36 | Richard Loader RURAL PEOPLE » Farm Without Harm - Pamu Farm Without Harm – Anita’s story Anita Kendrick had grown up in a farming environment around the King Country. Farming was her life and she had been working as a shepherd on Te Wharua a Pamu farm, 25 minutes north of Taumarunui. It was docking time over Labour Weekend and a neighbouring farmer asked Anita if she would like to earn some pocket money for a couple of days work. A keen horsewoman, Anita was saving for a new western style saddle and jumped at the opportunity to earn some valuable extra cash. Using the neighbouring farmer’s Yamaha Grizzly 700cc quad bike, Anita was given the job of mustering sheep up a hill and the satellite yards about a kilometre away. “It was a bigger bike than what I was used to and the track was uneven and rough. I was going up a straight bit of hill – relatively steep but nothing outrageous. I actually hummed and hawed about going up on the bike, but couldn’t find another way of going up. I came back to the original track, went up, gave the bike a bit too much juice to get up the track, hit a rut, and it didn’t end how I planned.” The quad came right up and over, landing straight on top of Anita’s back, pushing her head between her legs, and while she was unaware of it at that moment in time, breaking her back. “I was conscious the whole time and it was excruciatingly painful. I put my hands under my back to ease the pain and felt a lump, which I thought were broken ribs. “At that time it didn’t register to me that I couldn’t feel my legs. Adrenalin kicked in and I managed to heave the bike off me, though I don’t recall doing that. It was then a mental fight, till the farm owner and my father who was also helping out, came looking for me.” After being examined by emergency services, The Half-Arsed Stops Here campaign has been developed by the Agricultural Leaders’ Health and Safety Action Group Safer Farms, the organisation dedicated to leading, redesigning and inspiring a safer farm culture throughout New Zealand. It is a provocative message to start changing attitudes and a key component of the Farm Without Harm strategy. This is about farmers having everyday conversations that lead to safer outcomes. This is Anita’s conversation. It is about her life that changed forever in 2011 when she was 18 years old. Anita was helicoptered to the hospital, by which time she knew the injury was more serious than broken ribs. “The medic took my boots off before I was taken up to the helicopter and asked if I felt him doing that. I told him I couldn’t feel anything. I had broken my back at T12 L1 on the spine, which effectively meant I was paralysed from the waist down.” With the passage of time, the accident and the pain have become a distant memory — something that happened a lifetime ago — and Anita says she is not someone to dwell on things. It’s ‘get in and move on’. But she acknowledges that the first couple of years, adjusting to life without the use of her legs, and relearning to do the smallest of things that are taken for granted were extremely hard. “I was in a very dark place, hit the alcohol pretty hard, and put on a lot of weight. By 2018 I decided I’d had enough of sitting in a dark hole, drinking my life away. “So I did something about it, started to think outside the square, and it’s only since then that I’ve been truly happy. “As the years go by life gets better and better. I was also very lucky to have some very positive people in my life, and friends who are not short of humour. I have also been lucky that I was able to continue working as a shepherd at Te Wharua Farm, which is awesome. I spent a couple of years being a casual farm worker, working in with how much my body would let me do, and that has been a learning curve as well. “I had an extremely good work crew that I had known for quite some time and they helped me out quite a lot. It took a while to get my side-by-side bike modified with hand controls and I also had to retrain my dogs. It wasn’t till 2013/2014 that I was able to do six or seven hours at work and not have to rely on any one else.” As Anita observes, the benefit of hindsight is a great thing. “Was I half arsed? I suppose I was a little bit. I didn’t take the hill for granted because I initially thought I didn’t really want to drive up there. I went back around the hill to find another way up, but couldn’t find one. So I came back to my original track, and the rest is history. Pāmu Farms PROUDLY SUPPORTING For more information visit pggwrightsonseeds.com or freephone 0800 805 505 Proud to beworking with Pamu on its journey for a better tomorrow. www.cedenco.co.nz “I look back and think how much I miss walking, and that I really should have just walked up that hill to the yards with the sheep and got the boss to go back down and bring the bike up. With everything in life, you had to find a new way of doing things, like hunting for example, and I have to break the dogs in a different way. I never rode a horse again and never bought the saddle.” A strong advocate of the Half Arsed Stops Here campaign, Anita says her message to other farmers is if you are looking at a hill and think you can walk it more safely than ride up it, then walk it. “You see so many people who are lazy and don’t want to use their legs, and here I am sitting here looking at them and thinking jeez — can we just swap places, can I have your legs and I’ll give you mine. I think it’s that not being lazy thing. If you have to walk then walk.” Pamu supports cultivating a farming community that prioritises a safer future in farming. Its Farm Managers are signing the pledge to stop being ‘half-arsed’ about preventable injuries and fatalities resulting from accidents on New Zealand farms. Anita Kendrick grew up in a farming environment around the King Country.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NDc2Mzg=