Meat exporter fully onside with farm safety

The statistics are sobering: on average a person dies in an agricultural accident each month*.

Many injuries occur in yards.

WorkSafe’s 2024 Strategy has highlighted the ag sector as one of the high-risk industries that it will focus on.

And in February this year ACC announced it was investing more than $11m over five years to implement Safer Farms’ Farm Without Harm strategy to reduce injuries and fatalities in the ag sector.

ANZCO Foods wants everyone to be safe in their work and fully supports Safer Farms’ campaign to raise awareness of, and reduce, injuries from livestock, says ANZCO Foods general manager systems and supply Grant Bunting.

“Many livestock-related injuries occur in yards. Being in the yards is unfamiliar to stock so the drafting and loading process needs to be as smooth as possible and having high-quality yards can reduce the likelihood of injuries.

“Everyone who has employees and contractors going out on farm has joint health and safety responsibility with the farmer. In the case of meat companies this is livestock reps and contracted drivers in the yards and access roads.

“We’ve heard about serious incidents and accidents in yards including where people have been lying alone for hours with head injuries,” says Bunting.

“As an agricultural industry we need to manage this better. There are many examples in the world today of where the ways things have been done in the past are no longer acceptable.

“This shared health and safety responsibility means companies need to be checking on-farm inductions are taking place, hazards and risks in these joint areas are being captured and shared, and broken yards are repaired in a timely manner.

“It’s a responsibility companies and farmers share and in our view it’s a process that needs to be better managed, so we keep all our people safe and maintain high animal welfare standards.

“For meat companies there are protocols that can make drafting and loading stock safer including having someone from the farm present during the process, and some practical steps that can make yards safer for people and animals,” he says.

“Yes, health and safety has a compliance aspect to it, but at its heart it’s about looking after people and that’s what drives ANZCO Foods.”

ANZCO Foods has been working with Onside, an app that captures information about inductions as well as making any hazards and risks available to any farm visitors.

“The requirement to capture and share this information is not new; it’s just that Onside provides an easy way for us to do this,” says Bunting.

Using Onside can replace the existing manual system that’s being used to capture that farmers have an induction process in place, and show who’s been inducted.

It lets people coming on to farm know about existing hazards and risks and can be used to easily record new hazards and risks.

Farmers will also get notified when someone arrives at, and leaves, their farm.

“We’ve been using Onside on our farms for a couple of years now and recognised it could be useful for the joint areas of responsibility on producers’ farms,” he says.

ANZCO Foods has rolled out Onside to its livestock reps and is making it available to transporters and farmers from mid-2025.

*Fatalities | WorkSafe January 2020 to June 2023