Many farm jobs require repetitive motion – doing the same task over and over again. Though sometimes unavoidable, this type of work can cause serious, chronic injuries. Everyone knows of someone who developed a “bad back” after years of field work.
There are only a few ways of preventing such long-term injuries in jobs requiring high rates of repetitive motions such as cutting, picking, bending, lifting and carrying. Where practical, many work crews rotate jobs so that no one has to do such a job for more than an hour or two at a time. Job rotation is a good way to reduce the continued stress of such jobs.
Some jobs have built in breaks – such as the need to move from the picking area to another location where the product is loaded into bins. If the job does not have built in breaks, repetitive motion injuries can be avoided with “micro breaks” of a few seconds every 15 minutes to stop doing the work.
Another type of work break that UC researchers have shown to be effective in reducing pain and other symptoms of highly repetitive tasks is to add a five-minute work break to every working hour that does not already have a break. In other words, take just five minutes to stop working each hour in which you don't have a morning, lunch or afternoon break.