Farmers slow to get help with tough jobs

Farmers routinely fail to get help with difficult jobs, can be lax at using safety gear and don’t always check machinery is in good working order before use.

Overlooking these precautions is strongly associated with accidents and near misses on the farm, sometimes involving the farmer, and sometimes affecting others.

A report titled Risk Taking and Accidents on Irish Farms, published today, also found that those with larger farms were more likely to take risks by not routinely using safety gear: the odds of this were almost three times as high on the largest farms (more than 100 hectares) than on the smallest farms (less than 20 hectares).