🌱 Mapping the Safety Ecosystem for People with Disability in Agriculture
Understanding how safety decisions are made on farms and in agriculture is essential — especially for people with disability who already live, work, and contribute across Australian agriculture. Yet until now, the industry has never had a clear, co‑designed map showing who influences safety, where gaps exist, and what enables or inhibits safe participation.
Our Cultivating Safety in Agriculture for persons with disability research project in partnership with CQUniversity and supported by National Disability Research Partnership (NDRP) resulted in the first co-designed ecosystem map for agriculture, developed collaboratively with:
☘️ People with disability working in agriculture
☘️ Agricultural employers and supervisors
☘️ Farm safety professionals
☘️ Occupational therapists and allied health practitioners
This wasn’t theory — it was built from lived experience, real workplaces, and the voices of people who navigate these systems every day.
The ecosystem map highlights:
🔹 Enablers — confidence, shared responsibility, practical guidance, collaborative adjustments
🔹 Challenges — knowledge gaps, fear of disclosure, unclear roles, limited disability-specific safety guidance
🔹 Informal workarounds — often helpful, but sometimes unsafe
🔹 Formal supports — often disconnected from agricultural realities
By visualising these relationships, the industry can finally see where safety breaks down, where responsibility is unclear, and where practical change is most achievable.
This mapping is a milestone for agriculture — giving us a shared language, shared understanding, and a shared direction for building safer, more inclusive workplaces.
If you work in ag, safety, allied health, or rural workforce development, this ecosystem matters. To enable system change, we need to understand the ecosystem first.
An in-depth look at the co‑design process of the inclusive farm safety ecosystem map
Roundtable discussions informed the design of the ecosystem map to better reflect where change is most needed to support the safe participation of persons with disability or impairment across agricultural workplaces. Feedback highlighted that safety is shaped not only by formal systems and compliance processes, but by everyday interactions, time pressures, resource constraints, and the quality of relationships across the ecosystem.
Key priorities reflected in the revised diagram from co-design feedback include:
· Moving beyond transactional ways of working
Participants described the ecosystem as largely transactional, with interactions focused on compliance, assessments, or resolving immediate issues. The revised map highlights the need for more transformational approaches, including shared learning, trust building, and collaboration, to support sustainable safety outcomes rather than short-term fixes.
· Recognising coworkers as central to workplace safety
The revised ecosystem explicitly includes fellow employees as contributors to safety. Peer awareness, informal support, training, and shared responsibility were identified as critical to creating safe environments for everyone, particularly in fast paced or high-risk agricultural settings.
· Making system constraints visible
Feedback emphasised that safety decisions are influenced by real-world constraints such as time pressure, financial cost, workforce availability, and access to resources. These factors are now represented as contextual influences within the ecosystem, rather than as individual failings.
· Clarifying disclosure, legal context, and psychosocial safety
The revised diagram reflects the distinction between when disclosure of disability is required and when it is not. Disclosure is only necessary where support needs affect safe participation in work; where work is safe, there is no expectation or legal requirement to disclose. Fear of judgement or exclusion, and its impact on psychosocial safety, is highlighted as a barrier when this distinction is poorly understood.
· Addressing delays and fragmentation within disability support systems
Occupational therapists and allied health practitioners identified challenges associated with funding delays, system navigation, and administrative complexity, which can delay or prevent implementation of safe adjustments. The map shows how such delays increase the likelihood that people will continue to rely on informal or “DIY” adaptations in agricultural work.
· Expanding the role of safety consultants
The ecosystem redesign highlights the potential to empower safety consultants, who are often first on the ground, to act as connectors to broader disability and employment supports. This expands their role beyond narrow “fitness for work” or compliance focused decision-making.
· Broadening the focus from ‘farm safety’ to agricultural workplaces
Feedback reinforced the importance of representing the diversity of roles across agriculture, including agribusiness, processing, contracting, and related work environments. The revised map reflects safety for people working across agricultural workplaces, not solely on farms.
To improve interpretability, arrows in the diagram were refined to distinguish different dynamics within the ecosystem:
Red arrows with blunt ends represent challenges or inhibitors to safe participation.
Green arrows represent enablers and collaborative pathways.
Orange arrows represent emerging or under‑developed pathways which, if strengthened, could lead to safer participation over time.
Together, these insights ensure the ecosystem map better reflects lived experience, system pressures, and collective responsibility, while identifying priority leverage points for improving safety and inclusion across agricultural workplaces.
