Two steps you can take to prevent accidents in your farmyard

If you want to reduce the likelihood of an accident occurring in your farmyard, here are a few steps you should take.

Use a road broom to sweep debris off the yard

Over the course of a normal workday on a farm, your farmyard probably ends up covered in a variety of debris, including stray bits of hay, loose stock feed that has fallen out of nearby bags or storage bins, empty bottles of herbicides and pesticides, and various other types of agricultural refuse.

If you and the other people who work on your farm regularly walk across the farmyard, there is a risk that one of you might trip over this refuse, fall onto the ground and sustain an injury.

As such, it is important to sweep away this debris from the yard on a regular basis. However, if your farmyard is quite large and you don't have a lot of spare time to devote to tidying it, it might not be a good idea to use a manual sweeping brush for this task.

Instead, you should buy road broom and use this to sweep up the debris that ends up strewn around the yard.

Road brooms are large, cylindrical brushes that can be attached to machinery like tractors or skid steers. When the vehicle to which it is attached is driven across a farmyard or road, the bristles of the broom turn, and in doing so, pick up small debris and push larger pieces of debris forward.

A road broom will make quick work of this task and will thus ensure that you can minimise the risk of workers tripping in your farmyard, without having to waste too much of your workday tidying up this part of your farm.

Buy a forklift attachment to quickly transfer bags of fertiliser and stock feed indoors if the winds pick up

When large bags of fertiliser or stock feed are delivered to your farm, you may end up leaving them stacked up in your farmyard for a day or two until you can find the time to transfer them to your storage containers.

Whilst is it perfectly safe to do this when the weather is good, you should not leave these heavy bags piled up in your yard for too long if it starts to get very windy.

The reason for this is as follows; if you have stacked up several bags of fertiliser in such a way that the pile is unstable, and you leave this collection of bags out on your farmyard during a period of windy weather, a gust of wind could knock these bags over.

If you happen to be standing next to them when this happens, they could land on you, leaving you trapped underneath them and crushed by the weight of their contents.

To prevent an accident like this from happening, you should buy a forklift attachment for your tractor. This piece of equipment will enable you to transfer the aforementioned bags indoors quickly if the winds start to pick up.

Whilst you could carry out this task manually, this is more likely to result in you sustaining a lifting-related injury and will be far more time-consuming.