At the end of August, there had already been nine workplace deaths in New Zealand related to agriculture.
That number has since risen – and is part of what motivates Farmlands, the farmer-owned rural supplies cooperative, in its mission to help make New Zealand farms the safest in the world.
They want their 68,000 shareholders nationwide to join them on their quest to help improve New Zealand's poor health and safety record in the primary sector. As a first step, Farmlands wants to equip all shareholders with free safety software to help keep them, their workers and their families safe.
So they have teamed up with farm management software company FarmIQ to create SafeFarm, a health and safety app that can be accessed for free by Farmlands shareholders.
According to Farmlands chief executive Peter Reidie, the co-operative wants shareholders to be safer at their place of work, which often doubles as the place they live. Effective health and safety management is a cornerstone of this, as is their personal attitude to safety.
Reidie says, as a member of the Ag Leaders Health and Safety Action Group, he has witnessed a definite swing towards saying 'enough is enough'. "We (the primary sector) are over-represented in workplace injuries and fatalities. As a co-operative, we want to help make sure our members are not part of these statistics."
"Compliance is adapting and changing – and the primary sector must change with it," he says.
For many people, this means starting to learn about (and embracing) technology and how it can help with compliance. SafeFarm was created to provide that first step along the digital journey for some, while providing an efficient tool to assist with compliance for others already using farm management software.
Find out about more about the SafeFarm app here:
So, how does it help? SafeFarm provides users with the ability to record core data such as hazards and their risk mitigations, incidents and the learnings from them and emergency equipment locations. It includes a farm diary, inventory control and the ability to allocate tasks on-farm. All together – and with later releases to focus on safe visit tools for people visiting the property – it will hopefully make compliance easier and more routine for New Zealand's farmers.
Reidie says the goal of safer New Zealand farms is achievable. It will however require meeting the demands of a rapidly changing world, which means in some cases having to adjust how we farm.
Farmlands hopes to help SafeFarm users be better prepared for the increasingly digital world, says Reidie: "First, we want to help them stay safe."
SafeFarm can be downloaded by Farmlands shareholders free of charge by visiting www.farmlands.co.nz/safefarms