UK Farm Safety: A Working Farmer’s Guide to Risk Management on the Farm

Last updated: April 2026. This guide pulls together the law, the latest fatality data and the practical controls that keep farmers, families and visitors alive. It is general information and not a substitute for a written risk assessment of your own holding. See the action checklist at the end for what to do this week.

UK farm safety is one of those things you treat as routine for years, until something forces a change of mind. For me, it was a phone call. A friend down the road was crushed under his own tractor on a slope he’d cut every summer of his working life. He’d done the job a thousand times. He didn’t do it right once.

The numbers tell you the same thing in cold print. In 2024/25 there were 23 worker fatalities in agriculture, forestry and fishing in Great Britain, bang on the five-year average, plus another five farm worker deaths in Northern Ireland.[1] Agriculture employs roughly one per cent of the British workforce and accounts for around twenty per cent of workplace deaths, with a fatal injury rate roughly twenty-two times the all-industries average.[2]

Most of those deaths happen to people we know. The 65-year-old neighbour pinned by a bull. The contractor crushed under a reversing telehandler. The farmer’s three-year-old who climbed into the wrong cab. About 65 per cent of fatalities over the last five years were to self-employed workers, and around 80 per cent involved someone aged 45 or over.[3] This guide is an attempt to turn that data into something useful at the kitchen table. For our other working-farmer explainers see the BritFarmers Knowledge Hub.

What “safe enough” actually means in law

Farm safety is not optional good practice. It’s a long, settled list of statutory duties, and the bones of it run as follows.

The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 is the parent legislation. Section 2 puts a duty on every employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health, safety and welfare of their employees. Section 3 extends the same duty to non-employees affected by the work, which is the section that catches the public, contractors and family members on the holding. Self-employed farmers carrying on a “high-risk activity” are caught by section 3 even if they have no employees, and agriculture is on the HSE’s list.[4]

The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 put the duty into practical shape. Regulation 3 is the one that lands hardest on farms: every employer and self-employed person must carry out a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which workers and others are exposed, and write it down if there are five or more employees.[5]

The day-to-day regulations: PUWER, LOLER, COSHH

Three sets of regulations carry most of the day-to-day load. PUWER 1998 requires that work equipment is suitable, properly maintained, used only by trained people, and effectively guarded. It’s the regulation that says a PTO shaft must be guarded along its full length, that brakes must work, and that you cannot use a tool the manufacturer never intended for the job.[6] LOLER 1998 applies to telehandlers, loaders, hoists and any equipment used to lift loads or people; lifting kit must be marked with its safe working load and thoroughly examined every six months for equipment lifting people, every twelve months otherwise.[7] COSHH 2002 covers sheep dip, pesticides, grain dust, slurry gases and silage fumes; the duty is to assess exposure, prevent it where possible, and otherwise control it with engineering controls, ventilation and PPE in that order.[8]

Reporting, children and PPE

Three more sit alongside them. RIDDOR 2013 requires fatalities, specified injuries, injuries causing more than seven days off work, occupational diseases and dangerous occurrences to be reported to the HSE.[9] The Children (Protection at Work) Regulations 1998 restrict what under-16s can be asked to do, alongside the prohibition on under-13s riding on tractors and machines.[10] The PPE at Work Regulations 1992 (amended 2022) require employers to provide suitable PPE free of charge; the 2022 amendment extended the duty to limb (b) workers, which catches a great many casual harvest staff.[11]

If that list looks long, the HSE’s expectation is plain: identify the hazards, decide what to do, do it, and check that it worked. Their main farming guidance, Farmwise, has been the working document for two decades.[12]

The law is far less complicated than it looks on paper. A working farm that does an honest annual walk-round, keeps the risk assessment up to date and trains every operator on every machine has done ninety per cent of what the HSE expects. The remaining ten per cent is paperwork, and an afternoon will do it.

The risk assessment is the document

If a HSE inspector or the police arrive after a serious incident, the first thing they ask for is the risk assessment. There is no statutory format. What the law requires is that it’s suitable and sufficient, written down where there are five or more employees, and reviewed when something changes.[13]

A working risk assessment for a mixed farm covers vehicles and machinery, livestock handling, working at height, falls into pits and lagoons, slurry and silage gases, COSHH hazards, manual handling, electricity, noise, public access, contractors, children on the holding, lone working, and mental health and fatigue. The format doesn’t matter; the thinking does. The HSE’s free templates are perfectly adequate for most family farms.[14]

We started doing ours on the back of a clipboard while walking the yard with a mug of tea. Two hours of an evening, twice a year, and our insurance broker stopped asking awkward questions at renewal.

