Health and safety -- July 2016

I’ve always prided myself on being a go-ahead kind of guy: embracing new ideas and technology, moving ahead with the times, an early adopter if you will. I had to rethink all of that when a friend in Wellington tweeted me a mock-up of a health and safety warning sign that, bar the spelling mistake, I thought was pretty funny. “Hey Craig” she said, “do you have one of these on your farm gate?”
In part the sign reads: “We have a very good H&S policy in place, it is called common sense. If you do not possess any common sense do not enter. You must use your common sense whenever necessary.” I laughed and retweeted it and watched things snowball as it struck a chord with the recipients. Everybody wanted a copy for their place, my phone kept lighting up as the tweet was liked and passed on.

Then I thought about it and realised I wasn’t actually being very go-ahead, unlike all the other farmers on twitter who have been proudly displaying their proactive approaches to Health and Safety. Sure I require everyone on farm to wear a helmet while on their motorbike, but if I’m honest I still don’t see the point at 3km/h on flat ground behind a mob of cows in 30 degree heat.

Then I got to thinking about all the near misses I’ve had over the years, ones that with the passage of time become amusing anecdotes. Like the time I was managing a farm in the Manawatu, it was a herringbone shed and one of the lightbulbs exploded. Apart from it being a bit dark at that particular place in the pit it didn’t really bother me, so I ignored it. Then one day I had reason to climb up on the rails during wash-down. I was wet and holding on to steel pipework when my head came into contact with the exposed live filament, blue sparks danced prettily across my knuckles and I hardly even noticed when I came crashing down to the concrete yard. The twitching took a while to subside, as did the return of coherent speech, but it motivated me to change the lightbulb.
Another time I was getting the cows in at 4am, it was dark and foggy and I knew there was a rotorainer in the paddock. The fog disoriented me and, as I went up a slight rise, I heard a whooshing sound. Luckily I instinctively ducked as the irrigator’s boom brushed past my head close enough to knock my hat off. I blame the irrigator for the fact my pants were still damp on my return to the cowshed.

Despite these close calls, I was bemoaning the level of paperwork required for compliance when a friend gently chided me for my views. He pointed out that a near miss register alerts you to issues and allows them to be remedied before there’s a major accident, and that a hazard identification sheet might just have prevented my near electrocution. “It’s not about paperwork” he told me, “it’s about keeping people safe and doing your best to prevent these things from ever happening.”
So it’s time for me to catch up with rest of the farmers of twitter and proactively get on top of health and safety, because it’s not about paperwork and it’s not even about covering my butt if something does go wrong, it’s about keeping people safe in one of New Zealand’s most dangerous work environments.
Anyway, I hear there’s a Health and Safety app for farmers now so I can do most of it from my phone!