Live Well Farm Well - Physical Activity

Live Well Farm Well - Physical Activity on the farm

Voiceover: Next time you're driving to work take a moment to think about a magical farm workplace hidden in beautiful Far North Queensland where people stop to sing and dance when their favourite song comes up on the radio; all in the name of living well, farming well and creating healthier workplaces.  

Live Well Farm Well partners and owners of LMB Bananas at East Palmerston, Jade and Craig Buchannan, believe a healthy workplace is a productive workplace and that's why they are committed to creating a better place to work. Healthy active staff feel better about themselves, are more motivated, energetic and more productive.

At LMB, they don't just dance, they walk...10 000 steps or more...and some a lot more - every single day.

For four weeks they competed to outwalk each other. If they didn't do enough steps at work, they went for a long walk at home to catch up or got up early to walk the dog. They said it was easy and fun. Let's hear their story......

Khiarne Henderson: I used to get up in the morning and I'd put the pedometer on, and I'd come to work and because we're only standing there packing we're only doing 6000 steps and then when I fell short of   steps I'd go home and I'd walk the dog to make up to 10 000 steps or more, and I was getting about 15 000 steps by the end of the day by walking the dog. I felt more motivated and it was like a target to reach a target every day and so it was good trying to get to that target.

The best part of it was probably just reaching the goal, the 10 000 steps and to see how much further over the 10 000 trying to better myself by each day and that was actually a lot of fun. Jades actually thinking about bringing a personal trainer into the shed. I think once a week or once a month she was thinking about doing and I'm actually really excited about it personally because I think it will be a lot of fun and it gives you motivation to do exercise out of work if he's here and so I'm actually really excited about it.

Jade Buchanan: Why we decided to get involved in Live Well Farm Well was because we were really were looking for a lifestyle change for our business. So even though bananas are to be seem to be quite physical we you know did the 10 000 steps and we all got quite a shock that especially our packers that were indoors weren't hitting anywhere near that target. So yeah just to change our culture of our business and we really took it on board because we really felt it needs to come from the top down. Because we have three separate farms the all got quite competitive. They I think our top team did 24 000 steps per person which is amazing. So when the other teams saw what the other teams were doing it got them motivated. So they then wanted to get out and walk the dog in the afternoon, run around extra with their kids or really you saw the steps increasing every week.

We've also done the healthy eating program which we found really beneficial. Sharing that lunch with them, we'll definitely do that again. Another outcome that we've seen is the staff really like the physical activity being included so we as a group have decided that we're going to approach a local physical trainer who will come in possibly once or twice a month to do some boot camps.

Craig Buchanan: Yeah well it's just a change with all the workers in their eating in their fitness, smoking, some of them gave up smoking.

Jade Buchanan: We employ probably about 100-120 people but I would say it's affected three times that. Because of how people took it home into their house.

Voiceover: Look after your health the way you look after your crops. Live Well Farm Well will show you how to make positive changes in your farming workplace.

RUN TIME: 4 mins 25 seconds