A neighbouring farmer in South Canterbury made a grim discovery in January that a coroner now wants every rural worker in the country to learn from. David Fairclough, a 43 year old Albury farmer known to almost everyone around him as “Clever Dave”, had died alone in his workshop while changing a tractor tyre, a job he had done many times before. A newly released coronial finding is being used to warn other farmers that the routine task can turn fatal in seconds.
Fairclough died on 18 January while fitting a single agricultural tyre by himself, according to RNZ. He had used an excavator and tyre levers to take the old tyre off, then laid the wheel flat on the ground and lined the new tyre up on top of it. Coroner Mary-Anne Borrowdale found he had likely climbed onto the wheel to work the last of the tyre bead over the rim when the tyre dropped with force and pinned him.
The scale of what he was handling helps explain how quickly it went wrong. Borrowdale noted the tyre weighed about 316 kilograms and the rim about 196 kilograms, a combined load far heavier than any person can hold or shift unaided. When a neighbour came looking for him, the coroner found, the neighbour could see Mr Fairclough curled up inside the tractor tyre with his head and arms trapped between the tyre and the wheel rim. He could not be saved.
Rather than open a full inquiry, Borrowdale endorsed the safety guidance that came out of the WorkSafe investigation, deciding the most useful response was to spread the lessons as widely as possible. Her central message was blunt and practical. She said it is always safest to leave the tractor wheel on the vehicle when swapping tyres, and that an operator should never place their head or any body part within a tyre. Three straight tyre levers were found inside the tyre after Fairclough was freed.
WorkSafe found that the new tyre weighed so much it could not be moved unaided, and that Fairclough should have used C-bar tyre levers rather than the straight ones he had on hand. The agency had earlier issued a safety alert to farmers spelling out the danger of the work. Large agricultural tyres and rims are extremely heavy and can move suddenly and with significant force during fitting, the alert warned, and changing tyres yourself may seem quicker or cheaper but without the right equipment, training and method the risk of fatal harm is high.
WorkSafe regional manager Adrian van Dyk put the wider point simply, telling 1News that everyday jobs can quickly become deadly without the right controls in place. It is a warning aimed squarely at the kind of self reliance that defines a lot of New Zealand farming, where doing a job yourself rather than waiting for a tyre truck is often seen as the smart, thrifty choice.
That independence was part of who Fairclough was. His wife Bonnie told the Otago Daily Times that he was recognised by everyone as “Clever Dave”, a self taught farmer known for making, fixing and improving things himself, and someone who regularly changed his own tractor tyres. She described a man who led a life full of adventure and fun, was always positive and took on every day with a smile. He was a father of three. Albury, where he farmed, sits about 45 kilometres west of Timaru, in the kind of inland Canterbury country where the nearest help is rarely close at hand.
His death lands in a sector that keeps topping the wrong list. Agriculture remains the most dangerous industry in New Zealand by a wide margin, and WorkSafe figures show 14 workers were killed on farms in 2024, accounting for about 40 percent of all reported workplace fatalities for the year. Vehicles and machinery are the leading cause, through rollovers, operator error and poor maintenance, and the gap between farming and the next most dangerous sector is large. The toll has been stubborn enough that WorkSafe has named agriculture a priority sector and committed a significant share of its resources to bringing the numbers down, according to its data centre.
For all the statistics, the advice coming out of this case is small and specific. Keep the wheel on the vehicle if you can. Use the right tyre levers for the job. Never get your body inside a tyre that could shift. And when a load is too heavy to move on your own, treat that as the warning it is rather than a problem to muscle through. Borrowdale and WorkSafe are betting that a coroner repeating those plain rules might be enough to stop the next farmer in a quiet workshop from making the same call.
It is the sort of loss that ripples well beyond one farm gate, and the people most likely to recognise the risk are the ones who have done the same job a hundred times without incident. Have you changed your own gear rather than wait for a contractor, and what keeps you safe when you are working alone on the land? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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