FARMERSVILLE, Ohio – Fire companies and first responders may not be called all that often to respond to farms, but when they are, the incidents are usually severe and sometimes fatal. For that reason, the Montgomery County Farm Bureau and Crash Course Village recently joined forces to offer essential agricultural rescue training.

Crash Course Village, in Kettering, is a new way to provide extrication and rescue training for fire and rescue personnel. It was formed as a 501(c) (3) Charity in 2013 to assist fire departments with continuing training.

“We train around technical rescue, which is rescue in a confined space, vehicle extrication, those kinds of things,” said Jared Buckley, director of growth and development and fire chief coach at Crash Course Village. “Outside of the fire service and Emergency Medical Services (EMS), you have rescues, and that is the area of focus that we put most of our time into. Agriculture is our new area.”

The course was offered over two days. It covered large animal and grain bin rescue, manure handling, heavy equipment incidents, and power take-off/auger entanglement. About 45 firefighters and EMS people attended. Because the course has certified instructors, participants were able to get their education credits along with the training.

The idea got started when Eric Hagemeyer participated in grain bin rescue training with Ohio State University in Montgomery County about a year ago. Hagemeyer is a farmer, a firefighter with the City of Kettering, and a trustee with Montgomery County Farm Bureau.

“Talking with farm bureau members, they wanted their first responders and firefighters where they live to be well-trained in farm and ag rescue, and there was me, with a fire service background,” Hagemeyer said.

Hagemeyer reached out to Christy Montoya, farm bureau organization director for Butler, Hamilton, Montgomery and Preble counties. They sat down with Buckley and began planning to see if they could make some kind of program work.

“It’s been a year in the making,” Montoya said. “We wanted to make it as real and as hands-on as possible. We recruited some people to help us find old farm equipment that could either be utilized during the program and scrapped after, or just an example of what kind of equipment the firefighters may see as they approach an accident.”

They did manure pit rescue training in a classroom setting because they had no way to duplicate that, Montoya said. They talked about tractor turnover using an old tractor and a mannequin.

“Then another one was, when you approach equipment, what should you be aware of?” Montoya said. “If you’re approaching it for the first time, make sure that everything is off and that it’s not connected to anything electrical or anything like that. Friday afternoon, we did a large animal rescue program.”

On Saturday, the group learned about grain bin safety. They visited Leis Farm in Farmersville, which was the ideal location as they have all sizes and varieties of grain bins. The participants were able to go inside an empty grain bin.

Outside, they had a gravity wagon full of corn to simulate the grain in a grain bin, Montoya explained. The presenters used two different apparatuses to demonstrate how to rescue someone who was stuck inside.

“Then they were also able to go to the top of the largest grain bin,” she said. “They talked about, if you had to rappel from the top of this grain bin to get to the farmer, and how you would go about that.”

They took all five of those educational pieces and put them together in one training, which was all new. There is a need for this kind of training, Hagemeyer said.

“Where I live is a rural area, even though I work for a large city fire department,” Hagemeyer said. “But rural fire departments are funded less. A lot of the personnel work regular jobs. They volunteer nights and weekends for the fire service. There is definitely a need for low-cost training.”

This is only the beginning, Buckley said. They wanted to see how the training would go, and now, how do they fine-tune it to give the most impact to the firefighters and first responders?

“In the rural areas, because we know that funding is a challenge, we want to find ways that we can raise the funding, lower the cost, and possibly even scholarship the rural counties, the ones that actually serve the farm communities,” Buckley said. “That is the direction we are going moving forward, and we’re excited about the partnerships that are already reaching out.”