Employees have a serious accident rate of 20 per 1000 people a year versus 12 among the owner-operators.
Against the background of flat to slightly rising rate of severe injuries and workplace deaths in agriculture compared with forestry and construction WorkSafe was seeking the reasons for the higher rates for employees.
A greater understanding would lead to specific education and intervention, she said.
Rosie suggested employees could be given more high-risk physical activities and tended to be younger and less experienced.
As to why the injury rate in agriculture wasn’t declining, she said “We have found that experience is not correlated to risk.
“Farmers do the same things year after year but they lose mobility and strength and their reaction times get longer.”
WorkSafe would put emphasis on understanding and preventing injuries to younger farm employees and to the older cohort of farmers, aged 55 to 75.
In her new role since December, Rosie came from Fonterra where she was a past global leader for health and safety, a founder of the Farm Source programme and most recently a manager of the McKinsey site review.
Before Fonterra she worked in health and safety for Kiwirail and Fletcher Challenge Forests.
The serious injury rate and numbers of deaths in forestry were coming down because of new log harvesting machinery and the collective ownership of health and safety by the industry.
WorkSafe employed more than 500 full-time equivalents of which 200 people were inspectors.
It had a nationwide team of 20 farm assessors because agriculture was a priority sector for its proactive approach to health and safety, she said.
But those numbers should not threaten farming people.
The rate of prosecutions of farmers had fallen steadily from 10-plus a few years back to six last year.
“That means when there have been serious accidents, most farmers were subsequently found to have taken all reasonable, practicable, prevention steps.
“Our own surveying shows more positive interactions with farmers, many of whom now approach our farm assessors for advice.
“We are never going to enforce our way to positive health and safety outcomes.
“The agriculture sector must improve its own performance by saying ‘this is a problem and we need to change’ as the forestry sector has done.”
In 2014 there were 2750 severe accidents in agriculture, 1155 of them in dairying.
Dairying also produced about half of the estimated cost of severe injuries, $42 million in 2014.
Live cattle and machinery tended to produce the non-fatal injuries while the deaths were caused by motorcycles and tractors.
Men had twice the rates of women, who tended to be injured more by animals.
