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This week is Farm Safety Week.

The week is led by The – and we’re marking the occasion with a series of blogs talking with ÎÞÂ붯»­ staff examining why the week is vital not only for our staff and students – but for the wider agricultural community.
Agriculture Placement Manager Terry Pickthall has worked closely with the Farm Safety Foundation (Yellow Wellies) for many years and was a guest at this year’s 13 Years, 13 Stories lunch - which celebrated the power of storytelling when it comes to emphasising the importance of farm safety.

Here, Terry explains why he feels the week is so important.

Agriculture remains the most dangerous UK industry to work in.

The statistics are sobering. According to the HSE, in the last ten years almost one person a week has been killed as a direct result of agricultural work.

Despite representing just one per cent of the UK workforce, agriculture accounts for 18.5 per cent of all work-related deaths, with farm workers 20 times more likely to be fatally injured than the average across other industries.

Many more suffer life-changing injuries or are made ill by their work. It is easy to think this is someone else’s problem or that it won’t happen to us, but this is part of the problem!

We are all at risk and all need to take responsibility for making our industry a safer place to work, be it on-farm or in a commercial environment, where the risks are different, more subtle but still present.

How does Harper Adams as a University work with our students to emphasise the importance of farm safety?

Our undergraduate Agriculture degree courses all have a compulsory placement year. Safety is at the heart of our preparation for placement.

We have worked closely with the Farm Safety Foundation since their inception. Stephanie Berkeley and her dedicated team have been involved in preparing our students for the workplace for more than 10 years. It is a compulsory requirement for all students to complete the TIAH Foundations in Farm Safety qualification after receiving training from the Yellow Wellies team.

As well as providing a recognised qualification, this course encourages reflection on safe working practices across a range of farm enterprises and signposts participants to a range of additional safety-related resources on the TIAH website.

We also work with our employers to ensure that they are managing risks and providing as safe a place of work as possible. Our Head of Health and Safety, Matt Davies, is always on the end of the phone to provide support and guidance to our Placement Team.

He is also more than willing to head out and assist our employers with improving their safe working practices if a need for support is highlighted.

How do we work with our staff to emphasise the importance of farm safety?

Most academic staff act as Placement Tutors for our students during their year in industry. In the mainland UK, this usually involves a visit to the business.

Conversations around safety are an essential part of the tutoring process and our staff have access to a range of resources to ensure they can guide and support employers where improvements in safety are highlighted.

We also make use of the University Farm, which provides an excellent benchmark and environment to demonstrate the principles of Health and Safety training.

How can people in the wider agricultural community make their work on farm safer?

Put simply, always take safety seriously.

By the nature of what we do, be it with machinery or livestock, farms are always going to be dangerous places.

Long hours, lone working and repetitive processes can lead to both complacency and fatigue, with safety often being overlooked as time goes by.

If you add the level of pressure the industry is under through things like the weather and staff shortages, and high levels of poor mental health amongst farming teams into the mix - you can see we have a perfect storm.

We need to treat every day as a school day; learning from each other and improving our working practices. We can never afford to be complacent about the risks – they do not change, but it is easy to allow standards to slip and assume that just because nothing happened the first time then it won’t happen full stop.

We need to ensure staff at all levels in a business are not only trained but put safe methods of work into practice and engage in continuous improvement via things like toolbox talks, reporting near misses or benchmarking higher standards seen in other business or even industries.