To find out which of your work areas fall short, walk each one with a sheet of paper and compare what you see with a written standard, instead of trusting that it looks fine. Use one sheet for the whole farm, with one line for each place where someone works. On each line you write the standard that place has to meet, what you found on the walk, how far short it falls, the date, and who will fix it and by when. With the sheet, “it looks fine” becomes a written rating that someone else can check and that you can repeat next year.
A place you pass every day ends up looking fine because you pass it every day. The shop, the guards on the machines and on the power take-off shaft, the grain and chemical storage, the pens and chutes where livestock are handled, the drinking water and toilets out in the field: after a thousand trips past them, nobody really looks any more.
Farming is among the most dangerous work in the world. The International Labour Organization, the United Nations agency for work, estimates that at least 210,000 agricultural workers are killed in accidents each year. Safety standards for these places already exist. What is usually missing is a written record, place by place, of how each one compares with its standard.
Why write a standard instead of trusting that it looks fine?
Without a written standard, “good enough” is an opinion, and it changes with whoever is looking.
Mohammad Mohammadrezaei and colleagues, at Teagasc, Ireland’s agriculture and food development agency, looked at how being used to a place changes the sense of risk, in a 2023 study in the journal Frontiers in Public Health. The earlier research they review found that farmers could name the danger of a task and still saw a lower chance of an incidence occurring because they are familiar with the livestock or are experienced operating the machinery.
In their own survey of agricultural science students, most of them from farm families, about half rated their own risk of getting hurt on a farm as low.
The study surveyed students, not farm owners or crews, but it points the same way: once you are used to a place, it feels safe. With a written standard, you check against something other than that feeling. The guard is either on and working, or it is not.
A written standard also makes the rating come out much the same whoever does it. Kayla Faust and colleagues, at the University of Iowa, tested this on 52 crop farms in Iowa and published the results in the Journal of Agricultural Safety and Health. In their farm hazard checklist, each item gets one of four levels: compliant, minimal improvement needed, substantial improvement needed, and not compliant. Two researchers trained on the checklist, which the authors say takes about three hours, walked the same farms, rated every item separately, and gave the same rating on almost every item.
Their agreement came from a manual with a definition and pictures of each level. On your sheet, write in a line or two what each level means on your farm, so that whoever walks the place after you is more likely to rate it the way you did.
What standard do you check each area against?
The standard is the bar you decide each place has to meet, and on each line you write which bar it is. It can be the legal minimum, a requirement from a buyer or a certifier, the manufacturer’s specification for a guard or a piece of equipment, or a higher bar you set yourself. With the source written on the line, if someone disagrees with a rating later, the argument is about what was found, not about which rule applies.
The International Labour Organization’s Safety and Health in Agriculture Convention, a treaty that each country decides whether to ratify, asks countries to require the employer to carry out appropriate risk assessments. The employer then has to make sure that workplaces, machinery, tools and processes are safe and comply with prescribed safety and health standards, meaning the standards set by national law.
Whether or not your country has ratified it, its own rules apply on your farm. In the United States, the field sanitation rule of OSHA, the federal job safety agency, applies where eleven or more workers do hand labor in the field on any given day. The employer must provide potable drinking water, plus one toilet and one handwashing facility for each twenty (20) employees. Elsewhere, write the name of your own country’s or state’s rule on the line and check the place against it.
Which areas go on the sheet?
Every place where someone works or could get hurt. List places, not jobs: write “grain bin” or “shop”, not “loading grain” or “welding”, because on the walk you stand in places. Give each place its own line, instead of lumping them together as “the yard.”
Farm safety checklists are organized the same way. The review used by Certified Safe Farm, a farm safety certification program in the United States described in the same study, covers equipment, livestock structures, storage and other structures, and the general outdoor working environment.
The basics your people need through the day get one line each: drinking water, a toilet, somewhere to wash hands, and somewhere to eat and rest. They are easy to miss: a broken machine stops the work and gets noticed at once, but an empty water jug or a dirty toilet can stay that way for days without anyone saying a word. The ILO Convention also asks each country to require what it calls adequate welfare facilities, at no cost to the worker.
How far below the standard is a place, and why don’t all gaps get the same deadline?
A place does not simply pass or fail. What matters is how far below the standard it sits, and the further below, the sooner it has to be fixed. That is why the Iowa checklist has four levels instead of two: the two middle levels are gaps of different sizes, and “not compliant” means the place does not meet the standard at all.
Use the same four levels on your sheet and set each deadline by the level. If a gap can hurt someone today, such as a guard that has been removed or a crew with no drinking water in the heat, stop that work now. A smaller gap, such as a faded warning sign or a handrail still to be fitted, gets a date on the calendar.
Some gaps hide in things that are there but do not work. The ILO Convention also asks each country to require that machinery be appropriately installed, maintained and safeguarded. So rate whether the guard works, not whether there is one. A guard bolted on and then bypassed, a handrail left loose, a sink with no water: each looks fine from a distance and is a gap on the walk.
Deciding how to fix a gap can wait; stopping dangerous work cannot. The Convention asks that the employer take immediate steps to stop any operation where there is an imminent and serious danger. If you have a manager or a foreman, stopping that work should be one of the decisions they can make without waiting for you. In the guide to what your manager decides alone, you will find how to put that in writing.
When does the sheet stop matching what is really there?
When it is filled in at the office instead of on a walk. If you write “handwashing: yes” at your desk, all you know is that the farm has a sink, not that the sink has water, soap and a towel today. In the Iowa study, the farmer led the researchers on a tour of the farm, and each item was rated from what they saw on the spot.
The sheet also goes out of date quickly. A guard comes off for a repair and is never put back, boxes pile up in front of a shed door, months of rain rot a step. A line that was compliant at planting can be wrong by harvest. So the date of the walk and the date of the next walk go on the sheet.
Setting a standard, checking against it, fixing what falls short and checking again is a cycle you can use in other parts of farm management too, such as machinery upkeep. For other written tools for working with your crew, such as pay bands, see the people section of the library.
Where to start
You need a clipboard, a pen and a morning. The Iowa researchers report that their checklist can be completed in 1.5-2 hours on each farm. Your first walk may take longer; if your farm is spread out, walk one part at a time over a few mornings.
The person you name on each line answers for the fix, even if someone else does the work. Usually that is whoever holds the job that covers the place, such as the mechanic for the shop or the foreman for the pens. If you have already written down what each role is responsible for, you already know which job covers each place; write the name of whoever holds it. If you have not, decide it on the sheet.
Skipping the sheet seems to save a morning, but it only moves the cost to the day something goes wrong. On that day, nobody can say what the standard was, when the place was last checked, or who was supposed to fix it.