SafeHabitus Deliverable 1.5 Understanding farm safety and farmer health challenges in the EU. Batch 1 of EIP-Agri Practice Abstracts

This report provides an overview of the background, networks, and key safety challenges faced by farms in 11 EU member states who are represented by partners in the SafeHabitus consortium. The member states and associated partners were selected based on their capacity to implement the project activities and deliver the intended outputs, in addition to representing the diversity of EU agriculture. Six of the partners are drawn from the Sacurima Network, an EU Cost Action that completed its work in 2021 assessing the reasons why agriculture, is consistently amongst one of the most dangerous occupations in Europe and continually lags behind improvements made in occupational health and safety in other major economic sectors. The knowledge of this group and their understanding of the complexity of the challenge enabled SafeHabitus to start from an advanced position. This team is joined by institutions and businesses that function as knowledge brokers in the AKIS by working closely with farmers, policy stakeholders and researchers. This supports SafeHabitus to go beyond the state of the art by moving away from generic efforts to improve FHS amongst farmers and workers, and draw on the group’s expertise to respond to end-user needs by developing practical innovations that encourage farmers to take action. The aim of this report is to serve as an initial exploration of the safety issues in European agriculture and, more importantly, to collate potential solutions and good practices to address these safety challenges. This work will be expanded through ongoing and planned research and project activities that will be reported in the next two years.