The National Farm Medicine Center (NFMC) teamed up with Pittsville Fire Company to deliver their fifth and final Agricultural Rescue Training (ART) event in rural Central Wisconsin from October 25-26, 2024. However, ART wasn’t the only item on the agenda this year. There was also an RF-DASH training on Thursday, October 24, and an ART Train-the-Trainer course on Friday, October 25. Three whole days of agricultural emergency preparedness, prevention, and rescue training!
The RF-DASH training on Thursday had a dozen participants from 7 different states. These participants included firefighters as well as agricultural health and safety professionals and extension personnel. It was great to train these folks in the RF-DASH curriculum and broaden the program’s horizons. Many participants expressed strong interest in hosting a training in their home region!
The Friday Ag Rescue Train-the-Trainer course had 25 participants–a record! The goal of the Train-the-Trainer course is to provide participants with insight into how the Ag Rescue Training event is organized, giving the foundation to organize their own training in the future. Including the participants from this year, we’ve trained 59 folks to be ag rescue training instructors.
The highlight of the three-day sequence was definitely the Ag Rescue Training event. This event started with a series of engaging lectures on Friday night. Topics covered included confined spaces, large animal technical rescue, and noxious gases on the farm. The core part of the event, however, is the hands-on workshops on Saturday. These workshops provide detailed technical rescue instruction for a variety of scenarios and allow participants to practice actual rescue techniques using different tools and processes. There were five workshops this year: tractor rollover, equipment extrication, large animal rescue, confined spaces, and grain bin rescue. According to the evaluation data, all of the workshops were a hit! This year, we trained 72 individuals from 37 different departments and organizations in the Ag Rescue Training. Adding up all of the persons trained at NMFC-sponsored Ag Rescue Training events, from 2020-2024 we’ve successfully trained 307 individuals from 106 organizations.
Photos from the Ag Rescue Training event can be viewed in the gallery below:
Overall, the 2024 Ag Rescue Training was a major success and a great finale to five years of training events in Marshfield. Going forward, one of the goals is to develop a textbook and series of informational videos based on the Ag Rescue Training workshops. We think this would be valuable, especially for firefighters wishing to organize ag rescue trainings of their own.
Lastly, we would like to give a shout out to all of the ART sponsors, especially our Auction of Champions donors. Further, we’d like to give special acknowledgement to the Mike Biadasz Farm Safety and Education Memorial Fund, whose support has equipped rural fire departments with four-gas monitors and was an essential part of making the three-day event a success this year.