There’s no need to pay a consultant five hundred quid for a generic template. Walk the farm yourself, write what you see, and date the page. Kept honest, it’s worth more than a glossy folder that gathers dust.

Vehicles and machinery: where most farmers die

Moving and overturning vehicles cause around three in ten agricultural fatalities every year, and have done for at least a decade.[15] The kind-of-accident table is depressingly stable: tractors rolling on slopes, loaders falling over, people struck by reversing vehicles, runovers (particularly of children), people falling from moving vehicles.

The tractor

The HSE’s basic rule is the Safe Stop drill: handbrake on, controls in neutral, engine off, key out.[16] It is taught in every Lantra course in the country and ignored on farms every day. Almost every fatality involving someone falling off, being run over by, or being crushed by a tractor would have been prevented by Safe Stop.

The friend I mentioned earlier didn’t do Safe Stop. He hopped down to fix a hose with the engine running and the handbrake half-on. The tractor rolled, he went under, and his wife found him an hour later. I think about it every time I stand up in the cab.

The other tractor non-negotiables are short. ROPS and a fitted seat belt are required on all tractors used at work; running a ROPS-equipped tractor with the belt unclipped is the single most common factor in roll-over fatalities.[16] Brakes should be checked at least once a year; PUWER regulation 5 requires “efficient working order and good repair”.[17] Trailers must have a working secondary coupling and a parking brake. And children under 13 must not ride on or drive a tractor, full stop.[18]

The ATV/quad

Two children were killed in ATV incidents in 2024/25.[19] The HSE rule on ATVs is that helmets must be worn, riders must be trained (City & Guilds Land Based Services or equivalent), passengers are not carried unless the ATV is purpose-built for two, and children under 13 do not ride them.[20] On gradients, side-by-side UTVs with rollover bars and seat belts are demonstrably safer than sit-astride quads. We swapped ours two years ago and I haven’t missed the old machine once.

The telehandler

Telehandlers are LOLER equipment. They need a current thorough examination certificate (every six months if used to lift people, every twelve months otherwise),[21] a trained and certificated operator (CPCS or NPORS card plus farm-specific induction), a visible safe working load, and functional reversing aids.

Reversing telehandlers and tractors-with-loaders kill someone almost every year. A contractor (most farms now find safety-trained casual staff via specialist farm jobs boards; we keep one of our own) up the valley had his three-year-old reversed over by a casual driver who couldn’t see down the back of the machine. The boy survived, just. The driver never went back to work. A fixed pedestrian route through the yard, painted onto the concrete and drilled into family habits, removes most of the risk for the price of two tins of yard paint.

Power take-off shafts

PTO entanglement is the most preventable serious injury on a farm. The shaft must be fully guarded along its length, the guard chained at both ends to stop it rotating with the shaft, and the guard inspected before each use.[22] PUWER is unambiguous: equipment used without an effective guard is a regulation 11 breach, and the HSE prosecutes them. If the guard is split, missing, or wired open with baling twine, the machine is out of service until it’s fixed.

I had a near miss myself with the muck-spreader, years back. The guard was cracked and held with twine because I’d been meaning to replace it for six months. A loose corner of overall caught the shaft for half a second and pulled hard enough to leave a six-inch tear before the fabric let go. The twine went in the bin that afternoon. The man two parishes over, the year before, who lost a leg to the same machine on his own farm wasn’t so lucky.

Nine in ten of the machinery deaths are people doing the job they’ve always done, the way they’ve always done it, on a tired evening at the end of a long week. Safe Stop is the cheapest insurance policy in farming and it costs nothing but a habit.

Livestock: the hidden killer

Cattle now kill more people on UK farms than any other livestock category, and the rate has been rising for a decade. A 2025 peer-reviewed study found 142 livestock-related deaths in Great Britain between 2010 and 2023, with cattle responsible for the great majority and bulls for a disproportionate share.[23]

Cattle, bulls and handling controls

The practical controls aren’t complicated. A purpose-designed handling system with race, crush, anti-backing bar and adequate gates does most of the work; the HSE’s Handling and housing cattle AIS35 is the working specification.[24] A bull policy that keeps breeding bulls of recognised dairy breeds out of fields with public rights of way is a legal requirement under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 (s.59), and beef bulls require companion cattle. A cow-with-calf rule for spring calving means no public access if it can be helped, signage where it cannot, and never approaching a calving cow on foot when a quad will do.

