MADISON, Wis. – Little known outside farm country but important to people who live and work there are programs such as “RF-DASH,” an acronym that stands for Rural Firefighters Delivering Agricultural Safety and Health. It’s a nine-year-old effort to train rural firefighters, who are often first responders in such settings, the basics of caring for people injured by fire, farm accidents and more.
It costs about $200,000 annually to run RF-DASH, which has directly or indirectly trained about 3,000 rural firefighters, mainly in the Upper Midwest. Mostly funded through the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the program instructs firefighters, other first responders and farmers themselves on farm-specific first aid and how to mitigate potential safety hazards.
A prominent example is tractor rollovers, which can be avoided through “rollover protective structures” that can save lives if installed properly on vehicle cabs. Statistics show a single farm fatality can cost the surrounding community about $1.5 million in lost economic impact.
“The RF-DASH philosophy might be distilled to the following idea: Safer farms build safer communities,” read a recent memo from supporters.
That progress may be at risk with the expected downsizing of NIOSH and its Office of Agriculture Safety and Health, a prospect that would end support of RF-DASH by October.
While proposed cuts in National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation grants have received the lion’s share of public attention, proposals to dramatically restructure NIOSH and some other rural health initiatives haven’t escaped attention.
Two others with Wisconsin ties are the National Farm Medicine Center and the National Children’s Center for Agricultural Health and Safety, both based in Marshfield with ties to the Marshfield Clinic, now a part of South Dakota-based Sanford Health, the nation’s largest rural health system.
The National Farm Medicine Center was established in 1981 as a non-profit entity dedicated to rural health and safety research and service. It partners with Marshfield Clinic Research Institute and the University of Wisconsin Extension on studies that have shown strong results over time.
It’s not just “alarm bell” studies that get the center’s attention, but research that portrays the health and cultural benefits of farm life.
One such study in 2023 showed that farm life helps children be more active than their city and suburban counterparts, which in turn reduces the chance of childhood obesity. Being around livestock also allows children to build their immune systems naturally and leads to more robust health throughout life. It even showed farm kids can be better “problem solvers” as adults due to situations they encountered growing up.
The related Children’s Center was founded in 1997. It is one of 12 NIOSH farm-country centers and the only one focused on children. The rate of non-fatal injuries to children in agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting has dropped since the center was established, but there’s still work to be done. About every three days, a child dies in a farm-related incident; each day, at least 33 children are injured.
The Trump administration is looking for ways to reduce spending and thus whittle away at the national debt, and it also looks skeptically at projects that can lead to more government regulation. In the case of NIOSH, which is a research body, there are no direct links to the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration, which is the regulatory agency.
Rural voters in Wisconsin and elsewhere played a decisive role in President Trump’s 2024 election. In Wisconsin, he carried 60 of 72 counties with those 60 being far more rural than not. He won Wisconsin’s rural vote by a margin of 22.3 percentage points, a 2.4 percentage point improvement over his 2020 performance.
That rural margin translated to a gain of about 29,000 Wisconsin votes for Trump in 2024 over his 2020 total, and it accounted for nearly all of Trump’s statewide victory total of 30,000 votes.
Efforts to reel in federal spending to better control debt will continue, but voters in Wisconsin’s farm country should look out for themselves when it comes to low-cost programs that improve safety and health without costing an arm and a leg.
Still is president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. He can be reached at tstill@wisconsintechnologycouncil.com.
