Farming and Fatigue

​Fatigue is a significant and under-managed risk within Australian agriculture, contributing to adverse safety, health, wellbeing and productivity outcomes.

The RSHA research project Farming & Fatigue: Growing Sensible Solutions was conducted from 2023 to 2025 by a team led by CQUniversity alongside University of Sydney’s AgHealth Australia.

Working with producers, they used a mixed methods approach to explore knowledge and practices in relation to fatigue management on Australian cotton, grain, dairy and egg farms. The cotton and grain industries were chosen to better understand factors affecting broadacre farming systems with busy seasonal peaks; the dairy and egg industries were chosen to provide insights into factors for industries with more intensive day-to-day farming systems. Farms covered the spectrum from multi-site corporates with large workforces to smaller family-run enterprises.

The aim was to:

• Better understand the circumstances contributing to fatigue, the consequences of fatigue and the countermeasures currently used
• Develop practical fatigue management resources

Fatigue risk was found to vary substantially across commodities, operation sizes and workforce structures (indicating that risk mitigations should be customised by commodity and for individual farms). Common threads and transferable insights were also evident.

Commodity-specific fatigue risk profiles and a draft set of practical fatigue management resources were developed in alignment with the Safe Work Australia Managing the Risk of Fatigue at Work Model Code of Practice (Sept 2025).

See the Short Report for details of results and discussion.