Dairy Farm Staff And The Shocking Rate Of Employee Turnover

In this video I continue to discuss dairy farm staffing issues. I reference three reports into dairy farm employment.

The first is a report by Dairy NZ called Smarter Not Harder, Improving Labour Productivity in the Primary Sector

The second is a report written by Gillian Searle in 2002 called The Reality of a Career in the Dairy Industry, An Employee’s Perspective


These two reports found that:

• 50% of dairy staff have been in their current job less than 1 year
• The average length of service for a dairy farm employee is less than 1 year
• 1/3 of dairy staff leave the industry every year!

The third report written by Richard Kyte's "A different approach to staffing in the dairy industry" attempts to show that increasing staff numbers actually increased his farms productivity and profitability.

Transcript:


Well, gidday. Glen Herud here again and I am going to carry on talking about dairy farm staff. Last time I said that only a small percentage of New Zealand population are prepared to work on a dairy farm simply because of the long hours involved. 

Today I want to talk about a report that was released by Dairy NZ in 2009 I think, called “Farming Smarter Not Harder.” They had some interesting figures.  

• They said that 50% of staff had been in their current job less than one year.  

• The average length of service, so that's the average time people stay with an employer was less than one year. 

• 1/3 of dairy staff leave the industry every year.

These figures are also backed up by a report written by Gillian Searle way back in 2002, and she found that 59% of staff that she surveyed had been in their current job less than six months. 
These are figures from the dairy industry. These aren't figures from an anti-dairy group. These are their own figures. This shows a horrendous amount of staff turn-over. I can't even imagine trying to run a business where the majority of your staff aren't there for a full year. There is no continuity or anything.  So, these figures surprised me quite a bit. 

Average Staff Turnover in NZ is 20%. NZ Dairy Turnover 40% 

Now, take a look at this graph. This is from the “Working Smarter Not Harder” report.  If you look at the bottom line there that's the New Zealand average around 15 to 20%. This is for staff turn-over.  The blue line at the top is the staff turn-over for the New Zealand dairy industry. As you can see, it fluctuates wildly from down 25% up to 40%, and it's exactly the same every single year.

If look there, September seems to be the time where everything peaks and it's no surprise to me that September is right at the end of calving after people have worked for two months, doing 60-70 hour weeks; they leave.  

750 Cow farm has 4 staff

If we look at what it looks like at a current dairy farm, if you've got 750 cows here in Canterbury. I've said last time that you have about one staff member to 180 cows. So that equals four staff.  Another way of looking at it is one staff member to 75,000 KGs of milk solids. If you have 750 cows doing 75,000 KGs of milk solids that equals four staff. That equals 300,000 KGs divided by 75,000 equal four staff. Essentially that is three employees and one boss. 

So what does that actually look like actually on the farm? 

I am assuming we've got a 60 bale rotary with automatic cup removers and centre pivot irrigation.  Two staff are going to be required to milk and they'll start at 4 am. They go 5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12pm, 1, 2, 3, 4. They'll go through to 5p.m. 

They will have lunch at one and breakfast at eight for an hour.  So that's an 11 hour day. Essentially, one person is always going to be off because they'll have their rostered day off. Depending on what the roster is, it depends what part of the week you have a full complement of staff, but generally speaking you're only going to have two staff plus the boss. Maybe the boss starts at seven and this will probably rotate around. But anyway the third person starts at seven and they'll go right through to five p.m.  So, basically they've got to milk twice a day and they've got to do other jobs.  

750 cows & 4 staff is fine, as long as nothing goes wrong

So having three people on the farm with maybe a relief milker helping out, that sort of works when everything is going well, when the weather is dry, when nothing is broken, where everything just goes according to plan. But as soon as something happens, like what if one of these guys here gets sick? All of a sudden that puts pressure on everyone else. Or if they just don't turn up which is often the case. As we've just seen, the massive staff turn-over rates, you can see that people are leaving all the time within the dairy industry. When someone leaves and you've got this staffing level, it puts pressure on everyone else. Everyone else is already working hard. They are already doing 11 hours a day, and if someone leaves all of a sudden that just puts a heck of a lot more pressure on them.  

Richard Kyte, "A Different Approach To Staffing In The Dairy Industry"

So, I want to talk to you about this report.  Richard Kyte, he was a sharemilker in Southland and now works for the Dairy NZ and he's also a consultant. He wrote this report called, ”A Different Approach to Staffing in the Dairy Industry.” His introduction says, "I believe that the New Zealand dairy industry is being compromised by understaffing on farms especially larger units of 600 cows or more. This has become a significantly greater problem in the last ten years and specifically on the South Island with larger farms." 

He goes on to say, "As the dairy industry grows, to maintain this growth it must attract and retain people within the industry. To do this, the dairy industry must compete with other industries". 

And that's what I was saying last week, dairy is competing with other industries. He goes on and he references Rupert Tipples from Lincoln University and Rupert says that 64% of dairy staff work 50 hours plus.  That's compared to 17% of the general population who work 50 hours plus.  

