Headed by the Agricultural Leaders Health & Safety Action Group
Trialling the Good to Go concept
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Is it possible to improve farm safety without increasing the effort it takes to be confident in the competency of your workers?
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Well, let's find out!
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Just like driving, farming can be a dangerous thing, and no one wants people getting hurt on farm. We make sure that people are safe to drive before we set them free on the roads, so why not apply something that we know can work?
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Good to Go is an independent measure of competency, which means that no matter how you were trained, you can demonstrate that you understand the same things as every other worker. Just like a driving test, we can seperate the learning part from the proof of understanding.
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We could use this information to learn a whole bunch about safety on farms from the perspective of a worker, and we can solve common problems as an industry. Most importantly, if we take this proactive approach, then we wouldn't have to harm anyone, or anything, to learn where emerging problems are arising!
Who is on board?
How could the scheme work?
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Well, we would first need to develop a common standard. This would be a list of all the things that everyone who works on a farm should know, and do to be safe.
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This standard should be designed and maintained by experts. The experts at farm safety are farmers! So we would like for all farmers to have input into their industry standard.
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Once we have an agreed standard, then it should be owned by the whole industry, not one or two commercial companies. After all, our aim here isn't to make money, but to make safer farms.
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Ok, so we have a standard that is ethically owned, and is maintained by farming experts; What do we do with it?
Measuring a standard
Once we have an agreed standard, we can do what farmers do; Get some things done!
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Anyone can use the standard to develop training material for workers and we can be confident that we are all on the same page.
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We can have a look on our farms and improve how we control the risks in line with our standard, especially how we communicate them to new workers.
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After we have trained and mentored our workers, we can test whether we have been effective in communicating how we should be working with them.
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By having an independent assessment, then we can be confident in new workers arriving on our farm if they hold our competency, even if they were trained elsewhere, because they have passed an assessment to the same standard as we use.
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We could stop there, but we know that a driving test alone hasn't stopped road accidents.
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So, what could we do better?
Using data, not damage
If all of our workers are going through independent assessment, then we can learn a lot about what they actually know, or need help with.
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A smart solution would be to feed this information back to the worker, so they can seek the right type of help.
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We can also feed data about a workforce back to a farm, allowing farm managers to understand the strengths of their workers, and where some extra controls might be needed.
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We can learn together as an industry, identifying gaps in knowledge, and feeding back to farmers, training providers and others who can help with solutions.
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If we can do all of this based on what people know, then imagine what we could do if we were to understand if people actually do things in the way that our standard describes.
We can capture records of how well someone performs a task, rather than measuring safety only after something goes wrong.
We could use that data to improve our standard, and our industry way of working!