gone up the hill
Member
- Location
- Devon
The stats don't lie. Year after year half or more of the accidental deaths on farms are the over 60s. Given that over 60s do not form 50%+ of the agricultural workforce (ie those doing the day to day work) then that suggests that age is a very relevant issue when it comes to farm safety. Yet no one wants to address it, not in public anyway. We just keep having these H&S seminars of the type we've all attended where age is never mentioned.
I have no problem with the over 60s wanting to continuing working, and risking life and limb, as long as the rest of the industry are not continually targeted by the HSE as a result to 'improve farming's H&S record ' when the majority of the deaths are in effect a lifestyle choice by people who in any other line of work would either be retired or restricted to safer duties.
Why are there no H&S campaigns specifically targeted at the over 60s? To try and get them to address the risks that are specific to them? Why are we pretending that agricultural fatalities are distributed randomly, when they just aren't?
You are over looking/ ignoring why so many older farmers are still working/ doing physical/ dangerous jobs like cattle handling etc.
That reason is because nearly all the kids from these farmers would have as recently as 10 years ago been working home full time on the farm, now with the pee poor margins in livestock farming in particular they have had to seek full time work off farm to get a decent wage/ have a life so the parents are still doing jobs that 10 years ago that young farmers ( ie the sons/ daughters ) would have been doing.
Also people that have kids who have come home have had to expand so much to give then a reasonable wage that both the workload of the kids and the parents has increased three fold and for example two people are doing the full time work of three people.
Plus it doesn't help that farmers are now drowning in ever increasing red tape that is taking up so much time unlike say 10/15 years ago isn't helping the safety issue either!
Reality is for safety to really improve in the industry then both needless red tape needs to be reduced and a better split of the margins back to the farming industry from the retailers is needed.