Making the Reality Real: Health & Safety in Agriculture with Reg Steward

In this workshop you will:

• Evaluate and examine ways to change the culture where necessary, but only where necessary.

• Understand the need and the ways to develop employees and enhance the workers' ability.

• Recognize the value of retained and increasingly trained employees in a very shallow labor pool.

• Review "lowered stress, adequate pressure" livestock handling methods. Gain simple ways to improve your handling system and livestock flow.

• Uncover and develop ways to ensure “Low stress people handling”.

• Establish safety as a documented part of the way you do business - not an ad on. It is well said, if you want to know what matters to someone look at their cheque book and day timer. If farm safety is not in either, no one will believe that it is important.

• Keep safety simple. It does not have to be difficult, but you are accounting for it. What you did or did not do is not going anywhere.

• Address the realities of a changing world, culture and regulatory system where you either did, or you didn’t. You have something in place, or you do not.

• Help those “set in their ways” understand that there may be alternate ways - things that value the past and add to abilities and capacity going forward. Understand risk vs hazard.

• Savvy workplaces care about the animals. We need to make it known that we care about our people and have a record that supports that.

• Good places to work have more applicants, better retention, and safe work environments where every employee knows that they matter.

• The common goal of stockmanship needs to be attained, then retained and sustained by on site expertise.

• Site solutions must be built to be variable. Flexibility is important - different ways to skin the same cat. You are the expert at your site.

• Manage the reporting of incidents which will create ever improving sites and workers.

• Near miss reviews that arrive at alternate, better ways of doing things engage workers, make for a more efficient working site, and affirm the value of the team.

** Cafeteria lunch will be provided **

About Reg Steward:

With 20 + years as the Provincial Ranch Safety Consultant for BC, Reg Steward's focus is on the provision of realistic, "doable" solutions to matters of due diligence and regulatory compliance.

In addition to the supervisory and consulting duties Reg provides as a FARSHA/AgSafe consultant, he provides livestock handling clinics, training and courses to agricultural workers, government agencies, stockmen and livestock handlers throughout North America. Reg also has had the privilege of being a keynote speaker at large agricultural safety gatherings.

With his prior RCMP experience combined with ranching and farming, Reg provides a unique blend of investigative experience, agricultural background and the presentation of information and evidence in courtroom settings.

Over the years, Reg has many fond memories gained in helping people develop a health and safety management system that works for them.