The agriculture industry is working hard to change attitudes towards farm safety and prevent life-changing and fatal accidents.
The NFU is one of the key supporters of Farm Safety Week, which is managed and funded by the Farm Safety Foundation (otherwise known as Yellow Wellies).
Taking 5 to stay alive
It doesn't matter what aspect of farm safety or your own wellbeing it is, the idea of taking 5 minutes before each task, allows you time to evaluate the task at hand and implement ways to make the task safer.
Use the idea of 'taking 5 to stay alive' to promote regular breaks at a time of year when exhaustion will be high.
Take 5 minutes to check in on your own mental wellbeing and the wellbeing of those you work with.
Share your stories
We’re encouraging members to get involved and share their stories on social media, highlighting the ways they stay safe on farm.
Over the week we want to encourage you and others to #Take5StayAlive and share videos explaining one measure you take to stay safe on farm. Don't forget to tag fellow farmers in your video at the end and ask them to take up the challenge of sharing what they do on their farm.
You can share your stories through videos and images on social media, here are a few tips to help you.
- Think about your message, pick a key safety topic and try to summarise it into 3 points main points.
- Open your video with 10 words that summarise what you are talking about to draw the audience in. Attention spans online are short, you need to grab attention in the first 3 seconds.
- Statistics or emotive messages are a great way to ensure the message resonate with the online audience.
- Be yourself, the more authentic the video, the better. It doesn’t have to be a high-production piece.
- Make it personal to you and your story.
- Choose a backdrop that represents the message. If you are talking about pre harvest checks have a combine in the background.
- Include the NFU’s key message #Take5StayAlive to encourage assessing and managing the risk before each task.
- Be short and to the point – aim for no longer than 30 seconds, short and to the point.
- Use #NFUThinkSafe and #FarmSafetyWeek when sharing the videos.
- Tag @NFUTweets and @yellowwelliesuk for Twitter and @NFULife for Instagram.
We all have a role to pay – let’s start making a difference.
Pace of change is too slow
NFU Deputy President David Exwood said the NFU is proud to support Farm Safety Week.
“We’ve now had 40 years where the fatality numbers have hardly changed – this must be a reset moment for improving safety in our sector,” he said.
“Fatigue, familiarity with procedures or hectic schedules are not excuses. We have to stop the culture of risk-taking and make farm safety our number one priority. Because ultimately, everyone deserves to come home alive and well at the end of each day.”
The 2024 campaign is a special one as it marks 10 years of the Farm Safety Foundation (Yellow Wellies), a charity set up by leading rural insurer NFU Mutual to raise awareness of, and challenge attitudes to farm safety and poor mental health in the industry.
According to Stephanie Berkeley who manages the charity: “Ten years have passed quickly and we are proud of what we have achieved but there is so much more to be done to address the massive challenges we have in the industry.
“Attitudes and behaviours around farm safety and mental health are changing but the pace of change is slow – too slow for the families of those we have lost in the industry and too slow for the thousands of farmers suffering every day with long term ill health, serious injuries or poor mental health.”
“We’ve now had 40 years where the fatality numbers have hardly changed – this must be a reset moment for improving safety in our sector.”
NFU Deputy President David Exwood
This year’s Farm Safety Week will again highlight some of the key challenges farmers and farm workers face every day and will throw a spotlight on the dangers of ignoring near misses, reminding farmers that, while they can not eliminate risk completely, they can minimise it and learn from every near miss to improve their working practices.
Getting people talking
The first Farm Safety Week set out to raise awareness of the importance of safety in agriculture and trigger the discussion around changing the safety culture in farming and, today, this conversation is still as important as ever. Change can only be achieved if every person involved in farming puts safety at the forefront of everything they do.
During the past ten years, the annual focus has grown and now involves more than 400 partners in five countries – England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. The event raises awareness of the impacts of farm accidents on the industry and community and promotes the importance of farming safely.
For more information, visit yellowwellies.org or follow @yellowwelliesUK on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram using the hashtag #FarmSafetyWeek.
