An accident claimed the life of 17-year-old Adam Buurma on the family farm outside Watford.
Ontario farm fatalities down to four in 2024
Nelson Zandbergen
Farmers Forum
OTTAWA — Farms are becoming safer places to work as farm fatalities continue to decline.
On-farm farm-related accidents took the lives of four Ontarians in 2024, down from five last year and 13 in 2022. The 10-year average is seven deaths per year between 2015 and 2024.
Farms are reputed to be the most deadly workplace, but great strides in safety have been made in recent decades. An average of 29 people were killed annually on Ontario farms each year between 1990 and 2008. Nationwide, the average was 104 during the same period, but declined to 60 by 2012, according to the Canadian Agricultural Injury Reporting organization.
As counted by Farmers Forum, Ontario’s on-farm farm-related death toll does not include farm-related fatalities on public roadways. By that measure, there were no on-farm deaths in Eastern Ontario last year, with all losses occurring in Southwestern Ontario. The data is gleaned from police reports, a U.S. farm accident database and media coverage, including our own.
The four fatalities last year include:
• 17-year-old Adam Terrance Buurma was struck and killed by a payloader at a farm outside Watford in Lambton County on May 9. He was the youngest son of Harry and Shirley Buurma, well known in the agricultural community as the operators of Buurma Acres.
• 79-year-old Elgin County farmer Frederick John Small was killed in a July 29 tractor rollover at the Wallacetown-area family farm where he was born and raised.
• Two concrete workers died Oct. 3 when scaffolding collapsed inside a silo under construction at a grain elevator farm business — Sheridan Farms — just outside Owen Sound. The deceased were employed by Stratford-based Wilhelm Concrete.
Last year did see two farm roadway fatalities:
• 24-year-old chicken farmer Joel Owen Wallace died March 6 when the John Deere tractor he was driving careened into a rural ditch south of Stratford. Wallace was hauling an empty dump trailer when the tractor left the roadway, shortly before 11 p.m., ejecting him from the cab.
• A 41-year-old migrant farm worker from Mexico died Sept. 1 in a late-night utility-vehicle rollover on a rural road in Niagara Region fruit country, just west of St. Catharines. The man was a passenger on the side-by-side unit that rolled over while turning into a driveway in the wee hours of the morning. The deceased was thrown from the machine, which came to rest on top of him. Police said the side-by-side was not being used for farm purposes at the time.
