A bad year for farmers

Thursday 02 November 2000

In a year when returns in the rural sector are finally something to celebrate, the bad news is that too many farmers won’t be around to enjoy them.

With four months of the current financial year gone, Occupational Health and Safety Service (OSH) has investigated seven work-related farming fatalities. The figures compare with 18 for the whole of the previous year.

What makes the figures worse is traditionally there is an upsurge in deaths as on-farm activity increases over the summer months.

The OSH national agricultural co-ordinator, Ron Ward, says one of the most disappointing aspects of the deaths is that the same causes keep reappearing.

"Six of the seven deaths so far this year have involved vehicles, and it was 12 out of the 18 last year. It is very frustrating to see people continually being killed due to well-known dangers."

Although the focus on deaths is natural, they are just the tip of the iceberg. Last year in the agricultural industry there were approximately 21,000 accidents that required medical treatment.

That equates to around one in every five people working in the industry, a rate that is 40% worse than the national average.

"Agriculture continues to be the most dangerous industry in which to make a living. If there is any good news in all this, it is that we know what the problems are and the ways to negate them."

One of the initiatives to improve health and safety in the rural sector is the OSH national strategy in agriculture. The strategy is a programme aimed at helping farmers and was developed in partnership with agricultural industry organisations and farmers.

The strategy is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on developing information to help farmers identify and manage hazards on their properties.

The second part involves getting the information resources to farmers in the high-risk sectors of the agricultural industry (dairy, sheep and beef farming) through a series of public meetings for farmers in their local areas.

The third part is an evaluation process to assess how effective the information has been. This stage gives farmers a chance to feed back information to help further develop the strategy. At this point that it is possible to assess if health and safety standards are improving.

The information being provided is based findings of a 1996 taskforce that examined the high accident and death rate in agriculture. A major part of the information is a chart that identifies high-risk work activities and the critical factors that need to be considered when people are undertaking these activities.

The areas identified are tractors, ATVs, farm bikes, machinery, handling livestock, agrichemicals, leptospirosis and melanoma.

"Farmers getting and using effective information on these areas is the key to improving what is a very poor picture in terms of health and safety."

"It is through this strategy that we aim to do this and in turn make a big step towards reducing the economic and social costs to the nation of farm related accidents.

"Over five years, every farmer in the country will get the chance to attend a meeting in their area as part of this strategy. I hope they do because it could be the one thing that saves their life, the life of a family member or an employee", Ron Ward concluded.