S4E14: Farm Fire Safety

Recorded: 1/14/2026 

Spring is coming soon, and the increased use of farm equipment this time of year can increase risk of fire. In this episode, Justin and Ryan chat with Rob Nese, Assistant Fire Chief of Centre Region Fire Protection and Emergency Management, about farm fire safety. We discuss common causes of fire on-farm, fire prevention, and what to do in an emergency.  

Hosts: Ryan Spelman and Justin Brackenrich
Guest(s): Rob Nese 

Photo Credit: Alpha Fire Company  

Links:
Rob Nese, Centre County, Pennsylvania
Fire Prevention in Barns

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Transcript

speaker-0 (00:18)
Welcome to another episode of the Agronomy Highlights podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Spellman, and I'm joined here with my lovely co-host, Justin Brackenrich. Justin, how are you doing today? I'm good. Justin, I'm living the dream. ⁓

speaker-1 (00:29)
How about yourself?

speaker-0 (00:32)
today we have a topic that came in from a viewer request. So to our listeners, please, if you have ⁓ a request for an episode, we will follow up and make an episode on it. We make these for you. So anyways, today we got a request for a fire safety episode and I thought, geez, you know what? That's a great idea. I think I can count on my hand, you know, in our community and I'm just talking about the community I live in.

There was in the fall here, we had a combine fire, two barn fires, just within maybe a two mile radius from me that I know about that happened this year. So, I mean, this is important. It's something we all face. We deal with huge equipment, dry products, old barns. I mean, it's prevalent. So yeah, I don't know, Justin, what do you think?

speaker-1 (01:23)
Yeah,

I think part of that and I'm going to make up this number. actually I'm not even gonna put a number on it. the thing about like fires though, it seems like the majority of them are preventable problem, right? And like, you know, there are lots of accidents or lots of things that happen that are truly an accident that are kind of out of your control. but it seems like, and I'm sure we'll find out more about this, that fires are something that we have a lot of control over, if they're a problem or not. Right. And we're going to

talk today about ideas for ways to prevent fires, ways ⁓ to store and maintain our fire safety equipment. We're going to talk about some of the other things that occur and how we can get alerts. And so when we have all of these options that we can do, I think specifically with fires, we have a lot of opportunity to avoid that.

speaker-0 (02:12)
Yeah, definitely. I think you're right. Prevention is so important. But we also need to know what are the things that we need to focus on, right? What are the most important aspects of fire safety, right? Like, what are the steps that we need to do? Because it can be great when you say, yeah, it's all can be preventable. But if you're not educated, what you? Yeah. Yeah. Like, what are those steps and what do I not need to do?

speaker-1 (02:33)
It doesn't.

And now we have a fire, how do we stop it? So we're going to walk through a bunch of that today. And I hope that at least a few people listening to this take it and say, you know what? We're going to implement some better fire management strategies here at our place. And that's kind of the goal for all of these.

speaker-0 (02:58)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So hopefully by the end of this episode, you can have a plan for maybe steps you can take on your own farm to mitigate some of these risks and then... Yep, a plan for a plan. So...

speaker-1 (03:07)
and have a plan.

This

is obviously an extension event.

speaker-0 (03:12)
Exactly, we're gonna have a plan for the plan that maybe has another plan for it. So let's let's jump into this. We'll bring on our fire safety expert here.

Today we have on Rob Nies and Rob is the assistant fire chief of the center region fire So I'll let him introduce himself here.

Rob Nese (04:49)
Thanks guys and thanks for having me on. I'm glad somebody asked you guys about fire safety because it's something that we all learn through elementary school, middle school, high school, and then once we get in the real world, kind of forget about. So my name is Rob Nies. I'm an assistant chief, the assistant chief of special operations with center region fire protection. So we're based out of state college. We support the Alpha Fire Company, which is the volunteer fire company that responds to

the center region, which is Penn State University and the surrounding townships. So I work here full time, managing our hazmat response, technical rescue, and assisting with training and all of the background things that we do to prepare for emergencies.

Justin Brackenrich (05:30)
It's interesting you said that because you were saying we think about it a lot when we're kids and as we get older, it kind of goes away. And not to make light of a serious situation, but the amount of time you spent practicing stop, drop and roll as a kid, right? Made you think that this was going to be a much more common occurrence that you were going to be using that. But I think that's exactly right. And even from like a home standpoint, when you're young, when you're going through all of these things,

smoke detectors, fire alarms, you know, all of this stuff is so very important, but as an adult, it just kind of gets pushed to the back because it's, let's say it's not as important as maybe something else to you until it is.

Rob Nese (06:09)
Absolutely. When we have boy scouts or girl scouts or different groups visit the fire station, I have as many good questions from parents as I do the kids because they're starting to realize, ⁓ I didn't really think about that.

Ryan Spelman (06:20)
Yeah, it is something that we definitely don't think of enough and especially on on farming. I mean, there's so much equipment that can cause fires. have commodities that can cause fires like hay, you know, it's all around us. And I think oftentimes maybe some folks probably have it handled, but.

Sometimes we don't think about it until we have a problem. So I guess I'm curious to hear from your perspective, the person who's going to have to respond to some of these issues or you're aware of how many of these issues occur. How common are farm fires in general? And is there a trend of, do you see more barn fires, more equipment fires? What are some of the most common causes that you see out there?

Rob Nese (07:03)
Yeah, it's a good question. So it obviously varies by area. Before I came on today, I looked up some stats just to make sure that I wasn't going to speak out of turn. according to FEMA, the number one cause of barn fires on farms is heating equipment. The barn fires versus equipment versus field fires really just depends on the area that you're in.

