New South Wales moves to make sustainable farming safer

The NSW Government is tackling the emerging health and safety issues facing New South Wales (NSW) landholders, as they change the way they use their land, to keep it sustainable and profitable. Skye Buatava, Director of the Centre for Work Health and Safety, said the centre has embarked on a research project to understand the emerging safety issues in farming. The centre has partnered with the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology Sydney to better understand the risks facing landholders as they diversify their land use.

“We know the suicide rate among farmers is higher than the general population in NSW and we need to do all we can to protect these workers. Not just in NSW but across the world, farmers are increasingly facing a range of disruptions to how they farm. This is critical research to ensure we are doing all we can to understand the emerging risks to farmers as technologies and trends change,” Buatava said.

ISF Research Director Associate Professor Brent Jacobs said global drivers like climate change, biosecurity threats and new technology are forcing NSW farmers to change the way they use land, their farm enterprise mix and their production practices. “This project will help us understand how these changes are affecting the work health and safety of farmers to help keep our rural communities safe,” Professor Jacobs said.

The ‘Transformation in farm livelihoods: impacts on the work health and safety of farming communities’ report will explore the safety issues around new farming practices, with over 100 NSW farming participants being consulted. The project will then develop a range of solutions to keep workers safer. The first stage of the project, a literature review, revealed that research into new work health and safety risks in farming was limited. Currently, most health and safety literature is focused on the mental health impacts of drought and does not consider physical work health and safety issues.

SafeWork NSW is also supporting the farming community through initiatives including ‘The A–Z of Farm Safety Booklet’, which provides information on the safe use of chemicals, mental health, machinery guards and vaccinations. SafeWork NSW has also announced an overhead powerline rebate, which allows farmers to claim a rebate from SafeWork for purchasing overhead power line markers to help stop dangerous incidents on farms.

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