Farm Safety II

Dear Colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to contribute a manuscript to a Special Issue of Safety with a particular focus on farm health and safety. This Special Issue comes in the later stages and aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic period, a period in which many restrictions and modifications in the farming sector arose.

The pandemic brought a strong focus on the total health model, which indicates a reciprocal relationship between health, including mental health and farm injury prevention. In particular, mental health issues in the agriculture sector have arisen, while scholarship associated with this issue seeking solutions to emerging problems has increased in output.

The role of farm health and safety as a component in sustainability models for agriculture has grown in importance. However, it is my belief that a stronger focus needs to be given to UN Sustainable Development Goal 3, ‘Good Health and Wellbeing’. Such a focus needs to interconnect with all the other UN goals, particularly socio-economic and climate action ones.

A vast population worldwide lives and works on farms, where a huge and diverse range of technologies are used. Farm workers may be employed workers or self-employed. This range of work environments makes implementing health and safety measures a diverse challenge.

At a farm level, this challenge involves enhancing both the technical aspects of farming and human behavioral factors related to occupational health and safety. However, improving farm safety has been described as a ‘wicked’ problem because it resists solution due to its multifactorial and complex nature.

The scenario presented highlights the need for scholarship to seek ways to enhance occupational health and safety on a continuing basis across a range of agricultural workplaces.

Social ecological models applied to agricultural occupational health and safety emphasize multiple levels of influence (such as individual, interpersonal, organizational, community and public policy) and the concept that behaviours both shape and are shaped by the social environment. Thus, huge protential exists at many levels to seek solutions to the occupational health and safety challenge in agriculture.

This Special Issue offers researchers and practitioners the opportunity to present the latest advancements in the development of interventions, or novel approaches for the evaluation or the enhancement of agricultural health safety.

Topics of interest include the following:

• Approaches to survelliance related to agricultural occupational health and safety (OHS)
• Legislative and policy approaches to improve agricultural OHS
• Interventions aimed at improving agricultural OHS including:
• Farm infrastructure design
• Design and interface of vehicles
• Livestock facilities design and behaviours
• Enhancement of behaviour towards health and safety
• Application of total health and sustainability models to agricultural OHS
• COVID-19-related studies related to agriculture

Dr. John McNamara
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Safety is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1800 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.