Leading the way in safety at our Greenville LPI plant

We can explain missed production, but not an injury.

This safety-first mentality comes from the team at our Loveland Products plant in Greenville, Mississippi, and their dedication to Nutrien’s safety culture doesn’t go unnoticed.

The ACE Safety Recognition program celebrates employees across Nutrien Ag Solutions retail branches and Loveland Products facilities in North America for acting, caring and excelling at safety, and we’re excited to announce Greenville’s own James Bradley Senior as the 2022 ACE Safety Recognition winner.

New stop device helps solve safety issue

When a safety issue reoccurred at the plant, James, who works with the Maintenance group, was unsatisfied with temporary repairs and stepped up to implement a permanent solution.

The problem arose when fork truck operators would unload bags of product at the plant. The trucks were inadvertently hitting the glyphosate bag baler because there wasn’t enough space between the baler and the wall of the building. Each time the fork trucks hit the baler it would loosen the anchor bolts, which had the potential to result in safety issues.

James sat down with the Maintenance group and Formulators to brainstorm solutions.

“We quickly realized the forks of the trucks were reaching too far into the compactor chamber, and this was rocking and damaging the compactor. Keeping the forks away from the chamber was the key, so a stop device became the obvious solution,” says James. “We also beefed up the mounting brackets on the compactor as an additional improvement. This was a group effort, and modifying the loading process now requires more work, but everyone agrees it was the right thing to do.”

Leading the way in safety is nothing new for James.

“He always considers safety first when he scopes out and begins a task,” says Joseph Lee, Senior Plant Manager. “James doesn’t hesitate to point out an unsafe act, but he’s very patient and caring, and because of these qualities, our folks have a lot of respect for him.”

James’ dedication to safety made him a 2022 ACE Safety Recognition Award winner.

“I’m honored by this award, especially because there was such a large pool of candidates,” says James. “To know we have the authority to stop work when it’s unsafe shows the commitment that runs from the plant operators all the way up to management. At Greenville, we all have a high standard for safety, and I do my best every day to meet that standard.”

Celebrating a safety milestone

On top of James winning the 2022 ACE Safety Recognition Award, the Greenville plant recently celebrated going 365 days without a recordable incident according to The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) standards. The team threw a Safety Week to celebrate the milestone and work that went into overhauling their safety culture after starting 2022 with back-to-back recordable incidents.

“With the culture we’ve been building over the past year, we’ve been letting our employees know that safety is their responsibility too. Our job as an SH&E team is to make sure they are safe, but they play a bigger role than we do because they are the professionals out there doing the job each day,” says Mi’Shayla Johnson, Advisor of Safety, Health and Environment (SH&E) for Retail. “They see things that we might not, so to have them feel like they have ownership over safety too empowers them to speak up and tell us what we can do differently to keep our facility safe.”

To kick off the Safety Week celebration, the facility picked their first annual slogan to inspire safe decisions every day. After around 100 employee submissions, “Never give safety a day off,” won the vote for the 2023-2024 slogan.

The plant, which is the only LPI facility that does high production of pesticide products, focused a whole week on safety exercises where employees would enter a warehouse set up with hazards and would list all of the safety concerns they could see, activities such as crossword puzzles featuring safety-related words, and team bonding events, one event including a dunk tank.

“Our Greenville LPI Plant rose to the challenge of our Culture of Care in a way that is unheard of in a high production area. I’ve never seen a site in our Retail business unit engage their employees in a recognition week to promote fellowship of frontline staff to recognize a year without any recordable injuries where everyone has worked together and really just focused on safety,” says Justin Hughes, Senior Manager of LPI Safety and Health. “If that’s not promoting care than I don’t know how else we need to do it.”