Unpacking the Rural plant Code of Practice: Using technology safely

This video is about using technology safely and is one of a series of educational videos designed to help you use the Rural plant Code of Practice to manage work health and safety risks on farm. There are several other videos in this series, including vehicle safety, training and skills, and in-field traffic management.

I'm Mark from Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. I'm the manager of the agriculture unit. And today I'm at Forest Hill in the beautiful Lockyer Valley on a glorious day.

And we're down here with Mitch from Moira Farms.

Thank you very much for inviting us to your farm today and talking about the Rural plant Code of Practice, around the technology and automation.

Can you tell us a bit about what you do on farm here, please?

No worries. Welcome to Moira Farming, Mark, in the Lockyer Valley. We're a mixed cropping operation, growing a variety of vegetables. Some carrots behind us, broccoli, onion, sweet corn, green bean, pumpkin, and we do some cotton and a little bit of grain as well.

How many pieces of plant would be involved in that?

The cotton doesn't require too much labour, which is good. So planting machines, ploughing machines, spraying, irrigating, fertilising, cotton harvesting, and then freight as well. Whereas some of the vegetables are quite hand and labour intensive. So that includes hand planting, hand weeding, hand harvesting, and then hand packaging as well. So we've got quite the variety.

I just see behind us there the aluminium irrigation pipes and I know from history there's a lot of manual handling and work involved with that system of irrigation and now we've moved to some new technology with the pivot irrigator on farm. I'm just wondering, can you explain to me a bit about what it's brought about in terms of safety on farm, reduced manual handling and the risks and hazards that you have involved with irrigating on farm.

Yeah, irrigation in particular on farms come a long way over the years from hand shift pipes like we've talked about to centre pivot lateral irrigators and boom for example. It's a reduction of labour and manual labour as well from lifting repetitive pipes and walking long distances through crops and you're in the elements.

You're going through mud or slippery terrain. There could be wildlife out and about as well. So there's a lot of labour involved with hand shift pipes, but yeah, it's been good being able to transition to lateral move irrigators and pivots.

I know from history, we've had a couple of fatalities involving those aluminium pipes where people have put them into power lines there. You know, we've taken away that risk of putting things up high into the area there, but you also bring in some new hazards there with the centre pivot irrigators or straight line irrigators.

What would be some of the hazards that would be attached to that?

Yeah, they're pretty autonomous machines. Once they're set up and operating, they don't require an operator and it could be easy to forget about the machine or just leave it to its own devices. So things we've got to be very aware of is making sure there's no obstacles parked in front of the machine like a vehicle or there's correct stoppers put in place so that the machine will stop before it hits an obstacle like a tree or a shed or the end of a field.

There's still a few things to be aware of with these machines.

If there was an emergency we could stop the machine. Yeah, there's certainly safety features on these machines including stopping sensors where it'll hit a stopper or if there's a misalignment, if it gets bogged or if it does come in contact with a vehicle and becomes misaligned it will automatically shut down. And our operators are aware of those stopping features or safety features and where they're located on the machine.

And you explained to me before there that you actually use the technology on your phone. So with that technology, what sort of things would come along with that? Do you have GPS, automatic start stop, all that?

Yeah, so with these pivot and lateral irrigators, we can use telemetry, which is basically operating them start and stop from our phones. And that can be done remotely or anywhere in the world, to be honest. But there has to be a level of caution.

When we operate these machines with our technology remotely, it's good practice to observe, have someone observe the field and make sure there's no obstacles, it's safe to start, there's no one in the road and it's in the correct crop as well.

We talked a bit about irrigation on farm but there's a lot of other implements that you do have on farm here. So we've got some tractors, um you've got a cotton picker and baler there, I observed your fertiliser spread and operations there today. We've increased technology on farm with your pivot irrigator, what have we done with those three pieces of plant?

Yeah, so we're always looking for new technology and ways to optimise our farming practices, whether it's chemical application, fertiliser application or just optimising efficiencies on our machines and a part of our training when our staff learn how to operate these individual machines or the FertRig for example, that comes with its own piece of technology.

And that includes a screen and the spreader has way cells and there's quite a lot to understand how that works and a lot of on the job training to help our staff become competent with operating that equipment.

So I've been on an old Massey Ferguson and coming here now we've got an enclosed cab, we've got computer technology, we've got GPS inside the tractor there so there's a lot more to learn and maybe more senior people come to work for you or people that English is not their first language, so how do you go part of that training and making it work for you?

I think it naturally goes in phases here and you'll learn to drive a tractor first or you'll start chipping the fields and then you might learn how to drive a tractor if you haven't done it before and that would include GPS technology and then eventually once you're competent with that the next step might come along which might be operating the Fertspreader or operating a vacuum planter which does include precision technology on board.

As you keep adding these equipment or pieces of technology to the operation it's yeah just little bits of training just to build competency and make sure it's safe all around.

Rightio.

So yeah, we moved from the tractor up to the fertiliser spreader. So we've got the big unit up there with the cotton harvesting. It's a huge piece of plant. So same thing, is the technology in that piece of plant as well?

Yeah, there's a lot of technology in the cotton harvester and there's a lot of different systems to get your head around. And it too takes a lot of training and time to become competent and operate in that machine.

First of all, driving it, it's a big piece of equipment. But then understanding how all of the systems work on board, whether it's the guidance system or all of the sensors on the heads or the systems managing the mechanical aspects of the machine and then you go into the data recording on board for the RFID on the bales and that sort of thing, the yield monitoring. So there's certainly a lot of systems there to get your head around but with time and training you get there.

So obviously bringing that technology onto farm comes at a great cost, you know, has it helped reduce the risks and hazards on farm by introducing this here?

Yeah, we found with GPS guidance, it allows the operator to be available to monitor the job that they're doing. So if they're ploughing a field or planting a field or applying some crop care to a field, if the tractor's doing the steering for them, they're able to observe what's in front of them. Observe what the machine's doing behind them and monitor everything that's going on.

So that's been good.

And do you think that technology has actually saved you money overall now that it's fully implemented and operating on farm?

All the technology we implement certainly saves us money. It builds efficiencies on farm and we can often see it in our crop results.

So like technology and automation on farm, it's saved you like from the safety side of things, know, reducing risks to people from manual handling side of things, risks of coming into contact with other pieces of plant in the paddock and obviously it's saving your money on labour costs but also reducing that risk to workers out there in the field by having all that machinery automated.

That's right and we want that, that's forefront, we want safe environment for our operators, we want it to be safe for our equipment, and safe for our community as well.

Righto, Mitch, I really appreciate your time today telling us a bit more about technology on your farm and how automation has helped bring it all together. It's obviously improved safety on farm.

We really appreciate your time here showing us your plant that you have on the farm today and adopting that technology and using the Rural plant Code of Practice to help you keep your workforce safe and your farm safe.

No worries, thanks Mark.

Follow the link below to find a great conversation between some familiar faces in the agriculture sector as they step through the key areas of the Code, share their real life experiences and provide direction on where to find more information to help make sure you and your workers come home safe at the end of the day.