.”

In a follow-up editorial to her study, Marlenga suggested that the exemption allowing unlicensed youths to operate tractors on public roads should be abandoned. In other words, she thinks youths shouldn’t be out on roads if they don’t have a driver’s license. That’s required in eight states. The vast majority of states have nothing on their books regarding youths driving tractors on the road.

She contends that adult tractor drivers are feeling more “vulnerable” these days when driving farm machinery down the road. Other drivers are more removed from farming; most have no idea what it’s like to drive tractor. Drivers are also in a hurry to get to and from work or wherever else they’re going. They don’t have much patience when they get behind a tractor. And they don’t realize that tractors sometimes need to turn left into a field. “People are not expecting that type of thing on the road,” she remarks.

As noted, Marlenga has a farm background. She drove tractor on the road as a youth. But today, working in farm safety, she’s “alarmed” by that. Back then, however, her folks and other farm parents were just doing the best they could. There wasn’t the same level of awareness about tractor-related injuries and deaths. What’s more, it used to be that practically everybody driving rural roads was also familiar with driving tractor.

She suggests farm parents “pause” and at the very least make sure that they themselves teach their kids basic rules of the road - even though they’ve been certified. Better yet, though, keep them off the road until they get a driver’s license. Because of the lack of farm knowledge among other drivers on the road, it’s risky enough for a highly experienced adult tractor driver to be out there.

She also emphasizes the need for ROPS and seatbelts on all tractors. That requirement alone could save many lives.

Ohio Changes Speed Limit For Farm Machinery

Safety remains the key message for motorists sharing the roads with farm machinery, despite a new Ohio law that now allows farmers to drive their tractors, or other equipment, faster. Ohio’s new law increases the speed allowed for farm machinery that can go faster than 25 miles per hour, as designated by the manufacturer. High-speed tractors, which benefit most from the bill, can travel upwards of 40 miles an hour now.

Farm equipment that meets this requirement must display a slow-moving vehicle emblem along with a speed identification symbol indicating the machinery’s top speed. In the past, 25 miles per hour was the top speed allowed for farm machinery on Ohio roads, and a slow-moving vehicle emblem was required to caution motorists.

In addition to the added emblems on qualified farm equipment, the new law also limits speeds on machinery with towed equipment, and requires a valid driver’s or commercial driver’s license when operating tractors that can go faster than 25 miles per hour.

Ohio is the first state in the nation to pass such a law. The state is noted as a first adopter of many tractor-driving policies, due to its mix of agriculture and heavy urbanization. Ohio is also credited for developing and implementing the slow-moving vehicle sign and was the first to adopt an extremity lighting law for multi-wheeled tractors.

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