Rebecca Fing

Safe farms are more than just filling out the paperwork

NSW’s Rebecca Fing wants the farming community to treat workplace safety not as a box to tick, but a culture to lead.

Flipping the narrative, Rebecca from House Paddock Training and Consulting in Boggabilla wants safety on farms to be seen differently, especially, she says, as farm death rates continue to occur at unacceptable levels. While agriculture employs just 3 per cent of the workforce, it accounts for almost 30 per cent of workplace fatalities.

She’s spent two decades working with farming businesses and has been on 600 farms, and there’s not much she hasn’t seen. But she’s grounded. It’s culture, not compliance, and people, not paperwork, that will see change happen. 

Too often, Rebecca says, farm safety is seen as important, not urgent. She acknowledges that farms are complex workplaces, but at the same time, unsafe behaviours continue to be accepted unless there is a change of culture, where risky actions or shortcuts are called out.

Her study, “Beyond compliance: How leadership and culture influence safety outcomes in Australian farming,” will take her to farming communities across Japan, New Zealand, and Scandinavia. By looking at these low-fatality regions, she will investigate how proactive safety culture reduces workplace risk in agriculture.