So in our area, we have some extremely rural parts. We have some farms that are not far from campus and are operating on a different scale than maybe a family-run farm of 500 acres that's 20 miles from town. So we get a mix of incidents. Equipment fires, fires in barns, fires in adjacent structures, field fires from operating equipment.

It really, it's a pretty diverse call type in our area. Whereas in some areas where, you know, there's nothing but farm fields in a couple houses and they're using maybe less equipment or older equipment, the types of calls may vary a little bit from what we're seeing.

Justin Brackenrich (08:12)
I think that one of our conversations that we wanted to have or a piece of it was when is the most common time of year that you would see these and maybe because FEMA's saying it's heating sources, it's the cooler times, right? Maybe early spring, late fall through winter. I think that's a really interesting one and kind of back to that thing you take for granted. If you've got some sort of heating source in your house, you're probably very careful about what you have and around it.

⁓ But the dust and the hay and the straw and on and on and on that's in a barn That's really interesting how we could we could maybe change some of these so later on I'm gonna ask you what might be some alternative options to heating in barns I'll give you a little bit time to think about that But how we can change our equipment or what we're doing to help reduce some of that

Rob Nese (08:59)
Sure, yeah. And the time of year definitely affects what type of fire you have. I wouldn't say necessarily we see spikes in fires different times of the year, but you probably see more equipment fires in spring, summer, fall when equipment's being way more heavily used. You see more fires in barns in the cooler months from heating.

though you also may see just as many barn fires in spring, early summer that have to do with harvesting. So I wouldn't say that, especially for in our coverage area, we don't really have a time of year that is way busier than another for farm type incidents, but the type of incident is tailored somewhat to that type of year and really what's going on on the farm at that time of year.

Ryan Spelman (09:47)
Yeah, sure. And I remember I can think about, know, during the harvest time is really most of the time I start thinking of it because I think it becomes very visible, right? When a combine fire happens, everyone knows about it, everyone talks about it. And then when the heaters kick on in the barn or you're starting to store more equipment, it just becomes a little bit more prevalent. But that doesn't mean they don't happen all times of year. It's just a little bit more.

you can see them happening, you know? And so I guess one of the questions that I have is if I'm a farmer and I want to look at like, how do I prevent these, right? I know they can come from heat sources, from my machinery, from all these kinds of different operations. Where do I start, right? Like, where do I start at looking for preventative steps when it seems like there's all kinds of things that can cause a fire?

Rob Nese (10:38)
Yeah, great question. So this isn't a stat that I have in front of me, but from firsthand knowledge, I'd say the three things that are most likely to cause a fire in a barn or equipment is hay and grain and the process of spontaneous combustion if it's not harvested right, heating sources and operating equipment. So if you break it down to those three, the first one is

relatively, it's simple at its core. The spontaneous combustion of hay and silage and grain that's harvested. I say it's simple at its core because it's science. know, if your product is dry enough and it's not going to spontaneously combust because we see that when the products or especially in hay bales that are tightly wound

are too moist when they're harvested. And it allows for a lot of microbial activity and heat can build up inside that bale and you may not even know until you wake up at two in the morning because there's flames shooting out of the barn. So at its core, science tells us when it's safe to have these products harvested and stored.

But that comes with the need for that knowledge and the need for equipment, the right equipment to test that, ⁓ test moisture and ensure that things are being stored safely. So aside from that, equipment fires, that all has to do with maintenance. mean, we cannot prevent some type of catastrophic failure or that one in a million bunch of things hooked together.

a chain reaction of events, but we can do a really good job preventing the likelihood of it by maintaining equipment. we see fires in equipment that's operating because of overheating. know, that equipment is meant to operate for long, long periods of time, as long as it's cleaned properly, maintained properly. So someone might have a

bearing going bad and it's been squeaking for months and they just think I'll get to that eventually. Well then might be too late once the machine catches on fire. So paying attention to clues and you know problems with equipment to prevent overheating. Also keeping stuff clean. You know air filters need to be cleaned. If you're harvesting something or mowing.

During a real dry time of the season and you see that the filters just clogged up with dirt dust debris That's not going to allow the equipment to cool properly. So It seems obvious but I think a lot of time people May finish doing what they're doing and think Everything's good. But you know if a piece of equipment was was working a long time and had heated up a lot and it's not maintained or cleaned You've got dirt dust debris all through there

And it doesn't take a whole lot for one piece of hay to be leaning against an engine block that catches another piece of hay on fire. And now 15 minutes after you're done harvesting and your equipment's back in the barn, you have a fire. And then finally, heating sources. That's just, it's all based on.

Practicing safety heating sources around combustible materials are inherently dangerous and we just got to practice safety, you know Keeping areas clean keeping combustible materials away from heating sources making sure that they're properly mounted I've been to fires before where After the fire happens and it's out sometimes tough to figure out what caused it but we've believed that a heater may have fallen off of something or

an animal in a pen kicked something which knocked the heater over. So keeping things properly maintained but properly mounted, combustible materials away from them, and just really practicing what the manufacturer says. No one reads the whole manual on anything, that's no secret. But if it says keep away, keep 30 feet away from combustible materials, there's probably a reason.

Justin Brackenrich (14:27)
So I wanna jump back to the first, maybe I've got questions and comments for all three of the different types, but I agree completely with the hay thing, right? And we see that often and from a personal perspective of someone that's worked in hay and now tries to educate people on how to do this, for $500 or less, you can have a pretty doggone good moisture meter, right? You can get something handheld that you can.

