Dying to feed you

Welsh farmer’s wife and nurse Corrine Mathias suffered a fractured eye socket after being attacked by a cow.

Grace Addyman suffered multiple broken bones when she was hit by falling bales at her family farm. She tells us what happened on that day, the difficult surgery that followed and how she considers herself the “luckiest unlucky person ever”.

Beca Glyn was herding sheep across the road on her quad bike when she had an accident. Sadly, she wasn’t wearing a helmet and the impact resulted in a serious head injury.

Mike Nixon fell through a shed roof to clean the guttering. He landed on a concrete scrape passage and sustained a serious spinal cord injury. It began like a normal work morning but ended in disaster.

It’s a day that will be etched in my mind forever. It was 30 April last year. I never thought when I was getting up that morning that within a couple of hours I’d be flown off to hospital by the Welsh air ambulance.

I went to work that morning as normal. We were lifting potatoes. We had finished a field and we’d run the harvester empty to make sure it was clear. I have no recollection at all what happened. But I got tangled in the haulm roller. The harvester took my arm and pulled me in – up and over – into the machine.

I think it was a Thursday morning. I got a phone call from from a friend of mine who needed somebody on the Friday to suck out the underground tanks that hold the run-off from the from the yard.

Norfolk farmer Tim Papworth spent five weeks in a coma and had part of his skull removed after falling from a ladder.

Tim took an easy route to a job, that on the face of it looked simple, but it cost him dearly. It took a year of rehabilitation, in which his wife had to remove the work guns from the house as he was so depressed.

Cumbria farmer Ashley Herbert was 24 when he lost his hand in a farm machinery accident. After being rushed by air ambulance to hospital, surgeons managed to stem the blood pouring from his arm and operate on him successfully.

Ashley now manages with a prosthetic arm and while he says he can do everything he needs to, he admits it is hard.

William Sayers was 12 years old when he lost his arm in an accident on the family farm in Northern Ireland. Here, he tells his story.

It was an Easter Monday. We had been putting out slurry all day and everything was going well. It came to about half seven at night and I could hear my mother calling us for tea.

Growers and livestock producers are dicing with death on a daily basis – with half of all farmers saying they know someone killed in a workplace accident.

The stark statistic – uncovered by a Farmers Weekly survey – highlights the risks taken by farmers every day as they strive to put food on the nation’s plates.