Safety first urged during silage-making

Farmers and crofters are being urged to put safety first during silage-making season.

Rural insurer NFU Mutual has produced an extensive safety checklist to help keep silage-making season accident, injury and coronavirus-free.

“This year’s silage-making is already presenting challenges to many farms, particularly smaller units which don’t normally need staff beyond their own family members and need to put in place procedures to enable social distancing measures to be maintained,” said Ian Jewitt, who manages Risk Management Services Limited, a division of NFU Mutual.

“Everyone is having to cope with different ways of working and that brings new stresses and anxieties to everyone involved in food production.”

Advice in the checklist includes regularly checking machinery for wear or damage, and ensuring all engines are switched off and parts have stopped before clearing any blockages.

Farmers and farmworkers are advised to keep their mobile phones in their pockets at all times, and to ensure a system is in place to regularly check on lone workers.

All machinery operators are advised to ensure they know the locations and heights of any overhead power lines in fields they are working in, and to ensure all PTO shafts are properly guarded to prevent entanglement and entrapment.

Other advice includes keeping children away from working areas, and staying away from indoor clamps for the first 72 hours as this is the period in which the dangerous gas nitrogen dioxide can form in large quantities.