Zoonotic disease and sheep handling

Zoonotic disease is the bit most farmers underrate. Gloves and hand hygiene around lambing, post-calving and bottle feeding; pregnant women and the immunosuppressed kept away from lambing entirely.[25] Our niece was off work for the bones of a month with a Q-fever infection picked up in a lambing shed she’d visited as an adult on a Sunday afternoon. She knew the rules. She just didn’t think they applied to a quick visit.

Sheep are responsible for fewer fatalities but very many serious back injuries. Most are avoidable with a turn-over crate or a tipping race for foot-trimming. A decent crate is around six hundred pounds. A back operation isn’t.

My take: cattle are the animals that get me up at night. I won’t go in a pen with a fresh-calved suckler cow on foot again. One near miss should be enough to spend the four-figure sum on a proper handling setup.

Working at height

Falls from height kill three or four farmers a year, usually through fragile fibre-cement or asbestos-cement roofs, or from ladders or vehicles.[26] The Work at Height Regulations 2005 apply on farms in the same way they apply on a building site.

The rule is to avoid working at height if you can. If you cannot, use the right equipment and protect against the consequences of a fall. A scaffold tower or a mobile elevating work platform, hired by the day, is almost always cheaper than a hospital admission. The “I’ve done it for years” defence holds no water at the inquest.

Hire the MEWP. The day rate is less than the excess on an accident claim and a deal less than your funeral.

Slurry, silage and gas

Slurry stores and silage clamps are confined-space hazards, and the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997 apply.[27] Hydrogen sulphide release during slurry mixing is a documented killer; it accumulates rapidly in the first thirty minutes of agitation, particularly in covered tanks and under-floor channels.

The settled HSE advice is to agitate in a steady wind, evacuate stock from sheds, open all doors and ventilation, never enter the building during agitation, and keep clear for at least thirty minutes after starting the pump.[28] On silage, nitrogen dioxide release in the first 24 to 48 hours after clamping is the equivalent risk; clamps should be approached only with a gas monitor for the first two days.

My take: a portable gas monitor is two hundred pounds. The slurry-pit fatalities of the last decade have routinely killed two and three at a time, because the second man went in to rescue the first. Buy the monitor. Buy two.

Children on the farm

Children growing up on a working farm is part of why most of us do this. It’s also why ten or so children have been killed on UK farms over the last decade.[29] The children killed have almost always been in places they should not have been, doing things they should not have been doing, often with someone they trusted in the cab.

The law turns on three points. Under-13s must not ride on or drive farm machinery, trailers or ATVs at any time; the Prevention of Accidents to Children in Agriculture Regulations 1998 are absolute, and the HSE has prosecuted bereaved parents. Under-16s must not operate harvesters, sprayers, lift trucks, ATVs, skid-steer loaders or any machine with crushing, cutting or shearing parts.[30] And a safe play area, fenced off from the working farmyard and visible from the farmhouse, is the most-cited single control in farm child-safety guidance.

We had a near miss with our youngest, years ago. He was six. The loader tractor was running, the cab door was open while I checked something on the engine, and he climbed in. He pulled a lever that engaged the front end and swung the bucket two feet from the kitchen window. I locked every cab on the farm that afternoon and have never since left a key in an unattended machine. The Yellow Wellies/Farm Safety Foundation school programme covers this in plain language for under-16s.[31]

What I’d actually do is non-negotiable. The keys go in the kitchen drawer the second you step off the machine. The play area is at the opposite end of the yard from the loaders and the slurry. No child rides in any cab unless they’re old enough to drive it themselves.

