A farm safety organization created three decades ago in the wake of a tragedy in Iowa is going to dissolve at the end of the year. Marilyn Adams created “Farm Safety For Just Kids” one year after her 11-year-old son Keith died in an accident invovling a gravity flow wagon in 1986.  “At that time there were no farm safety programs for 4-H or F-F-A, the organizations that probably should have been carrying the torch at that time, but they just weren’t. There just wasn’t public demand,” Adams says. Adams wanted to prevent other families from having to go through what she went through.

“It was hard to do when I first started it — but you know I didn’t know any better,” Adams says. “I did it without any feasibility study or anything, it was just pulling on my heart strings of something positive to focus on.” Adams was the face of the organization and went to numerous appearances where she talked about farm safety and her story. She says now is a good time to retire from that role.

“I’ve been thinking about the need to wind things down at Farm Safety For Just Kids. There’s a lot of organizations that are doing children’s farm safety. If you take a look at the website you will see it is all over the world. And it wasn’t that way 30 years ago when I first started,” Adams says. Adams says the group has accomplished what she started out to do 30 years ago as the farm safety movement has grown substantially.

“It’s incorporated into the agricultural companies, it’s incorporated into the universities, the health departments, and the list goes on,” Adams says. The Farm Safety For Just Kids organization will continue its work through the Progressive Agriculture Foundation (PAF). Adams started the movement to help her deal with the death of her son — and while it helped her to do something positive — she says thoughts of Keith are always there.

“I think of him when we mow the yard, I think of him when we plant trees, when we harvest — he is just still a part of our lives,” according to Adams. “You know the other kids grew up and left home, he left home and didn’t grow up. So, it is hard, but a lot of good has come out of it, and I am sure he is still out there pointing his mother in the right direction.” Adams has some simple plans for retirement.

“My future holds canning green beans and babysitting, and assisting on the farm and running errands,” Adams says. The assetts of Farm Safety For Just Kids will be donated to the Birmingham, Alabama-based P-A-F. As part of the transition the organization will donate five thousand dollars to both the National 4-H Council and National F-F-A Organization to recognize their advocacy work for youth safety in agriculture.

(Radio Iowa)

An Iowa State University graduate who was held hostage in Lebanon for more than six years has died. Thomas Sutherland died this past weekend at his home in Fort Collins, Colorado, he was 85. Sutherland was a native of Scotland who received his masters and P-H-D in animal breeding at Iowa State University. He began his teaching career at Colorado State, and was serving as the dean of the agriculture faculty at American University in Beirut, Lebanon when he was kidnapped on June 9th of 1985.

Thomas Sutherland (Image from blacktie-colorado.com)

Sutherland was held with fellow Iowa State graduate Terry Anderson, a reporter who had also been kidnapped, until they were released in 1991. Sutherland is survived by his wife Jean, who is the daughter of the late William Murray, an I-S-U professor who help create Living History Farms.

(Radio Iowa)

Cooler, more seasonable weather is in Iowa’s forecast this week as last week’s extreme high temperatures in the upper 90s are giving way to the 80s and even the upper 70s. Iowa’s crops appear to have weathered the triple-digit heat indices well, according to Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U-S-D-A. “It looks like the Midwest goes right back to nearly ideal temperatures,” Rippey says. “Just a little blip in this path towards what has been a pretty good crop year overal for corn and soybeans.”

There’s been fairly timely rain across much of the state throughout the growing season, he says, so there should not be fears of a crop disaster. Rippey adds, last week’s heat wave can’t be blamed on the La Nina weather pattern because it hasn’t really formed yet. “Years that we see El Nino quickly die out in the spring or early summer, it’s quite common to see mid- to late summer heat and that certainly seems to be the case,” Rippey says. “We got through the early part of the summer without extreme heat. Now, we’re looking at an expansion of heat but again, it doesn’t look like a major, summer-long event here for the Midwest.”

Looking back, Rippey says there have been three recent heat waves where crops in the region did very well: 2000, 2004 and 2014. “All three of those turned out to be reasonably good overall crop years for corn,” Rippey says. “2014, that is the existing all-time record corn yield, 171 bushels per acre.”

As rain moves in late on Wednesday and into Thursday, forecasters say parts of Iowa may see highs only in the upper-70s by the end of this week.

(Radio Iowa)