Farming is a high risk industry with many and varied hazards presenting opportunities for accidents1 and incidents. A Risk Assessment helps you manage and improve the safety on your farm.
Whether you are a self employed farmer or someone who employs staff you have a responsibility to maintain a safe working environment for yourself, your employees and any visitors.
That can be a big ask on a busy farm with livestock, tractors and other farm equipment, chemicals, workshops etc. It can seem a daunting amount of work to manage the health and safety aspect of all that on top of the general farm management.
Carrying out risk assessments is not difficult. The hard part is simply making a start!
The HSE tell you there’s 5 steps to carrying out a Risk Assessment:
- Identify the hazards2.
- Decide who may be harmed, and how.
- Assess the risks3 and take action.
- Make a record (if you employ 5 or more staff).
- Review the Risk Assessment.
Identify The Hazards
Hazards are defined by the HSE as anything that may cause harm.
Around the average farm (is there such a place?) there are a huge range of things that have the potential to ’cause harm’. One of the hard parts about identifying the hazards around the farm is to not become overwhelmed by all the different potential hazards you identify.
The phrase “as far as reasonably practicable” is used to balance the amount of work/effort/cost involved in taking steps to reduce the risk of the identified hazard occuring against the likelihood of anyone coming to harm . We’ll come to Risk in another article (basically, how likely is anyone going to come to harm).
This phrase require you to make a judgement about the hazards and gives you lea way to, not ignore, but take reasonable steps in proportion to the likelihood of anything happening (the Risk).
The hazards you are likely to encounter on your farm are heavily dependant on the type of farm you run (obviously) as is the risk of these hazards doing harm. The time of year also has an impact.
You will know your farm best but it is very easy to skim over potential hazards due to familiarity or to brush them off because there’s never been a problem before. So, when identifying hazards, make a note of everything and then later, when looking at the risk, some can be prioritised and appropriate steps taken.
Some of the hazards are applicable across the farm such as slips, trips and falls. But there maybe certain areas or tasks where the implications may be much more serious or where the likelihood of a slip or trip is greater. These should be treated as separate hazard in your risk assessment.
Many of the hazards will be specific to certain areas of the farm or different times of the day, week, month or year (seasonal). Harvest time may have a different range of hazards to when you’re preparing ground or sowing.
Decide Who May Be Harmed
This step of the Risk Assessment process is relatively straightforward. Who has access to your farm?
- You (obviously)
- Your employees
- Family members (working on the farm)
- Contractors
- Delivery Drivers
- Children (yours and others people’s)
- Members of the Public (invited or otherwise!)
- Sales people
- (I’m sure you can think of some more)
You may have all of these examples, some of them or more types of people who could access the farm. But most, hopefully, will only have limited access but you need to at least consider all scenarios. When we look at Risk (the next step) some may become an insignificant issue (but at least you will have considered them).
You may also want to consider those that although uninvited are legally allowed – walkers on footpaths etc.
Next, consider how them may come to harm.
Some of the hazards you identified in the first step, Identify the Hazards, will only apply to a small number of the people you’ve noted above. For example Children are unlikely to be at risk of overhead lines around the farm but You, your Staff and Employees and Delivery Drivers could be.
So, now you need to think about how those people you have identified as possibly being at risk could be harmed. Some examples:
- a crush injury from tractors or lorries moving about your farm
- electrocution from contact with overhead lines
- blinded by sparks from grinding wheel in the workshop
- injured falling from height
- etc…
Assess The Risks
The Health and Safety Executive define the Risk as the chance that someone could be harmed because of the hazard.
Now that you have
- Identified the Hazards, and
- Decided who may be harmed (and how)
you can decide how likely those people may be harmed by those hazards – the Risk. This is a judgement based on your knowledge and experience and can be simply “High/Low” or “High/Medium/Low”.
By deciding on a ‘Level of Risk’ you are able to prioritise those hazards that present the greatest danger. This helps prevent you from potentially becoming overwhelmed by the number of things you found around the farm that could cause harm. Although they may all need addressing you can see which should be tackled first.
Also, you are only required to take “reasonably practicable” steps to address the hazards. Adding a ‘level of risk’ helps you decide what steps you may need to take to address the situation. You need to balance the level of risk against the amount of time, money and effort needed to address the hazard. It’s pointless spending a huge amount of time and effort (and possibly money) taking steps to address a hazard you identify as ‘Low Risk’.
On the other side of the coin ‘High Risk’ hazards require sufficient and prompt action and effort spent on them to reduce that risk.
It can be worth making note of anything you already have in place that address some of those identified hazards.
The measures you need to put in place to reduce the risk of an accident happening need not be expensive or time consuming – but that’s not to say that they won’t be either.