Dairyman leads farm safety effort

ORANGEVILLE, Ill. – Mark Baker begins and ends his days with cows. In between, he runs Stateline Farm Rescue, an instructional course on grain bin rescue which is delivered to fire departments, medical students and other emergency medical service people.
Baker runs a dairy farm with his wife, Kim, and sons Chad and Zach. The family milks 110 cows near Orangeville. The cows are housed in a sand-bedded freestall barn and milked in the original stanchion barn. Chad and Zach do all the mixing while Baker does all the scraping. They have hired hands to help with milking, but everyone fills in when needed.    
The inspiration for launching a farm rescue training course came from Kim losing her first husband in a farm accident more than 40 years ago.
“It just resonated with me because she told me about the fire department showing up, and they just didn’t know what to do,” Baker said. “She was basically doing the rescue herself.”
Since Stateline Farm Rescue has taken off, the initiative has seen global involvement. Baker and his training crew have talked with various universities and aided in starting a program for the state of Kansas. All of the providences in Canada have been trained through the program. Australia sent representatives of its fire academy to attend a class with Stateline Farm Rescue and then modeled their own program with the information they learned. The program has also had participation from people residing in France.
“I think it is really cool that I had a part in getting a country’s grain rescue program up and running,” Baker said.
Baker began the business after joining the local fire department and realizing how little experience the fire training offered when it came to agricultural-related accidents.
“When I joined the fire department in my local community, it just kept gnawing at me that we don’t know anything,” Baker said. “We practice for car accidents and house fires, but when is the last time the local department practiced a tractor roll over, a grain entrapment?”
The training effort began 30 years ago when Baker worked with the national training center for agricultural safety and got a program up and running in Iowa. Initially, Baker commuted back and forth to teach out of Iowa.
“I never thought of myself as a teacher or instructor by any stretch of the imagination,” Baker said. “But, I had years of practice in the barn.”     
Baker said he knew where the gaps in training were at his local department and used his practical knowledge to fill those gaps. He stopped teaching out of Iowa and started Stateline Farm Rescue after realizing a mobile training program would be more effective.
“What we do is we take the show on the road so we come to them,” Baker said. “Then there are no boundaries.”
The grain simulator used for training was designed and built on the Bakers’ farm and is hauled on a trailer pulled with a pickup truck. The simulator holds 200 bushels of corn and replicates three scenarios: live grain entrapment, auger entrapment and side cutting of the sheets for a scenario where a victim is fully engulfed in the grain bin.
The goal when training medical students without any agricultural background is to help them realize that a lot of times, farm accidents are unique.
“We try to bring them the knowledge and scenarios that they are going to encounter and how graphic these accidents are going to be,” Baker said. “Farmers do not pick up the phone and call 911. They either drive themselves in or call their wife.”
The training program has worked in tandem with The Rural Medical Education Program at the University of Illinois College of Medicine Rockford, which lowers the tuition for the medical student if they commit to practice in a rural area once becoming licensed. The knowledge provided in Stateline Farm Rescue is often the first rural experience for the students.
Classes are in the form of an eight-hour day and focus on grain bin extrication, confined space entry procedures, grain auger entrapment, grain bin cutting, dust explosion, EMT rescue considerations and current Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulations. Classes can also include tractor and combine rollover courses. The classes are instructed by Baker and five others. The other instructors have an agricultural background and include certified emergency responders, firefighters and one flight nurse.
“They are the most gifted, kind and talented people you’d ever want to find,” Baker said. “I have no idea how I was blessed enough to have these people. Their help makes it really easy for me.”
Baker said he feels it is important to keep the dairy going, even though the farm rescue program could probably stand on its own. He credits a good herd of cows and nice buildings for keeping him grounded to dairy.
“I just feel that this is a nice little dairy,” Baker said. “I think it keeps us together as a family.”