Safety on a farm works best if the person or people in charge take a leading role in managing safety and health.

Many business enterprises have proven that good safety management leads to increased productivity, and the same works for farms.

By having a good safety management program, you can avoid not only farm injuries, but also unplanned incidents that are costly, time consuming, stressful and inconvenient. This makes good economic sense.

How to start

To assess safety management on your farm, check whether you have:

• Regular hazard spotting surveys of plant, equipment, substances and tasks.
• A system of recording injuries, near misses and identified hazards.
• Safe procedures for farm tasks.
• Safety training and supervision for new and young employees.
• Protective clothing and equipment.
• Safety training and practice for each new item of plant and equipment.
• Safety discussions between employers, contractors and employees.
• Safety information readily available for plant, equipment and hazardous substances.
• Copies of the Occupational Safety and Health Act and Regulations.

Develop a plan

Draw up a safety management plan covering the points listed above. Preferably, put your plan in writing, and keep it with other safety information about plant, equipment and substances on the farm.

Discuss it with others on the farm during development, and ensure their safety concerns are met. Make sure the plan allows for ongoing safety consultation with others, the provision of information and training, and a system for hazard identification, risk assessment and risk control.

Then make sure employees and others on the farm are familiar with the plan, safe work procedures, and current legal safety and health requirements.

The plan should cover providing farm workers with safety information, induction for new employees, safety training with new plant and procedures, special safeguards for young workers, and keeping a record of injuries, near misses and potential hazards.

Consultation

Consultation means discussion - talking about and reaching agreement on safety and health problems and solutions with others doing the work. Here are some guidelines:

• Allow others on the farm to discuss and contribute to the safety management plan.
• Make sure everyone on the farm knows and understands the safety rules you have agreed to, and is aware of the relevant workplace safety laws.
• Involve others in safety planning for new plant or equipment before it is ordered.
• Discuss unfamiliar or potentially risky farm tasks beforehand, and plan an agreed safe procedure.
• During shared tasks, communicate with one another continually to avoid risky situations.

• As far as possible, keep to agreed safety plans for each job.
• Following any injury or near-miss incident, no matter how minor, discuss and agree on a safer way to continue the work.
• Be prepared to stop work until suitable safety improvements can be made.

Spot the hazard

The best safety outcomes on farms are achieved by a 24-hour approach to spotting and dealing with hazards. A hazard is any situation, activity, procedure, plant, equipment or animal that may result in injury or harm to a person. Hazards may be identified in:

• Environments (light, noise, rain, heat, sun),
• Substances (pesticides, fuels, dusts),
• Workplace layout (work space, bench height, storage heights),
• Work organisation (unnecessary manual handling),
• Equipment (ladders, silos, chainsaws, angle grinders),
• Farm animals (that bite, kick, butt, crush, toss, infect),
• Heights (roofs, silos, windmills),
• Electricity (switches, cables, leads, power tools, connections).

How to spot hazards

• Observation - use your senses of sight, hearing, smell and touch - combined with common sense, knowledge and experience.
• Material safety data sheets (MSDSs) - obtain them from manufacturers and suppliers. Read them carefully to identify possible harm from hazardous substances, and precautions that need to be taken.
• Hazard and risk surveys - conduct hazard spotting surveys of main work areas. Talk to others about their safety concerns; check injury and incident records.
• Children and visitors - include in your surveys areas and activities in which children or visitors could be at risk.
• Discussion groups - are useful for identifying hazards and recommending solutions.
• Safety audits - consider hiring a consultant to investigate safety and help prepare a management plan.
• Information - keep informed of hazards in the industry through the latest available information.
• Record analysis - keep records of identified hazards, near misses, injuries and workers' compensation claims, to help identify possible trends.
• Consumer information - carefully read and follow consumer guidelines on equipment and substances.
• Act and Regulations - become familiar with the Occupational Safety and Health Act and Regulations.

Assess the Risk

Once a hazard has been identified, the likelihood and possible severity of injury or harm will need to be assessed, before determining how best to minimise the risk. High risk hazards will need to be addressed more urgently than low risk situations.

You may decide that the same hazard could lead to several different possible outcomes. For each hazard consider how likely each possible outcome is, and record the highest priority you come up with. The following list may help your decision.

Make the changes

Consider the following control measures, listed in order of importance.

a) Remove the hazard at the source - e.g. get rid of the plant or substance.

b) Substitute it with a less hazardous plant or substance.

c) Isolate the hazardous process, plant or substance from people.

d) Add engineering controls, such as safety barriers or exhaust ventilation.

e) Adopt safe work procedures, training and supervision to minimise the risk.

f) Where other means are not sufficient or practicable, provide personal protective equipment.

g) Implement and monitor the controls you decide upon.

One or more of the controls recommended above should be agreed upon, and the changes made as soon as possible, before the hazard causes an injury.

Checking the changes

To make sure risk has been minimised, and a further hazard has not been created, the new safety measures may need to be carefully tested before people are allowed back onto a worksite or before work recommences. Consultation between the employer and others at the workplace will help to reach a safe decision.

In some cases, a new set of safe work procedures may be necessary, possibly even another period of training and supervision, until the improvement can be shown to be working safely.

Safety improvements should be reviewed periodically, to make sure they continue to be effective.

Copies of this information may be freely printed and distributed provided that WorkSafe Western Australia receives appropriate acknowledgement, and that no substantial changes are made to the text.