The Strategic Advisor Agriculture with Workplace Safety and Prevention Services suggests an effective farm safety plan that that eliminates hazards should improve both the safety and productivity of the farm.
“Farm Safety: The Top 10 Greatest Risk Factors and How to Avoid Injury” was among the topics examined during Saskatchewan Pork Industry Symposium 2022 last month in Saskatoon.
Dean Anderson, the Strategic Agriculture Advisor with Workplace Safety and Prevention Services, says the key to improved farm safety is to create a plan and make sure everyone is aware of and believes in that plan and follows it and that’s the responsibility of everyone, starting with the owner.
The owner has to. Whether he’s working for himself or he’s got a bunch of workers working for him, the legislation will fall to the owner of the operation. Who needs to be worried about it? Everybody.
Work place safety is a joint aspiration by everybody in the system, so that a newer employee gets mentored by a worker who has been working there for several years. Supervisors need to know that a new worker can come to them if they see a problem or they don’t understand how to do the job right. So, you can see how the owner has the big legal responsibility then supervisors and workers have responsibilities.
It’s a culture. You don’t change it over night. If you’ve been dong something the way your dad always did it, you don’t need to just throw it out. Why don’t you think about how you can change it and how you can make it better. The big thing is everyone wants to go home the way they came to work.
~ Dean Anderson, Workplace Safety and Prevention Services
For those formulating a farm safety plan, Anderson recommends completing a risk assessment of the farm, highlighting the biggest risk factors and then identify ways to eliminate those hazards.
He suggests improving safety should improve productivity, whether it’s quality of product, amount of product or the speed at which you can put product out which ultimately affects the bottom line.
