Thankfully I can count myself and my siblings in the ‘what if’ category – what if we hadn’t moved, what if that ladder had fallen. Having grown up on a tillage farm, with six children in our family and plenty of machinery about, we were lucky that the only accident was a minor encounter between myself and a digger bucket.

I’m now heading into my final year of Agricultural Science in UCD, and so far we had a whole module dedicated to health and safety, which we completed in second year.

How good was this module at highlighting the risks on farms? The potential was there, but if we were to judge it by student attendance alone, the answer would not be good. We had weekly lectures a mid-semester written exam, a project, two practical sessions out on Lyons Research Farm and an end-of-semester exam.

The two things that remain in my mind are a short and gruesome video about workplace accidents and a straw dummy getting caught in a staged PTO accident out in Lyons

The point was that visual learning is incredibly important; people need to see it to believe it.

The shock factor gets through to people a lot quicker than lecture notes and statistics.

Quite a large hole still remains where farm safety education uptake is concerned. However, the number of people enquiring about and attending courses is increasing, just at a slow rate. The main problem is a lack of information as to where to access such courses.

Training

Kearney Training and Consultancy (KTC Safety) Ltd, based in Ballydavis, Portlaoise, offers a wide range of courses for farm safety, with its pesticides courses being the most sought-after.

Operations manager David Kearney Jnr said: “We offer a wide range of pesticide courses including boom sprayer; pelleted or granular application; knapsack sprayer; mist, fog and smoke application; and we also offer sprayer testing.

“We are the only company offering such a range of City and Guilds NPTC certification. These are globally recognised with no expiry date.

“The PA1 (Safe Use of Pesticides) and PA2 (Boom Sprayer), takes three days to complete. Most people don’t realise that it is now a legal obligation to hold a training certificate for pesticide application.

“We have had a wide range of clients – from Teagasc, Kinsella Agri Contractors, Portmarnock Golf Club – in for training, as well as individuals.”

The City and Guilds NPTC is the only certification accepted in the forestry industry in Ireland and the only certification accepted in Britain and Northern Ireland for pesticides.

Another training body, FRS Training Ltd, offers educational and interactive safety training opportunities for individuals, groups and organisations involved in all aspects of production in agriculture. Based in Derryvale, Roscrea, Co Tipperary, programmes include:

  • Farm safety (half-day course).
  • Farm safety demonstrations on farm walks.
  • Completing risk assessment manually or online
  • Livestock safety demonstrations.
  • Tractor safety for young farmers
  • First aid and occupation first aid
  • Progressive agriculture farm safety days.
  • Horticulture tools and equipment (Fetac level 4).
  • Other FRS courses include ATV/quad training, pesticide handling and application, tractor safety, drovers course, fire safety and chainsaw safety.

    Along with the safety courses, there are a wide range of safety products being developed. Slurrysafe is a product designed by Collette and Alan Martin, a husband and wife team from Ballyduff Upper, Waterford, to save lives while agitating and spreading slurry from open pits.

    Non-slip

    The safety platform has an agitation point on its steel non-slip floor and a separate entry point for the hose pipe used to extract the slurry.

    “It has been shown that more slurry farm deaths are caused by drowning rather than from slurry gases,” explains Collette.

    “We have two young children ourselves and had two open slurry pits on our dairy farm, so we wanted to make it as safe a place for them to be as possible.

    “We came up with the idea in September 2013, and had it patented and received funding from Waterford LEADER Partnership. There has been great interest in our product,” says Collette.

    “We exhibited at the National Dairy Show 2013 where we won the Gold Innovation award.

    “Two of our Slurrysafe products are installed in Moorepark. It’s brilliant to see farmers showing an interest and striving to make their farms a safer place for everyone involved.”

    See www.slurrysafe.ie, www.ktcsafety.ie and www.frstraining.ie