'Hobby farm' growers getting hurt, killed

The risk of serious injury or death has always been a part of farming. But the nation’s growing embrace of small-scale production of local and organic crops is drawing more amateurs into the field, and inexperienced growers are increasingly getting maimed and even killed, often by old, unsafe machinery. Experts say some novices have little appreciation of the occupation’s dangers.Up to a quarter of Indiana’s 115 farm fatalities over the past four years have been on small operations that include so-called hobby or lifestyle farms, which are often run by people who entered farming from other lines of work, according to research by Purdue University farm-safety expert Bill Field, who has tracked farm fatalities for nearly four decades.Those deaths — nearly 30 between 2013 and 2016 — represent a disproportionately high percentage of Indiana’s total farming deaths, given the state’s widespread commercial farming operations, Field said.Gasperini warned in a July article in the Journal of Agromedicine that “very small, subsistence, part-time, non-traditional and hobby farms will continue to pose significant challenges” to the safety of U.S. agriculture.