Farm Safety Week and the Hidden Cost of Manual Mulch Removal

Every September, National Farm Safety and Health Week asks growers to stop and look hard at the tasks that quietly cause the most harm on a farm. Tractor rollovers get the headlines. Rural roadway collisions get the PSAs. But somewhere below the fold is a task nearly every plasticulture grower repeats every single fall, and it rarely gets mentioned in a safety huddle: pulling last season's plastic mulch out of the ground.

This year's observance runs September 21–25, 2026, under the theme "Safety Today, Success Tomorrow!" Monday's focus is equipment and rural roadway safety; Tuesday's is health and wellness. Manual mulch removal sits at the intersection of both, and it's worth reframing as what it actually is: not just an end-of-season chore or a line-item cost, but a recurring safety exposure that's been treated as routine for too long.

A teardown nobody puts on the calendar

Mulch removal doesn't happen in the calm of early spring, when crews are fresh and the schedule has slack in it. It starts in October and November, after harvest, when the same crew that just brought in the crop is asked to go back into the field and pull plastic out of cooling, often wet, ground before the first freeze. It competes for labor and equipment time with fall tillage, cover cropping, and getting the rest of the operation buttoned up for winter. It's the task that gets squeezed into whatever daylight and dry weather is left, by workers who are already at the tail end of a long season.

That's exactly the kind of task farm safety professionals worry about: not a single dramatic hazard, but ordinary fieldwork done under fatigue, time pressure, and deteriorating conditions, which is when routine tasks turn into incidents.

What manual removal actually involves

Removing polyethylene mulch film is not a quick pull-and-go. A 2022 review of end-of-life management options for agricultural mulch film found that operator and manual labor for removal averages about 42 hours per hectare, roughly 17 hours per acre, and that even with that time investment, the process is "labor-intensive, expensive, and incomplete." Film that's been in the field for a full season is brittle, partially buried, and shredded into fragments a few square centimeters across, which means multiple passes and a lot of hand labor to get what mechanical retrieval leaves behind.

Where mechanical retrieval is used, it's typically a tractor-drawn implement, such as a mulch lifter or rotary broom, running the same rows repeatedly to gather torn film and buried fragments. Like any tractor-drawn implement worked at the edges of a field in falling light and softening soil, it carries the ordinary entanglement, rollover, and rough-terrain risks that Monday's equipment and roadway safety theme exists to address. Where it's done by hand, workers are bent over for hours pulling brittle plastic from the soil, which is exactly the kind of repetitive, awkward-posture labor that shows up in musculoskeletal injury data across agriculture. Neither method is quick, and neither is free of physical strain.

The hazards underneath the labor

Beyond the physical strain of the task itself, there's what the material leaves behind. Penn State Extension's review of agricultural plastics notes that workers handling and removing plastic film can be exposed to airborne dust and plastic particles, along with plasticizers, stabilizers, and pesticide residues that adhere to the film's surface. Without gloves, masks, and proper handling procedures, that exposure adds a chemical and respiratory dimension to a task already built around physical exertion.

None of this shows up as a single, reportable incident. It shows up as a strained back in November, a skin irritation nobody connects to the film, a task everyone dreads, but nobody has re-examined. That's precisely the blind spot National Farm Safety and Health Week is designed to close hazards that hide inside routine, unglamorous work.

An incorporation story instead of a removal story

The reason Carbon Nurture exists is that this task doesn't have to happen at all. SoilBond, our soil-biodegradable mulch film, is designed to be tilled directly into the soil at the end of the season and more preferably, according to USDA guidelines, in early spring when fields are prepped for the next season. No pulling, baling, and hauling to a landfill. No mulch lifter passes; no crew bent over brittle plastic in the cold, no dumpster rental or disposal run. The labor, the fuel, and the exposure that come with manual removal are designed out of the process rather than managed around.

That only works, of course, if what goes into the soil is actually safe to leave there. That's why SoilBond has been tested four separate times by an independent, GLP-compliant lab against real field soil, covering plant growth, earthworm survival, and the soil's nitrogen cycle. Growers considering a change to how they handle mulch teardown can review those results in full on our soil safety resource page before making that call.

Where this leaves growers and safety officers

Reframing mulch removal as a safety issue doesn't require new equipment guards or a new PPE policy, though both help in the meantime. It requires the same question National Farm Safety and Health Week asks about every other task on the farm: does this have to be done this way? For a task that costs 17 hours an acre, exposes workers to dust and chemical residue, and gets done by tired crews at the worst time of year, the honest answer is no.

Frequently Asked Questions

When is National Farm Safety and Health Week in 2026? September 21–25, 2026, with the theme "Safety Today, Success Tomorrow!" Each day has a focus area, including equipment and rural roadway safety and health and wellness.

How much labor does manual mulch removal actually take? Research on end-of-life mulch management puts operator and manual labor at roughly 42 hours per hectare (about 17 hours per acre), and even then,the process is typically incomplete, leaving fragments behind in the soil.

What health hazards are associated with removing plastic mulch films? Documented hazards include airborne dust and plastic particle exposure, skin contact with chemical residues such as plasticizers and pesticide adherents, and the musculoskeletal strain of repetitive, bent-over hand labor.

How is a soil-biodegradable mulch film different? Instead of being pulled from the field, baled, and hauled away, a soil-biodegradable film like SoilBond is tilled directly into the soil at season's end, eliminating the removal task and its associated labor and exposure.

References:

Madrid, B., Wortman, S., Hayes, D. G., DeBruyn, J. M., Miles, C., Flury, M., Marsh, T. L., Galinato, S. P., Englund, K., Agehara, S., et al. (2022). End-of-life management options for agricultural mulch films in the United States—A review. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems, 6, Article 921496. https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2022.921496

Michael, J. (2024, January 3). Human health hazards from ag plastics. Penn State Extension. https://extension.psu.edu/human-health-hazards-from-ag-plastics

Moore, J., & Wszelaki, A. (2016). Plastic mulch in fruit and vegetable production: Challenges for disposal (Report No. FA-2016-02). University of Tennessee Extension. https://biodegradablemulch.tennessee.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/214/2020/12/Plastic_Mulch_in_Fruit_and_Vegetable_Production_12_20factsheet.pdf

National Education Center for Agricultural Safety. (n.d.). 2026 National Farm Safety and Health Week. https://www.necasag.org/nationalfarmsafetyandhereek/