Farm Worker and Employer Safety Measures for Covid-19

There has been an uptick in farm worker infections with Coronavirus recently and you may be wondering how best to keep employees safe on the farm.  Here is a link to the Center for Disease Control's Interim Guidance for Agriculture Workers and Employers that you can use to develop your farm's plan.  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/community/guidance-agricultural-workers.html

Here are the key points of the information: 

• Management in the agriculture industry should conduct work site assessments to identify coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) risks and infection prevention strategies to protect workers.

• Work site guidance for COVID-19 prevention and control should be taken into consideration in employer-furnished shared worker housing, transportation vehicles and work settings.

• Prevention practices should follow the hierarchy of controls, which includes using source control and a combination of engineering controls, administrative controls (especially proper sanitation, cleaning, and disinfection), and personal protective equipment

• Grouping workers together into cohorts may reduce the spread of COVID-19 transmission in the workplace by minimizing the number of different individuals who come into close contact with each other over the course of a week, and may also reduce the number of workers quarantined because of exposure to the virus.

• Owners/operators should maximize opportunities to place farmworkers residing together in the same vehicles for transportation and in the same cohorts to limit exposure.

• Basic information and training about infection prevention should be provided to all farmworkers in languages they can understand.

• Agriculture work sites developing plans for continuing operations where COVID-19 is spreading among workers or in the surrounding community should work directly with appropriate state and local public health officials and occupational safety and health professionals.