EMT Talks Farm Emergency Safety
Published: Friday, August 29, 2025
With harvest season right around the corner, EMT Greg Simms urges farmers to include a trauma-ready first aid kit in the cab of their tractors and combines.
"You're in the middle of a corn field, it might be 30 acres, and you go down, who's going to help you?" he asked during the Pinney Purdue field day last Wednesday in Wanatah. "If I'm a farmer, I might have to save myself."
He discussed several emergency situations and responses, including deep wounds, severe blood loss, object protrusions and suspected drug overdoses.
Simms lifted two bottles of red punch for farmers to see.
"A smaller person –if you lose this much blood quickly, you're in trouble," he said, raising the 6-ounce bottle. "And that's not much blood."
He raised a 1-liter bottle next.
"Bigger person, if you lose this much blood, you're in trouble," he said.
Simms also noted that there are variables. For instance, there is no distinct body size chart for either amount of blood loss. It is an approximation. The amount can also vary either high or low depending on many factors, but as a guide, knowing what that amount of blood looks like can help people know the severity of the situation and how long they have to act.
Simms instructed farmers to stuff deep wounds with gauze and put pressure on them to stop the bleeding. The more pressure, the better. The proper way to put the maximum amount of pressure on a wound is, after administering gauze, to place both hands on the wound and to lean over it so most of the pressure results from body weight. He warned that this is a tiring process, but by utilizing body weight, energy can be saved.
In the case of extreme blood loss, Simms said a tourniquet can save a life.
"Sometimes it's hard to gauge how much blood left the body because it soaks into the ground," he said. "It's critical to understand those things. If you're going to go help, you've got to know how much time you've got before something is going in a very bad direction."
Tourniquets are only used on limbs.
"Tourniquets are meant to stop the blood from flowing past where the tourniquet is," he said.
Simms demonstrated the use of a tourniquet by applying one to his own forearm.
"You have six hours. Within reality, (there's) six hours of this being on before I'm going to lose my hand," he said.
The ideal response time to emergencies, from the time of the injury to the time the injured person is delivered to the emergency room, is at most, an hour. Simms said this allows for optimal care and is key to getting the best possible outcome.
Simms also warned farmers not to base their first responder knowledge on what is shown on TV.
"One thing I can tell you is that TV and reality don't line up. For example, you see somebody get stabbed on TV, they pull it out and they're all good to go, right? If you get stabbed or something penetrates your body, you leave it in," he said. "Do not pull it out!"
He said in such a case, the foreign object becomes "like a cork," keeping blood in. While some may escape around the edges of the object, it will ultimately aid in controlling bleeding until the injured person gets to a medical facility where it can be safely removed and the injury can be fully treated.
The key in the situation of a protruding object, Simms said, is to immobilize it, to prevent further damage.
"If something penetrates your eye cover your bad eye and try to keep your good eye from moving around too much," he said. "Because our eyes are connected, so if I've got something in my eye that's not good, and I move my other eyeball somewhere else, it's going to mess me up. It's going to do more damage."
He suggests covering both eyes to stop eye movement if coming to the aid of someone else.
When coming to a person who may be overdosing, Simms said the key is Narcan. Whether or not drugs were used, it does not harm individuals. If drug use is the cause for unconsciousness, Narcan "shuts the drug off" if present.
A trauma-level first aid kit includes: a tourniquet, compressed gauze, emergency trauma dressing, trauma shears, a marker, gloves, a chest seal, a hypothermia blanket, hemostatic gauze and bleeding control instructions, among other items.
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