Farm Injury Dashboard Maps Midwest Hazards, 2016-24
Illinois and neighboring farm operators can benchmark grain bin and machinery injury patterns against regional data.
Updated on Nov. 2, 2026 in Agriculture
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University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign researchers have built an interactive Agricultural Injury Dashboard covering farm injuries in Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin from 2016 to 2024. For Illinois agricultural operators, it offers a region-specific view of injury causes, types, and victim demographics.
Why it matters
The project began as a tool for Extension educators to study injuries in their own communities and compare regions. Because fatal farm accidents are rare enough that patterns can go unnoticed within a single community, pooled multi-year data gives operators a broader baseline for spotting risks.
The dashboard covers five Midwestern states across 2016 to 2024 and draws on news reports across the U.S. and Canada. The figures shown reflect news-reported cases rather than a complete census of farm injuries, and the source does not quantify how many incidents may be absent.
The players
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
A public research university whose team built the dashboard, with Extension educators as the intended users of its regional injury data.
Illinois Department of Public Health
The state agency that reviews the university's database to add missing injury cases, giving it a regulatory and public-health role in the record.
The details
Users select a year and an injury type, and every chart then highlights that type alongside age, gender, and fatality distribution. The underlying AgInjuryNews database categorizes injuries by cause, type, location, time, and victim demographics. The Illinois Department of Public Health reviews the university's information to add cases that are missing from the record.
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 is built on AgInjuryNews, a database that catalogs agricultural injuries drawn from news reports across the U.S. and Canada. It adds an interactive, five-state Midwestern layer on top of that national news-based record.
Farm operators in the Midwest can use the dashboard to compare injury patterns by type, age, and fatality rate against their own operations. Grain bin safety and other preventable hazards are the areas where regional comparisons may most usefully shape training and procedures.
The takeaway
Treat the dashboard as a regional baseline when reviewing your own hazard controls, especially for grain bin entrapment, which the source identifies as among the most preventable farm accidents. Because the data is news-based and may be incomplete, pair it with your own incident records before drawing conclusions.
Further reading
For more on the sector this tool tracks, see Agriculture coverage across the state.
Source note: This article includes information reported by Herald-Whig.
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