What We Heard at the Ploughing: Farm Safety in 2026

This year I attended the National Ploughing Championships not as an exhibitor, but as the CEO of a company building products to make farms safer and as a result as someone with a lot of questions about whether the industry is having the right conversations about safety.

It turns out it is. Just not loudly enough.

I spoke with people from the HSA, Bord Bia, the Department of Agriculture, Zurich Insurance, FBD the ESB and others. The conversations were honest, and some of what I heard reinforced my beliefs that we all have to do more in this space.

Here is what came back.

The ESB: electricity on farms is more dangerous than ever

The ESB team I spoke with described a pattern of incidents they are now seeing regularly on Irish farms, and the common thread across all of them is machinery and infrastructure that have not kept pace with each other.

Three examples stood out.

Self-steering tractors hitting utility poles. GPS-guided tractors are increasingly common on Irish farms. They are accurate, they reduce operator fatigue, and they are genuinely useful. But GPS guidance systems only know what has been mapped into them. An electricity pole standing at the edge of a field that was never entered into the system is invisible to the guidance software. The tractor steers into it. The operator, who is not actively driving, may not react in time. The ESB is seeing this as an emerging pattern as precision agriculture becomes more widespread on Irish farms.

Hedge cutters severing pole stay wires. The stay wires that brace electricity poles at angles are low, often partially concealed by vegetation, and exactly the right height to be struck by a hedge cutter working along a field boundary. When a stay wire is cut or significantly damaged, the pole it was bracing can lean. A leaning pole changes the clearance of the overhead lines it carries. The 4-metre ground clearance that machinery operators plan around is no longer accurate. The HSA's own guidance on overhead lines makes this point directly: lines sag in heat and under load, and the clearance you measured last season may not be what it is today.

Machinery striking overhead wires. The fundamental rule, which the HSA's guidelines state plainly, is that electricity can arc. A machine does not have to make contact with an overhead line to receive a fatal or serious shock. The arc can jump across several metres of air gap, particularly when lines are under high load. Walking the field before working it, and knowing where every line runs, is not optional.

The pattern across all three is the same: infrastructure that was installed and mapped at one point in time meeting machinery and practices that have changed since. The farm looks the same. The risk profile has shifted.

The insurance companies: fence incidents are more serious than most farmers realise

The conversations with Zurich Insurance and FBD were equally striking, and they centered on a category of incident that rarely gets discussed openly: fence-related accidents.

Two recent incidents were described that stayed with me.

A bull electrocuted by his own fence. An animal that had no prior experience of electric fencing encountered a high-powered fence and fell onto it. The shock killed him. The fence was doing exactly what it was supposed to do. The problem was that nobody had assessed whether that particular animal, in that particular location, had any familiarity with electric fencing as a boundary. An inexperienced animal meeting a properly functioning high-voltage fence without adequate physical backup is a known risk. It does not require a fence fault to end badly.

Cattle on a road, a passer-by badly injured. A fence failed. Cattle got out onto a road. A member of the public, trying to help get the cattle back into the field, was badly injured by a bull. This is the sequence that electric fence failures set in motion: not just an escaped animal, but a series of events that pull other people into danger in environments they have no way to assess or control.

Both incidents point at the same underlying issue. A fence that is not monitored and not maintained creates risk that extends well beyond the farm boundary.

Why fence monitoring matters more than most farmers think

The majority of electric fence incidents do not start with a catastrophic failure. They start with a gradual degradation that goes undetected.

A wire that has been grounded by vegetation for weeks. A fault in the energiser that is reducing output without triggering any obvious alarm. A section of fence that has been hit by machinery and is no longer properly tensioned. A gate contact that has worked loose.

Any of these can reduce a fence from an effective barrier to something that looks like a barrier but no longer functions as one. Animals test fences. They remember which sections held them and which did not. A section that has been weak for long enough stops being a boundary.

The HSA's data on livestock incidents reinforces this. Livestock are the single biggest cause of farm fatalities in Ireland. A freshly calved cow accounts for 32% of livestock fatalities on its own. Add an ineffective fence to the equation, and the margin for error collapses further.

Traditional fence testing requires a dedicated tester, a ground rod, and a cable. The cable breaks off. The tester stays in the shed. The fence goes unchecked because the friction of checking it is too high. This is not a failure of farming practice. It is a design failure in how fence testing works.

Why we built Jolt

Bua Terra exists because farm safety is a practical problem that needs practical tools, not just awareness campaigns.

Jolt is a cable-free electric fence voltage tester that clips to a keychain. No ground rod. No cable. No detour to the shed. You touch the back metal strip to the wire, press the button, and six LEDs show you the voltage from 1 kV to 8+ kV. It takes seconds. It is CE and UKCA certified, IP44 factory tested for water and dust, and designed to go wherever the farmer goes. The goal is to eliminate the friction that stops farmers from checking their fences regularly. A fence that is checked regularly is a fence that works. A fence that works keeps animals in, keeps the public safe, and reduces the sequence of events that the insurance companies described to me at the Ploughing.

What we are building alongside it

The conversations at the Ploughing also reinforced something we have been working on separately: the need for a structured farm safety self-assessment that any farm operator can do without bringing in a consultant.

The Bua Terra Farm Risk Assessment at risk.buaterra.com covers 13 risk areas on Irish farms, including livestock handling, overhead electricity lines, machinery, slurry, children on the farm, and fencing. It is built on HSA guidelines. It takes 15 minutes. It is free.

If the Ploughing conversations told us anything, it is that the incidents happening on Irish farms right now are not random. They follow recognisable patterns. A structured review of where those patterns show up on your farm is the starting point for preventing them.

Run your free farm risk assessment at risk.buaterra.com.