Farm Safety Improves Through 'Incremental Gain', Says Birkett

The former arable section chair recently hosted an event on his farm, which was organised by the Safer Farms advocacy group and celebrated a big reduction in ACC claims from on-farm accidents over the last five years.

Claims are down from about 25,000 in 2020 to 16,666 last year.

Offering some practical tips on improving farm safety, Birkett told the gathering that farmers should look at health and safety angles whenever faced with capital expenditure or replacement.

“At the moment we’re seeing dairy and the red meat sector going well, and I think it’s a real opportunity for us to drive health and safety around those capital decisions and getting people to really focus on, ‘well, if I’m going to replace that piece of machinery or equipment, what are the safety features that I need on it?’”

Primarily an arable farmer, Birkett also runs some winter livestock grazing. He said he replaced his stock yards a couple of years ago, but only after looking at the design to make it safer for both the workers and the stock.

All his lambs are crutched before going to the works or to market, and previously that was done in the race.

“Now we do it all through a crush – far easier on the body. You know, when you’re crutching in the races, the next day you’d always have a sore back and you notice it.

“We can do 500 lambs through here in the crate with electric shears and the next day you don’t have that issue anymore.”

Birkett had also made incremental gains over the years as he has upgraded his grain silos.

He said all his silos now have lids that can be opened from the ground without the need to climb up, the newer silos have safety cages around the ladders, and the newest are a lot steeper, so there is no need to get into them to clean them out.

“Now we can pretty much give them a bang with a rubber hammer – clean enough for if we’re going to put the same crop back – and we don’t need to get in the silos to clean them at all.”

Augers were another high-risk item and Birkett said they had decided to change the auger that they mainly use for unloading to hydraulic operation instead of power take off.

“When you’re unloading a silo, you are walking around the auger quite a bit, so that alone is quite a cheap thing to do. In fact, there was very little difference in price of a PTO driven versus hydraulically driven.

“So, it’s just those little decisions that you make along the way that add up to accumulate to a lot safer work environment for us.”

The gathering was attended by Safer Farms ambassador (and former chair) Lindy Nelson, ACC associate minister Nicola Grigg, and industry leaders including Dairy Holdings ex-CEO Colin Glass, PGG Wrightson CEO Stephen Guerin – both Safer Farms board members – and Federated Farmers president Colin Hurst.