Farm safety’s one of David Stewart’s pet subjects and so he was pleased to be able to present his talk at the recent Lifestyle Farms Workshop Landcare Sustainable Farm Days. His concern is that if you have a serious accident on a farm, as an injury or a death, it does a whole lot to your sustainable agriculture as in it completely shuts the whole system down very quickly. Unfortunately David finds when you mention farm safety, people find it confronting just to talk about things which perhaps we are in denial about. How many of us take the time to consider the costs of ensuring safety with farm machinery? He says that unless it shows up in the press, it’s not regionally caught and so it is not often given the importance that it needs. The best data we can obtain is collected by an organisation called the Australian Centre for Agricultural Health and Safety. Did you know that in 2015, there were 69 deaths on farms. and as far as David is concerned that is 69 too many.
So what are the 5 main things that are causing farm deaths?
