16 Jan 2014

Too many

8:50 am on 16 January 2014

The state-owned farming company Landcorp says a huge change is needed in the health and safety culture within the farming industry.

A two-year-old girl drowned in a duck pond on a dairy farm at Otapiri in central Southland on Tuesday, and last week, a six-year-old boy died after he became trapped by the adult-size quad bike he was driving while visiting a Southland farm.

Landcorp runs 137 farms with 700 staff and says in 2013, a person was killed every three weeks on a farm and 20,000 people were injured. Chief executive Steven Carden says the industry needs to drastically reduce those statistics.