Welcome to The Select Sires Podcast talking Your Success, Our Passion, starting in 3-2-1.
Ethan Haywood
Hello and welcome to episode two of this season's Select Sires Podcast. I'm your host, Ethan Haywood, and today we are talking about Farm Safety Week and celebrating Farm Safety Week here in the U.S. We’re talking to a couple of guests who have some wonderful insight for us on how to be safer on-farm and how to approach some of these topics with our workforce and families here in the ag industry. National Farm Safety and Health week is recognized as September 15th to the 21st this year. It is dedicated to raising awareness about the hazards of working in agriculture. For part one, we have Ashton King, Michigan Farm Bureau Agency owner, joining us today. Ashton, thanks so much for taking the time.
Ashton King
Yes, thank you, Ethan. Appreciate it.
Ethan Haywood
Ashton, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your involvement here in the agricultural industry?
Ashton King
Yeah, so a little background history on me. I grew up on a small farm. We had some 4-H animals mainly steers, but we had some hogs at the end. I showed cattle for 12 years and got to be involved in the ag community. I was fortunate enough to be family friends with a 300-head beef operation, so I got to learn quite a bit about the beef animal side and then my wife's family owns a grain elevator and farms a good amount of acres and so I got to have a background in the farming ag community from a young age. I have been with Michigan Farm Bureau, Farm Bureau Insurance specifically, for the last eight years. And I went to Northwood University. Right out of college, I was not, specifically in the ag community. I was actually on the trucking side remanufacturing Weller truck parts and then had segued into doing business finance in insurance, which is what my degree is, administration and finance.
Ethan Haywood
Well, it sounds like a plethora of different experiences and that is super helpful within the ag industry because there are so many different things that you are insuring and so many different angles. Will you tell us a little bit about the farms and individuals that you typically work with here in Michigan?
Ashton King
Yes, so about 50% of our business is all farms. That is specifically because our relationships, mine and my wife's, are in the ag community. We work with anything from a small couple hundred acres farmer to farms that have nearly 5,000 head of dairy cattle and 12,000 head of hogs. I do also have a sheep farmer insured. They have 600 head of sheep. Pretty wide range, specifically we tend to get more involved, on our larger farms on the safety side of it because of the fact that they have more workers. When it's just them and their kids they are able to manage it and take care of it because it's their own but once you actually rope in the larger farms they have a lot of employees and you're trying to make sure that everybody has a similar mindset or at least background of when to do certain tasks and how safely to do them.
Ethan Haywood
Yes, it becomes increasingly difficult as farms get larger, machinery gets larger, facilities get larger, and things become more mechanized. There are more machines around and more people running around at the same time. You and your team have taken a larger approach to trying to be preventative about safety and helping farms have safety plans in place and helping farms think about scenarios before they happen. Can you tell us a little bit about how you started growing that portion and focus of your business and some of the things that you work with your producers on?
Ashton King
Yes. One of the aspects for specifically our agency and it has become more and more popular with other agencies as well, is trying to alleviate headaches for our clients and a headache for a client is a claim. There is a large portion of the claims that do happen that could have been preventable if there was some type of protocol or understanding or checklist that the employees follow. Sometimes it's the client themselves that has an accident. The team as a whole, if they had an understanding of, we're going to implement high vis on these farms and we're going to try to get involved with CPR training and first aid and also trying to, basically taking like the commercial side like in the construction world and trying to integrate OSHA regulations, even though they are not necessarily regulated, implement those onto the farm to help prevent or at least minimize these larger claims for our clients. So, when we attack or come alongside with our clients, to specifically work on that, it becomes a large benefit for them because, we do not want to just be an agent that they call only and get their insurance premiums or add or remove equipment. We try to make it so that we are seen as more of a partner.
Ethan Haywood
Specifically on cattle farms, those are most of our clients, both beef ranches or beef growers or dairy producers. Where are some of the areas that you tend to focus on within those operations or you view as high-risk areas for safety?