Test in the swath a lot of these nows come with like a chamber pad that you can put in your baler and run a wire up and you can use the same Handheld monitor that plugs into that so you know this this method of we're gonna go out and we're gonna twist it a few times and if it breaks in three turns and it's good to go right I think that was an art as much as it was a science that a lot of us probably haven't carried and $500 is much cheaper than a new barn and absolutely

We recognize like, so Rob didn't tell you all this, but he has a background in turf grass. And so he understands a lot of this part too. And I think he's doing a great job, like with the parallel to agronomy. But our hay doesn't dry the same, right? If we're along trees, that's often wetter because it's not getting the sun. Or if we get in these very heavy areas, that often doesn't dry as well. And so for 500 bucks, the peace of mind is just kind of invaluable, right? Go out, spend the money.

make the test, do the things, and I think that can save a lot of time and trouble. Sue, go ahead, please.

Rob Nese (15:52)
just gonna say one comment with that and we comment on this in the fire service all the time with really all emergencies we go to. People get stuck in their day-to-day lives and bad things happen when they they do that. So you you might have driven on a road 60 miles an hour on the way to work yesterday so why can't I do it today? Well today it's four degrees cooler and there's ice. So you know in terms of harvesting it may be that farmer that's been on it's

65 years old and has been you know riding in a combine since he was three years old and has done the same field the same way the same order same day or week of the year for 60 years but this year it's a little bit wetter or this year the the the weeds were a little bit the weed content was a little bit higher and so the moisture in the hay is a little bit higher because there's there's leafier tissue in there

You know, just these small things are what changes and causes catastrophe. So using science to try to prevent that, the moisture meter is huge. ⁓ You know, the old tricks of the trade work until they don't work.

Justin Brackenrich (17:02)
And I think we see that a lot with like transition of farms, right? This person that's 65 or 70 that's been doing this for 40, 50 years, right? They have a much different set of skills. I mean, this is a worst case scenario, but I've worked with producers. Dad was 60 or 70, made the management changes. He's now passed away. You're 30 and you're thrust into this position of figuring it out on your own, right? You didn't have...

someone to help you acclimate and get all these skills and there's nothing wrong with double checking yourself and taking advantage of those things. So you mentioned about combines and dust and cleaning filters. Maybe we have this kind of queued up to talk about later, but talk to us about the fire extinguishers that are on these pieces of equipment, right? I know there's an ABC. Is that right? Different types.

Rob Nese (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

Justin Brackenrich (17:52)
They can expire. I've heard people say like, well, they settle out and so you should take them off and shake them. Talk to us a little bit about how we can prevent that with a fire extinguisher.

Rob Nese (18:01)
Yeah, I've never heard the settle out and shake them before and that could be very well true. It also could be, you know, 30 years ago because of how they were constructed, it worked different, but yeah.

Justin Brackenrich (18:11)
And

I've made the argument like I don't know how smoothly you're running your piece of equipment, but you know, there's all this shaking and vibration happening. I don't know. But anecdotally, that's that's one of those things that I've heard.

Rob Nese (18:23)
That's interesting. Yeah, I haven't heard that one. ⁓ But yeah, so an ABC fire extinguisher, most basic type. It's for class A, B and C fires. A is ordinary combustibles. B is flammable liquids and C is electrical fires. So you get beyond that. There's D, which is flammable metals and those are super specialized extinguishers. So your normal ABC that you can get at Home Depot, Lowe's, wherever.

⁓ That'll do anything you need for a piece of equipment. So keeping one on, keeping it in close range and keeping it maintained. It's not always cost effective to have them refilled and inspected every single year, but it is important to keep them inspected. You can call local companies that'll come out and inspect them for a couple bucks each.

⁓ Or if you don't feel like doing that then you can replace them when they go out of inspection. They're only $30, you know at a big box store. So having one close by is huge, but the biggest thing is knowing how to use it. That sounds stupid because what you pull it off and you squeeze the trigger, right? Well, you think you know how to do that until time is of the essence. So we teach pass, pull, aim, squeeze, sweep. First you got to pull the pin out of your extinguisher.

squeeze the handle or I'm sorry, aim at your target, squeeze the handle and then sweep back and forth. The pulling the pin is the hardest thing for people. You you grab the extinguisher and you're panicking, you want it to work. And I've seen instances before where people have had kitchen fires and we had someone that was trying to cut the pin, the little tie off for the pin. So she was running around looking for scissors. Well, they're made to just rip out, but she just wasn't thinking in that moment. So.

⁓ Yeah, having extinguishers handy is huge, but knowing how to use them is even bigger.

Ryan Spelman (20:07)
So would your recommendation then to be like when it comes to equipment like definitely have that fire extinguisher on every piece of equipment and do you know are there requirements that farmers need to meet for that or is this just something that they it's a best practice rather than something that's like required by any fire safety type code?

Rob Nese (20:27)
That's a really good question. As far as having them, yeah, I have them on every piece of equipment and you probably want them in the cab, you know, so it's right there accessible to you. Couldn't hurt to have one on the cab and if it's a really big piece of equipment, maybe one on the cab and one away so that if you're outside of the cab and the cab catches on fire, you have another one available. You you have a couple hundred thousand dollar

combine, you can afford 50 bucks worth of extinguishers to mount on it. As far as the regulations go for having those on, I gotta be honest, I'm not sure. It would probably vary by state or jurisdiction, regardless of if someone's gonna make you have one, I would have one, you know, and there's a lot of family farms that probably aren't large enough to meet certain...

criteria for being inspected every so often, or it might have to do with what crops they're harvesting and what agencies are coming in and looking at them. So I think, I don't think there's a ⁓ blanket rule there that's gonna get any farm shut down if they don't have an extinguisher, but it really just can't be too safe.

Justin Brackenrich (21:33)
So, I don't want to get stuck. We warned you, we get in these rabbit holes right now. We're stuck in this fire extinguisher loop. You know, we're going to talk about what else is important for maintenance and preventing fires. But the last question I have on this, I buy a fire extinguisher. It's good through a certain date. Does being in like, how do I say, harsh weather or environments or something change that, right?

