2025 Classes

Safety is more than just a job or a career, it’s a calling.  We all have our reasons for choosing to work in safety.  If you can learn how to communicate your purpose to others, you can build the foundation of trust critical to building a strong safety culture.  Anthony Vigness has worked in Occupational Safety for 18 years and in production agriculture for the past 12 years.  Join him as he shares his safety story of stumbling into a job that quickly became a purpose and how he works directly with front-line workers to develop a culture of safety.

Bin sweeps were a hot topic in the early 2000’s and this lead to the development of OSHA’s Ten Sweep Auger Safety Principles.  These rules were effective in educating the grain industry and OSHA on safe handling of bin sweeps.  Unfortunately, as time went on the focus drifted and so has the adherence to those Safety Principles.  It’s time to revisit those principles and re-educate our newer/younger workforce on them.

How can employees and customers get hurt in a modern large grocery/hypermarket stores? Have you ever made a list of causes? Have you ever studied annual loss and injury data from store records or national injury and death logs? Have you ever asked employees to tell you about chances they have taken or materials or equipment they have used incorrectly? Does your store have a safety committee that really works or walks the store looking for hazards? Does your store listen to its customers that report hazards they see or find? Does store leadership really take “safety” seriously? Can you tell when they talk at meetings. Does your store conduct safety training throughout the year or just at new employee orientation?

The agricultural industry in Michigan has one of the highest industry fatality rates.  Motor vehicle incidents are the third most common cause of farm-related fatalities in Michigan.  This presentation will discuss the most common types of fatal and non-fatal injuries among farmers and farm workers with a special emphasis on motor vehicle incidents.