FARMSTRONG
A wake up call A near-fatal accident completely changed Owen Gullery’s approach to life and farming. Now he’s alerting other farmers to the dangers of fatigue.
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Waikato farmer Owen Gullery, pictured with son Ryan, says working long days without a break led to a tractor accident that nearly killed him.
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wen contract milks 480 cows on a dairy farm near Cambridge. He’s been in the industry 20 years and loves “the daily challenges of farming – good and bad.” But a few years back a tractor accident almost killed him. “I’d only been contract milking a couple of years in Manawatu. I was your typical ‘I’m gonna take on the world’ guy, working full-on hours. I wanted to make as much money as I could, bank every cent so I could buy a farm,” Owen says. “That drove me to work 200 to 300 days in a row without a break. I was working from four in the morning till eight at night most days.” That combination almost killed him. “The night it happened I had a cow I knew would have problems calving, so I was waiting to calve her. I went out to check her late at night. We had a threepond effluent system and I knew she was in the paddock by the dry pond, but it was a pea soupy kind of night, with fog everywhere,” he recalls. “By the time I got to her it was 11 o’clock at night in October, and I hadn’t had a day off all year. “I drove the tractor up the side of the pond where I thought she was, went over the bank and before I knew it, the cab was filling up with effluent. I’d driven into the wrong pond because I was so tired. Owen says he couldn’t get anything to open to escape the cab space. “I ended up gasping for breath in the last couple hundred millimetres of cab space, managed to kick the back window open, grabbed the blade on the back of the tractor and hauled myself out. It was pretty scary,” he says. After that traumatic experience, Owen completely changed the way he approached his job. He employed parttime help. He took his first break of the year and scheduled two afternoons off a week from then on. The family also reset their life goals. “We changed from being prepared to go anywhere and do anything just to own a farm to concentrating on
DAIRY FARMER
April 2021
