Farmers are being urged to put safety first after fresh warnings that agriculture holds the poorest safety record of any sector.

The call comes as part of a renewed push to get farmers to treat safety as a core part of daily farm management rather than an afterthought. The message is direct: farming consistently kills and injures more of its workers, proportionally, than any other industry, and that record will not improve unless behaviour changes on the ground.

That agriculture sits at the bottom of the safety league table is not a new finding. It has been the case for years, and the persistence of the problem is precisely what has prompted the latest appeal. Campaigners and industry bodies have repeatedly pointed out that the sector's safety performance lags behind construction, manufacturing and other high-risk industries, despite the widespread availability of guidance, training and equipment designed to reduce harm.

The warning to farmers is blunt. Poor safety practices are costing lives, and the sector cannot continue to treat incidents as an inevitable part of the job.

Why the record stays poor

Several factors keep agriculture at the wrong end of the statistics. Farmers often work alone, in remote locations, with dangerous machinery and livestock, and in weather conditions that raise risk. Long hours during busy periods — harvest, lambing, calving and drilling — push fatigue into the equation. Self-employment is common, which means many farmers have no supervisor, no colleague nearby and no formal structure forcing them to stop and assess a task before starting it.

Older machinery also remains in service on many farms, sometimes without modern guarding or operator protection systems. Where equipment upgrades are expensive, the temptation is to keep running what is already there, even when the risks are known.

The advice being issued is not complicated. It centres on basics: plan work properly, maintain machinery, use guards and personal protective equipment, and never take shortcuts with tasks that carry obvious danger. Those include working at height, working with livestock, entering confined spaces such as slurry stores and grain bins, and carrying out repairs on running equipment.

The cost of shortcuts

The safety appeal stresses that most serious incidents on farms involve a small number of recurring causes. Machinery, vehicles and livestock account for the majority of deaths and life-changing injuries year after year. That repetition is significant for farmers making decisions about where to focus their attention: the risks that kill are rarely obscure ones. They are the everyday tasks — moving a tractor through a yard, handling a bull, fixing a baler in the field — that have been done hundreds of times without incident.

That familiarity is the trap. A task performed routinely feels safe precisely because nothing has gone wrong yet. Safety campaigners argue that this normalisation of risk is the single biggest barrier to improving the sector's record.

The financial argument reinforces the moral one. A serious injury or fatality on a farm does not just cause human suffering. It can stop a business in its tracks, remove the main source of labour at the busiest time of year, and expose the operation to investigation, insurance complications and, in the worst cases, criminal proceedings.

What farmers are being asked to do

The core of the appeal is personal responsibility. Farmers are being urged to:

• Stop and assess risky tasks before starting them, especially when working alone
• Keep machinery guards in place and maintain equipment to manufacturer standards
• Plan work during high-pressure periods so fatigue does not drive decisions
• Ensure children and visitors are kept clear of working areas, machinery and livestock
• Seek training where a task is unfamiliar or high-risk

The message also extends beyond farm owners to everyone who sets foot on a holding — contractors, seasonal workers, family members and delivery drivers all fall within the safety conversation.

A record that should not be accepted

Those behind the appeal make one point above all others: the sector's poor safety record is not an unavoidable feature of farming. It is the cumulative result of thousands of individual decisions, and those decisions sit with the people doing the work.

Farmers who want to act on the advice should start by identifying the highest-risk routine tasks on their own holding and putting specific controls in place for each one. Further safety guidance, training options and campaign materials are available through the main agricultural safety organisations, and farmers should watch for follow-up campaign activity and events in their region over the coming months.