Working safely to reduce accidents

A safe working environment is important for properly doing the work. This certainly also holds for dairy farmers, their family members, employees and visitors. The Sustainable Dairy Chain aims at raising the awareness of dairy farmers with respect to safety at the farm, making sure that they will actively put this into practice. With this parties from the agricultural and green sectors want to substantially reduce the number of accidents.

The success of the project will be measured by the number of attended meetings, the number of conducted risk inventories and the number of courses for prevention officer / emergency response / legislation for agricultural vehicles and, eventually, a downward trend for accidents (from a long-term perspective).

Objectives 2030

  • Raise the awareness of dairy farmers with respect to safety at the farm and actively put this into practice. This should eventually lead to fewer accidents involving dairy farmers, family members and visitors.
  • In the Sustainable Dairy Chain it is determined what will be a good indicator for the longer term (2030).

Result

NB Results compared to sector objectives 2030 are not available yet.

Method of working

The ‘Zero Accidents 2020’ action plan was started in 2018. In this, parties from the agricultural and green sectors have signed a letter of intent to substantially reduce the number of accidents. Parties signed for improving the safety at the agricultural and green businesses by:

  1. Working together;
  2. Creating a culture in the sector in which working safely has priority;
  3. Supporting entrepreneurs and employees with advice, information and tools;
  4. Working together on technical solutions to improve safety;
  5. Stimulating the reporting of (near) accidents and learning from them.

Stigas (expertise centre for working safely and sustainably) has started a project co-financed from the European Social Fund (ESF) to support the sectors. Extra attention is paid to communication, information and tools to lift the safety awareness to a higher level.

BoerVeilig: Veilig op 1 [FarmerSafe: Safety first]

In September 2019, a three-year programme BoerVeilig: Veilig op 1 [FarmerSafe: Safety first] was started, in which NMV, LTO Nederland, NAJK, NZO, ZuivelNL and Stigas (expertise centre for working safely, healthily and sustainably) work together on improving the safety at the dairy farm. Activities and experiences of dairy farmers are shared on the website BoerVeilig [FarmerSafe].

This project is mainly focused on strengthening the intrinsic motivation of dairy farmers to take the theme of safe working conditions more seriously. By means of, e.g., communication, tools and interactive contributions to member meetings of LTO, NAJK and NMV, the parties want to raise the awareness with respect to safety at and about the farm and stimulate proactively taking action in unsafe situations. In this safety experts are involved as well and dairy farmers who have experienced (near) accidents themselves are given ambassador roles.

With specific actions a connection is made with the annual ‘Veilig-op-1 week’ [Safety first week] (September), an initiative from the broader Zero-Accidents platform of agricultural and green sectors, in which working safely is central. https://www.veiligop1.nl/

LTO and Cumela are working on bundling trainings and courses in the area of safety in dairy farming. This should also contribute to a reduction of the number of accidents in the longer term.