With the new growing season coming up shortly, it's important to plan for more than just seeding.

This week is Canadian Agricultural Safety Week, and agricultural health and safety specialist Glen Blahey says it's a reminder for farmers and farm families to think about safe farm practices.

"It's all about dialogue," he says, "and hopefully what we're doing is setting the stage for ongoing dialogue for each family to talk about safety during this whole production season. And once the harvest is in the bin, once the cattle are off to market, it's time to sit down and do a reevaluation of how good of a job we did in terms of protecting everyone and what we can do better next year."

One way to ensure farm safety is to determine a safe play area, which could be an area on the farm designated by hedges or fencing, and serves as a way to determine boundaries for kids to understand where it's safe to be on the yard.

"As children from toddlers mature and grow, that understanding of boundaries is really very important to them because they get to understand that when mom or dad or an older sibling or grandparent says, 'this is the boundary, when we're moving grain, we don't want anyone who's not involved in doing the actual work any closer than this point,' the children are familiar with that concept... of safe limit areas."

Blahey says when it comes to getting kids involved in farm work, it's important to assess risks to ensure they won't be in danger. He says it's important for kids to understand how their food is raised and grown, but stresses children are just that — children, not employees.