Campaign targeting farming death tolls

Farmers are far more likely to die at work than any other Victorian worker, according to WorkSafe Victoria, and this simple but shocking fact will be at the heart of a compelling new public awareness campaign to be launched on 3 April.

According to WorkSafe statistics, almost 30% of all workplace deaths in Victoria occur on farms, despite the fact that agriculture employs just 3% of Victorian workers.

In addition, 10 farmers every week are injured seriously enough to make a workers compensation claim.

The new campaign will highlight agriculture’s deadly toll and call on farmers to reduce workplace risks by taking a few moments to think about safety before beginning a task or project.

According to WorkSafe Executive Director of Health and Safety Marnie Williams, farmers needed to make safety a permanent part of their daily routine and reassess their systems of work with safety as their number one priority.

“Effective planning, using the right equipment, operating machinery safely; these are simple, everyday measures that can change a life in an instant,” said Williams. “It doesn’t take much but it can mean the difference between life and death.”

Of all farm fatalities in recent years, experienced farmers doing routine tasks were a significant high-risk group for a number of reasons, including working with heavy machinery or alone, or financial pressures to cut corners.

Tractors and quad bikes are also involved in a significant number of fatalities each year.

“Following a fatality, it’s not uncommon for investigators to discover that the tractor wasn’t well maintained, or it was being used for the wrong purpose, or the farmer was doing something he had done a hundred times before, which could suggest a loss of concentration,” she said.

“The same applies to quad bikes, which is why WorkSafe last month made a decision to accept rollover protection devices as a means of controlling the risk to operators in the event of a rollover.

“With the help of the farming community, we hope this campaign will change the current story of death and injury that remains such a dark cloud over Victoria’s renowned agricultural sector.”

For more information about on-farm safety, visit worksafe.vic.gov.au/farmsafety.

Originally published here.