How to Protect Your Farm Workers’ Hearing Before It’s Too Late

Farm and ranch employees are normally exposed to loud noises from tractors, machinery, animal confinement areas and more. In fact, according to Texas A&M, it’s common for farmers to lose hearing in one ear faster than the other. There’s more hearing damage on the side where they frequently look back toward the tractor exhaust or machinery to check on it. 

How Farm Work Can Damage Your Hearing

Sounds are measured in decibels, and louder sounds can damage your hearing more quickly than quieter sounds. For example, a tractor running at full load or an old chainsaw might hit 120 decibels, which can cause immediate hearing loss. A tractor that’s idling or a conveyor might register 80 decibels. That can damage your hearing if you’re exposed for more than eight straight hours.

Ways for Farmers to Prevent Hearing Loss

Of course, communicating on farms and ranches is crucial to productivity and safety, especially during harvesting, loading, conveying and other dangerous tasks. So, you’ll want to find ways to protect hearing without blocking out all sound. 

Hearing loss can be permanent. These ways to prevent hearing loss can keep yourself and your farm employees safe.

Use Hearing Protection for Farmers

Earmuffs and ear plugs can lower your exposure to sound. Earmuffs generally block 20 to 30 decibels, while ear plugs block 26 to 33 decibels. Using both together adds another three to five decibels of protection. 

Earmuffs and plugs don’t block all sound, so you and your employees should still be able to hear some conversations and notice sounds that might mean something is wrong with equipment while still using hearing protection.

You can also choose electronic hearing protection, which uses technology to block loud sounds while allowing quiet sounds to pass through. They come in over-the-ear and in-the-ear options, and you can choose models with noise reduction ratings that generally fall between 20 and 30 decibels. 

Limit the Volume of Farm Machinery

You can take steps to lower noise levels on your farm or ranch at the source:

• Replace defective equipment, especially mufflers.
• Don’t modify exhaust systems in ways that make them louder.
• Keep your machinery lubricated properly.
• Enclose noisy machines with acoustic barriers.
• Purchase tools and equipment that have noise reduction systems built in.

Make Sure Employees Care for Their Hearing

By law, you must have a Hearing Conservation Program if noise levels exceed 85 decibels over eight hours. That means you need to:

• Train employees about hearing protection.
• Measure sound levels.
• Offer hearing tests to employees.
• Provide hearing protection.
• Require employees to use hearing protection in certain situations. 

You can also place signage in high-noise areas so employees know when they need to use hearing protection.

Protecting Your Farm and Your Workers

When you run a farm or ranch, there’s a lot more you need to safeguard than hearing. Farm Bureau offers a range of products from farm or ranch liability coverage to crop insurance to livestock revenue insurance to help protect your agricultural business from risk and loss. Reach out to a Farm Bureau agent today to learn more about our products and protections.