Farm safety experts have highlighted the importance of farmers learning from each other in the fight to reduce farm fatalities and dangers.
A number of well-renowned experts were speaking at today’s National Conference on Farm Safety and Health in Co. Carlow, extolling the benefits of peer-to-peer learning, one-to-one supervision and discussion groups.
Peer-to-peer learning
Prof. Gerry Boyle, director of Teagasc, spoke about the importance of peer-to-peer learning.
“I believe that it is possible to expand production in line with Food Wise 2025 while also achieving improved standards of safety and health.
This will, however, require the strong engagement of all farmers in active safety and health management.
“Farmers need to continue to adapt farm infrastructure and technology to match the scale of operations or to facilitate off farm employment.
Prof. Gerry Boyle, director of Teagasc. Image source: Finbarr O’Rourke
“Research and Knowledge Transfer has a vital role in assisting farmers with adapting both the physical farm infrastructure and behaviours for enhanced safety and health management.”
Swedish style
An international perspective on farm safety was provided by Prof. Peter Lundqvist of the Department of Work Science in Sweden.
Prof. Lundqvist set out how following intensive work on farm safety in Sweden, when farmers were provided with one-to-one supervision on farm safety and health, they achieved a calendar year with zero fatalities.
Prof Lundqvist called for EU action to ensure such initiatives could be sustainable.
He appealed to farmers not to see risk in farming as normal but to treat farm work more as a business that needs safety management.
Discussion groups
UCD’s Prof. Jim Kinsella presented research on improving safety on dairy farms through discussion groups.
Prof. Kinsella noted that dairy farmers are already discussing farm safety and health in their discussion groups – however, to a limited extent in most cases.
The research findings to date suggest that dairy discussion groups have potential to enable behaviour change in farm safety and health.