Taking a proactive approach to upskilling farmers and all our young people working in agriculture, Macra’s Agricultural Skillnet now has four online farm safety modules. The ‘Safe Agri Skills’ Training modules are available to complete free of charge by visiting www.ifj.ie/safeskills. The package consists of 4 core courses – Safe Livestock Handling & Management, Tractor Driving & Machinery Maintenance, Manual Handling and Emergency First Responder & Health for Farming. Completing all four should take about 90 minutes and people can do them at different times to suit their own needs.
We are all involved in farming or working in an agricultural setting to complete the courses. It will be one positive move to improve safety on our farms that can be easily completed in your own time, as part of a meeting with other employees on farm or perhaps as part of a discussion group.
Those who complete all four courses will be awarded the ‘Safe Agri Skills’ Wallet Card. This is something we hope will be sought after in the future by farmers or contractors employing people to work with them. It should also be something family members who help out on the farm should complete to remind us of dangers we have become perhaps immune to. Young people looking to work as farm operatives or as drivers for contractors should see it as a must have on their CV.
The modules address common dangers, good practice and prevention of incidents across all four key areas common to all those present on farms – Machinery, Manual Handling, First Aid and Livestock. Training is also available face to face – groups who wish to complete it can contact us in Macra Agricultural Skillnet for further information. Training in Chainsaw use and the safe use of Quads or ATV’s is also available face to face in addition to the core modules above – register your interest with us so you can be contacted when a course is happening in your area.
Macra Skillnet offers free tractor skills training course
