“When you identify and control hazards on your farm, you can prevent an incident,” said Ron Bonnett, Canadian Federation of Agriculture president. “Nothing happened because you followed your farm safety plan and it worked.”
“Plan Farm Safety” is the three-year theme of the Canadian Agricultural Safety campaign. Each aspect of the theme is being promoted with a year-long campaign. Last year the campaign, highlighted Plan with safety walkabouts and planning for safety. This year, the focus is on Farm, including implementation, documentation, and training. And next year, emphasis will be on Safety including assessment, improvement and further development of safety systems.
The year-long Farm campaign will be launched with Canadian Agricultural Safety Week (CASW), March 13 to 19. The Canadian Federation of Agriculture (CFA) and Canadian Agricultural Safety Association (CASA) deliver CASW in partnership with Farm Credit Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada.
Prevention and problem solving bring benefits, not only of better knowledge, skills, and attitudes, but also better quality, productivity, and cost control without losses due to injury or illness. Here are six key questions to ask as a general guide to this process.
1. What could go wrong? Agriculture has many variables such as weather, equipment, and human resources, among others. Try to anticipate possible problems.
2. What skills and abilities do your workers have? Find out. Offer upgrade opportunities. Keep a record. Offer incentives.
3. How have you prepared to minimize the variables? Set priorities in terms of how serious it might be if it happens, and how probable it is that it might happen.
4. What are your contingency plans in the event of an incident? Write them down and let everyone you work with know where they are.
5. Are you prepared to learn from a close call? Note lessons learned and share them with the people who need to help improve safety on your farm.
6. Do you involve everyone in identifying and controlling safety risks? Hold regular safety meetings. Depending on the number of employees, set up a safety committee. Listen, learn, and act. In farm safety, the old adage, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is as true as ever. And it all starts with a plan followed by action.
For more information on this and other farm safety topics visit www.planfarmsafety.ca.
Theresa Whalen is the CFA Farm Safety Consultant
