Editor’s View: Don’t let familiarity breed contempt for farm safety
© Kay Roxby/Alamy Stock Photo That familiarity breeds contempt is as true as it is clichéd, which probably explains why so many of those who lose their lives on farms across the UK (40%) are over the age of 65.
This week marks the 10th annual Farm Safety Week.
Yet even for this worthwhile campaign, there is an ever-present danger that familiarity can undermine its crucial objective – to drive down the death toll in farming.
See also: HSE confirms 27 fatalities on GB farms in 2023-24
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One of the challenges the Farm Safety Foundation always faces is how to keep its messaging fresh, so people continue to sit up and take notice.
This year, the theme is to “learn from your near misses” – with as much emphasis on the accidents that people survive, as on the ones that they don’t.
It is a long time since I decided that the hard graft of practical farming was not for me. But when I think back on some of my own “near misses”, it still fills me with horror.
Being headbutted on the kneecap by an angry ewe was more painful than dangerous.
But treading a live electric wire onto a metal ladder while descending from a slurry store was more hazardous.
(Just being in the silo with a shovel was not too clever, either – though at the age of 18, you do what your employer tells you…)
The most serious incident was getting my leg trapped between a plough and the tractor when trying to kick it free from the three-point linkage, while working alone one Saturday morning.
The lesson I probably learned from these near misses (and others) was to get an office job…
But working on the News desk at Farmers Weekly still keeps me mindful of what can, and too often does, go wrong for those at the coalface.
This week’s figures from the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) speak for themselves: some 34 people killed on UK farms in the past 12 months, including four members of the public and two children.
A glance at social media reinforces the message that people are either too slow or too reluctant to learn from their own or other people’s mistakes.
Just this week I saw a photo on Instagram of a toddler resting up against a bull in the field with the caption “That’s my boy!”
Facebook is awash with videos of farm kids tearing around on ATVs, not a helmet in sight.
And I think back with genuine anger to the two idiots winding themselves up in bale wrap in a quest for clicks on TikTok.
The causes of farm accidents and fatalities are all too familiar.
Being hit by moving vehicles, crushed by falling objects, trampled by livestock, falling from height – same old, same old.
But the reality is that attitudes and complacency are the biggest killers on Britain’s farms.
So learn from those near misses, undertake training, study the HSE’s guidance, have a plan – and don’t let familiarity breed contempt.