Although producers try their best to be mindful on the farm, it’s safe to say that safety protocols and precautions aren’t always top of mind and are occasionally bypassed altogether in the name of speed, efficiency, or force of habit.
It is usually only until you or someone you know has been affected by that lack of attention that the importance of safety begins to seep into every day practices.
Zachary Hango grew up on a grain farm outside of Handel, Saskatchewan. He is currently in his third year of the Agriculture Technology program at Lakeland College in Vermillion, and as a farm boy at heart, his involvement on the family grain farm has always been quite high.
"Anything from hauling grain to swathing, seeding, being in a combine, running a little bit of grain carts, pretty well, everything in between," he said.
July 11 of last year started out as a regular day of hauling grain for Zach, something he had done hundreds of times before. The injury occurred while moving a bin sweep into a new bin.
"So I was by myself. I put the old motor on the man door, and what happened was I was taking a step back to move the rear end over so I could pull it in straight into the man door in the bin. And I left the auger running that goes up to the truck, and the man door is like right above where the grain comes out of the bin from the bin that runs underneath of it. So I went to go pull the rear end over, and my foot slipped and my left foot went into the auger, took a pretty good chunk off the top of my foot." he explained.
Hango managed to get his foot out of the auger and call his father, who was home at the time along with his grandparents. His father made a tourniquet while his mother called 9-1-1.
He said it was about one hour and ten minutes after the call was made that STARS arrived at the farm to airlift him to Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon.
He says he was fully awake for the helicopter ride, feeling nothing but a mild foot cramp due to the adrenaline.
"So we landed, I get wheeled out, there's some nurses waiting for me. I got put in the room, and I got given a phone, so I called my mom, told her where I was, and then…I called my girlfriend, told her what happened." he said.
He stayed in the hospital for about a week following the amputation, which took his leg halfway up his calf. With a new prosthetic in tow, he didn’t let the minor adjustment get him down for long.
"Like in the hospital, they told me, they said for young guys like me, it doesn't take too long to learn the prosthetic, which it didn't quite for me. You know, kind of got it and pretty well walked out on it."
By sharing his story, he hopes to convey the message that something like this can happen to anyone, regardless of how long they’ve been doing it, or how careful they’ve been in the past.
(With files from Keira Miller, CJWW)
