According to Chapter 10 of OSHA’s Field Operations Manual, OSHA can’t inspect farming operations that have ten or less employees and have had no temporary labor camp (TLC) within the past year.

The article “OSHA Investigates Small Dairy Farms So Rarely That Many Worker Advocates Don’t Bother Reporting Deaths or Injuries” by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel states, “Last month, ProPublica reported on how OSHA has inconsistently labeled farm housing for immigrant dairy workers in Wisconsin as a temporary labor camp. Our reporting identified three worker deaths on small farms over the past decade, including the March drowning of an undocumented Mexican immigrant in a manure lagoon, that OSHA said it couldn’t investigate even though workers lived in farm housing.”

Another part of this that I think is important information is, “‘It’s unjust and it’s inhumane,’ said Crispin Hernández, a former dairy worker and a member of the Workers’ Center of Central New York, a nonprofit focused on workplace and economic justice. ‘It is on small farms that workers get injured the most.’”

The third part of the article I found important was, “Since 2005, OSHA offices said they couldn’t investigate 44 safety incidents on dairy farms — including deaths, injuries, complaints and referrals from local agencies such as medical examiner’s offices — because of the small-farms exemption, records show.” 

According to the Dairy Workers Fact Sheet by the National Center for Farmworker Health, the non-fatal injury and illness rate in 2022 was 4.1 injuries and illnesses per 100 full time workers (the non-fatal injury and illness rate reported in this fact sheet for the private industry is 3.4 per 100 full time workers) and forty workers in dairy cattle and milk production died due to work-related incidents in 2022. 

Other things mentioned in this fact sheet that I think count as important information are as follows: - A study done in 2019 showed that 94% of around 90 workers in Vermont worked over eight hours a day and 38% reporting working over twelve hours a day. 
- A survey of 60 dairy workers in New Mexico in 2012 found that 85% worked six days or more per week, half worked more than eight hours a day and a third of workers never recieved lunch breaks.            
- A study of dairy workers in the Texas panhandle and Southern Plains in 2020/2021 found that 80% of the 300 dairy workers that participated made less than $39,999 annually, were working 60 hours a week on average and were being paid from $8.10 to $30 an hour.                  

- A 2014 study done in Vermont showed that dairy workers were (allegedly) receiving less than minimum wage, didn’t get pay stubs and had their first paycheck illegally withheld.                                        
 - In a national 2014 survey, dairy workers reported being paid an average of $11.54 an hour.                                                             - A study on dairy workers done in 2019 showed that 20% of dairy workers lived in or near the barn and 7% reported their housing wasn’t heated.                                  
- When 55 dairy workers were interviewed in Colorado, 69% reported receiving safety training and 40% reported receiving health training at their workplace (the health training includes information on zoonotic and infectious diseases).           - Results of a study done on Vermont dairy workers in 2019 showed that 45% of participants recieved training to safely operate machinery and other farm equipment, 50% received animal safety training and less than 10% received training on biological safety.                             - In a 2019 study, 96% of dairy workers surveyed reported working with chemicals even though 67% didn’t know the risks associated, 83% reported experiencing harm from chemicals and other biohazards on the job including 26% reporting harm from medicine or syringes, 66% didn’t have protective masks, 71% didn’t use goggles or gloves and 75% didn’t wear aprons.                                           - The most commonly reported injuries in a 2018 study were animal related, equipment related and musculoskeletal pain and 93% of dairy workers that responded reported continuing to work after the injury occurred.                            
- Another study of 37 dairy workers showed that cows were considered a major injury source, mainly causing crush injuries, but overuse syndromes, fractures,  sprains and eye injuries (some resulting in permanent disability, chronic pain and/or blindness) were also discussed. Accidents reported included drowning and injuries that resulted in loss of income, loss of housing and/or having to go back to their home country.                                                    - Dairy workers with tasks in milking parlors have more than five times the risk of carpal tunnel syndrome than dairy workers without those tasks.                             - A cross-sectional study of 452 dairy workers found that 76% had at least one body part affected by an occupationally related musculoskeletal injury, most commonly in an upper extremity.                   - A 2013 study found that dairy workers had more than twice the risk of testing positive for tuberculosis than non-dairy workers and over half of the 311 dairy workers tested positive for latent tuberculosis.

And all these problems are just within the dairy industry (that I know of). I didn’t find any articles about other types of farms because I found out about this issue because of the article by Melissa Sanchez and Maryam Jameel so my research was mainly focused on the dairy industry, but I believe that other farms also shouldn’t have to either have more than ten employees or have a temporary labor camp to be investigated by OSHA.