MIDDLETOWN, Pa. (AP) - Tom Williams raised four sons on the dairy farm where he spent his own childhood. To him, injuries are an unfortunate part of growing up on a farm.

But Williams has mixed feelings about the criminal charges brought against the father of a 3-year-old boy who fell from the bucket of a front-end loader and was run over.

"It's a sad situation," said Williams, 64. "People have to do what's correct by the laws. And parents have to use an abundance of caution."

James Samuel Fisher was to be arraigned this month in Perry County on charges of child endangerment, reckless endangerment and reckless driving in the March 29 death of his son, John Wesley Fisher.

Fisher's lawyer declined to talk about the case, and Perry County District Attorney R. Scott Cramer did not return several telephone calls.

While Williams and other central Pennsylvania farmers question the criminal charges, they are stunned by John Wesley Fisher's death and those of two other toddlers in recent farm accidents.

A 2-year-old boy was run over by a plowing disc in Chambersburg on April 25 as his father started a tractor attached to the implement. The same day, a 2-year-old boy in Lebanon County was crushed after falling from a horse-drawn wagon that his 6-year-old brother was driving. The boy's father and another brother had been walking alongside, clearing stones from a field.

"All the farmers have learned from these accidents," Williams said. "It's a tough way to learn."

Nationally in 1999, the last year for which there are complete statistics available, 104 children died in farm-related accidents, mostly involving machinery, according to the National Children's Center for Rural and Agricultural Health in Minneapolis. Of the 30 fatalities on Pennsylvania farms in 1999, about one-third involved children younger than 10.

Ensuring the safety of children on farms is a matter that the law leaves mainly to families. While farm safety experts questioned about the Pennsylvania deaths stopped short of calling for new laws, they said parents need to keep the youngest children away from farm machinery.

The U.S. Labor Department classifies farming as a hazardous occupation, which bars children who have not reached their 16th birthday from operating machinery on farms not owned by their families. But no similar restrictions are imposed on children working on their families' farms, nor are there limits on the number of hours that they may work there.

"No other hazardous industry allows anyone under 18 years old even onsite, but because this also happens to be a place where people live, they're there," said Malcolm Legault, a research associate for agricultural safety at Penn State University.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, extrapolating from a review of 50,000 farm operations in 1998, estimates that there were 32,800 incidents in which teen-agers and younger children suffered injuries that incapacitated them for at least four hours. Forty percent of the injuries were suffered by children 10 or younger.

"Even though people live there, it's a work setting, and it can be a very deadly work setting," said Nancy Esser, a youth agricultural safety specialist at the Minneapolis center.

It's tough to draw the line when it comes to where children should or shouldn't be on a farm, Williams said. "It's hard to do. Young kids want to be with their father. Tractors can be very tempting."

Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.