A West Quebec farmer and father of three is dead after a horrific accident on his dairy farm this morning. It's the second incident involving the owner of a farm in just a few weeks.
This latest one happened in Val Des Monts on Chemin Des Rapides on a dairy farm during what would likely have been the routine chores; getting the feed ready for the cows. But in a second all that changed. The tranquil setting of the picturesque farm belies the horror of what happened here hours earlier.
Police say around 7 a.m., the owner of the farm, a 48-year-old man, was working on a piece of machinery, chopping a bale of hay; getting it ready to feed to his Holstein cows.
The victim has been identified as 48-year-old Duane Thompson.
‘At one point, our information is that a piece of hay that was in the machine was caught or the machine was unable to cut it,’ explains Cst. Martin Fournel with the MRC Collines Police in West Quebec, ‘and the individual tried to unstick what was in the blade and the worst happened.’
The machine uses spinning blades to chop the hay. Someone on the farm managed to call 911 immediately but police say it was too late by the time help arrived.
‘Big surprise this morning when I heard about it,’ says Emmett McGarry, who runs a beef farm next door. McGarry knows the family well and says the loss is horrific for the family and the community. He’s farmed all his life and says there are risks around big farm machinery.
‘It’s an accident, that's what happens,’ says McGarry, ‘Sometimes you get careless around machinery. We all do, eh?’
Just last month there was another farm accident in west Ottawa involving a power take off connected to a tractor. 69-year-old Ken Paul lost both his arms in that accident. Paul is still in the hospital recovering from those injuries. Farm injuries are on the rise among older farmers but fatal farm accidents are dropping. According to statistics from the Canadian Agriculture Injury Reporting, there were 135 deaths on Canadian farms in 1990. That number dropped to 111 by the year 2000. The latest statistics from 2008 show 66 died farming.
That is little comfort, though, to a family mourning the loss of a father and husband. Police have not yet released the name of the farmer while they notify next of kin.
