Safer Farms - Making Good Calls for Kids on Farm

Webinar with Farm Without Harm

Safer Farms recently held an online hui to support and enable farmers to make good calls when it comes to on-farm safety for our children. The recording is now available to view below.

The number of harmful incidents involving kids on farms is too high — 1284 claims have been made in the past five years, according to ACC figures. That is almost 5 five accidents involving children on farms every week in New Zealand. Children are part of our farming DNA and we want them to play and come home safe.

In this 30 minute workshop, Safer Farms Chair Lindy Nelson was joined by Otago farmer and mum, Becks Smith; Pamū Head of Health, Safety & Wellbeing, Mark Ogilvie; and children’s safety book author and health & wellbeing advocate, Harriet Bremner-Pinckney.

Watch webinar - Making good calls for kids on farm

In this discussion, the panel explored what is working on farms when it comes to keeping our kids safe; age appropriate freedoms and responsibilities; how children can help shape our thinking and keep us in check; and how to have hard conversations with our kids and their non-farming friends and family.

The session finished by inviting the farming community to imagine a future where children are free from harm on our farms, where they learn through play and adventure, where we are creating the next generation of future farmers, and we have developed those young people as farmers who go on to know how to look after themselves and other people. A future worth imagining.

Thanks to Federated Farmers for their support on this event. These are some additional resources that might prove helpful in identifying safety protocols for your farm environment and for your family:

READ:

Understanding growth and development stages of children - a helpful table that identifies types of injuries or fatalities that occur at different stages of a child’s growth and development (what Mark was telling us about). It outlines prevention suggestions and developmentally appropriate work tasks for each age group.