continued on page 8 ONTARIO GRAIN FARMER COVER STORY 7 “It was quite wet, and we were behind, just starting to get into late May for planting, and I always made a bit of a habit of working late when it was necessary, sometimes maybe more late than I should have,” he says. “Whatever time it was, I said to myself, I'm just kind of gassed at this point. I need to go home. So, I started to make my way home, but I never quite made it.” The fatigue overcame him, and Boersen hit a maple tree on the side of the road, at “a reasonably high speed,” which caused significant damage to the tractor and implements. “We weren’t able to use them for the rest of that spring,” he says. “It was an eyeopening experience.” Being short on sleep can have a drastic impact on your health and can lead to serious injury or even death, says Seafortharea family physician, Dr. Heather Percival. “After about 18-24 hours of being up, you find that your judgment is impaired, but even more importantly, the frustration factor goes way up, and then you become more impulsive.” Percival points to research that shows that being tired can impact a person as much as drinking alcohol or smoking a joint: being awake for 17 hours is similar to having a blood alcohol concentration of 0.05 per cent; at 24 hours, that goes up to 0.1 per cent. That’s equivalent to blood alcohol concentration levels (0.05 to 0.08) that would result in charges for someone driving on Ontario roads. Percival, who grew up on a farm in Bruce County and currently treats many farmers in her Huron County practice, understands the nature of farm businesses and the stress that comes with the job, with so much outside of a farmer’s control, including the weather, but cautions that farmers shouldn’t push the limit on sleep. “The witching hour—three to six in the morning—that’s when accidents happen,” she says. “[Lack of sleep] is a recipe for making mistakes, cutting corners, which invariably end up not going well.” That ‘witching hour’ is when Boersen’s farm accident occurred, and he describes it as the time of day when “nothing good happens, especially when you’ve been up and working all day.” While he fortunately wasn’t injured in the farm accident, he says the outcome was not worth the extra 50 acres or so of planting that he got done. “From then on, I made a policy that we're going to stop at about 11 o'clock at night and call it a day, and I will get up at four or five in the morning and get started again.” PHYSICAL AND MENTAL HEALTH IMPACTS Chronic lack of sleep can have negative impacts on a person’s physical and mental well-being, including an increased risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and significant effects on mental health. These factors will “significantly impact your ability to do the job over the course of a lifetime,” says Percival. Lack of sleep is just one of the factors that can impact a farmer’s health during busy periods like planting or harvest. Percival points to heat and sun exposure as two top-of-mind topics for farmers to consider. “A lot of [farmers] have air-conditioned cabs now, but not everyone does,” she says. “You can get dehydrated just sitting in the cab of a tractor, even with the air conditioning on, partly because you’re in and out of the tractor and the heat shock is almost as bad as being in the heat… dehydration impacts your judgement, which then makes you do stupid things.” The easiest way to know if you’re dehydrated, says Percival, is by the colour of your urine: if it’s anything other than light yellow, then you need to drink more fluids. She recommends at least a cup of water per hour. PUT ON A HAT Percival says she is seeing more and more farmers in her office with with skin cancers, including melanoma and squamous cell cancer, particularly on their ears, lower arms, and hands, due to years of sun exposure and sunburns.
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