Ryan Spelman (21:55)
She's

gonna have the same thing.

Justin Brackenrich (21:56)
Alright, if I'm leaving it on my tractor, which is being stored in the barn and let's say it gets below zero this winter, versus having it out there when it's 90 or 100 in my barn, should I be taking that off and bringing it in? You know what I'm asking.

Rob Nese (22:11)
Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, it'll stay right on the outside store between X, Y and Z temperature. Extinguisher is the ABC extinguishers that we normally see are powder type and they just have a propellant in there in a powder. So, you know, they're not freezing shut. I'm sure that it's going to have an operating temperature on the side there because at some point. Too cold might be too cold, but generally speaking.

No, because they want to make these so that there's as little guesswork or room for error as possible. If you have to take it off every day, then you're going to forget to put it on one day. fire extinguishers are meant to travel with equipment and be in hot environments, cold environments. I don't think that you'd be hard pressed to find an environment in the United States that is so

harsh that it's not viable to leave a fire extinguisher on there.

Justin Brackenrich (23:05)
just as a general knowledge, right? So I'm not a fire expert. Don't take this as gospel for anything. But within a quick Google, what they're saying is from some reputable brands, they're saying operating temperatures are minus 40 to positive 120.

Rob Nese (23:21)
I actually just googled it too, yep, so-

Justin Brackenrich (23:22)
Okay,

yeah, so you'd have a hard time finding that anywhere in this country that you would be running equipment.

Rob Nese (23:29)
Of eventually too cold. I'm sure it can be too cold, but like I said, they have pressurized water cans, which is a different type of extinguisher for different types of scenarios. Obviously that wouldn't do so well in a barn below 32 degrees. But ABC extinguishers, the powder type that we're talking about, are made to be there when you need them and not have to worry about forgetting it or it not working when you want it to.

Justin Brackenrich (23:55)
So outside of fire extinguishers, what other important equipment should we be maintaining and kind of monitoring? And maybe if you give us some frequency, we should be doing these things so that our emergency equipment's working when we need it.

Rob Nese (24:10)
So

in terms of fire safety, smoke detectors are huge. I think a lot of people probably think, well, I can't have a smoke detector in a barn because I'm starting equipment. There's dust there, you know, it's going to go off all the time. And that's absolutely true. But there's fire alarm systems that aren't just smoke detectors. We have heat detectors as well. Think about in industry, you know, lot of industrial applications, they couldn't have smoke detectors because

of the processes that they're doing. So they do make heat detectors. So it's not cheap. It's not going to cost 30 bucks to get heat detectors installed in your barn, but it will be worth the headache of avoiding a fire. Now, obviously, heat detector won't activate until there's enough heat to activate it. But at that point in time, it still may be something that a fire extinguisher can take care of rather than not knowing until

there's flames coming out every side of the barn. So we can install heat detectors in our barns and facilities. That's something that really a technician would have to do. You'd have to hire a company to come out and do that. But you can have a monitored alarm system just like you have in your house. So when you're talking about how big and expensive a farming operation is, a couple thousand dollars to prevent your barn burning down is probably worth it. Now I understand on

family farm, they probably aren't going to spend $5,000 to get a detection system in their barn. And, you know, we've gone for how long without them. So there's no problem with that. But to add a little bit of extra safety there, you can have something installed. And especially if you're living on the farm, you could get a notification or a phone call from a monitoring company that says, Hey, we're detecting some heat in your barn. And you may be able to get out there before it gets

you know, unmanageable.

Justin Brackenrich (26:01)
So that was the first thing I thought when you mentioned these detectors is if it's in the barn, no one's there to hear it. Right? Cause I'm sure most of these fires, especially if it's related to a heat source or something like that, if you're there, probably not happening. So I think that's a good point is some of these are, you hopefully Bluetooth or wifi and technology is great, right? ⁓ You just might have to do some digging to find them.

Rob Nese (26:22)
Yep. And just like home security systems, they even have monitoring companies. you, of course it's another service that costs more money. But someone would be monitoring it 24 seven and their, their service gets a phone call or notification that says heat detector at one, two, three main street. And they call the local fire company and say, Hey, we have a heat detector activated at this address. Go check it out.

Ryan Spelman (26:46)
Now, Rob, you might not be have an answer to this, but I'm curious, like in environmental, when we have environmental issues, there's a lot of like conservation grants and stuff like that that we can use to help farmers get some build, you know, the barriers around their barn, the gutter systems, things like that. Are there any such like fire safety kind of grants that folks might?

be able to utilize to upgrade, let's say, know, whether they want heat detectors on their farm. Are there any opportunities like that?

Rob Nese (27:17)
⁓ so I've never researched anything like that specifically for a farm, but you mentioned, what was the term you used for the grants?

Ryan Spelman (27:24)
Like well, I'm thinking conservation grants when it comes to like environmental issues if there's any such similar programs or grants that we can use to help farmers upgrade their fire systems

Rob Nese (27:37)
Yeah, so I don't know of any specific to farms, but a grant that is looking to help with conservation and safety measures on farms and safety of the environment around the farm. know grants are typically worded so that they're very specific, but you save a lot of the environment around a barn by not burning it down.

While that's not what people generally think of, I think maybe it's something that people could look into because it wouldn't have been your first thought before. But when you think about trying to mitigate an emergency, the best way to mitigate an emergency is to just not have one at all. And money could be spent to try to prevent those and be very worth it. I can't speak and say that I know of specific grant opportunities that exist there.

But I think money spent on something like that could be just as beneficial as, you know, something that is retroactive, you know, being proactive is even better.

Justin Brackenrich (28:35)
I think that's so true in everything, right? If you're a farmer and you're listening to this or you're a consultant that has your office or you're even thinking about your home, right? Like I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with my wife about spending $100 for, you know, fire detectors or.

