The Department of Customer Services’ Centre for Work Health and Safety has launched a research project to understand the emerging safety issues in sustainable farming.
Director of the Centre, Skye Buatava said that in the bid to keep their land sustainable and profitable, NSW landholders were changing the way they used their land and the new project would tackle the emerging health and safety issues associated with the change.
“We know the suicide rate among farmers is higher than the general population in NSW and we need to do all we can to protect these workers,” Ms Buatava said.
“Not just in NSW but across the world farmers are increasingly facing a range of disruptions to how they farm,” she said.
“This is critical research to ensure we are doing all we can to understand the emerging risks to farmers as technologies and trends change.”
Ms Buatava said the Centre had partnered with the Institute for Sustainable Futures (ISF) at the University of Technology, Sydney to understand the new risks facing landholders as they diversified their land use.
She said the partnership’s Transformation In Farm Livelihoods: Impacts on the work health and safety of farming communities report would explore the safety issues around new farming practices and consult with over 100 NSW farming participants.
“The project will then develop a suite of solutions that will keep workers safer,” she said.
“The first stage of the project, a literature review, found that research into new work health and safety risk in farming was limited.”
Ms Buatava said most health and safety literature on farming was focused on the mental health impacts of drought and didn’t consider physical work health and safety issues.
She said the final report would be finalised next year.
The Centre and ISF’s 97-page Transformation In Farm Livelihoods literature review can be accessed at this PS News link.