Ashton King
In the farming world, there are mainly two, but it is the planting season and then harvest season, which are typically spring and fall. But obviously there is the summer harvest that happens as well. So, when we are looking at these larger farms, we try to pinpoint how we can make it their push time, minimize the downtime, during their push time. I will touch base on the high vis safety. You are running long days; you're working through a time where you're up early and you're out late. We have a farm actually it is Aaron Gaspers farm that he's told us a story about one early morning he's getting ready to go out and work on a feed pile or something, and he's coming around the corner and he's like, honestly, it was the reflector that was on that shirt or vest that caught my eye. I was driving pretty fast in the Gator. Maybe it was not ever going to be an accident, but the fact that it caught his eye at a time when his mind was elsewhere on trying to get the cows fed or trying to get ready for spring planting. It just took a little bit off him where he did not have to think. It was just a reaction, “oh, there is somebody there!” The high vis is a huge help with that. There are serious actions that do come up and caught betweens are an important thing on farms. When they do happen, if the individuals that happens with understand how they should react quickly on something, instead of just saying, “oh, we got to call somebody”, sometimes that does take down an insurance claim to be not as high. The biggest factor in that is now you did not lose one of those good employees that you really do need, which is hard to come by right now, is an employee that you can rely on or trust that knows your operation. Trying to avoid downtime for our clients is what we are trying to work with and partner on. So those would be some quick examples. Then there is fire safety, which is always a big one. Do fires happen very often? No, they are far and fewer in between because there is an understanding of, we do not want to plug in a semi or tractor all night or all year round or throughout the wintertime. That is the advancement in technology on just the truck side or the tractor side, it has been better.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah, you really hit some of those big topics that we've discussed even here on our operation with you, getting all of our folks in high vis, making sure that they're trained, setting up the opportunity to work with the fire department. It has been really rewarding to have you and your team on farm, so that we can walk through scenarios and point things out and they can point out, “Hey there's not a cover on this,” or “This area here is a risk we should be putting something up,” and just that on-farm aspect that we really want to encourage anyone no matter who you're working with to have those conversations, have those boots on the ground and to get a fresh set of eyes when you're around the farm all day, every day, some things become normalized to you. A fresh set of eyes can see what might be a higher risk when we're in late September, we've been chopping corn for a month and everybody's getting tired and a little bit irritated in the process and what we can do to be preventative and keep those people safe on our operations.
Ashton King
Yes. Complacency is everywhere. Trying to keep it as more of a reactive than a, “I got to remember all these things.” It is like “That is how I need to react.”
Ethan Haywood
The insurance world is a huge thing that is a very necessary part of agriculture, but maybe something that we are not necessarily plugged into as farmers. The only thing that we know is it seems like rates continue to go up, right? That is what every farmer wants to tell you when you sit down for coffee, I am sure. Can you give us a little bit of background to why it seems that way and what economic benefits there can be to being safer?
Ashton King
Yes. Farmers should feel that way because the actual reality is that insurance premiums are going up. Insurance companies are a for-profit company. And so yes, they are in it to make a profit. There is the law of large numbers that if you spread the risk out over a large group of people you can minimize the impact in the event of a claim. Most people will not have a claim. But what is happening is when those claims happen, especially a large claim that went from being a million dollars claim 20 years ago, to now we're talking about $10 million, $20 million dollars, or even in some of these lawsuit claims called nuclear verdicts that are claims anything over 10 million. There was one awarded a couple of years ago and it was a billion dollars, and that has an impact. Insurance companies work with reinsurance companies. So, these are individuals that invest in reinsurance, and they purchase the reinsurance or companies purchase reinsurance. So, then they mitigate their risk. Well they’re in it for profit, an so when you start having to go and dip into this reinsurance bucket more and more often, they will start increasing the reinsurance costs. So, the reinsurance costs since 2020 have gone up over 300%. With the nuclear verdicts going up over 235%, it is going to continue to go up. If it is one thing where we are only having to deal with these liability claims, that’s ok. Alright, we’ll figure out how to take that on and we can go after that. It is when you have the liability claims with having a property damage claim. That is where you are having both of those happen right now. So that is why you see these massive increases in reinsurance, which the reinsurance main cost that has gone up has been through the property damage side because we've seen significantly more hailstorms, tornado storms, windstorms that have had such an increase in claims, even since 2020 specifically, that has impacted and changed the insurance landscape. It is very turbulent.
Ethan Haywood
The overall goal of working with our farmers and producers is to minimize the business that they have to do with you, the better, right? If we can minimize claims and minimize accidents through safety, then hopefully that helps the overall system, not to mention keeping our people safe on the ground.
Ashton King
We've been working with the farmers to try to help mitigate risk and we've raised deductibles because they're not going to file a claim unless it's 5, 10, 20, 50 thousand dollars or more depending on the farm and especially if their gross revenues are 1 million, 5 million, 10 million, and 20 million. It's like, “What if we raise this deductible to a certain limit or another limit?” Now that just reduced your insurance so that you're saving you don't have a claim now every year, you have a claim every five years and you've made up that premium during that time so yes there's ways to try to combat it. The biggest way to combat it is trying to reduce claims, specifically claims that are large in cost and liability claims are getting up there, or you know, property damage from a fire or the wind and hail, which is outside of our control, but the fire is not as much.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely. Is there anything else that you typically get asked about on-farm, whether you are looking at a new policy with someone or you are out there doing a safety audit with your team? I know that you were out on a few farms this winter when here in Michigan where it was slick, and we were talking about slip and fall opportunities and where that risk was. Is there anything else that you typically tell your farmers to keep an eye out for when we are starting this safety conversation?
