It has been written that it may be that your purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others and 22 year old Erin Gailey, a herdsperson on a 400-cow farm near Shrewsbury would wholeheartedly agree.
Erin’s life plan was to attend university to study some form of animal-based degree. She was aiming for a career in veterinary medicine, however circumstances prevented her from following that route and having finished sixth form in June 2019, she started working on a 600-cow organic dairy farm in Shropshire.
She came into the industry with no real prior experience, education or training. She had some experience of the lambing season but little, or no understanding of the operations of a busy working farm. She explains :
“Whilst I would not consider myself a risk-taker, I was under the impression that my employer had stuck their neck out to take me on. I felt under pressure to do the things that I could do quickly, and to offer to do as much as I could – even if I didn’t really know how.
“I’d been taken on to relieve the pressure on existing staff after what had been a busy Autumn season. After my first week of feeling a bit lost and left to it, I’d got in my head to go back on Monday and try and start doing things without being asked and take some responsibility on.
On the morning of 23 December 2019, we had finished milking, and my colleague asked if anyone had shut the cows away. I knew they hadn’t but as I didn’t know how to drive the quad bike to get to them I said nothing. My colleague showed me “here’s the throttle, here’s the brake, here’s the gears, the helmet’s in the workshop somewhere” and sent me on my way…
“I had never been on the cow track before. I had no idea about the pile of Astroturf in the middle of the track, of how slippy it was in the rain, of how to control a quad bike, how to negotiate a sharp turn or steep downhill track.”
The complete lack of training and experience on the quad bike meant that, by the end of the day, Erin was nursing broken bones in her left hand, a broken wrist on her right after she lost control and crashed the quad bike into a strainer post.
Erin had five weeks off with her injuries, which her colleagues had to cover and for which she still feels a bit guilty. However, the injury left Erin with little use of her ring and little finger on her left hand but, despite the painful setback, she was keen to give the job another go.
She explains: “If anything, I saw the accident as my fault, and it was me that owed my employer for injuries I had sustained. When I returned to work, all I was told was ‘take it steady’ and that’s how things went on for the next year. I took it steady with a newfound respect for the vehicle and, over time, I have built skill with the quad and value it as an extremely useful piece of equipment on the farm.
Fast forward to Christmas Day 2020 and another quad bike task left Erin with even more serious injuries. A small country road, a quad bike and a blind junction led to another trip to hospital, this time in an ambulance when she was hit by a car. Her right leg had been snapped in half which resulted in an external fixator being fitted for six months. She has been left with nerve damage and chronic pain that will persist her entire life.
When asked what she feels she could have done differently, Erin struggles to answer: “My first incident, I should have stopped putting so much pressure on myself, and quite frankly not cared about the pressure being applied by my employer – I should have refused to go.
But, on the second occasion, despite a year of quad bike experience, I still sustained another ‘life-changing injury’. Okay so, on this occasion, there was nothing I could have done – it was simply wrong place wrong time, but it does demonstrate that it doesn’t matter how competent and experienced you are; you are vulnerable on a quad bike.
Now happily working for new employers in a safe environment on a 400-cow farm in Shropshire, Erin believes farm workers should not be allowed to drive quad bikes on public roads or private land without undergoing formal training. Something that has already been adopted in the Republic of Ireland.
An amendment to Ireland’s Safety, Health and Welfare at Work (General Application) Regulations SI 299/2007, has introduced two brand new requirements for anyone operating an ATV/quad bike.
The first new requirement makes it mandatory for all quad operators to have completed an all-terrain vehicle safety training course provided by a registered training provider. Secondly, all quad operators must also wear a protective helmet when operating a quad.
These new requirements officially come into force in November 2023, and will hopefully help improve farming’s persistently poor safety record (In the Republic of Ireland, farming accounts for 8% of the workforce according to CSO’s Labour Force Survey but 40% of all workplace fatal incidents – 12 of the 20 reported in 2022/2023.)
Having learnt the important of safety by ‘accident’, Erin now believes that the most important ethos is making sure she will be going home at the end of the day.
She has started a new job which did provide a full health and safety induction, a ‘farm walk-and-talk’ and a booklet outlining the various dangers on a working farm. They even sent her on a first-aid course before she had officially signed the contract.
As she says: “It’s a real positive for the industry that there are so many young people coming in from non-agricultural backgrounds – but these young people need support. Most workers who join a new workplace are given a proper health and safety briefing, but this doesn’t seem to happen in farming unless it’s a big commercial enterprise.
How many more stories like mine do you have to read before the industry – the WHOLE industry – decides that enough is enough?
Maybe you think you’re fine because you’ve driven quad bikes for years – you can still be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe you don’t use quad bikes at all – have you had full training on the vehicles that you do drive? Maybe you’re lucky enough to have a good employer who does take your safety seriously – you are still responsible for the situations you put yourself in.
Farm safety starts and ends with you – you’re the one who will decide if you’re going home at the end of the day.”
For more information on the safe use of Quad Bikes visit:
Working with Quads and All-Terrain Vehicles ATVs – YellowWellies.org
http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/ais33.pdf
Welcome to the European ATV Safety Institute – Home (quadsafety.org)
www.nfu-cymru.org.uk/media/fueft55j/can-am-charter-visual_aw2022.pdf
