May 6, 1998
Tractor course stresses safety
By Garret Leiva
Herald staff writer
It is a half-ton of powerful steel and knobby tires. With brutish horsepower it pulls jagged knives and steel discs that shred and slice through hardened soil. And right now it's in the hands of a 14-year-old.
No, this is not your son's video game; it's real - as in real clutches, real gears, real John Deere's and real Kubota's.
With that in mind, Bill Bassett and his assistant, Robert Fortine, teach their students the real-life safety and knowledge required to become a certified tractor driver. On Saturday at the Career-Tech Center on Parsons Road, they put students to the test.
But the learning begins well before the key turns in the ignition.
Last month 42 teen-agers signed up for the tractor safety training course offered through center. Under the U.S. Department of Labor's Hazardous Occupation Order, all children younger than 16 who perform farm jobs classified as hazardous must successfully complete a tractor operation and safety course.
"We start out with the broad overall safety aspects of how dangerous agriculture is as an occupation and move into specifics such as which part influences the tractor to do what type of job," said Bassett, who teaches landscape horticulture at the Career-Tech Center.
The five-session, 30-hour training program is equally divided between class work, lectures, videos and operating hours on the machinery, Bassett said. During their time on the tractors, students begin by learning basic starting and stopping techniques. The course then progresses to backing up and hooking on farming equipment.
For some students, these tractor skills will be put to use during summer jobs on area fruit and dairy farms. Others will work on family farms in Grand Traverse, Leelanau, Benzie and Antrim counties.
While knowing how to engage the clutch is essential in operating a tractor, safety and awareness are the most critical issues when a teen-ager sits atop a half-ton tractor, instructor Fortine said.
"Safety is important mostly because the largest group of accidents on the farm is going to be this age group," said Fortine, who will teach another course starting May 19 at the center. "Part of the problem is that they do not necessarily have the physical size or reasoning skills to deal with something when it goes wrong, and they panic.
"This course, however, can run students through those scenarios so they can understand what to do in certain cases by giving them a building block to make better decisions."