Curious children approach Channing Snoddy with the inevitable question.
“Hey, what happened to your arm?”
A shark attack, a fight with a bear—Snoddy always has a story for inquisitive kids wondering why part of his right arm is missing.
“You should see the bear, he’s hanging on my wall,” Snoddy jokes. “No, I had an accident because I didn’t listen to my mommy and daddy.”
Snoddy, Fluvanna County Farm Bureau president and a farmer who raises beef cattle on the family property where he grew up, was 24 and in a hurry to go hunting after work on Oct. 12, 1994. He was running a corn picker through the field, but it kept jamming, and he was getting frustrated.
The machine is supposed to separate the ears from the stalks, and its counter-rotating rollers are intended to pull the stalks down to the ground.
“If a corn stalk broke off and came up through the shaft, it would whip it through and knock the cob off,” Snoddy explained. “When it happened a sixth time, I grabbed the stalk, and the rollers grabbed me at the same time, and pulled me into it. I could see my arm hanging down on the other side.”
Snoddy was working alone on the equipment, and was stuck in the machine for a half-hour.
“Luckily I have a big mouth, and I yelled for help a bunch of times,” he recalled. “A neighbor came out, and I told her how to cut the machine off. The fire department—a bunch of friends of mine—showed up, and they had to take the machine apart to get me out.”
Snoddy’s arm was intact, but was pinched to a small diameter in the middle.
“It splintered the bone,” he said. “I never bled a drop, luckily. And it didn’t hurt until they cut me out of the machine, and I guess the blood started flowing again, and I didn’t have the adrenaline going anymore.”
He was airlifted to UVA University Hospital, where a doctor told Snoddy’s family his arm would need to be amputated.
“I said something to my dad about being disabled, and he shut me up,” Snoddy said. “After I got out of the hospital, I borrowed a friend’s crossbow and figured out how to cock it one-handed and went hunting. The day after Thanksgiving, I killed my biggest buck.”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, most traumatic injuries that occur on farms involve interactions with machinery, especially during maintenance.
“With a lot of farm work taking place in the hours before or after other jobs, and the advances of new equipment, many accidents occur while farmers are working alone and stressed to complete tasks in short order,” said Dana Fisher, chairman of the Virginia Farm Bureau Federation Safety Advisory Committee. “Taking an extra few minutes to use the proper safety precautions and making sure that others know where you are working and when to expect you home can make a huge difference.”
Snoddy said resuming his routine and continuing work on the farm after the accident kept him in good spirits.
“The next spring, I was out there playing softball with my league team. I played with one arm for 18 years,” he said. “I have the type of attitude—just keep going in life. You’ll figure out a way.”
Twenty-six years later, Snoddy imparts his painful lesson when he has the chance: Stay away from moving parts, and shut down mechanized equipment when it needs maintenance.
“I try to teach that to my son,” Snoddy said. “I’m way more careful now. It all comes down to being in a hurry.”