Ashton King
We do try to encourage during the wintertime if you are able to have some type of salt routine, that happens, that is huge. That is going to help mitigate a potential loss not only on your insurance, but a loss of an employee if they are injured and out for a while. Employee safety is huge because of the downtime and the headaches that that causes for the farms. And then trying to get a safety plan in place that is implemented and trying to get a fire department out to understand in the event of a large loss, typically that is a fire for the fire department, knowing this building right here is the one we can't lose. This is our parlor we can't lose this one and so if we know the fire is spreading just save this one and we can deal with trying to figure out how to house these animals which is a lot quicker than trying to set up a new parlor. I would also say something that's been at the forefront or becoming more of a forefront is the cyber risk in the insurance world. It doesn't seem like it's a safety thing as much, but your employees, if you have internet on-farm, you have employees that might have access to it. Well, now you opened yourself up to whoever that employee now has been having a text message from that they are not aware of or an email. There have been farms that have had their crowd gates totally shut down, not been able to milk and they have to pay these cyber-attacks and these ransoms. It is increasing, beginning to be more of a risk, even though you would not have thought. I am a farmer. Why would they want to stop me? Well, if they can get a quick payday, they will do it.
Ethan Haywood
Yes, just a crazy part of the industry that our grandpas probably never imagined that they would be not able to milk cows because someone on the internet was holding equipment ransom. That is on the forefront of our minds in this industry due to problems that some other organizations have had recently. When we look at on-farm, it is typically not a very protected system because you think of yourself as being rural. You are not plugged into a big city where there is a lot of criminal activity going on, but you are so accessible and even an easier target that way. So, it is a wonderful component to tie in and learn about and start those conversations on the front side with both your insurance provider and experts in that field.
Ashton King
You would not have thought that the same ransom that happened on a few dairy farms up north in northern Michigan, that the same group that ransomed them was the same group that ransomed the municipalities in Texas. Where did these cross lines? They found a quick loophole and thought “this will take me 10 seconds on my end to code this.” I guess I do not know the exact way that they are getting in. If I did, I would be able to stop them or prevent all of them. But that allows us the ability to have the conversation and hopefully try to prevent that because again loss of employees is not profitable to a farm but not being able to milk your cows for instance or run your programs the way they are supposed to be ran is even worse.
Ethan Haywood
Ashton, thank you so much for your time today. We have gotten a lot of really good food for thought. A lot of our producers are listening to this either in the chopper cab, the tractor cab, the truck cab, or on the way to and from the field. So, we hope that everyone has a happy and safe harvest. Wish you a lot of success. Stick around for part two of this Farm Safety Week podcast, where we will be focusing on safety for the next generation of agriculturalists on the farm and ranch, continuing this high vis conversation, talking about education of safety, and visiting with another guest who has a really cool impact in that space.
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Part 2:
Ethan Haywood
Hello and welcome to our second segment of our National Farm Safety Week episode of The Select Sires Podcast. We are excited to have Melissa Nelson of Hungry Canyon joining us from Northwest Iowa to talk farm safety, specifically the safety of the next generation of farmers and ranchers. Melissa, thank you so much for your time and for being here with us today.
Melissa Nelson
Thanks, Ethan. I am excited to talk to you today.
Ethan Haywood
Melissa, you are a woman who wears many hats and has a lot of roles within our industry. Do you mind sharing with us just a few of those roles?
Melissa Nelson
Yeah, you described it perfectly. I do wear a lot of different hats, and that is exactly how I describe myself. I first of all am a farm wife and mom. My husband, Mark, and I farm and feed cattle and have a cow herd here in Northwest Iowa. We have three little kids, and they are six, four, and one. We are very involved in agriculture – our whole family - my husband and I both grew up on farm and cattle operations. I actually grew up in Nebraska until I crossed the border about 10 years ago when I moved here to Iowa. I grew up on an Angus cattle operation in Nebraska and row crop operation as well. So, a very diversified background. My husband's family operation looked very similar. I went to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln for college and kind of found my passion in ag education and communication. Growing up, our family farm was right outside of Omaha, Nebraska, and was very close to the city. We were a small town about 10 minutes away from the city, but it got closer every single year, and so we just had a very populated area that I grew up in with not a lot of farm kids. My sisters and I had a lot of opportunities to teach people what happens on the farm and where food comes from just by talking at school and bringing our friends home from school to help us do chores and to help us with our 4-H projects and such. So, I was always very passionate about that. My first job out of college was visiting elementary schools and visiting schools in the Northwest Iowa area and Sioux City and beyond, teaching elementary kids about where food comes from. I did that for about six years. Then after that, I transitioned to teaching big kids about ag, and now I work at Morningside University in Sioux City, and I help our students figure out what they want to do with their life and where their part of the ag industry fits for them. And so, to help them find career opportunities and work experiences while they are here at Morningside so that they can be productive and happy members of the ag society when they leave college. So that is a little bit about my full-time gig. My side hustle is a business called Hungry Canyon. I started out selling greeting cards and gifts with an ag spin on them. It has turned into a multitude of different things and different passion areas for me. It started out with greeting cards and gifts that speak to people like us in agriculture.