We've got natural gas in our home in the conversation Well, you should invest in a natural gas detector to put in where your heater is right in you think about all these things and then you Google it or you look it up and you're like I don't know $55 well You know, I'll just stick my nose in there once a week or something and see if I you know And you can like really talk yourself out of this But in the instance and you know knock on wood God forbid anything happened that 55 or 100 or 200 dollars pales in comparison to

the actual losses that you can have for this. And I think like, you just have to be really strict with your self-discipline and say like, nope, we're not gonna skip this. This is, you know, not going to dinner this week. We're buying a smoke detector, right? And find some way to make that work.

Rob Nese (29:38)
Absolutely right. mean, it's it's insurance. It's not an insurance policy, but it's it's insurance. It's a gamble, just like any insurance is. Yeah, I could save a couple hundred bucks and not have someone listen to my alarm system. Well, you already spent money putting the alarm system in. And if it gets used and you don't know that it got activated, you're going to think, man, if I only I would have spent those two hundred dollars to have someone call me in the middle of the night and say, hey, your alarm's going off. Absolutely. Self-discipline is the perfect.

term there. No one wants to spend money that they think is going to go to waste and nobody thinks they're going to have a fire. You know, that's a common thing we talk about the fire services. Nobody thinks their house is going to catch on fire. Nobody thinks that they're going to be the one in the car accident today. Why would you? But having that self discipline to realize that, you know, maybe maybe this is worth it. It's a gamble, but you're gambling for your life and your property, really.

Ryan Spelman (30:28)
Yeah, so maybe we can branch now into, we had a fire. How do we respond, right? So, you know, whether this is equipment fire or barn fire, do you have any rules of thumb of like, you know, how quickly to call your local fire department, how to do that properly and how to get the right people there and when to call, when to not call.

Rob Nese (30:49)
Yeah, so couple of huge things that it seems obvious you call 911, they show up, they put the fire out, right? You can make it way harder on the first responders or you can make it way easier. Sometimes 911 will get a call and basically all they can tell us is we heard some screaming, someone said fire and they hung up. Well, we'll show up, but you know, we could be a little bit more prepared if we had some better info. So best thing you can do, call 911 immediately. You're not going to get charged.

I can't speak for every inch of the country, but I know that around here, we don't charge for fire protection services. That's paid for by your tax money. So you call us out and we show up and you say, I saw a glow. I swear it was something. Well, we're going to have a quick laugh and say, well, maybe you need get, you know, maybe you need some better glasses, but hey, thank God there's no problem. You're not going to get charged for that.

I think people sometimes hesitate because they don't want to be annoying. You we get, I live in a college town, we get students all the time, they call for a smell of this or that, and then they're embarrassed. And we say, look, it was either you go to sleep wondering if you're going to wake up the next day, or you call us and potentially bear the embarrassment of there being no problem. You know, so I think people need to call early and often when they think they need help. The other thing you can do is have a plan in place. So

You know, someone says there's a fire. What is the first thing you're going to do? Well, of course, call 911. But then what's the first thing you're going to do after that? Do you have animals that you can go open up a gate? Do you have equipment that you can move out to prevent from getting worse? Now, we don't want anyone putting themselves in a bad situation, but if there's fire or smoke coming from the top of your barn and you can go and open a gate at the bottom to let all your cattle out.

By all means, please do. That's something that we can't train individuals on, but you can make that call yourself and determine if it's still safe enough for you to try to do any type of salvaging of your property. The other really big thing that people can do is when they call 911, stay on the phone, give us as much info as you can. Let us know what you're seeing, what's happening, but also how can we...

best get there and what can we best do? There's a lot of areas in our first do where there's bridges that we can't go over. But there is farm roads on the other side of that bridge that may take us three extra minutes to get there. But it's the difference between us taking three minutes to go the long way around or sitting 2000 feet from the barn because we can't get over this 85 year old bridge.

So the one I'm thinking about specifically, and we haven't had a fire here, but we have a far about two miles from here that if they were to call and not really give a whole lot of instruction, we would probably show up at the address and wouldn't be able to get across the

So.

other farm roads there and if they could say, hey, go this way, someone will be there to see us, but we're now going to be able to get 100 feet from the barn rather than 2000 feet from the barn. So really just staying on the phone, giving us the most info you can and having that plan in place so that you're not thinking on your feet and not later thinking, my God, I should have just told them to come around the backside and that would have been easier. Thinking of that worst case scenario and

knowing what you would do and telling everyone on the farm the same thing, because you're not always going to be there.

Ryan Spelman (34:18)
Yeah, so is there anything as a farmer, so if I want to be prepared for that situation, right, you mentioned if there's a bridge, right, that you know is not accessible and there's a better way to get to your farm or certain structures, is it good to be proactive with your fire department, know, provide some maps of your farm in particular, maybe some notes on where things are, how to access things, is there anything that you guys would like to see from farmers?

Rob Nese (34:46)
Absolutely. It's such a good question. I'm glad you brought up 30 years ago, you know, you could call the fire department, tell them that and hopefully they pass that message around or put the map in the truck, but it's going to depend who's on the truck that day. know, central Pennsylvania and most of Pennsylvania is volunteer fire stations. So you might have somebody that took the phone call and knows, I know exactly how get to this farm. Or it might be somebody that, you know, just never got that message and doesn't know. Now we have a lot of softwares that

Most fire departments use, because it's as easy as having an iPad and an app that help us pre-plan. So for instance, if you were to call here today, I would say, here's my email, shoot me a map of your farm with some info, and I'm going to upload that. So then when we get dispatched, it'll come up with those documents for me and tell me, this is the best route of travel. Here's a map of the farm from overhead. We can even drop icons on that map and say, propane tanks over here.

or the driveway is really steep over here, you can't access it during the winter. If fire companies aren't using that type of software, still having that info in someone's ear is better than nothing. But absolutely, us having information beforehand, whether it's paper copy, it's ideally on an app with a lot of information that we can upload or worst case scenario, but better than nothing, word of mouth.

can really change how an incident starts and finishes.

