A 15-year-old girl lay still in the hospital bed. She looked like a mummy. From the shoulders up, that is. Tightly woven white gauze extended upward from the tip of her nose covering her eyes and forehead, over the back of her head and down her neck. The bandaging stopped abruptly at her shoulders. Only her mouth and chin were exposed. A clear tube extended from her nose and snaked from sight under her arm. Darker, thicker bandages bulged at her eyes.

She was obviously sedated. For the hour I was there, she made no noise. Aside from the rise and fall required by breath, she never moved. A man and a woman occupied molded-plastic chairs wedged between the hospital wall and her bed, discomfited. They attempted no conversation or eye contact. I assumed they were her parents.

In the two days my friend shared the semi-private room with her, the bandaged young girl never spoke. Nor did the parents. Nurses confided later that the inhuman power of a spinning shaft had changed their lives forever. The shaft caught that beautiful girl's long hair, twisted it into an inelastic rope and forced it to rip off her scalp from eyelids to neck. The process took less than five seconds. The consequences take a lifetime.

She had no eyelids. No scalp. No skin at all from her ears up. No skin covering her skull or the back of her neck clear down to her shoulders. Gruesome. Unspeakable. I share it only with a father's sense of the horror posed by life's random side.

It's easy to shrug off safety concerns. After all, the odds are with you. Really. How many times have you faced the everyday dangers of farm work? We've all been close to the edge. But we've survived. Trouble is, that's the shorthand view. What we have to ask ourselves is how our cavalier attitude about safety would withstand the ultimate tragedy. Make no mistake, tragedy lies waiting for opportunity. In my life. And in yours. And worse still, in our children's.

Stop and think. Over your lifetime in just your community, how many people do you know who've been seriously injured? Killed? The longer you think, the more you'll remember. That's just your community. Extrapolate. From an old man crushed during harvest, to a child fatally kicked by a horse, to a young father drowned by an overturned tractor, I can put a name and face to each.

Farming ranks second in the nation in terms of a deadly occupation. I don't know or care what's first. What I do know is that every year 100 children are killed on farms while attempting chores. Every year 100,000 are seriously injured. Analysts blame poor judgment in considering the task and the child's (take your pick): cognitive development, balance, strength, reaction time, coordination, attention span, memory.

Some jobs involving tractors should never be assigned to children for any reason: pulling an oversized or overweight load; pulling to dislodge a stuck or implanted object; applying pesticides or anhydrous. Think and add to that list yourself.

As an adult, you must demonstrate how to perform a job correctly. And as hard and inconvenient as it is, you can never tolerate shortcuts. No thing or no lecture replaces good example. Make safety mandatory. Establish procedures. Go over those rules until your child can repeat them from memory.

We must both do all we can to ensure no child lies in a hospital bed because of ignored safety concerns. It's been 10 years since I saw her lying bandaged; 10 years since I saw her parents in their despair. I see them still. I always will. And it breaks my heart. Don't allow it to happen to your baby.