Ethan Haywood
Checking out your website, I absolutely love the creativity and puns in those greeting cards and gifts. I have to say the ‘Fountain of Youth’ with the Ritchie cattle drinker is one of my favorites on there. I think a lot of us grew up with those around, as well as the “Roses Are Red, Violets Are Blue, I did not get a gift, so steaks will have to do.” I would love to receive that one, but I would maybe get in trouble if I'm the one giving that one out.
Melissa Nelson
For people like you and me, this is our lifestyle, and this is our interest area and that's the whole reason that I started this. I was looking for cards to give to my husband who knows the joys and concerns of dealing with Ritchie water cattle fountains, like they speak to people like us and it's my goal to make people chuckle or laugh at a card that they get with something that speaks directly to them and their lifestyle.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah, I love them. They feel like they hit so close to home and the creativity is just awesome. So, an additional line of your company there is the “Wait for Me” line of products, really focusing around child safety on the farm and ranch. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into that arm of the business?
Melissa Nelson
It started out back in about 2020. I said I have two younger sisters; three of us girls. We all have kids, and we all are married to farmers. We are all involved in the ag industry, and four years ago, we were in the beginning of our foray into the farm mom world. We had this idea that we should have high vis clothing for little kids because we take our kids to work with us all the time. We take them on the farm, we take them when we are working cattle, and working with equipment. I will be the first to say I am not an expert in farm safety or farm mom. But one thing that I thought was that, why not put them in a high vis piece of clothing? I can see them better when they are in safety green or bright orange or just those brightly colored clothing options. That creativity kind of put a spin on it, and I decided to call it “Wait for Me” because that is what we say a lot in our house. Whether it's my kid or me or my husband, the kids run out and we say, “Wait for us, wait for me, wait for mom. Don't get going too far ahead of me and get lost or get to a spot where you're not going to be safe without me.” But my kids also say it too. If we start walking out towards a piece of equipment or a chute or something, they are saying, “Wait for me. Wait for my little legs to keep up,” because they want to go to work with us too. And so, we called it the wait for me line. I have some high vis clothing options. I also have some sticker options that go on pieces of equipment that I worked with a friend from, she is actually from upstate New York. Her business is called Carousel Design, and her name is Taylor Holscher. She helped create some stickers that we put on different spots in tractors, skid loaders, trucks, and different things that people are driving. It is a way to make someone sit and take just a second and think about those little farm kids that might be around. It is not everything that we can do to keep our kids safe, but it is one small thing that we can do.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely. I love that sticker idea as well as the high vis. We talked about in our earlier segment some of the importance of high vis as well as just that extra half second that it takes to think and be safe. It is kind of a staggering statistic that there are over 20,000 children in farm-related injuries per year. So, I love the attention putting on this and it is so helpful to us and to our cooperative members to take care of their families. This line is very special. Tell us a little bit about where it is manufactured and where the proceeds go.
Melissa Nelson
Yeah, the clothing that we have done, I use a local print shop in Sioux City here where my hub is. They manufacture it for us, and the owner of the company is a farm kid from my town that I live in now. So, they understand the importance of why these things need to be created and sold. Then the proceeds go back to whether it is either farm safety education events or farm safety education things, or to families who have suffered injury or loss of kids on the farm. It is horrible and sad how often we see kids that are injured or killed in farm accidents or ranch accidents. I think there is no shortage of information on the internet. We see things often, so if there's families that have suffered injury or loss, we donate some of our proceeds to families like that, whether it is through GoFundMe or sending a check to a family through a contact that someone has shared with me, or we know. When we started it, I thought this is not something that I am going to get rich on. This is not something I am going to make a bunch of money on for myself. It is bigger than that. It is more for people like us.