Justin Brackenrich (36:07)
So that's an interesting conversation because I've been looking and I couldn't find it, but years ago we used to do a presentation as part of our core trainings on pesticide storage and safety. And part of that was you need to have your, at the time they were MSDS, now I think they're SDS forms, right? This safety data sheet for all of your pesticides. You should store that in a binder.

you should make, even if it's a hand drawn map with like some X's and keys saying this is pesticide storage, this is fuel storage, this is propane, kind of et cetera, that this binder should be part of not only where you store your stuff, but there should be one kept at the home. So that if you're not there and something happens, the fire department can show up, someone can walk out and hand-rob the binder and say here's everything that we think you should know.

I mean, that still sounds like it's probably a pretty good practice that people should be implementing.

Rob Nese (37:02)
Absolutely. And it's even better now because we can actually have that, you know, firsthand. It's no secret that if the fire department pulls up and there's flames coming out of everywhere, finding the right person to give a binder to and having a quick conversation with them is probably going to be pretty tough. So the more info that we can have ahead of time, the better. So yeah, those SDS sheets, that could be...

Now, this is going to depend on the fire department, but if you call down and they say, yeah, here's our fax number, you might be able to just fax that over them, email it to them. And then either they can have that in a binder or they could have that on the app they use. I know we have hard copies of lot of preplans in our command vehicle that responds to every structure. But we also have that on on our app. We use an app called I am responding and I would be able to pull that right up and see all kinds of documents about the farm.

⁓ even see distances. So I know, you know, this hydrant is this far from the barn or especially if you're out off the beaten path and a lot of farms don't have hydrants, tell them about water sources. That really is huge. Water is one of the biggest problems when it comes to rural firefighting. Now we bring tankers with us and we try to bring as much water as we can, but until you get everything in motion,

It takes a little bit. So if we can get there and put our first fire engine near the barn, start putting some water down and put our second one, you know, a hundred yards away near a pond or creek, um, and start drafting water out of there. It's going to be a lot better than if we find out that that creek was there 30 minutes in.

Ryan Spelman (38:35)
that's a good point with the water there and something folks might not be aware of. And I know some farms like Ag Operations are required to have a certain capacity water tank. Now,

I'm curious, we've talked about a lot of these things we can do to prevent. Do you have any other notes of things that farmers should prepare when it comes to emergency plan or fire suppression equipment that we haven't talked about yet?

Rob Nese (39:00)
The two biggest ones are of course the detectors and fire extinguishers, making sure people are trained on them, making sure everything's up to date. Alternatively, I was thinking about this when I was talking about water, people can actually install on their property things that make it easier for us. They could install what's called a dry hydrant, which is just a pipe that goes down to maybe a stream that's

a little bit in the woods that might be tough for us to get to, and basically pops up a pipe right at whatever location we can pull water from that pipe. You could install a dry hydrant on your property for probably $1,000 that gives us basically access to water right where we need it rather than having to worry about, it too muddy to get down there? Is it too icy to get down to that creek? So that's something that could be done.

But really just fire prevention. mean, we it's a topic that we just beat to death when we go into schools and do public education events, because ideally we just won't have fires to have to go to. Right. You can't prevent everything. You can't prevent catastrophe or an act of nature. But prevention and making sure that everybody knows the plan is really it's key to everything.

Ryan Spelman (40:17)
So I'm curious,

if you have any real life example to help some folks kind of think about this in their own mind of where the proper planning helped avoid a major fire or improper planning made it a lot worse, just so people can kind of contextualize this and think about it in a story, you know?

Rob Nese (40:38)
Sure. proper planning, usually with fires, we don't see it a whole lot because a lot of time we don't get notified, especially on farms. Now, if it's in an apartment building or something, you're still going to get 12 people calling 911 and we show up and find out, yeah, there was a grease fire that happened in this apartment and they were able to put it out with an extinguisher. On a farm, it's usually we show up because there's a big problem or

Hey, they prevented something bad from happening and no need to call. So we, we usually don't go out to, ⁓ to incidents that have been narrowly escaped because it's no secret that, you know, farm work is blue collar. And once they're, the problem is solved, farmers want to get back to their business, you know, they're, they're problem solvers. They're going to say, we don't, we don't need the fire department. That's fine. You know,

That's no issue, but we don't normally go to narrow misses on farms. It's either they don't need us or they do need us. Some quick examples of things where planning could have helped more. I've been to more than one fire in a barn that was from spontaneous combustion. Whether they did their due diligence and just missed something or it just wasn't even a thought to them.

Like we talked about the science would have told them, that's not safe right now. We just had a combine fire last year that just came from a clog. There was a grain that was, or hay that was clogging in a combine they didn't notice for a little bit. So just being vigilant and making sure the operation is going according to plan could prevent that.

I can think of one other where we had some animals die because best we could figure was a goat had either kicked or knocked over a heat lamp. A goat had just had some babies and they had a heat lamp in there to keep them warm and it had somehow got knocked over. And I can't say that they could have done a better job. I don't know the exact scenario or why it happened. But looking back,

I'm sure that there was some way that it probably could have been prevented with being secured better or being further away from combustibles. But yeah, usually we don't know that these things happen until they happen.

Ryan Spelman (42:46)
So, and I hate to keep extending this, but you kind of hit on something that we did want to follow up on earlier, but proper heating sources in a barn. Do you have any notes on, you know, what are the safest options and what aren't? Because I think we have one of these statistics, it's a little outdated now, but that heaters might be the leading cause of barn fires in a lot of cases.

