What Do You Think Would Be The Main Things That Are Causing Farm Deaths?

I want to just go through and this could be confronting in a sense but to make you think about farm safety. I don’t need to put up gory photos, that doesn’t work at all, you can go onto the internet if you want to see that sort of thing. But just to talk about things which perhaps we are in denial about. Some of the data on farm safety and injuries and deaths comes from basically from media monitors, because they actually, nowadays they’re capturing all the information about deaths on farms. Unless it shows up in the press, it’s not regionally caught that well, but this is the best data we can have, and it’s collected by the group up at the farm safe people up in Dubbo who run the organisation called the Australian Centre for Agricultural Health and Safety.

In 2015, there were 69 deaths on farms. What would you think would be … I’m going to look at the top five, the headline acts for this sort of thing. What do you think would be the main things that are causing farm deaths?

Quad bikes

Quad bikes. Excellent. Number one, 15 quad bike deaths. Number two?

Tractors?

Excellent. 13. All right. That is true, until quite recently tractors always sat on top. It didn’t matter if you were in grain farming, horticulture, vineyards, sheep and cattle, dairy, whatever it might be, it was always tractors. Well, now it’s quad bikes. And there’s far too many instances occurring in recent times as well. Number three, what do you think might be next?

Farm machinery.

Down the bottom, farm machinery’s just generally farm machinery, so not just tractors on their own, but farm machinery. Keep on going. Tree felling, also one of my favourite subjects. Chainsaws. Motorcycles are on the bottom. So, the old two-wheel version, which is actually my preferred way of getting around when I’m mustering stock anyway, I prefer to be on a two-wheeler bike for manoeuvrability rather than a quad bike, but that’s the top five.