Tractors keep killing Victorian farmers, and the protection that would stop most of it is already a legal duty

The toll

Agriculture is one of the country's most dangerous industries to work in, and the figures WorkSafe Victoria released for National Farm Safety Week (19 to 25 July 2026) show why. Since 2021 there have been 39 work-related deaths in Victoria's agriculture industry, six of them in 2025, and the injuries are not rare events either: an average of about ten agriculture workers are injured every week, 2,937 in the same period. Tractors are the machine the regulator has chosen to lead the campaign with, and the reason is in the count: eight fatal tractor incidents since the start of 2025 alone. These are Victorian figures, but the machine and the physics are not state-specific, and the campaign this week runs under a national banner.

The protection that is already a duty

What makes tractor deaths particularly bitter is that the engineering answer to the biggest killer, the rollover, has been settled for decades and is not left to goodwill. WorkSafe Victoria's position is plain: employers and self-employed people must ensure that a wheeled tractor is not used at their workplace unless it is fitted with a roll-over protective structure (ROPS). A ROPS is the frame or cab that keeps a space around the operator if the tractor tips. The exemptions are narrow and tell you where the risk now concentrates: tractors made in or imported into Victoria before 1 July 1981 where retrofitting is not reasonably practicable, stationary plant with no rollover likelihood, a ROPS temporarily removed to work under low vegetation, and tractors under 560 kilograms. In other words, the machines most likely to be running without protection are the old ones.

The ROPS only works with the second half of the pair. As the regulator puts it, seatbelts keep the operator inside the zone the ROPS protects, which is why the advice is to keep every seatbelt in working order and wear it whenever the tractor is moving; retrofit seatbelt kits are available for older machines. A rollover bar with an operator thrown clear of it is not protection. The two are one control.

The rest of the checklist

Around the rollover case, WorkSafe's tractor guidance for the week is the unglamorous operational discipline that prevents the other deaths: a pre-start checklist before the machine moves, guarding on the power take-off shaft (an unguarded PTO is a well-known entanglement killer), never starting a tractor from the ground, keeping people clear of an operating machine, and connecting attachments safely. None of it is new, which is the point of a safety week: the controls are known, and the toll persists anyway.

The regulator let a parent make that argument rather than make it itself. Brendan Garrett, whose son was injured, is quoted in the campaign: “People find some safety requirements a burden or costly, but when you see your son unconscious with barely any signs of life, you realise working towards a safer farm is worth everything.” For a duty-holder the practical reading is narrower than the grief: the highest-return job on most farms is confirming every wheeled tractor has a ROPS and a working seatbelt, and that the oldest machine in the shed, the one most likely to fall inside the pre-1981 exemption, is the first one checked.