It's that time of year when the patchwork green scenery is punctuated by little specs of yellow. Wouldn't it be real innovation if someone came up with a use for ragwort?

There's certainly farmers and county councils more adept at growing that than grass.

It was the bane of my youth. Myself, my brother and on occasion any friend "lucky" enough to be visiting would be dropped off after dinner in rented ground. Armed with a few litres of diluted orange the mission was to pull as much of the cursed stuff before pick up after six or if there was a match, five o’clock.

When we first started working the farm where I live there were hedges of the stuff and for a few Augusts, ragwort harvesting was one of the main jobs. With hindsight, the "no seed, no weed" approach worked as now it's a job easily done, but at the time it topped the list as my least favourite summer job.

Farms are unusual workplaces. Combine people from across the age spectrum with powerful machines, unpredictable animals and ignorance and you have a dangerous mix.

Risk reduction and common sense at an individual level can go along way to prevent injury or death. But so much is outside your control.

In August 2011 I had sat down to watch an Irish rugby world cup warm-up match when I got a text from a friend to say there was children in a field taking runs at cows the other side of a wire. I rang him to see what he meant and he then told me the cows broke through the wire and had gone after the children.

Far too many scenarios were playing out in my mind on the drive to that farm. A 650-700kg cow at speed versus a child under 10 is not a contest. Luckily everything was okay but it just showed things can happen you have no control over.

Children aren't the only ones to worry about, adults who should know better - myself included - avoid the common sense route too often.

There was an open day hosted here a few years ago and it really brought home the laissez faire approach to farm safety Irish farmers have. I had the cattle in paddocks either side of a road way and had a strip wire about 30 metres back to at least keep them close for viewing. I put up signs saying do not enter the paddocks with cattle. For stock judging I put up signs saying do not enter the pens. While walking about making sure things were okay what do I see?

People walking through the cattle and I had to ask someone to get out of the pen of cattle while stock judging. It's a commercial suckler herd that's run here - not a pet farm.

Earlier while a photo was being taken of us with the stock in the field, rather than walk 10 metres to the gap and through it, a man took a running jump over the wire rather than take the sensible option. Being honest I was hoping he'd fall. As much as we'd like to think we're invincible, we're not.