Agriculture is officially the most dangerous industry to work in. Farmers are used to doing things their own way, without assistance or advice, and many still ignoring the facts. Clemmie Gleeson looks at how can the industry facilitate change and become a blueprint for best practice.
Farmers are not invincible, yet many take uncalculated risks with their lives everyday.
Lone working, long hours, dependence on weather and daylight, and economic pressures, as well as increasingly powerful machinery have become a dangerous combination, contributing to high numbers of injuries and fatalities on farms over the years.
Figures released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) reveal that between April 2009 and March 2010, the number of reported major injuries, such as broken bones or amputations, rose to 640 from 599 the previous year.
Tragically, 38 people lost their lives working on farms compared to 25 the previous year and above the five-year average of 37.
It is the rate of fatal
injuries to workers in 2009-10 - 8 per 100,000 - which earned agriculture the title of Britain’s most dangerous industry. While only around 1.5 per cent of the working population is employed in agriculture, it accounted for one in four work-related deaths last year.
Many of the accidents could have been prevented, or their impact reduced, had simple safety precautions been taken, believes Graeme Walker, head of agriculture at the HSE.
“The first thing to learn is that accidents are not acts of God,” he says. “They are generally caused by failure to do something properly and are often repeated time and time again.
Cutting corners
“There are all sorts of pressures on farmers which cause them to take unconsidered risks that if they were to step back and think about they might have taken a different view. There is a lot of pressure to cut corners.
“The industry as a whole has been in denial and that it is not just a problem for industry, but one for individuals,” he says.
But how do you change an industry where many farmers have their own methods of working - despite knowing such techniques do not meet even the most basic of health and safety requirements?
“Individuals need to rethink their attitude and behaviour, while the industry needs a culture change,” says Mr Walker. “They need to think about what they are doing and be prepared to ask for advice,” he says. “On an industry level, the culture of cutting corners is something we cannot accept any longer.”
Agriculture is about a decade behind other industries in terms of health and safety, he warns. The construction industry was in a similar position when it started to work collectively on the issue about 10 years ago.
It was the most dangerous industry to work in, and despite pleas from the HSE, little seemed to be happening.
That began to change when the construction industry took responsibility for improving its safety record. It held an industry summit to discuss the crisis and what could be done to change things.
John Spanswick, who was chief of contractor Bovis Lend Lease, says getting the industry to work together was key.
“Unless the industry is engaged, there won’t be any change,” he says. “The HSE has helped, and we have a positive dialogue with it. They have good technical people, who have helped the industry work to improve its safety record.”
Changing behaviour and culture is vital any improvement, he says. “The construction industry needed to get personal - everybody has something they value.”
Construction, like agriculture, has a massive focus on getting the job done in time. “Sometimes that means when it comes to health and safety, other pressures overtake it. But we have to be uncompromising about it,” he says.
Saving lives
Sharing information on the cause of accidents and near misses helped save lives in construction, he says. But it became apparent that some workers - about 20 per cent of those in construction - will never get the message and as a consequence require very close supervision at all times.
“We also worked with everyone in the industry - workers, designers and suppliers - to look at ways of helping to solve some of the issues.”
Achieving change means acknowledging there is a problem and wanting to address it, he says. As a result, construction has seen a dramatic fall in fatal injuries (from 118 in 1983 to 30 in 2009-10).
The HSE’s ‘Make the Promise’ campaign, launched in January 2009, helped pave the way for change. It urged farmers to make the promise to themselves, their families and their businesses to ‘come home safe’ by taking time to consider their safety while going about their day-to-day work.
More than 30,000 farmers signed up to the campaign, which offered a small ‘promise knot’ to hang in a prominent place to remind them of their promise.
It wasn’t until Scottish livestock farmer Wullie Russell had a harrowing experience of his own, which left him fighting for his life, that he backed the campaign.
While pumping out a flooded underground storage tank, he slipped on ice and his shirt got caught on the partially-guarded pto shaft of the slurry tanker. It was ripped from his body and the friction was so great, his skin was flayed from the left side of his chest and arm. He crashed to the ground, hitting his head on the draw bar of the tanker and gained extensive internal injuries, including a ruptured spleen, four broken ribs and damage to his lungs and kidneys. He spent four days in a high dependency ward and was eventually allowed home from hospital 10 days later. He was unable to work for seven months.
Graeme Walker and his HSE colleagues considered the campaign a success, but believe it is just the beginning.
“It means 30,000-plus people are now recognising health and safety is a major issue - it is a step forward for the industry.”
He would like to see the industry take the campaign forward further. That work has already begun, and Mr Walker welcomes a farming industry-wide ‘safety summit’, held at the end of last year.
“Now we are seeing for the first time that key bodies in the industry are saying: we are going to take responsibility and demonstrate we can improve it.”
The summit saw organisations, such as the NFU, CLA, TFA, agricultural colleges, Lantra and Unite come together to discuss the health and safety of farming for the first time.
“The whole idea is to get people talking about safety and the importance of it,” says the NFU’s Peter Garbutt, who has recently added farm safety to his remit as transport and inputs adviser.
“We want to have a common-sense approach with some very simple practical ideas - the focus is on reducing accidents. We want to empower people to talk about health and safety. It is not just the preserve of the HSE, but a fundamental part of what we do.”
Mr Garbutt has been analysing the statistics to find what lessons can be learned.
“The key areas that we are looking at to start with are transport, machinery and falls,” he explains. “They are the causes of the biggest number of accidents, but are the easiest areas to make a difference.
“We will not see movement unless we see leadership from the top, which is why we have involved management from all organisations,” he says. “There will always be accidents, but what we want to do is reduce their severity and stop the preventable ones.
“We do not want to stop people doing their jobs - just to think about safety. Farmers are resourceful people and will no doubt have their own ideas.
“We want to impress on farmers that they are not invincible - they are invaluable to their businesses and families.”
