Alex Thomas works to improve safety in agriculture sector
Growing up on a sheep station in northeast South Australia, Alex Thomas saw first-hand the critical importance of farm safety.
HEADLINES about quad bike deaths, machinery injuries, or tractor rollovers are an all too familiar and tragic reminder about the importance of farm safety.
The statistics, too, paint an ominous picture: the fatality rate in agriculture is eight times higher than any other industry in Australia, and of those fatalities, 93 per cent are men.
Growing up on a sheep station in northeast South Australia, Alex Thomas saw first-hand the critical importance of farm safety.
She was aged just three when her father — facing financial stress from drought — opted to muster and sell feral goats, which led to him contracting the deadly Q fever, caused by inhaling dust particles contaminated by infected animals.
“Even today he talks about a raging fever and the skin peeling off his hands,” Alex says, adding that at the time her father had not had the injection against the disease.
“Having contracted Q fever, it totally wore him out and compromised his immunity and so he then got Ross River fever, followed by a whole range of illnesses, including diabetes, and heart and kidney failure.”
Ultimately the fifth generation farmer was forced to sell the station, separated from his wife and ever since Alex has carried the weight of responsibility for his health.
“Looking back it all started after the drought and financial stress saw him work around the clock. He became exhausted.
“Maybe if we had more knowledge and more conversations about what he was putting his body through, things would have been different.”
The “conversations” Alex refers to are now at the heart of her work specialising in agricultural health and safety.
For more than a decade, the 32-year-old has run Alex Thomas Pty Ltd, working with farmers and the agricultural industry to improve health and safety.
In 2018 she won South Australia’s prestigious annual AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award for her commitment to the cause, which followed a Rural Youth Bursary in 2014, travelling to Norway to study leading work health and safety practice.
In working closely with the industry, in workshops of a few hours, through to year-long consulting projects, her message to farmers is simple: manage risk by thinking, talking and doing something about it.
“When people think of compliance with work health and safety legislation, they think of penalties, policies and procedures. Box-ticking, which is perceived as costly and convoluted, and yet we forget the intent of compliance is simple: just don’t kill someone.
“These days the emphasis is on more practical aspects. A lot of farmers don’t realise this change and have a misplaced emphasis on paperwork.”
Alex says this focus on practical solutions is “not overly prescriptive”.
“I don’t profess to know more about someone’s business than they do, so it’s not up to me to tell them what to do, but to help them find ways of managing risks in the best way they possibly can, while still satisfying the intent of the law,” says Alex, who now lives in the Adelaide Hills.
“Every single farmer is an expert in their own business, in what can go wrong and how. So let’s have more conversations about that.”
So, for example, the contentious issue of quad bike rollovers has no easy answer.
“If you can avoid using quad bikes all together do that, but for a lot of farmers that’s not possible. The next option might be to install rollover protection and if they can’t afford that then it’s about coming up with the next best solution for them.
“What may work for the farmer down the road may not work for someone else.”
Alex says it’s about tailoring solutions to each farm.
“Have that Q fever injection, charge the radio before you go out on the farm all day, put a guard on the auger, don’t step over an exposed PTO shaft, be mindful of fatigue.
“When it comes to mental health, we need to give each other explicit permission to talk about things that are worrying us and set the right example ourselves. Silence only condones it.”
One of Alex’s largest projects was sponsored in part from her AgriFutures Rural Women’s Award.
The online #PlantASeedForSafety project, which launched in New Zealand in May, focuses on the voices of rural women in farm safety.
“Often men have been doing dangerous farm work for decades and that work becomes habituated. Rural women bring a fresh perspective to environments notorious for having ‘done it this way for years’.
“They are also the closest other person to that person getting the work done. Women are also naturally more risk-averse and if something happens to him, they are often the ones left carrying the load.”
Alex has so far gathered 45 stories from women around Australia and New Zealand, including five in Victoria, to underscore conversations around farm safety.
“We have a sheep and cattle farmer from western Victoria who writes about the importance of using an emergency app to know where her husband is at all times, and she also gives details on her makeshift snake bite kit.”
Alex says she always wanted to work in agriculture but after her family sold the station, the options were limited.
So when she started working in work health and safety in the mining industry, and later in fisheries, she saw an entree back into farming.
“Change is incremental, but it can happen overnight when everyone wants that change to happen. This is my way of giving back.”
plantaseedforsafety.com
alexthomasptyltd.com
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