This Farm Safety week, GrainGrowers has launched a new program, providing farm safety resources and learning opportunities for growers across Australia.
With 68% of industry fatalities occurring in three industries including agriculture, GrainGrowers is working to support growers in improving those statistics and to help ensure everyone goes home safely at the end of the day.
“Farms are unique workplaces and we need practical, farm-ready solutions to improve our approach to farm safety in Australia. Improving farm safety has positive flow-on impacts for productivity, farm families and our broader regional communities. For many of our growers, the farm is also home and we know keeping their families and workers safe is really important to our farmers.” said David McKeon GrainGrowers CEO.
“Farming environments can be unpredictable. Weather conditions deteriorating quickly is a good example of that. There are also more high-risk activities that happen on a farm than you would find in a corporate office desk job. In sobering statistics, over half the fatalities in agriculture involve a piece of machinery or equipment – namely quad bikes, tractors and side-by-side vehicles.”
“GrainGrowers farm safety resources have a focus on machinery, recognising these risk factors. There’s easy to use information and tools such as checklists that growers and farm workers can use to make sure they are on the right track and have appropriate risk management plans in place.”
The GrainGrowers farm safety resources cover general farm machinery, vehicles, motorbikes and quad bikes, grain harvest and general farm safety. There is a comprehensive workbook with interactive check lists and there is also a series of farm safety videos presented by respected industry specialists.
“These resources are all available on the GrainGrowers website and we encourage every grower to use them. These will also be available in a variety of languages to support the return of seasonal workforces for harvest this year,” said McKeon.
The resources have been developed in partnership with industry specialists House Paddock Training, Ben White and Josh Giumelli, and are part of the National Farm Safety Education Fund. GrainGrowers farm safety resources are intended to provide growers with practical, useful tools to support WH&S efforts on the farm.