FRAM‐Based Safety Culture Model for the Analysis of Socio‐Technical and Environmental Variability in Mechanised Agricultural Activities

Mechanised agricultural operations are often performed individually, under minimal supervision and across a wide range of unfavourable working conditions, resulting in a complex mixture of hazards and external stressors that severely affect safety conditions. Socio-technical and environmental constraints utterly affect safety culture and require continuous performance adjustments to overcome timing pressures, resource limita-tions, and unstable weather conditions. This study introduces a FRAM-based safety-culture model that embeds the thorough-ness-efficiency trade-off (ETTO) in four distinct operational modes that adhere to spe-cific safety cultures, namely thoroughness, risk awareness, compliance and efficiency. The model has been instantiated for mechanised ploughing: foreground task functions were coupled with background functions that represent socio-technical constraints and environmental variability, while severity classes for potential incidents were derived from US OSHA accident database. The framework was also supported by a semi-quantitative resonance index based on severity and coupling strength, the Total Resonance Index (TRI) to assess how variability propagates in foreground functions and to identify hot-spot functions where small adjustments can escalate into high resonance and hazardous conditions. Results showed that the negative effects on functional resonance generated by safety detriment on TRI observed between compliance and effective working modes was three times larger than the drift between risk awareness and compliance, demonstrating that efficiency comes with a way higher cost than keeping safety at compliance levels. Ex-tending the proposed approach with quantitative assessments could further support the management of socio-technical and environmental drivers in mechanised farming, strengthening the role of safety as a competitive asset for enhancing resilience and service quality.