Avoid Accidents on the Farm this Summer.
Farm safety remains a major concern and challenge for rural communities, with up to 50% of workplace fatalities in Ireland taking place on a farm. To ensure that farms are safe it is important that’s farmers act. With the right control measures in place all accidents are preventable.
As the year moves on, machinery will have been exposed to not only wear and tear, but also some damage while carrying out demanding work such as slurry spreading and silage harvesting. Allocate time to checking and maintaining tractors and machinery. Something as simple as a faulty handbrake can have devastating consequences. Visibility from the tractor seat is a major contributing factor to injuries and fatalities associated with tractors and farm vehicles. Allocate time for cleaning the windows and mirrors regularly to help improve visibility.
Make sure the PTO shaft, PTO cover, safety chains and O guard are in good condition. Check for cracks, rust, loose components and the general structural integrity of the machine. Make sure oils are checked and the machine is fully greased.
With silage and hay season in full swing it’s important to maintain a tidy farmyard, this allows machinery to move easily through it improving both efficiency and safety. There must be good lines of sight at the access and egress points from yards and fields to a public road. Warning signs and cones should be used on road verges – not on the road surface – at entrances to farmyard and fields.
Storage
Silage-pit height should never be more than double the height of the silage-pit wall, and it should slope at less than 45% above the walls. Other factors which must be considered when assessing the safe height of the pit include:
- Moisture content of the grass;
- Condition of the silage pit walls;
- Loader equipment;
- Driver experience.
If there is inadequate pit capacity, then the surplus grass needs to be conserved as baled silage, rather than overfilling the pit. Guide rails on silage-pit walls will show the location of the walls to the loader drive when the pit rises over the walls. They are not to retain machines. They also provide some protection against a person falling when covering or opening a pit.
After baling hay remove from the fields as soon as possible after harvesting, and ensure it is dry before storing, to prevent spontaneous combustion. Store hay and straw away from other buildings - especially those containing fuels or chemicals and separate from livestock. Store hay and straw in stacks at least 10 metres apart and ensure there is sufficient space between the top of the stack and electrical roof lighting.
Moist hay is a fire risk. Hay bales or stacks with high moisture levels (more than 22 percent) can have chemical reactions from the bacteria found in forage crops and build heat. Hay has insulating properties, so the larger the haystack, the less cooling there is to offset the heat that is building.
Hay fires are most likely to occur within six weeks of baling. All hay above 15 percent moisture will heat up within three to seven days, but this generally does not get to dangerous levels and causes minimal loss of forage quality. After the first week of heating, temperatures within a stack should then decline to safe levels in the next few weeks. Bales with a lower density that are stacked lower and have good air flow and ventilation have a lower risk of overheating.
It is important to make sure you are using a fresh set of eyes to look at your farm, as we all can become so accustomed to our surroundings, and we may not notice what an external person could spot as a danger. We encourage farmers to risk assess their farms, take action and not to wait until there is a problem.