Opinion: Shifting responsibility is deadly in farming

Driving with the family in France recently I passed a farmer repairing a roof from a ladder raised up in a tractor front loader bucket. My immediate reaction was: He’s going to kill himself.

He didn’t, and it got me thinking about our attitude to risk and danger and how much it’s changed in the UK over the past decade.

The French farmer made me wonder, for those countries with inherently older machinery, no formal on-farm H&S, children around and an older average farmer age – surely all these things would point to them having a higher death rate than the UK where we have done so much as employers to improve things?

See also: Opinion – the Land Use Framework should spark a ‘revolution’

About the author

Jo Franklin

Jo Franklin is an arable, sheep and sheep-dairy farmer from Hertfordshire. She and her partner, Rob, launched the business as a start-up in 2013 and went full-time in 2017. She has completed a Nuffield Farming Scholarship and is currently studying an MBA at Cranfield University sponsored by The Worshipful Company of Farmers.

Read more articles by Jo Franklin

But the statistics for deaths in UK agriculture are the highest in Western Europe, so what’s going on in the UK that makes it so dangerous? And most importantly, what can we do to reverse this trend?

Over recent years, many businesses have tried to improve on farm health and safety, with harvest briefings, first-aid training, hi-vis workwear, signs (lots of signs), voluntary H&S reviews, investment in equipment that should make operations safer, an increase in the number of staff with the correct qualifications, and enough written risk assessments, COSHH assessments, Emergency Procedures and Standard Operating Procedures to make a library blush – but still the toll rises.

The common theme to all these actions, is that they are the actions of the employer. These actions are the employer taking on more responsibility for their staff’s welfare, and who are they taking that responsibility from? The employee.

So how much self-preservation do people learn from classroom training, or a dusty file of brain-numbing assessments and policies? How many times do you pass a sign before you ignore it?

How many times do you reverse around a corner and it’s OK before you don’t look behind you anymore – but it’s alright because you’ve got a reversing beeper on?

Personal responsibility is being devolved in UK society, including farming and it’s proving deadly. And as machines get bigger, the damage that can be done by them gets more significant.

The lack of good quality labour, means farms often have to employ sub-optimal people.

The worse they are, the more time needs to be invested in training them, and this has to be an experienced staff member next to them until they (the trainer) feels comfortable in their abilities.

This has been happening a whole lot less over the past 10 years and, while we all appreciate the reasons why, it doesn’t make it right.

We as employers can also be too keen to hide behind the fact they have their tickets, so must be OK, even when what we see with our own eyes doesn’t ground truth this statement.

And finally, there’s the lack of profitability. UK farming (broadly) is the least profitable in Western Europe and with the loss of subsidies the gap is growing.

It means people are pushed for time on farm, training suffers and corners are cut.

All the actions employers (and society) have taken over the past decade have made the devolution of personal responsibility worse. We have to change this or the toll will continue to rise.