Mental health: the leading hidden cause

The Yellow Wellies Mind Your Head survey of UK farmers under 40 has consistently found around 94 per cent rank poor mental health as the biggest hidden problem facing farming.[32] The Office for National Statistics has repeatedly recorded suicide rates among male farmers and agricultural workers above the all-male average.[33]

The practical infrastructure is well established now. RABI runs a free, confidential 24/7 helpline. The Farming Community Network runs a confidential helpline 7am to 11pm, 365 days a year. YANA funds free counselling for farmers in East Anglia and beyond. The DPJ Foundation provides counselling in Wales. Samaritans, on 116 123, is the catch-all 24/7 crisis line.[34]

Mental ill-health on a farm is not a soft topic separate from UK farm safety. Tired, depressed, financially-pressured operators have accidents. A phone-call rota with a relative or friend during lambing, harvest and TB-test weeks is one of the simplest interventions that exists.

My take: the suicide rate in farming is a scandal, and most of us know one local family that has lost someone. Pin the RABI and FCN numbers in the office, the kitchen and the workshop. If a neighbour stops returning calls, drive over.

Pinch points: harvest, lambing, TB testing

Three points in the calendar account for a disproportionate share of UK farm safety incidents.

Harvest brings long days, contractors, school children helping, road haulage and grain stores. The NFU Mutual harvest checklist is a good benchmark; the core of it is functioning brakes and lights, beacons and reversing alarms, a check on PTO shafts and bale wraps, a written delivery route, and a cap on hours worked.[35] Lambing brings fatigue, zoonoses, livestock handling injuries and public access. The annual Mind Your Head fortnight runs in February for a reason. TB testing brings tight handling races and cattle in a state of agitation; the HSE Handling and housing cattle AIS35 race-specification is the floor.

The same five days every year are the days farms get hurt. Plan them like you plan a big delivery, with a clear-headed conversation a fortnight in advance and an agreed cut-off time each evening.

Reporting: what RIDDOR catches

You must report to the HSE under RIDDOR any work-related fatality, any specified injury (fractures other than fingers and toes, amputations, loss of sight, crush injuries, serious burns, loss of consciousness, anything causing more than 24 hours in hospital), any worker absent more than seven consecutive days, any reportable occupational disease, and any “dangerous occurrence” listed in Schedule 2.[36] Reports go online at hse.gov.uk/riddor; phone reports are accepted only for fatal or major incidents. Failure to report is itself an offence.

If I’m honest, most farmers underreport, partly out of habit and partly out of a fair fear that a report is the start of a trail leading to an inspector. Report anyway. The fines are real, and a clean RIDDOR record is worth a discount at renewal.

Insurance and the UK farm safety system

Most working farms carry employers’ liability cover (required by the Employers’ Liability (Compulsory Insurance) Act 1969) and public liability cover at £5m or above. NFU Mutual, NFU Cymru and others routinely require evidence of risk assessments, machinery inspections and operator training. The cost of upgrading a handling system is dwarfed by a refused liability claim. Insurers tend to give discounts for documented risk assessments and training records. Capital grant routes that pay for safer kit (e.g. handling races, cattle crushes, MEWP hire-and-buy) are covered in the UK Farming Grants Guide.

Ring your broker. Ask what discount the insurer will give you for written risk assessments, current LOLER certificates and a training register. The number is usually higher than you’d guess.

A first-week UK farm safety checklist

If you do nothing else after reading this, do five things this week.

Walk the farm with a notebook and write down every hazard you see: broken steps, missing PTO guards, unguarded edges, chemicals stored where stock can reach them, vehicles parked on slopes. Date the page.

Check the ROPS and seat belt on every tractor and the rollover bars on every ATV. Replace any seat belt that is frayed or seized.

Book a thorough examination of every lifting machine that doesn’t have one within the last 12 months.[37]

Print and pin the HSE INDG163 risk assessment template, the Farmwise contents list, and the RABI/FCN helpline numbers in the farm office. The phone numbers matter when you cannot remember anything else.

Have the conversation about children. Where is the safe play area? Where are the no-go zones? Who is in charge of the children when both adults are working? Write the answer down, because you will not remember it at five in the morning on a lambing night.

Further reading

The single best free resource on UK farm safety is Farmwise HSG270, downloadable from hse.gov.uk. The HSE’s agriculture topic pages carry the up-to-date Agriculture Information Sheets on every common hazard. The Farm Safety Foundation publishes a year-round programme at yellowwellies.org. The NFU’s farm safety hub at nfuonline.com gathers the trade-association guidance, fatality stats and toolkit for farm businesses to build on.

For BritFarmers readers, this guide sits alongside the UK Farming Grants Guide, the Farm Inheritance Tax 2026 Guide and the seasonal Lambing Season UK 2026: Complete Guide.