A first of its kind workshop which has put women in the driver's seat of on-farm safety is set to be rolled out across other small acreage areas after its organisers won a prestigious $10,000 Safework SA award last week.
Belle Baker, who runs Adelaide Hills and Fleurieu Farm Services with her partner Patrick O'Driscoll, says she was thrilled to be one of three recipients of the Augusta Zadow award for their Tractoring for Women workshop.
Held in May, the one day workshop at Currency Creek saw women become proficient in a range of practical tasks from lifting, moving and stacking hay bales; swapping hay forks for the bucket on the front end loader and hitching a slasher on the back.
Ms Baker says she identified a gap in training opportunities for women who lived on farms but often didn't come from a farming background. The courses that are available are a few days in duration and focused on the construction industry rather than farming.
"Women aren't that interested in the technicalities behind how to pull apart a diesel engine, they simply wanted to know where to check the oil levels and how to put in the fuel and some basic tractor operations," she said.
Ms Baker says there was fantastic support for the event from local dealerships Emmetts, Ramsey Bros, G & J East and ND & JA Giles in promoting the event and supplying tractors.
"In the end we had more tractors than women," she said.
"What we did was put the women in a tractor similar to what they had at home - if someone had a big series CASE that is what we had here or if they had an 85 horsepower John Deere, they learned using that."
As well as empowering women with practical skills in tractor operation, she hopes it will give them the confidence to have conversations with their families about on-farm safety.
"Women more often than men are the ones that get the message about safety and having those conversations about being aware of the risks of tractors which are the number one cause of death on Australian farms.
The next Tractoring for Women workshop will be held early next year but Ms Baker's vision is to hold workshops across SA as well as interstate, especially targeting areas where there is a high concentration of small acreage farms.
"Every second farm with 80 acres seems to have a tractor but often the women have zero experience in how to drive it," she said.
She says there is strong support from every machinery dealer she has spoken to but she wants big tractor brands to financially get behind it and even consider offering a half day workshop with the sale of each tractor.
"It is not acceptable that according to the Tractor and Machinery Association of Australia there was $2.1 billion worth of tractor sales in 2022, including $213m in SA but there is no obligation to train operators to drive them," she said.
