On Wednesday September 16^th, the FCS Agronomy department did a new first of its kind event that we called our Safety Field Day. 

This event took place at our outside at our Sioux Center Agronomy location at 9:00 am and again at 1:00 pm that day so that all employees could attend. We also took the extra step of shutting down any agronomy operations for the day to commit the time and drive home the overall priority we need to all have around safety. Our main goal was to improve overall safety for our team as well as our customers so we can all go home safe each night.

The event was assembled by Western Agronomy Operations Manager, Tim Zuetenhorst, and some of the FCS professional applicator team members. This field day was set-up to be a hands on training focused on timely safety topics right before we go to the field this fall. We invited all of our full-time Agronomy operations and sales people along with our part time and seasonal labor we use during the busy fall season. This mix of people enabled us to utilize the valuable experience some of our more veteran people have to help less experienced people and overall learn from each other.

The set-up included stations in the yard with dry fertilizer application machinery and tender trucks, anhydrous application equipment and tanks, as well as our cover crop equipment. The teams went through best practices for machines, communicated expectations, as well as facilitated group interactive discussions on how to do things as safely as possible.

The event was well received with the team and our plan moving forward is to commit the time and effort to a Safety Field Day in the spring prior to busy season as well as the fall every year!