A suite of innovative tech tools which aim to highlight and improve farm safety have been developed by a Mayo farmer group.

A prototype job-planning app that builds farm safety into the various steps involved in completing regular and occasional on-farm tasks is among the concepts developed by the group.

In addition, the Organic Mayo Knowledge Transfer (KT) Group helped produce an animated programme which created a farm of the future with labour-saving and data-based technology for improved farm safety.

ADVERTISEMENT

The farmers also created an interactive farm safety map, which identifies the most common hazards on farms.

The work was undertaken as part of Teagasc’s BeSafe project, which is funded by the Department of Agriculture and adopts a farmer-centred approach to farm safety, explained Dr Áine Macken-Walsh of Teagasc.

Key risks

“The BeSafe scientific team identified key risks based on evidence. Farmers in this innovative KT group took a selection of those risks and used their decades of farming experience to contextualise them to real-life farming scenarios and develop practical tools to address them,” the Teagasc researcher said.

In creating these various tools, the farmer group developed prototypes, which a professional team of animators and graphic designers then fine-tuned into the finished versions.

Some of the tools created by the farmers could be used to highlight and address the issue of farm safety in schools and to Green Cert students, it has been suggested.

Speaking at the launch of the project’s findings, Mayo farmer Michael Holmes said: “You have to talk to farmers, to get an understanding of what happens on farms, in order to find ways to address and improve things.”

Another farmer member of the group PJ Foy brought his young son to the launch.

“The older you get, the more near misses you experience, the more aware you are. We need to share that sense of safety with our younger farmers. Young people need to be more aware at a younger age and tools like this can share and widen common lessons and experience,” Foy maintained.

Teagasc's regional manager in Mayo John Noonan said the strength of the BeSafe project lay in its encouraging farmers to think in a practical way about safety on their own farms.

“When we’re doing a job, with sheep or cattle or whatever, do we think 'is this safe'? This should be an automatic consideration to think of safety. It should be part of the plan,” Noonan pointed out.

The BeSafe project was led by Dr David Meredith of Teagasc, with the co-design work undertaken by Macken-Walsh and Dr Marion Beecher.