Look Up. Slow Down. Go Home.

Think back over the last week. Was there a moment - loading the ute, moving stock, working near the powerlines that run across the back paddock - when you consciously thought about your safety before you got started? Or was your mind already on the next job, the weather closing in, the list that never gets shorter?

If you're being honest, it's probably the second one. Most of us are. We've all done the "she'll be right" run to save five minutes, skipped the safety check because we've done the job a hundred times before, or told ourselves nothing's gone wrong yet, so it probably won't. But every one of those moments is a small decision and each time we choose speed over safety, we edge a little closer to the injury, or the tragedy, that changes everything.

That was the heart of the message at this year's National Farm Safety Week, and it came through loud and clear at the Farmsafe Australia NSW State Forum in Wagga Wagga on 17 July, which the RFCS NSW team attended. Alongside the forum, Farmsafe Australia also released its Safer Farms 2026 trend report, and together they paint a sobering but important picture of where farm safety in Australia stands today; and what it will take to change it.

A truck, a mob of cattle, and powerlines nobody saw

Chris Trutwein, a public safety specialist with Essential Energy, opened his session with a story that's stayed with everyone who heard it. A farmer had climbed onto the roof of his truck to push cattle out - a job done a thousand times before, on a thousand farms. He didn't see the powerlines overhead. He made contact, fell, and was trampled by the very cattle he'd been trying to move. He was lucky to survive.

It's exactly the kind of hazard Chris spoke about: hidden in plain sight. He calls it inattentional blindness - the psychological trick where we miss the thing that's right in front of us because our attention is fixed on the job, not the risk around it. Powerlines blend into overcast skies, disappear against tree lines, and vanish from view the moment we're focused on getting cattle moving, a load lifted, or a stake driven into the ground.

Chris' message was simple and worth repeating on every property in the state: Stay. Call. Wait. If a vehicle makes contact with a powerline, stay inside it, call 000, and wait for the experts to confirm it's safe. Stay at least eight metres from any fallen line, even one that looks dead should be treated as live, and so should the ground around it. And the myth that rubber tyres protect you? Not true: electricity can travel through a tyre and cause it to explode.

His advice for every farm, no matter the size: run a safety induction for anyone stepping onto the property - workers, contractors, family helping out over harvest. Two extra minutes, he said, can save a life.

A father lost, a son nearly lost too

If Chris' session showed how easily hazards hide in plain sight, keynote speaker and NRL legend Shane Webcke showed just how personal the cost of complacency can be.

Shane was eighteen when his father was killed in a horrific wool press accident after a hydraulic failure. It's the kind of loss that should change everything, and for a while, it did. But fifteen years later, despite becoming a passionate advocate for farm safety, Shane found himself slip into complacency. While loading a tree stump heavier than his Bobcat could safely handle, the stump flipped back onto the machine. It narrowly missed him, and his six-year-old son, who was sitting on his lap at the time.

"If I get hurt, am I the only one who gets hurt?" Shane asked the room. The answer, every time, is no. It's the people who depend on us - family, workmates, our communities - who are left carrying the consequences of a decision made in a complacent or rushed moment.

His point wasn't that farmers don't care about safety. It's that the longer we do a risky task without incident, the more convinced we become that nothing will go wrong - right up until it does.

The rest of the day built on that message from every angle. Rural business owner and disability advocate Sam Longmore shared her own story on fatigue and the "she'll be right" mindset, Safer Farms Ambassador Gavin Dal Broi joined for a Q&A on leadership and safety, and behaviour change specialist Dom Thurbon closed the day with practical ways to make the safe choice the easy choice.

The numbers behind the message

The Safer Farms 2026 report backs up every story shared on the day. In 2025, Australian farms recorded 53 fatalities and 182 serious injuries. Men accounted for 91 pc of deaths and 77 pc of injuries. Six children lost their lives, and fourteen more were seriously hurt.

Vehicles and machinery remain the biggest killers on farm. Tractors, side-by-side vehicles and quad bikes were behind nineteen of last year's deaths between them, while quad bikes alone caused 31 serious injuries - more than any other cause. NSW recorded 16 fatalities and 74 serious injuries in 2025, and the preliminary 2026 figures show four fatalities and 29 injuries in our state in the first six months of this year alone.

Zoom out, and the picture is bigger still. Agriculture has recorded 427 fatalities over the past seven years, at a cost to the sector of more than $1 billion. Workers' compensation claims add roughly $159 million in injury costs every year, and the overall economic toll of farm injuries and deaths now exceeds $300 million annually.

One figure worth sitting with: millennials aged 26 to 44 account for 42.5 pc of farming injuries recorded between FY20 and FY26 - the highest of any generation. Farm safety isn't just a message for the "old hands" or the inexperienced. It's for everyone, at every stage of a farming life.

Leading by example, not by lecture

This year's National Farm Safety Week theme, Set the Standard: Show 'em How It's Done, was chosen deliberately. As Farmsafe Australia's chair Felicity Richards puts it, farming incidents are rarely just bad luck, they're often preventable, shaped by decisions made under pressure, fatigue, or plain routine.

Role modelling, the forum heard, is one of the most underrated forces on any farm. People learn how to operate machinery, manage risk, and respond to pressure by watching the people around them, and whoever's watching, the standard they see becomes the standard they follow. That cuts both ways. Shortcuts and "the way it's always been done" spread just as easily as good habits do. But so do the good ones: wearing a helmet, buckling a seatbelt, taking the extra two minutes for a safety induction, speaking up when something doesn't look right.

It's why Farmsafe Australia has launched its Safer Farmers Ambassador Network this year - six farmers sharing honest, real experiences of safer decision-making, showing rather than telling what safety looks like in practice.

The choice is still yours

Shane Webcke's closing message is the one worth carrying back to the farm gate: safety was never really about compliance, forms, or ticking boxes. It's about the decisions we make every single day, and the fact that those decisions belong to us, nobody else.

"Too much of what safety has become is about compliance," Shane said. "Not enough about our responsibility." The people who understand that best, he said, are usually the ones who've been touched by loss. The rest of us have the chance to learn it without paying that price.

So, back to the question we started with. Next time you're on the ute, under a load, or moving stock near a powerline, take the moment. Stop. Look up. Ask yourself if you're the only one who'd be affected if it went wrong.

The answer is always no.

Rural financial counsellors attend events like Farm Safety Week as part of their outreach - engaging with their communities and updating their own knowledge and skills so they can share it with, and best service, their farming clients. Reach out to your local rural financial counsellor if you'd like a chat on how improvements can be made on farm – 1800 319 458 | www.rfcsnsw.org.au