Many of us know of someone in our communities who has been killed or suffered a life-changing injury on-farm. Every death leaves a gaping hole. Partners widowed, children losing a parent, a mother and father whose child dies before them, friends and colleagues gone forever. Every death resonates through a rural community and beyond.
When people ask what keeps me awake at night, this is always where my mind goes, followed quickly by what the heck can we do about it? The thought of any of us experiencing that knock at the door, dreaded phone call, or coming across a terrible scene when looking for someone who hasn’t come home is quite literally our worst nightmare. So why does it keep happening, and with alarming frequency?
I have experienced the dreaded phone call.
Karen Williams | February 16, 2021 from GlobalHQ on Vimeo.
A few years ago, one of my children was a passenger in a side-by-side that was driven into a bull hole hidden by long grass. Thank heaven he survived, but he was not wearing a seatbelt and the sudden halt of the vehicle resulted in his face and throat smashing into the dashboard, resulting in a life-threatening windpipe injury and long-lasting concussion issues. He was not doing anything stupid in the vehicle, but it was clear that his injury would have been prevented if he had been wearing his seatbelt.
As a mother, wife and farmer, it is obvious to me that NZ’s farming community needs to develop safer farming habits. And not because we have to in a compliance sense, but because we want to. We care about our own. We don’t want to see our people hurt and we don’t want to see loved ones experiencing unimaginable grief.
Some farmers are doing a really great job around communicating health and safety messages to their people, talking the talk and walking the walk. But too many of us continue to push ourselves through fatigue and beyond capability, or take a fatalistic attitude to on-farm accidents.
Making changes need not be difficult. If we open our ears and minds to farmers who have embraced good health and safety practice, not as compliance but as something that’s beneficial for them, their people and their farm business, we’ll find it’s not that hard.
It’s about identifying risks, deciding how to manage them, communicating that to everyone who needs to know, and taking a few minutes before any job to think or talk through the safest way to do it.
At your team meetings, ask open-ended questions about safety and risk such as, “What tasks on-farm do you do where you feel concerned for your safety?” Ask if they have any suggestions about how they can mitigate or eliminate that risk. You may be pleasantly surprised at the practical solutions that will be developed and the positive momentum such conversations will have on changing our on-farm safety culture.
Karen Williams says while her son was not doing anything “stupid” at the time of his on-farm accident, it was clear that his injury would have been prevented if he had been wearing his seatbelt.
One of the simplest measures is to ensure we use seatbelts in our tractors, side-by-sides and utes on the farm and on the road. There’s a dangerous myth that seatbelts stop you ‘jumping clear’ if a vehicle rolls. The reality of not wearing a seatbelt is you are more likely to be ejected in a crash and deaths are often due to a vehicle rolling on the victim. Accident investigations have found that almost all recent tractor fatalities could have been prevented by the driver wearing a seatbelt. I recently asked a fellow farmer why he thought we’re not wearing our seatbelts and he said, “It’s a hassle with opening and shutting gates when you’re heading out the back of the farm.” I then asked how much more time he thought would be added to the trip. “About 10-20 seconds per gate,” he said.
The biggest health and safety tool you have as a farmer is your voice and your commitment to do better. If you talk with workers and contractors about doing things safely, there is a good chance they’ll listen. If you wear a helmet, wear a seatbelt, talk about how you are going to manage the risks around a job, others will follow.
We need to take the lead on this. We need to be responsible for the wellbeing of ourselves and our people.
So, we have a choice to make. We can choose to adopt a culture of ‘farming safe’ and making some proactive decisions to support this – or we can continue with the status quo and suffer the unimaginable consequences.
Who am I? Karen Williams is vice president and health and safety spokesperson at Federated Farmers. She’s also a board member of Safer Farms (Agricultural Leaders Health and Safety Action Group) and an arable farmer.