Ethan Haywood
Well, we think that is absolutely awesome, and we really appreciate what you're doing for our industry and the wonderful people that are within it. As you go about the farm and ranch with your own children, how do you focus on safety while also trying to give them some of those cool experiences that we had growing up here in agriculture?
Melissa Nelson
That is a really good question. There is a quote that I saw probably on social media a few years ago, but it talks about letting your kids live “dangerously, carefully.” Of my three kids, the two older ones are boys, and I grew up in a family of girls. So, this has been like a wild new experience for me having boys and I never even had boy cousins. Like they are nuts and they just run, and they jump, and they are crazy. I want them to be able to learn on their own and problem solve. That is something that my husband and I are very passionate about is helping them learn on their own, but we also do not want them to get hurt or die. We let them live dangerously, carefully, and I'm not going to say we're always watching our kids because we're not and accidents can absolutely always happen, but letting them experience things that are safe enough and letting them do that while also keeping a watchful eye on making sure, when do we need to step in and say, “Hey, look around you, what could happen?” One of the things that we have done is we make our kids listen, like listen to the things that are happening around them. They know when you can hear a piece of equipment start up or if there is a commotion of some sort. Looking up and paying attention to, and asking what is going on? What do I need to do to be safe? And to look out for their younger siblings or their friends that might be around too. So definitely that live “dangerously, carefully,” that is something that we do try to do with our kids.
Ethan Haywood
Absolutely! Growing up the oldest of five brothers on the farm, I know that maybe sometimes they use each other to explore the boundaries. We always said that we were less safe when we were together because we are pushing ourselves into each other a little bit. So, it is an egging on effect. But it is great to grow up on a farm and to have those experiences and get that gut feel for what is safe and what is not at a young age to be able to use the rest of your life. Conversely, some of your students that are entering into agriculture did not grow up with those experiences. What can we provide or what do you provide within the industry to help them catch up on some of those non-tangible things you learned growing up on the farm?
Melissa Nelson
Yeah, good question! So here at Morningside, we actually have a school farm. We have facilities that our students are in on a daily basis, whether it is our school garden, outdoor classroom, a greenhouse, or the farm. We use equipment, we have tractors, we use power tools. We are the only department on campus that uses power tools, so safety is one of the very first things we talk about in any of those classes that have a lab section where you are going to be doing hands on work. We have the tractor class where they learn how it works and how to operate it safely. We talk about the eyewash station and fire extinguisher. We have a group come in that talks about ag safety and they bring in the masks, respirators, and all the PPE that we can talk about, Tyvek suits and things when we are working with certain chemicals in the greenhouse. Communication is absolutely key to all of this. Just communicating and telling the story of this is what we do, but this is why we do it and why it is important. I think that is something that whatever the age of student or non-student that you are working with is talking about why we do things, what can happen if we do not do them a certain way. I think that is really, really important.
Ethan Haywood
Awesome! I think that “why” is such an important portion of this safety to make you think about it and to make you take it more seriously as you are growing up as a kid. Even for your ag background students, which is something they do not always receive on the farm. You get do this or do not do this without all those whys. It is an awesome thing that you are providing there, and an awesome impact that you are having. Is there anything else you would like to share with our listeners as they hop in the cab and get to harvesting pretty quick here in the Midwest? Some of our Western and Southern friends are already midway through harvest. What do you want them to think about as they sit down in the seat and turn the key?
Melissa Nelson
Yeah! We call this line of farm safety items that I carry “Wait for Me.” “Wait for Me” is something that, anyone who has kids or has been a farm kid, knows if you wait for me just take a second. We can get in a hurry. We can get behind. I wake up in the morning and see the fog and I am like oh great. We are going to have a long, slog of a harvest and tension can get high in a lot of those times, and we can get anxious and rammy. I think that's when bad things happen. So just taking a breath, waiting a second and just kind of going with the flow a little bit, I think is something that we can all do a little bit more of and it will keep us all safer.
Ethan Haywood
That extra couple seconds can make a very large difference in whether we consider our harvest for the year successful and safe for everyone or not. So, thank you so much for your time today, Melissa. It is really cool to see the impact that you're having within the agricultural industry and several different age levels of people. We are excited to shop some of your products in the future. Where is the best place for people to find your products?
Melissa Nelson
Good question. I sell my products online in a website. It is www.hungrycanyondesign.com. And there is a section on there called “Wait for Me.” And that is where those farm safety items are. So, thanks for letting me share that.
Ethan Haywood
Yeah! Thank you so much for your time today. We hope that you have a happy and successful and safe harvest this fall. And to all our listeners, thank you so much for tuning in and listening today about how we can work a little bit harder to be safer on the farm and ranch to preserve our future generation's safety.