ACCIDENTAL deaths on farms have dropped to the lowest figure in more than a decade, the Health and Safety Executive announced today.

In Yorkshire, only three people died, one less than the year before.

Nationally, the figure fell from 42 to 38.

But experts said the drop could correspond with a decline in the amount of people employed in agriculture, and the amount of fatalities affecting self-employed farm workers has actually risen since the 1990s.

"Looking at the trends over the last 17 years, the incident rate for fatal injuries among employees has gradually declined," said Linda Williams, the Health and Safety Executive's chief inspector of agriculture.

"However, in the case of the self-employed, we have seen consistently higher rates and the fact is that the rate of fatal injuries among the self- employed in agriculture has been higher in the past few years than it was in the early 1990s."

Mrs Williams said: "HSE and the industry can take some comfort and, I believe, some credit for the decline in incident rate among the employed and we must continue to find new and innovative ways to drive this down further."

She said projects for the next 12 months included targeting transport, which was responsible for 32 per cent of last year's deaths.

Updated: 11:00 Wednesday, July 02, 2003