Kids and farm chemicals don't mix

Since it's National Farm Safety Week, here are a couple of the ways we've made our milkhouse chemicals more inaccessible to our children:

This is the barrier we constructed to hide our acid and detergent barrels. As far as physical barriers go, this design will not keep children out. But it does provide a good visual barrier. And since the "out of sight, out of mind" principle works well with young children, we've found that this barrier does what we wanted it to. Between the barrier and the child-resistant drum pumps we now use, our milkhouse chemicals are a lot more inaccessible than they used to be.

I also save all of the child resistant caps off of gallon jugs and use them to replace non-child resistant caps on other jugs. For example, our utensil soap comes with these caps, but one of the stronger cleaner-santizers we use comes with a regular cap, so I replace the cap with a child resistant cap from an empty soap jug. Other products that are often left at ground level – like mineral oil, propylene glycol and oral calcium – get child resistant caps, too.

I shared a couple farm safety web sites earlier this week; here are two more good sites:

• National Ag Safety Database

• The National Education Center for Agricultural Safety

I hope you had a safe week!