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Chapter 7. Challenges, Opportunities, and Ideas for the Future

Published by the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers, St. Joseph, Michigan www.asabe.org

Citation:  Murphy, D.J. 2003. Challenges, Opportunities, and Ideas for the Future. Chapter 7 in Looking Beneath the Surface of Agricultural Safety and Health, 81-82. St Joseph, Mich.: ASAE.  .(doi:10.13031/2013.12258)

In the first chapter I mentioned that this review was written for agricultural injury prevention professionals, and that one advantage of a single-authored document over a consensus document was that it could dig deeper into sensitive issues and be more provocative and philosophical. At the same time, it is incumbent upon an author conducting a critical review of a field of practice to offer suggestions and recommendations for the future. That is the purpose of this chapter.

This review has been rather wide ranging, and is admittedly uneven in its treatment of some topics. For example, considerable space was devoted to the background and professional development of early agricultural safety professionals, the history of public health involvement in agricultural safety and health, and the BBS process. There has been little to no published literature in agriculture on these topics. On the other hand, some subjects, like behavioral and learning theory, are nearly bottomless wells in which one can spend months tracing the roots of a single philosophical viewpoint. Several times in the chapters addressing behavioral and learning theory, a statement was made that going further into a particular point was beyond the scope or purpose of this review. Nevertheless, an attempt was made to include enough insight into the topic to illustrate relevance to the broad issues of agricultural safety and health. References were provided if readers chose to explore the point or issue further. Finally, some more traditional topics in agricultural safety (e.g., safety engineering, human factors engineering [ergonomics], pesticide safety) were barely mentioned due to time limitations and a more complete existing literature on those topics.

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