Farm safety checklist: rate each gap, name who fixes it

In January 2022, a court in Bundaberg, Queensland, fined a macadamia grower A$410,000 for three failures to meet a health and safety duty and one failure to report incidents. A state spokesperson said the offences involved injuries to a number of people on a number of occasions. The report does not give the cause. To find which of your work areas fall below standard, walk each one against a written standard, rate every gap on one of three levels and write beside it one name and one date. Passing a place every day shows you that the guard is there; only the walk shows whether it works.

A work area is any place where someone works or could get hurt: the shop, a machine, a pen, the drinking water at the field. The standard is the bar that place has to meet. The sheet you carry on the walk is a work-areas checklist. It has one line per place: the standard and where it comes from, what you found, the level of the gap, who fixes it and by when.

To follow the steps, take a macadamia orchard near Bundaberg with a shop, three tractors and a harvest crew. The orchard is an example, not a farm from the report above. Queensland’s own rules are not applied here. The standards in the example come from the studies and rules cited below, and on your sheet each line takes the rule that applies where you work.

Why doesn’t passing a place every day show what is missing?

Because passing shows what is on the farm, not whether each guard, rail and tap still works. After a thousand trips the eye stops catching what is out of place. At the orchard, the guard of tractor 2’s power take-off, the shaft that carries the engine’s power to an implement, has leaned against the shop wall since the last repair.

Knowing the farm well does not fix this. Over 70% of the 417 agricultural science students surveyed in Ireland were substantially engaged in farm work. Those who had done more farm work did not, by the survey’s tests, rate the risk of farm injury any differently. They were students, not farm owners or crews.

A general answer also sounds safer than an item-by-item one. A 2021 survey of 104 people in the northeast of Buenos Aires province, Argentina, asked about protective gear. 86.5% of those who use farm chemicals said they had it, but asked which pieces they had, only 23% had the full set for applying. Another 41% had an incomplete set, in some cases only gloves. The 86.5% and the 23% are what people answered, not what anyone saw. Someone with only gloves can truthfully say yes to the first question. On the walk, look at and try each item, one by one.

What does a guard that is there but does not work look like?

From a distance it looks like any other: the rollover bar folded down, the seat belt pushed under the seat. Researchers in Iowa tested a checklist on 52 row-crop farms in 2019 and 2020. For each tractor it asks whether the machine has a rollover protective structure (ROPS) free of structural damage and in upright position, the frame that protects the driver if the tractor rolls over. It also asks whether the seat belt is in good working condition: no rips or frays, and it adjusts and latches properly. It asks about the state of the guard, not only whether one is there.

A guard that comes off is easy to lose. Researchers in Brazil checked 487 tractors in use on 270 farms in São Paulo state between August 2000 and December 2001. 17.3% had a guard on the power take-off, against 71.0% of the 31 new tractors at dealers and fairs. The survey is old and from one state, but it counted what a walk finds: a guard missing from the machine.

At the orchard, the line for tractor 2 does not say “guard: yes”. It says whether the guard is on the shaft today. It is not: it is leaning on the shop wall. A guard that is bypassed, loose or folded away is a gap, even when it is on the farm.

Which standard do you check each place against?

The standard is the bar the place has to meet. On each line you write where it comes from: the machine’s manual, your country’s or state’s rule, a buyer’s or certifier’s requirement, or a higher bar you set yourself. In the Iowa checklist study, two trained raters scored the lights of older vehicles differently. One took into account the lighting requirement at the time the older vehicle was made, and the other compared it with current requirements. The researchers then clarified their field manual so that both would apply the same bar.

The rule you find is the floor: the standard you write can ask for more, never less. With the source written on the line, a later disagreement is about what was found, not about which rule applies.

The places people need through the day get a line too: drinking water, a toilet, somewhere to wash hands. When a machine breaks down, the work stops and everyone sees it. When the water at the field runs out, the work goes on, which is why these places get a line of their own.

