Safety on-orchard everyone’s responsibility

By now you should be starting to see your trees showing their next avocado fruit crop. It’s looking like a mixed bag, with some outstanding results from a heavy flowering, while some other trees may be suffering from that mild early spring.

Pest and bugs are on the rise and spraying is being undertaken. The latest AIC recommendation on coppers per season will add costs to production. Our Avogreen monitoring in this past year has shown a significantly-reduced need for crop pest spraying.

Aongatete Avocado Limited orchards have most of their fertiliser applied timed to meet tree flush, flowering and initial fruit growth. It’s now back to basics in applying regular dressings until mid-winter. With an expected heavy cropping phase, AAL will again be doing a full autumn round injecting with the Avoject syringe for Phytophthora.

In orchard management there is a great emphasis on making sure we do this safely. I am aware there have been a number of near-misses on orchards this harvesting season. Reporting these near-misses can have a big impact on them re-occurring.

Hydralada courses

I tutored Hydralada courses for a number of years and it was surprising the number of stories that emerged of near-misses and close shaves. However, what I got out of them was the learning on the causes and therefore the opportunity for improved prevention. As an industry we are very weak in this area. While many of the larger contractors have good systems, few if any have a common investigative process for learning from near-misses and accidents. The industry continuing to have near-misses will place considerable harvesting costs on growers.

It’s in all our interests to improve the risk prevention tactics used. For a number of months Worksafe has been issuing a weekly media release on matters around workplace safety. Some of those releases contain information on court prosecutions and findings.  

Significant fines

The message I’ve taken from them is that a workplace accident will be very expensive if Worksafe is successful in a prosecution. The fines and costs it has been publishing are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars and some have been against small local business operators.

It’s in all our interests to get this right. The new legislation drives responsibility back to growers (as deigned under the act: a Person Conducting a Business or Undertaking, or a PCBU). It amazes me how many growers still do very little to ensure contractors on their properties/business operations are operating with health and safety programmes, training, records and plans, and if the contractor staff are fully trained.

Do the growers as business owners ask for documented records of such? Do they query if machinery inspections are being done and that contractors are operating with a comprehensive health and safety process? I know in AAL that by taking a strong leadership approach in our management team regarding health and safety, this is rubbing off on all our staff. We regularly meet and get feedback from our teams and are continually improving our safety systems and procedures.  

To wrap this up, it is our collective responsibility to drive safe operating environments and attitudes in our avocado industry. It’s also important that our central leadership provides a framework to drive that in our growing community.


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