Farm Safety Assessments Found Gaps on Roughly Two Farms in Five
WorkSafe inspectors completed 680 assessments on sheep, beef and dairy farms between October and December 2025, and hazardous substances emerged as the highest-risk area, with 39% of assessments requiring improvement. Inadequate guarding of power take-off shafts required improvement in 16% of assessments, rising to 25% in the South Island, and farm vehicles, tractors, side-by-sides and quad bikes accounted for a further 14%. Notably, 81% of the businesses assessed had fewer than five employees.
Those findings describe worker safety, which is the regulator's focus. The same conditions produce a different and less-discussed exposure: harm to people who are not employees. Contractors, shearing gangs, stock agents, vets, fencers, spray operators, truck drivers, meter readers, farm-stay guests, hunters and the general public on a paper road all come onto working properties, and the farming entity owes each of them a duty.
Who Counts as a Visitor, and What You Owe Them
Under the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015, a person conducting a business or undertaking must ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of workers and of other people put at risk by the work. A farming operation is a PCBU. That duty extends to visitors on the property, and it is not discharged by a sign at the gate.
Where two or more businesses share a workplace — a farm and a contract harvesting crew, for example — they hold overlapping duties and must consult, co-operate and co-ordinate with each other. Overlapping duties are not divisible by contract. A clause in a contractor agreement saying safety is the contractor's problem does not remove the farm's duty, though it may matter later when liability between the parties is sorted out.
The Visitors Most Often Missed
- Casual and family visitors during busy season. Extra hands at docking, calving or harvest who are not on any induction record
- Delivery and service drivers. Fuel, feed, stock trucks and couriers moving through yards where machinery is operating
- Farm-stay and agritourism guests. Paying visitors with no rural background, often with children, frequently around effluent ponds, silage pits and unlocked chemical stores
- Recreational users. Hunters, trampers, four-wheel-drive clubs and mountain-bikers using access granted informally or by long habit
- Neighbouring property and road users. Spray drift, stock on the road, and dust or debris from farm traffic
Where Public Liability Cover Responds
The accident compensation scheme removes most claims for compensatory damages for personal injury, which shifts the centre of gravity for farm liability cover towards property damage and third-party economic loss. The exposures that generate the largest farm claims are rarely the ones owners name first.
| Exposure | Typical claim | Where cover usually sits |
|---|---|---|
| Spray drift | Damage to a neighbour's crop, vines, organic certification or shelter planting | Public liability, subject to the pollution clause and any chemical exclusion |
| Stock escaping onto a road | Vehicle damage and consequential claims from road users | Public liability; check whether stock-on-road is carved out |
| Effluent or fuel entering a waterway | Clean-up costs, regional council enforcement, downstream damage | Typically excluded beyond a sudden and accidental carve-back; statutory liability handles the regulatory side |
| Fire spreading from farm activity | Damage to neighbouring property, plus Fire and Emergency cost recovery | Public liability, subject to hot-work conditions |
| Contract work off your own property | Damage caused while cultivating, baling or spraying for someone else | Public liability, but only if contracting is disclosed as an activity |
| Farm-stay or agritourism guests | Property damage and non-injury claims from paying visitors | Public liability, but only if the accommodation or tourism activity is declared |
The last two rows cause more declined claims than anything else on the list. A policy written for a sheep and beef operation is not automatically a policy for a contracting business or a tourism business. Diversification — a farm-stay cottage, a cafe at the gate, a wedding venue in the woolshed, paid hunting access, a pick-your-own block — changes the risk the insurer priced. Each of those is a separate activity that needs to be on the schedule.
Fines Cannot Be Insured; Reparation Usually Can
Section 29 of the Health and Safety at Work Act 2015 renders any insurance policy of no effect to the extent it indemnifies a person for a fine or infringement fee. Statutory liability cover picks up the two costs either side of that line: legal defence and investigation costs, and reparation ordered by the court to a person who suffered loss or harm. Farm owners who assume a prosecution is fully insurable are usually thinking of reparation, which is insurable, rather than the fine, which is not.
Controls That Also Reduce the Claim
The improvements WorkSafe identified are mostly low-cost, and they happen to be the same records an insurer or a defence lawyer will ask for after an incident. Of the improvement notices issued for hazardous substances, 94% related to missing safety data sheets or chemical inventories — a paperwork fix with a direct safety benefit and an obvious evidential value in a spray drift dispute.
- Keep a current chemical inventory and safety data sheets, and store them where emergency services can find them
- Record spray dates, products, wind speed and direction, and operator — the single most useful document in any drift claim
- Guard PTO shafts and check them seasonally rather than after an incident
- Keep vehicles serviced, check brakes and tyres, and require seatbelts and helmets, including for visitors given a bike or side-by-side
- Run a short visitor induction with a signed record, covering no-go areas, vehicle rules and what to do in an emergency
- Fence or cover effluent ponds and silage pits where guests or children have access
- Collect certificates of currency from every contractor before work starts, and check the insured name matches the entity invoicing you
Limits to Review This Season
| Operation | Limit commonly held | Reason to reconsider |
|---|---|---|
| Owner-operated sheep and beef, no diversification | $1M to $2M | Adequate for most property claims; thin if spray drift affects a horticultural neighbour |
| Dairy with effluent infrastructure | $2M to $5M | Waterway contamination and clean-up costs escalate quickly |
| Farm with contracting income | $5M | Work on third-party property; principals increasingly specify the limit |
| Farm-stay, venue or agritourism | $5M | Paying public on site, plus booking-platform and venue contract requirements |
| Cropping or horticulture near sensitive neighbours | $5M and above | Loss of an organic certification or a vintage is a large, quantifiable loss |
Next Steps
Two checks are worth doing before the next busy season. First, list every activity the property now earns money from and compare that list against the activities named on your policy schedule; anything missing is a gap, not a grey area. Second, confirm whether your programme includes statutory liability alongside public liability, because the costs of a WorkSafe investigation land long before any question of civil liability arises.
Our coverage guide explains how the two policies divide the risk. If the operation has changed — new contracting income, guests staying on the property, a new block or a new chemical programme — Get a Quote and a referred adviser will match the limit and the activity schedule to what you are actually doing, or email hello@cover4you.co.nz.