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WELLBEING 4-WHEEL DRIVING
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Good management beats good luck Everyone has those moments when you think ‘phew, that was a lucky escape!’ Harriet Bremner says we should be doing all we can to avoid those moments by considering the risks and planning for them. Harriet Bremner and Poppy.
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nowledge is something that comes after being exposed to plenty of different ‘experiences’ in life along the way. We have experiences that range from relationships, careers, hobbies and life in general. These help to mould us as a person and help make us who we are right now, in this moment. When I read Mark Warren’s caption ‘Experience is the thing you get a split second after you need it’, in his book Many a muddy morning, it really made me think. My mind raced back to all those defining moments where I wish I had known better before I delved into them. We have all had those moments, the ones where you know just how damn lucky you were to walk away from it. I often hear people trying to justify why they are not wearing their seatbelt on the farm. Like seatbelts in general, we hope we will not need to use them and when we are pottering along behind a mob of cows at 10km per hour we don’t think anything could go wrong. Suddenly, an animal breaks back and you put your foot down to catch up with it, not seeing the bull hole in the long grass then ‘BANG’. It literally happens so quickly and leaves you wishing you had buckled up or not worried about the getaway cow in such a hurry. Left with a head injury and time off work, making it click would have been the simple answer, along with not driving like an idiot. Terrain changes all the time on farms and yes, flat farms are at lower risk of something going wrong for obvious reasons. We need to be looking at the theory of ‘it could happen to me 84
Mark at his home farm; Waipari.
and what am I going to do to avoid that in the first place’, rather than, ‘it will never happen to me’. Being able to stop in the moment and assess this can save you from an ongoing injury or the loss of your life. Life and its continuous curve balls doesn’t always operate in an accommodating way. When I think back, my defining moments where it could have so easily gone wrong were good luck, not good management. This is why we need to be able to stop and think about something before we do it. Through reading Mark’s book, I realised that there were ways in which he taught about how to ‘stay safe’ without specifically using those words. Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | March 2021
