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The number of recognized accidents with fatalities during agricultural and forestry work, despite better technology and coordinated prevention and trainings, is still very high in Austria. The accident scenarios in which people are injured are very different on farms. The common causes of accidents in agriculture and forestry are the loss of control of machine, means of transport or handling equipment, hand-held tool, and object or animal, followed by slipping, stumbling and falling, breakage, bursting, splitting, slipping, fall, and collapse of material agent. In the literature, a number of studies of general (machine- and animal-related accidents) and specific (machine-related accidents) agricultural and forestry accident situations can be found that refer to different databases. From the database Data of the Austrian Workers Compensation Board (AUVA) about occupational accidents with different agricultural machinery over the period 2008-2010 in Austria, main characteristics of the accident, the victim, and the employer as well as variables on causes and circumstances by frequency and contexts of parameters were statistically analyzed by employing the chi-square test and odds ratio. The aim of the study was to determine the information content and quality of the European Statistics on Accidents at Work (ESAW) variables to evaluate safety gaps and risks as well as the accidental man-machine interaction.

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For five agricultural biogas plants with a high share of energy crops in the input material, a detailed balance of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and cumulated energy demand (CED) was calculated for the years 2007 and 2010. The results vary considerably between plants and over time. In 2010 compared with 2007, all of the five biogas plants reduced their impact on climate change and four of them also reduced their consumption of fossil energy. The strongest influence was from the enhanced utilization of surplus heat energy, whereas variations of environmental impact due to direct emissions from the biogas plants were less distinctive. Compared with a reference system based on fossil resources, electricity production in the biogas plants avoided GHG emissions of 603 g to 940 g carbon dioxide equivalents (CO2-eq)•kilowatt hours electrical energy (kWhel (-1)) and saved 2.48 to 3.23 kilowatt hours primary energy from fossil energy carriers (kWhfossil)•kWhel (-1) CED (results for 2010).