Goodwill and Universities Team Up to Aid Farmers With Disabilities

David Glamm had been raising corn and cows on his southwest Minnesota farm for most of his 47 years when a silo-unloader accident in 2004 claimed his left foot and ankle. A below-the-knee prosthesis allowed him to walk again, but the constant, strenuous labor required to tend his crops and dairy herd left him wondering if he would be able to work the land that had been in his family for three generations.

“Immediately after the accident I was in the hospital for 10 days, but farm work doesn’t stop just because you’re laid up,” Mr. Glamm recalls.

“Friends and neighbors gathered together and milked my cows and did my chores for me,” he says. “Even after I was fitted with my prosthesis, I couldn’t work like I had before; everything is different. You can’t walk as far or climb like you could before — something as simple as walking on uneven ground is treacherous.” He asked himself whether the pragmatic thing would be to sell his herd and begin a new life, but he could not imagine doing anything else.

Thanks in part to the AgrAbility Project, however, Mr. Glamm never had to to find out. “I would not be farming today if not for AgrAbility,” he says of the federally financed program, which since last year has been run as a nationwide partnership between Purdue University’s Breaking New Ground Resource Center and Goodwill Industries International.

“They came to the farm and assessed my situation,” he says. “They can see what you can’t see after you have had an accident or injury. They have experience to know, OK, you lost your leg so you’re going to have these problems with mobility. They can think ahead and help you with modifications or assistive technology you don’t even know you need.”

In the recession, as nonprofit groups are looking to make the most of their resources by collaboration, the AgrAbility Project offers one example of a cutting-edge partnership between a charity and a university.

And in a time of high unemployment, nonprofit programs that help keep people at their jobs, as AgrAbility does for farmers with physical challenges, may hold lessons for other job-readiness projects.

Charities with expertise in aiding people with disabilities make strong partners for state universities’ cooperative-extension services, which bring education on a variety of topics mostly to rural people, says Bill Field, director of the National AgrAbility Project, which maintains headquarters at Purdue University’s Breaking New Ground Resource Center.

“The relationship with a not-for-profit disability organization brings in more passion and perspective specific to disability issues so that each partner gets a bigger bang for their dollar,” he says.

Nonprofit Partnerships

Last year, Purdue University’s Breaking New Ground Resource Center awarded Goodwill Industries International a four-year grant totaling $130,000 per year to provide services at the state level; Goodwill works with cooperative-extension services at each participating state’s land-grant university.

AgrAbility also works on a more limited scale with Easter Seals and the Arthritis Foundation. The national program served 1,284 farmers and ranchers during 2007 and 2008.

Goodwill Industries International, with headquarters in Rockville, Md., was an attractive mate for Purdue in administering the national program.

“Goodwill is one of the largest employers of people with disabilities in the U.S.,” says Mr. Field, “and they have a very strong rural presence. You go to Somerset, Ky., or Burlington, Wyo. — I’ve been to all these little towns, and there’s this little Goodwill thrift store providing employment opportunities for persons with disabilities, recycling, raising money. We’re working with extension offices in those communities, but many of those offices don’t have much training on disability issues.”

Lauren Lawson, a Goodwill spokeswoman, says the AgrAbility partnership fits in with her charity’s mission of training disabled people for jobs. “Goodwill’s mission is to help people find fulfillment through the power of work,” says Ms. Lawson. “In providing assistance to farmers and ranchers and agricultural workers with disabilities, we can help them return to successful careers in farming or other chosen fields.”

She adds that military veterans, some severely injured in the line of duty, are now returning home to rural communities.

“So we are also providing assistance for these veterans, to help them get back to work in agriculture or elsewhere,” she says.

Farming has always been a hazardous occupation.

“For as long as they’ve been keeping track, agriculture is consistently in the top three riskiest occupations, along with mining and construction,” says Mr. Field.

Statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that one out of every five farmers can no longer do essential work because of a disabling condition.

To deal with the problem, the U.S. Department of Agriculture included money in the 1990 Farm Bill to establish a national program to provide support, education, and practical assistance to disabled farmers and ranch workers.

AgrAbility consists of both the national project, and state and regional programs, which work as partnerships between a land-grant university and at least one nonprofit disability organization.

Twenty-seven states have AgrAbility projects, and they, along with the National AgrAbility Project, are supported by the USDA Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service.

Making Adjustments

As a key aspect of their partnership, Purdue and Goodwill have committed to expanding AgrAbility beyond its current 27 states.

“We are choosing three states each year where AgrAbility doesn’t exist and we’re providing training on how the program could support ranchers and farmers,” says Ms. Lawson. “At the end of that year we might not have a full-fledged AgrAbility program in place, but our hope is to establish some kind of program to offer technical assistance or resource referrals to farmers.”

And that can make all the difference: When Mr. Glamm sought the Goodwill/Easter Seals Minnesota AgrAbility Project’s help in 2005, staff members came to thoroughly evaluate his farm operation and his physical abilities, identifying obstacles and recommending farm modifications and assistive devices to deal with them. This advice in hand, he was able to apply to a state agency for money to put the modifications in place — and stay on his farm.

“Mobility is my biggest issue,” says Mr. Glamm, “so we did some cement work in my dairy barn, made a nice sloping platform to walk on instead of steps. Put in safety bars here and there, replaced metal feed carts with lighter plastic ones that push easier. They got me a fence-line feeder so I could feed my stock outside the pen on even ground, instead of walking inside where I could get stuck in the mud or fall over.

“Simple things, mainly, but they made all the difference,” he says.

Just as important, he concludes, “is AgrAbility’s positive attitude. When you are recovering from a catastrophic injury, having someone tell you you can still do what you did before, that’s so much help.”