This years theme for Farm Safety Week is ‘Safe Farms – Healthy Farmers’ and targets practical issues that farmers can take to improve safety and health for themselves, their workers and family members. A free phone app has also been released to help farmers with safety inductions for new workers on their farm.

“Farm safety is something that we often take for granted, of course no one wants to be injured or see others injured” said Farmsafe Australia chairman Charles Armstrong. “As an industry we have been improving our safety record, with reductions in the number of farm injury deaths approaching 65% over the past two decades. However, we still need to do more.”

“Having safety as a major aspect of our business will not only reduce risks to those that work and live on our farms, it will also improve our bottom line. Even non-fatal injuries can have major cost implications on things such as delays in harvest, damage to equipment and downtime needed to recover from injuries.”

“The new free farm safety induction app is one important step to improving safety. Farmers can work through the induction with one or more new workers. When completed, a record of the induction and what it covered is emailed to both the farmer and the worker. It’s a big step in making the process of safety induction and record keeping easier.”

Other practical steps that farmers can take to have safety as a core value include:

• Have a safety plan in place that identifies potential hazards and take action to fix these.
• Always be on the look-out for new hazards and fix these as soon as possible once identified.
• Set clear safety procedures for risky work.
• Make sure everyone that works on the farm understands and uses the safety procedures you have.
• Have an emergency plan in place in case there are any incidents.

2014 Farm Safety Week is running from 21-25 July. For more information on the free new safety induction app and Farm Safety Week can be found at the FarmSafe website.

Source: FarmSafe, July 2014