Farm Vehicles and Harvesters Safety: Farm vehicles and harvesters pose significant risks, leading to numerous fatalities and serious injuries among workers and family members, including children. Operators, passengers, and bystanders are all vulnerable.
What are Farm Vehicles and Harvesters? Farm vehicles include cars, utes, trucks, 4WDs, motorbikes, side-by-sides, and quad bikes. They are used for transporting people and objects within the farm and to and from other locations.
Harvesters come in various sizes to match different farming operations, from small to large machines, and are designed to cut and often collect crops like grains, fruits, and vegetables.
Risks Associated with Farm Vehicles and Harvesters Fatalities and serious injuries often result from collisions, rollovers with ejection, and runovers. Contributing factors include:
- Operators and passengers not wearing seatbelts
- Unrestrained passengers in the tray or on trailers
- Unsupervised children around moving vehicles
- Inexperienced drivers
- Poorly maintained vehicles
Harvesters share similar risks, along with additional hazards such as:
- Entanglement with levelling or discharge augers in the grain tank
- Falls from the machine, especially during cleaning
- Contact with overhead power lines
- Contact with knives, reels, or stripper rotors
- Contact with straw choppers or spreaders
- Being trapped under the header or injured by a falling header from its transport trailer
- Injuries from drive mechanisms or automatic sensor operations
- Exposure to dust, leading to respiratory issues like occupational asthma, farmer’s lung, grain fever, chronic bronchitis, and allergic eye and nasal infections
- Exposure to noise, potentially causing hearing loss
- Crop material igniting from machinery sparks or heat
- Strain, sprain, and crush injuries related to field palletising on harvesting aids
Farm vehicles and harvesters contain numerous hazardous parts, including:
- Rotating shafts, gearing, cables, sprockets, chains, clutches, couplings, cams, or fan blades
- Run-on points of belts, chains, or cables
- Projections on rotating parts like keyways, keys, grease nipples, set-screws, and bolts
- Pulleys or flywheels with openings, spokes, or protrusions
- Crushing or shearing points such as augers, slide blocks, roller feeds, and conveyor feeds
- Ground wheels and track gear with openings, spokes, or protrusions near operator or passenger positions
- Rotating knives, blades, tines, or similar parts operating near the ground or engaging crops
- Components that cut, grind, pulp, crush, break, or pulverize farm produce
- Hot machine parts with surface temperatures exceeding 120°C during normal operation
How do I manage the risks? Workers and managers can work together to reduce the risks of farm vehicles and harvesters.
For workers: As a worker, you must:
- take care of your own health and safety as well as the health and safety of others
- cooperate with management to meet health and safety requirements and reduce risks.
For businesses: As an employer or business owner, you have legal responsibilities as outlined in the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 for the health and safety of every worker and visitor.
The four-step risk management process below will help businesses to meet their responsibilities under work health and safety (WHS) laws.
You can also use the practical advice in the How to manage work health and safety risks code of practice 2021 (PDF, 0.65 MB).