Ellis, who was speaking at the afternoon session of the National Conference on Farm Safety and Health in Kilkenny on Thursday, said that over the past ten years, farm deaths have averaged one per week throughout the country.

“Farming employs 1.5% of the population in Britain, but causes 15%-20% of fatal accidents,” Ellis explained.

He added that agriculture deaths is 19 times the all-industry average and is four times the number of deaths in construction. Similar to Ireland, the largest volume of deaths in Britain has been as a result of machinery or vehicles. In 10 years, 40 farmers were killed when they were run over by their own vehicles while 30 died when they were caught up in machinery.

The NFU is rolling out regulatory and financial framework policies to solve and prevent many of the accidents. It also has various workshops aimed specifically at lowering deaths around slurry fumes, cattle handling and machinery maintenance.

Professor Alan Plom who is board member of the British farm safety partnership said that the partnership is taking a “long term” view to lowering farm deaths and accidents.

“We recognise that it could take 10 to 20 years to fix it, perhaps even a generation,” he said.

On the home front, Catherina Glancy inspector with the Health and Safety Authority (HSA) described how the body investigates farm deaths. Glancy said that the HSA investigates “all workplaces deaths, serious accidents and dangerous occurrences”.

When arriving at the scene, the HSA contacts the emergency services before taking photographs of the scene and talking to eye witnesses to glean how the accident occurred. All related items are “bagged and tagged” and take for investigation. Larger items such as vehicles are taken by An Garda Síochána for investigation at a later date.

Glancy said that each death allows them to draw a “learning” for the HSA. It uses the data collected from each death in an attempt to prevent deaths involving similar scenarios in the future. She concluded by saying that farmers can become "blind" to the risks.

The afternoon session of the conference concluded with John McNamara, health and safety officer with Teagasc.

McNamara showed the results of a five year rolling farm fatalities data. The data showed that the period of 1997 to 2001 has been the most dangerous for deaths since 1993 although the period of 2010 to 2014 is growing ever closer to that level.