Rob Nese (43:10)
Yeah, so I mean the safest thing you can do is have your heat source away If you can somehow have forced air, you know your heater outside Or the heater behind a closed door where if there was a fire it's not going to spread really quickly and And have that, know pushing air where it needs to be now Setting up an air handling system in a barn isn't easy but even if you can have you know a a propane powered

Torpedo heater that is using metal ducting to force that air in but the torpedo heaters outside the barn Just trying to keep that as far away from combustibles as possible is is huge What we often see is just things are way too close to combustibles, you know in a barn The barn itself is usually combustible unless it's a newer barn. That's usually old dried out Boards but

especially if the heat is being used for animals, there's got to be a lot of hay around. There's got to be, you know, potentially blankets around. Definitely a lot of combustibles in that area. you can't prevent combustibles from catching on fire when science says that they want to catch on fire. So if that heat source is too close and the combustibles get to the right temperature, it's going to happen. So the best thing you can do is really keep the heat source as far away as possible and move the heat into the barn.

The source can be far away as long as you get the heat there. The source doesn't necessarily have to be right there among these combustibles.

Ryan Spelman (44:33)
Yeah, that's a good point. mean, I think it is a task to do that. But again, we're talking about things that can save your barn, right? To have some forced air to come in from the heater. I mean, then you kind of eliminate that factor, right? You have hay in the barn, you have combustibles in the barn. it gives you one less thing that you have to worry about every day. So maybe we can move on here to our last kind of thing that we want you to talk about here, which is

I know you spend a lot of your time also going over farm rescue. So I just wanted to give you some time to highlight some of the rescue coursework that you do and some other things that maybe farmers can keep in mind to be prepared for.

Rob Nese (45:15)
Sure. It all starts with safety. It sounds cliche, but it all starts with safety. If there's a warning label on something, it's there for a reason. The reason that PTO shafts have a picture of, you know, don't have your shoelaces untied, don't have your drawstrings hanging down, because it's happened to somebody, right? So I would say most rescues that we end up in have to do with safety precautions, just either not being followed.

⁓ not being put in place at all or somebody just didn't know. Oftentimes, you know, we see that I think you'd be hard pressed to find a farm where they say, yeah, we have plenty of help. Actually, we have too much help. You know, we work short hours and we have too much help and our equipment is too nice. You're not going to find that anywhere. People are working long hours. You got to get jobs done sometimes. Sometimes corners get cut.

And that's where bad things happen. And I can't fault people for cutting corners or thinking, ⁓ you know, I'll be okay doing this just this one time, because sometimes you have to do what you have to do when you're trying to get, you know, something done. And a lot of tasks that are done on a farm are, have a time constraint, but really just paying attention to farm safety, you know.

using air monitoring before entering atmospheres that could be harmful, making sure equipment's being used properly with proper PPE, making sure that we know where people are at all times. you're felling trees, got to make sure you know where people are so they don't get hit. You're operating equipment or you're loading something with the PTO going. You shouldn't be there anyway with the PTO going, but

make sure you don't have any loose clothing, ideally turn it off. 99 % of safety related accidents on a farm could be prevented. And it's not that people don't know, it's just that, you know, we get so set in our ways or, you know, duty calls and we have to cut a corner. You know, and I feel bad a lot of the time.

when we go to these accidents and it's not just out of stupidity, it was just out of necessity and somebody was just trying to do the right thing to get the job done and it maybe wasn't the safest option.

Justin Brackenrich (47:29)
Yeah, think we, Ryan, I was racking my brain and thinking we did an ag farm safety episode a while back and you're talking to Linda Fetzer and those groups. I think one of the more common ones she mentioned was just slips and falls, right? And that's probably not something that they're going to call your group out and that you're going to see as much of. But I remember our conversation when we did that was

how to keep your mind on less than five tasks at one time. Because just like you said, right, no one's got all the help they can stand. how do you, maybe this is self-discipline again, but how do you focus on what you're doing and only what you're doing? Because you know there's 50 things that have to get done today. You know you're only one person, you've only got so much time. I really think at least from what I've seen with a lot of this and kind of echoing what you're saying is it's just focus, right? One thing at a time.

knowing your limitations as a person because we also talked about ⁓ vision impairments and you know driving in the dark because well I got to get this done tonight but understanding your own limitations can also be a big factor in and just kind of helping avoid some of this.

Rob Nese (48:35)
Yeah, I mean, you summed it up with discipline. Hey, I got I got to get something done in the dark and the headlights don't work on this. Well, do you need to have it done? And if you need to have it done, do you have another piece of equipment that can do it? Do you have somebody that can come out with you and spot you? Do you have a flashlight that you can use? You know, it's not ideal. But usually, you know, when we're thinking about what we need to have done, a lot of the time, it might not

need to be done. We really want to get this done by tomorrow or else it's really going to be a pain. But is that worth sacrificing your life or your safety? And the answer is almost always going to be no. Now, that's not easy to just say, well, I know I could really get hurt doing this, but if I don't get this done tonight, man, is it going to be a pain tomorrow? We're humans. We're probably going to do it anyway. But that self-discipline is huge just in following the procedures that we have in place and

Really recognizing the hazards first. I think that's a huge thing is people don't recognize hazards and I don't want to go too far off, but I can give you some examples that come to mind and I'm not picking on the Amish community at all But I know we have we have a fair amount of accidents on Amish farms Because they're not using a lot of the same equipment that that other farms are using In the past couple years we had an accident on an Amish farm

about 10, 15 miles down the road where a father and two sons died in a grain bin or a silo because of silo gas. And I don't know exactly what happened and every step they took. But I can tell you that if the first person would gone up there with a gas meter, which they probably didn't have on hand, it wouldn't have happened. You know, I can't fault them for not having a gas meter.

