Pressure is a common factor in deaths

I HAVE lost a number of acquaintances and some good friends to farm accidents over the years and each time I read of yet more shocking statistics or the industry’s ongoing, appalling safety record I recall all of them.

Perhaps the term ‘accident’ isn’t appropriate here, however. Because one legal definition of the word I read is “a happening resulting in injury that is in no way the fault of the injured person”.

And in all too many cases people who have died on farms have been at least partly responsible for their own demise: perhaps by walking on roofs they knew to be less than well supported, or by assuming that a bull would be in a benign mood, or by telling themselves they had attached a PTO so many times they were immune to any kind of mishap.

But I would argue that there is one common factor underlying so many of the tragedies involving injury and death that make our industry so dangerous. And that’s pressure.

Pressure caused by time – or rather a lack of it, because the farm can no longer afford to employ staff, so leaving all the jobs to be done by the boss. Pressure to comply with an increasing burden of regulation, failure to do which will lead to penalties.

Pressure caused by the knowledge that there is a growing list of repairs and renewals that are necessary (often on grounds of safety) but which cannot be afforded. And look as though they never will be. Pressure, fundamentally, related to not being able to make a decent living because the farm isn’t earning enough from what the market pays.

Pressure, in a nutshell, caused by this country’s insistence (encouraged, or certainly not discouraged by politicians) on having cheap food.

That pressure has grown over the last three decades and has been mirrored by a worrying upward-moving line on the graph recording farm deaths and injury.

That pressure leads to distraction and therefore carelessness. It encourages people to try to save a few quid here and thereby taking shortcuts with livestock, chemicals or machinery. Most tragically it can temporarily blind them to the fact that farms are inherently dangerous places and certainly not locations where children should be allowed to venture without the closest possible supervision.

Living under such a degree of pressure is close to intolerable for many people, which is why calls to farming helplines have also grown exponentially in recent years.

But do you ever hear these circumstances being acknowledged by our supine farming leaders? No. Because the trail would lead immediately and directly back to the front door of the supermarkets. The very organisations we are constantly being told are our ‘partners’ in the food chain. The ones who voice such concern for having healthy balance sheets, massive pay packets for senior staff and decent dividends for shareholders while remaining content for farmers to carry on running on fumes.

It would be foolish to suggest that if all farmers were permitted to earn more from the market in order to raise their living standards and take some of the stress and anxiety out of their daily routines we could immediately eliminate all on-farm deaths.

But I remain convinced that money-related pressure is a common denominator in so many such tragedies – while, sadly, being equally convinced that the obvious remedy has little chance of being applied.