Despite its importance, few researches have been carried out characterizing work accidents involving agricultural tractors. The objective of this work was to characterize the accidents with agricultural tractors, to determine more efficient ways to prevent them. A questionnaire was applied to an ample of agricultural tractor operators from the Central Region of Rio Grande do Sul State. Results showed that 39% of the agricultural tractor operators analyzed had already suffered some kind of accident. The most frequent type of serious accidents was tractor overturning which occurred in 51.71% of the cases. Slips were the most important slight accident. The most important causes of accidents were lack of knowledge about safety procedures on tractor operation (32.77%), lack of attention (32.22%) to the task carried out and inadequate equipment (22.22%). There were great differences between the causes of serious and slight accidents. Operators without adequate training, no observation of some important safety procedures and very long working day were reported in this research, collaborating to increase the occurrence of accidents. Finally, it is necessary to incorporate confort and security devices, as well as training the agricultural tractor operators, to prevent future accidents.
kind of accidents; causes of accidents; prevention