⁓ I can't fault them if they didn't know that they needed a gas meter. But I can say as a fact that if certain precautions would have been taken, none of them would have lost their lives. We had somebody get stuck in a grain bin up to their face about a year ago. When we got in there, you could only see his eyes. And it was because the grain had crusted and he was in there trying to break it up.

didn't have a harness on, you know, and really, even if you had a harness on, most farmers are going to tell you, you shouldn't be in there at all. You need to find a piece of equipment to take care of that or do it from the top with a pole or something like that. You know, so just recognizing these hazards beforehand and, and, and making sure that the people doing these jobs know why they're doing them a certain way. You know, if you don't tell somebody, Hey,

we don't go in a grain bin to break up crust because you could fall in, get sucked in. They might be down in there thinking, the old guy doesn't know what he's talking about. I'm fine standing in here and you're fine until you're not.

Ryan Spelman (51:23)
Yeah, I think that's a very important message and one that's close to home because I think we all can think of some accidents that we know of that could have been prevented. And, you know, a big one is being properly harnessed around some of this equipment and ground grain equipment. mean, that's that's just huge. It takes a little bit extra time, but it's important to do. And the silo gas, you know, that's another one to be concerned. So maybe part of this is also understanding

the equipment that we're working with, right? If we don't really understand the equipment that we're working around and what the hazards are, we should seek out someone that can help us understand that because without knowing that, know, siloed gas might not be something you're looking out for. So I think it's important that you hit on that because it's a good reminder for all of us, you know, to think through our operation and huh, actually I don't know what are some of the risks of working with that TMR mixer, you know, I don't know what the proper precautions are. Well, I bet you there's

someone even if it you know it might be a company sales rep or something that sells these things that can help you to understand what are some of the risks what are some of the safety things that you you can seek out

Rob Nese (52:30)
Yeah. And just like I said, the, you know, no one thinks their house is going to catch on fire, you know, or their barn, they've done the same thing year after year after year. I'm sure with that silo gas incident, they'd probably done the same thing, same time of year, year after year after year. But, you know, you have a drier summer, the nitrogen fertilizer doesn't get leached down into the ground as much, more of it ends up in the plant. When you harvest it, it...

decomposes slightly different, creates more gas than it did last year. Little things can change these. And if you had no idea that that was a potential risk, then what are you to do?

Ryan Spelman (53:05)
Yeah, think, well, I think we're going to wrap up here. I'm kind of just plugging some resources. You mentioned earlier FEMA, and it looks like that's a good source for some information on fires and stuff and statistics. So I'll plug that. We have another page on fire prevention and barns. Are there any resources that you would like to plug it and that we can put in the show notes? ⁓

Rob Nese (53:27)
Absolutely.

Your biggest one, your local fire department. Because while information on safety and tactics and precautions is going to be pretty much the same across the board, having that relationship with your local fire department so that they know what you have, who you have on your farm, what hazards you have, it's huge. Making that relationship, getting them the info they need.

them getting you info that you might need from them is huge. know, a lot of very rural fire departments, maybe they don't have time to come out and do a three hour walkthrough of your farm and see everything, but I'm sure somebody can either spend 10 minutes on the phone with you or come out for 20 minutes and see what kind of operation you're running. So really, I think the biggest resource is just being on the same page with them.

Obviously every homeowner in every jurisdiction can't call the fire department, have them come out and pre plan their house. But farms are huge operations with lots of implications and a high chance of the fire department showing up one day or another for some reason. And I think making that connection is huge.

Ryan Spelman (54:32)
Great, thank you. Well, we appreciate you coming on Rob. I think this has been an awesome opportunity to learn a little bit more about the dangers of fire on our farms and how we can prevent them and how we can work with our local fire department. So thank you for coming on. We appreciate it. Justin, you're unmuted. there anything?

Justin Brackenrich (54:52)
You know, I guess just as towards the end of this, it felt a little more bleak, right? We still, you know, I think that it's a really good message, right? What we're trying to do with this is make sure people aren't having these accidents and these incidents. And I think this always resonates with some of these farmers that are, you know, we talked about the hay in the barn, but I see accidents that happen with farmers that are 60 or 70 years old, right? They've done it this way forever and things still happen. So

We don't want everyone to just stop farming and shut down and close their doors, right? Because accidents are looming. We want you to just be aware of what options you have to prevent some of these steps. And hopefully Rob never has to come visit you in one of these terrible situations. And so, you know, it's very serious, but now's a great time. We're in the winter. Take a little bit of time, scout your barn, scout your places, get on the internet and find some options to help avoid some of these issues.

Rob Nese (55:44)
Yeah, prevention is key. And you're right. It did get a little bleak. And I apologize. Glad we can end on a better note. I think one other real big point to drive home is please ask for help. know, look, I'm as stubborn as anybody. And by nature, blue collar workers are probably as and farmers are probably more stubborn than most. But just ask for help. You're not going to get charged if you if you're embarrassed that you called and you didn't need us. Well, you live it down.

So call early and call often because it might just be the right decision and that call might ⁓ really change a minute earlier than you may have called may have completely changed the situation. So yeah, I think it's important people know that this doesn't cost and the fire department's here to help call if you need us.

Ryan Spelman (56:33)
Yeah, definitely. That's a great way to leave it. A positive note. Make some friends in your fire department. We all need people to talk to, so use that option as well. All right. Well, thank you again, Rob, for coming on. Thanks for having me. Yeah, thank you. And to our listeners, thank you guys for listening to this episode, and we'll see you on the next episode of the Agronomy Highlights podcast.