This week is National Farm Safety Week (18-22 July 2016), a time to raise awareness of farm safety issues across Australia and highlight some of the practical steps farmers can take to improve worker health and safety on farms.

Agriculture can be a rewarding industry to work in, but it can also be dangerous.

In 2013-14, 36 workers were killed and 2565 workers were compensated for serious injuries and diseases in the agriculture industry. While these rates have been declining, improvements can still be made to reduce the number of deaths and injury on farms.

Working with animals, manual handling and falls from height are the leading causes of injury to farm workers and single vehicle incidents are the leading cause of farm worker fatalities.

Safe Work Australia has released a Guide to managing risks in cattle handing, which was developed in collaboration with industry experts and provides information on natural cattle handling techniques that use cattle behaviour and livestock handler position to achieve the desired goal.

Cattle handling can present significant risks to workers including injuries and fatalities, from being crushed, gored, trampled, hit or bitten by cattle. In the 10 years from 2005 – 2014:

• 36% of injury claims in the agriculture industry were due to cattle handling
• most of these injuries were caused by being hit by cattle, and
• 8 530 injury claims were due to handling live animals (37% due to horses, 36% to cattle, 14% due to sheep and 9% due to pigs).

Injuries from cattle handling can happen anywhere on the agriculture supply chain, from the farm to the abattoir. This new guide has been developed to help people who work with cattle on farms in paddocks, laneways, yards, cattle transportation, feedlots, abattoirs, saleyards and activities relating to on-farm cattle sales.

To assist people working on farms, Safe Work Australia has partnered with the National Farmers’ Federation to produce two short farm safety videos on machinery guarding and stockyard handling.

The videos outline four simple steps to manage risks when working with machinery and around the stockyard. The video’s can be viewed on the Safe Work Australia You Tube channel.

The Australian Work Health and Safety Strategy 2012-2022 lists Agriculture as a priority industry, actions under the strategy aim to drive improvements in work health and safety in Australia.

Safe Work Australia and individual Safe Work Australia Members are working to improve work health and safety outcomes in the agriculture sector through activities listed in the National Agriculture Activity Plan 2014-2019 available on the Safe Work Australia website.

Source: Safe Work Australia Website