When Sam Bailey was a teenager, he understood farming as a job for the fit and able-bodied. It was also the only job he could see himself doing. After high school, Bailey left his family farm at Croppa Creek in north-west New South Wales to work as a jackaroo in big stations in northern Australia.
Then the vehicle he was travelling in rolled on the Barkly Highway, and “in a heartbeat my whole life was shot down another road”.
Bailey returned home a quadriplegic. It was 1987 and the then 19-year-old did not know what to do.
“Farming is in my blood and I’ve had dirt under the fingernails since day one, but I never imagined I’d arrive home in a wheelchair,” he says.
Bailey was advised by medical staff to consider an office job in town. “But I just couldn’t come at that,” he says. “So, against their advice Mum and Dad picked me up and we went home to the farm at Croppa Creek.”
With no connection to others in similar circumstances and no internet to research their predicament, Bailey and his family were forced to work out how to make wheelchair adaptations on their farm by themselves.
Freedom and mobility for Bailey returned first with a four-wheel bike. Then came a hand-controlled car and modified farm machinery. To access tractors and headers the family, with help from a bush mechanic in Warialda, devised a motorised hoist fitted with a plastic kitchen chair and mounted on the back of a HiLux.
Bailey, now retired to an 80-acre (32-hectare) property near Tamworth, says technology such as drones, which can be used to check stock and water, and autonomous agriculture make life easier for those in wheelchairs. “But I think it’s kind of sad if you just want to farm from your phone inside your house,” he says. “Half the pleasure is going out and seeing the echidna cross the road and the birds flying.”
Changing the industry
Glen Clarke became a paraplegic after a truck accident in 2003 and, like Bailey, had been advised not to return to his previous life on the family farm at Kempsey, on the NSW mid-north coast.
“We were advised to sell the farm and get a job in town but we struggled through with family and changed our operation from cows and calves to steers to make it less labour-intensive,” he says.
Like Bailey, Clarke found himself isolated in his new life. There was no network for those with a disability in agriculture.
Even off-farm, there were accessibility issues. “I had to use the grains storage ramp to get into the produce store,” Clarke says.
Clarke was already married with four children aged between five and 13 at the time of the accident. “The biggest challenge in the early stages was learning acceptance and patience, but I’ve always said you can either lay down or get up and do something about it,” he says.
His youngest daughter, Josie, is now undertaking a PhD in agriculture. After one particularly wet season, when Clarke’s wheelchair bogged in the sodden black soil, the pair had a long conversation about support and accessibility issues in agriculture. In 2021 Josie Clarke launched Ability Agriculture, a not-for-profit organisation aimed at providing support for people with disabilities in agriculture.
“I wanted to share stories of people with disabilities in agriculture to challenge traditional views, raise awareness, create opportunity and provide a supportive community,” she says.
A 2023 survey commissioned by the organisation found that 81% of respondents were not aware there were rehabilitation programs for agricultural workers who were injured in an accident and 61% did not think there were transparent career pathways for agricultural workers with a disability. It also found that 72% of employers said they would modify or adapt their workplaces to make them more accessible – and that number rose to 80% if there were grants or subsidies available.
The federal government administers the employment assistance fund to aid workplaces make modifications but Clarke says a lack of clear information about the grant criteria leads to 80% of people with disabilities funding adaptations themselves.
“People may want to modify stockyards, for example, and don’t think that would be covered by a grant,” she says. Self-funding adaptations “can lead to people leaving agriculture because of financial restraints”.
Ability Agriculture publishes an accessibility checklist for agricultural events and businesses. It also sponsors young people with disabilities to take part in agricultural shows and hosted a seminar with SafeWork NSW in Wagga Wagga in October on adapting in agriculture, which provided an opportunity for people with disabilities to talk about their experiences in the industry.
“It creates a space for businesses to come and ask questions and that’s really important in building disability confidence in the industry,” Clarke says.
She says technological improvements and a more inclusive approach from industry could make agriculture a more welcoming place to those with disabilities.
“One thing I learned from Dad being in a wheelchair was that it was OK to be vulnerable and it’s OK to be frustrated when you can’t do certain things,” she says. “Together we can figure out a different way to do them.”
