Yes. There are many things that we have improved on dramatically.
One of the best areas has actually been young children under the age of six; that's the category I would put them in. I'll refer specifically to Ontario data because I'm more familiar with it. In the early seventies, we were at around 20 fatals a year of children on family farms. At the present time in Ontario, we're running closer to about one a year. That is primarily through awareness, through encouraging people and making people aware.
As for programs that we're doing, we actually have been doing safe play areas. It's amazing how many people still are not aware of the statistics of children being injured on the farm and also how many people don't have what we refer to as a safe play area, an area where a child under the age of six, for example, can play, so the milk pickup truck can drive in and out of the laneway and you don't have to worry about the child playing in the laneway. That's an example.
There are all sort of things. There's legislation that has led to better fencing around manure pits and those kinds of things. That has also stopped drownings.
There are a number of issues that are still increasing. In the province of Ontario, for example, the horse population is now higher than it was in the sixties, and we're having a large number of injuries and fatalities.
It's an interesting group. It tends to be females because they tend to be the ones who are around horses. The horses are not being used as farm implements; they tend to be what I refer to as large chihuahuas. Complacency is what causes the problem here. People stop wearing their riding helmets. They get too familiar with the animal. Again, we're working closely with the University of Guelph in Ontario, specifically doing programs such as EquiMania!
There's another statistic that's going possibly in the wrong direction, but I think it's because of the demographics. Older farmers are a group that seems to be more at risk. The statistics are climbing, but it's an age group that's increasing. The average age of a farmer in Canada is going up. Each year the average age goes up, as the years go up. Part of that is probably just around succession planning; not many young people want to take over the farm.
But as people age, we end up with issues of people starting on high blood pressure medication or these things, which can tend to make them unstable at certain points in time if they move quickly or get up after sitting all day on a tractor. You get falls. Being around livestock, you also end up with incidents, and there's complacency: old habits, stepping over a power takeoff, doing things by themselves, not asking for help, and working alone. They are issues that have always been there.
Those, I think, are some areas, but there are definitely areas of wins. Equipment has gotten much better.
Also, there are some excellent organizations in the U.S. that we partner with. There's the Progressive Agriculture Foundation out of Alabama doing day camps for children, and actually in the last year we've doubled our numbers in doing day camp education. I know that next week we're doing a session in Ontario with a Mennonite farm. We expect to get about 400 kids out.
There's an excellent organization in Marshfield that is running the Childhood Agricultural Safety Network. They've run a campaign called “It's Easier to Bury a Tradition than a Child”, which is against riders on tractors.