Dashboard Tracks Farm Injuries Across Five Midwest States
A University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign research team has built an interactive tool covering agricultural injuries from 2016 to 2024.
Updated on Nov. 2, 2026 in Agriculture
Live Poll
Do you think your community is doing enough to prevent farm injuries?
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have developed an interactive Agricultural Injury Dashboard covering injuries in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin from 2016 to 2024. The tool lets users explore cause, type, location, timing, and victim demographics through customizable graphs and charts.
Why it matters
The dashboard gives Extension educators and community members a way to see injury patterns that may not be visible within a single community, since serious farm accidents occur rarely. For Illinois residents, it offers a regional view of risks that affect local farm families and workers.
The dashboard draws on the AgInjuryNews database, which categorizes agricultural injuries from U.S. and Canadian news reports, and it covers Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin from 2016 to 2024. The source does not report total case counts, and it is unclear how many injuries go unreported in local news.
The players
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
A public research university in Illinois whose research team built the Agricultural Injury Dashboard as a tool for Extension educators and community members.
Illinois Department of Public Health
The state agency that reviews the university's injury information and adds missing cases to the dataset.
The details
Users can click a year and an injury type, and each chart highlights that injury type alongside age, gender, and fatality distribution. The Illinois Department of Public Health reviews the university's information to add missing cases, and future updates will incorporate the researchers' own data.
Timeline
2016: Start of the injury data covered by the dashboard.
2024: End of the injury data covered by the dashboard.
Market Landscape
The dashboard extends the AgInjuryNews database, which catalogs farm injuries reported in U.S. and Canadian news, by turning that record into an interactive regional tool. It positions Midwestern farm safety data as something Extension educators can use to compare communities rather than rely on isolated anecdotes.
Farm families and agricultural workers in Illinois can use the dashboard to see injury patterns by cause, age, and region before planning safety measures. Grain bin safety, which the research identifies as among the most preventable farm accidents, is a practical area where the data may guide prevention efforts.
The takeaway
Because serious farm accidents are rare in any single community, comparing regional injury data is one of the few ways to spot preventable patterns. Grain bin entrapments in particular can be avoided with planning, so reviewing local risks before the planting and harvest seasons is a useful step.
Further reading
Explore more in Agriculture coverage for the wider farm safety landscape in Illinois.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Herald-Whig.
Live Poll
Do you think your community is doing enough to prevent farm injuries?
