More than 200 farmers from across Cambridgeshire attended a farm safety day, run by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) at The East of England Showground in Peterborough last week.
The event was organised in an effort to reduce the number of farm workers killed and injured each year. The Health and Safety Executive has employed a number of approaches to try and help make the industry safer, including traditional inspections of individual farms. However, smaller family businesses do not all find this approach helpful, often prefering practical advice delivered by people from the industry without feeling there is a threat of enforcement hanging over them. Self-employed family farmers from across Cambridgeshire, who may have had little contact with the HSE in recent years, were therefore invited to attend.
The safety day featured scenarios covering issues causing the majority of injuries and ill health including farm transportation, safe working at height, safe use of ladders, farm machinery maintenance and manual handling. Each scenario highlighted the risks involved and there were practical demonstrations on how these risks can be eliminated or reduced to acceptable levels.
Agriculture continues to be the most hazardous industry to work in, with a fatal injury rate that is higher than any other industrial sector. On average over the last ten years almost one person a week has been killed as a direct result of agricultural work.
But while the number of fatal accidents to employees is decreasing, that for the self-employed is going up, with almost three times more self-employed workers than employees killed last year.
The HSE say they are particularly concerned with child safety as half the fatal accidents to members of the public on farms, between 1993 and 2003, were to children.