As a model of what such a standard looks like, the US field sanitation rule applies when eleven or more employees do hand labor in the field on a given day. The employer must then provide potable water placed in locations readily accessible to all employees, and one toilet and one handwashing facility for every 20 employees or fraction of 20. A rule from another country is not the standard for Queensland. Each line takes the rule that applies where the work is done.

How do you rate a gap, and what deadline does it get?

Think of two slow-moving vehicle signs, the red-bordered triangle on the back of a slow machine on the road. One is beginning to fade; the other is missing. A pass-or-fail check fails both, but they cannot wait the same amount of time. The Iowa checklist rates each item on four levels: compliant, minimal improvement needed, substantial improvement needed and not compliant.

For that sign, the researchers scored a triangle that is dirty or beginning to fade as minimal improvement. A sign that no longer reflects light, or is broken, counted as substantial improvement, and a missing sign as not compliant. Their field manual gave definitions, examples and pictures for each level. The two raters had about three hours of training and scored 52 farms separately. Their agreement, measured by a statistic that corrects for chance, ranged from 0.86 to 0.94 across the checklist sections, where 0.80 or more counts as strong.

Your sheet uses the three levels below compliant, with a line or two on what each means on your farm, so that whoever walks after you rates the way you did. The deadline follows from the level by four rules, a suggestion and not a research finding:

• Not compliant, where someone could get hurt today: the work at that place stops until the fix is done.
• Not compliant, where no one can get hurt today, such as a missing sign on a machine that stays in the shed: fixed within a week.
• Substantial improvement needed: fixed within a month.
• Minimal improvement needed: fixed by the next walk.

If you have a hired manager or a foreman, stopping the work where a not compliant gap could hurt someone today should be theirs to decide without waiting for you. A separate article, on what your manager decides alone, explains how to put that in writing.

What do you write first, and when do you walk again?

Write the list of places and the standard for each one before the first walk. The Iowa checklist took 1.5 to 2 hours per row-crop farm, so a small farm takes a morning; on a spread-out one, walk one part at a time over several mornings.

The sheet stops matching the farm as soon as something changes: a guard comes off for a repair, boxes pile up in front of a shed door, months of rain rot a step. Walk again within a year, and sooner after any change: a new machine, a repair, a new building, a harvest crew. The one-year limit and the triggers are a suggestion, not a research finding.

The studies cited here count what people said, what a walk finds and how closely two raters agree. None of them shows that a sheet means fewer accidents on your farm. What the sheet gives you is a dated list of what is below standard, with a name and a deadline on each line, to check at the next walk.

The sheet is about places. For tasks such as working cattle or climbing onto a truck you need another record. It covers how each task is done and which safety briefing each worker got, the subject of a separate article on who got which safety briefing. On the sheet you rate the place, never the person who works there.

• List every place where someone works or could get hurt, one line each, including the places people pass every day and the water and toilets at each work site
• Next to each place, write the standard it has to meet and where that standard comes from: the machine’s manual, your country’s rule, a buyer’s requirement or a higher bar you set yourself
• Walk each place with the sheet and check every item by looking at it and trying it, not by a general answer or memory, and rate whether each guard works, not whether there is one
• Give each gap one of the three levels below “compliant”: “minimal improvement needed”, “substantial improvement needed” or “not compliant”
• On each line, write one person who answers for the fix and a deadline by level. Work stops where a not compliant gap could hurt someone today; other not compliant gaps, a week; substantial, a month; minimal, the next walk
• Write the date of the walk and of the next one, no more than a year away and sooner after any change, and hang the sheet where each person named can see their lines

The person named on a line answers for the fix even when someone else does the work, usually whoever holds the job that covers the place, such as the mechanic for the shop. A separate article on the org chart and job descriptions explains how to write down what each job answers for. If you have that, you know whose name goes on each line; if not, you decide it on the sheet.

Deciding who answers for each place, and walking it again on a set date, is the part of how the farm is run that passing the shed a thousand times does not do.