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Safe Work award for Fosters Coonawarra

Posted on November 3, 2009, 2:02pm

The South East has taken out one of the state’s major Safe Work awards for 2009 with innovation at Fosters’ Coonawarra vineyards reducing the risk of injury for workers.

Fosters won the Best Solution to an Identified Workplace Health and Safety Issue Award with what judges described as a “highly innovative and effective” engineering solution to replace manual processes.

Local contractor LT and JM Wilson engineered a hydraulic sheer to replace chainsaws for vineyard pruning and a Merrett Logging log forwarder was used to move the discarded canopy material to the end of vine rows.

Some of the pruned material was then mulched with a timber grinder and will be used under vines in the coming season.

Fosters Coonawarra southern vineyards manager Stuart Sharman said that before the changes were introduced staff had manually handled more than 15000 tonnes of vine material over the past decade across 330 hectares and completed more than 500,000 chainsaw operations.

“We hadn’t incurred any significant repetitive strain injuries or lacerations, but were certainly conscious that with the number of operations we’d completed, statistics would say we were due to have something and over a number of years we’d been looking at ways to reduce that risk,” he said.

“The best way is to engineer it out and the solutions our vineyard operators, supervisors and external contractors have come up with has eliminated the personal injury risk — it is a great result for the business, staff and our contractors and a great credit to all involved.”

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