Cheating death: An Australian farmer has escaped a horrible death by digging his way to safety with a pocket knife after a nine-tonne crop-spraying tank crushed his leg, pinning him to the ground after a careless accident.

Queensland farmer Barry Lynch was preparing for the days work on his sugarcane farm near the small town of Tully. It was 7.30 a.m.

With no-one in earshot, while setting up his equipment he accidentally kicked out a support and the chemical tank's drawbar came down dropping nine tonnes of pain onto his leg.

The grandfather-of-five's smashed leg began filling with blood until the pressure hit critical mass and his flesh burst, leaving a "fist-sized" wound.

As the blood pooled, and knowing no-one would notice him missing for 12 hours, he smoked a cigarette as he figured out a plan. "I thought, 'nobody's going to miss me until maybe 7pm', so I started digging," Lynch said

He then took out a pocket knife left to him by his late father and began digging a trench either side of his smashed limb. "I just thought, 'I have to keep going otherwise I'll lose the leg' ... it was just getting bigger and bigger and blacker and blacker until I could feel my skin cracking," he said.

It took Lynch a full six hours to dig the 15cm-deep trench before he was able to reach his phone and call for help.

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