"It was starting to bite on my neck": Yorkshire farmer recalls losing arm in farming accident
New annual figures reveal that farming continues to have the poorest safety record of any occupation in the UK with 35 people losing their lives on farms in 2023/24.
While the farming sector only accounts for one percent of the working population, the industry is responsible for 20 per cent of all deaths in the workplace.
Farm Safety Week 2024 aims to reduce the number of incidents which continue to give farming the poorest safety record of any occupation in the UK and a Yorkshire farmer who lost his left arm in a farming accident 26 years ago is getting behind the safety drive which has been running this week.
James Bannister, a farm contractor, was lifting potatoes in the summer of 1998 and was going to a different field from reds to whites. With his mate, he had stopped the machine, cleaned it out and the last thing he can remember is talking to the trailer man.
"I climbed on to the harvester and have no recollection of that”, he said. “I got dragged in through the roller, it got to the top of my arm and by the time my mate got it stopped, it was starting to bite on my neck.”
It took the fire brigade and emergency services two and a half hours to free him from the machine and he was flown by air ambulance to Sheffield’s Northern General Hospital. It was a journey that took just nine minutes compared to the hour and a half that it would by road.
Mr Bannister, who was 36 at the time, was awake throughout the rescue and even had to sign his own consent form for his arm to be amputated when he got to hospital.
He added: “One of the things that stands out I remember, if you poured a jug of water from three feet high, that was my body when they released the pressure. I could hear it and my body shut down.”
The aftermath of the incident caused his marriage to break up and he was told my his employer he was no longer needed.
He did get back to work and worked in New Zealand for a while and when he returned to the UK in 2009 he met his partner, Lorraine. Within a year they had set up JLR Farm Services and they specialise in crop spraying and muck spreading from a yard at Haxey, near Doncaster.
With Yellow Wellies, and having just spent two years as chairman of the National Association of Agricultural Contractors, Mr Bannister, now 62, has been keen to raise awareness of safety while working on farms, which he says is still a problem as farmers are under increasing pressure.
He said: “It was not an unusual thing to do and I admit we were blase with safety. It was one of those things that we all did. It is still a difficult one, farm staff are getting less and farmers are under more pressure.
“The other issue is that, people slate the HSE, but they are not doing farm inspections this year or for the foreseeable future. That is all very well but farms will get complacent, they need the focus that they are open to inspection.
"The main thing that comes out when I speak is the visual impact. You can sit in a room or go on a course, see pictures and videos and people tell you what you need to know but when I stand in front of people and talk about what happened to me, people take notice, you can hear a pin drop.
"People come up to me afterwards and say ‘I am like that and think it will never happen to me’.”
In addition to the numbers of lives lost on farms every year there are an additional 23,000 injuries to workers every year in Great Britain with the attitude to risk-taking and poor safety behaviours being listed as the main cause.