Richard also talks about Peter Sheehan who is a gen Y specialist. You should Google him. He's got some videos out there. He basically made the comment, "If the dairy industry thought 12 days on, two days off was a good roster it needed to get real. As five days on, two days off was the benchmark." He went on to say, “He's extremely surprised that dairy workers even accepted this.”  Richard goes on to say. “If five days on and two days off is the benchmark then 40 to 45 hour week is also a benchmark the industry should look for.". This comment is interesting. "The drive to reduce hours to date has been mainly from professionals looking in at the industry not from farmers themselves." Ain't that the truth!  

Richard added staff which cost $50,000, but increased turnover by $91,000. $41,000 more profit

So, the gist of what Richard was saying was that he went on and he decided he's going to spend an extra $50,000 dollars. When he was sharemilking on a 600 cow farm, he added an extra labor unit which cost him $50,000 dollars.  As a result of that, he had more time to manage his pasture, so he used the pasture plus system. He had less culls, less lame cows, less mastitis, and as a result of that he brought in an extra $91,000 dollars in extra income and savings. So $95,000 minus $50,000 equals $41,000. So he's still ahead by $41,000 which is about a 80% return. So he spent 50 grand to make an extra 41 grand profit. He spent more money to make more money. 

This is the whole thing, I think the level of staffing we've currently got is a false economy.  I think people think that four staff working on a 750 cow farm is the standard, it’s the benchmark.  But I think that you are losing money in all other aspects of your dairy industry. 

So, the interesting thing about Richard's farm is that he has a staff turn-over rate of two and a half years. So that means that his staff stays with him on average two and a half years and they move on basically because they want to progress in the industry, not because they want to leave dairying.  

So next time I am going to talk about how I would run a 750 cow farm and how I propose to pay for it.

Why Only A Small Number Of People Will Consider Working On A Dairy Farm

There are 60 new dairy conversions going into Canterbury this year. In This video I discuss how this equates to an extra 250 dairy staff been required, and why most "townies" won't even consider a job on a dairy farm.

I'm surprised by the extra staff required, but the numbers seem to be logical.

Please comment if you feel I have got something wrong.

You Tube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaSu1NRWwQU

Transcription

60 new dairy conversions in Canterbury for 2013 season

Hey, well I want to talk about dairy farm employment issues. So staffing, of all the issues that the dairy industry face, finding people to milk the cows is the biggest issue. So I was talking to a cow shed manufacturer. He said there's 60 dairy conversions going into Canterbury this year; and those are new dairy conversions. 

60 conversions x 750 cows (cant avg) = 45,000 extra cows into Canterbury 2013

Now the average herd size in Canterbury is 750 cows, so 60 times 750 equals 45,000 extra cows coming into Canterbury this year alone. That's not including Southland or the rest of the South Island; 45, 000 new cows into Canterbury. 

1 employee : 180 Cows. 45,000 cows / 180 = 250 new dairy jobs required

Now, there’s a rule of thumb, that you need around 180 cows to one labour unit. So 45,000 divided by 180 equals 250 new jobs. So that's actually really good news. We hear a lot about job closures and job losses, but the dairy industry has been charging away for a good part of a decade. Adding a heck of a lot of new jobs to the economy every year.

Where are these extra employees going to come from?

The problem is where are all the people to come from to milk these extra cows? Now traditionally for the last ten years at least, dairy farmers have been employing Filipinos and Brazilians and other international employees to fill the gap.

I was talking to a guy and I said to him - or he said to me, why can't the dairy industry attract all these people from town? And I said because of working condition. Its the hours of work. And people who have read my blog will know what I think about that . And he said, "I don't" -- he didn't except that anyway. He said, "No, no there's are plenty people who will go and work those different hours." And he mentioned people who joined the army and go on fishing trawlers and all sorts of things. So I had a little think about things and I have came up with a theory.

So if we draw a standard old bell curve, I would say that the people who fit into there, these are your 40 hour a week people. That's a majority of the population. A big chunk of people fit in there. People who go to work on a dairy farm are smaller, with much less of a number of people. And I am going to call it 60 plus hours. 

How many "townies" would apply for a "town" Job, if the hours were 4am to 5pm, 9 days on 3 days off?

Now, I'll tell you why I think that. I, as I said before I employ people myself and I run an ad in the paper that says " Customer Service Rep Monday to Friday, 9 AM til 5 PM," and we get heaps of response. And I can be quite picky of who we employ.

But if I put an ad in the paper and said "Customer Service Rep required, 4 AM to 5 PM, 9 days on, 3 days off," they wouldn't even bother applying. Its just totally unacceptable to them, they just couldn't even imagine starting at four in the morning, working all the way to five o'clock in the afternoon and doing that for nine days in a row, then give you three days off.

Its just not - they're not even going to considered it. So these are the people here who wouldn't even consider that. 

Now the number of people who will consider that are much less, a much lower number of people I'd say, about half the of number of people would consider that. 

No surprise, Dairy Farmers struggle to attract and retain staff

And it's absolutely no surprise to me at all that dairy farmer's cant find staff because there's better options. They can go building and start at seven in the morning or eight in the morning.

Dairy industry must provide 40-45 hour weeks

So I believe if the diary industry want to get serious about actually solving their staffing issues, I think they need to move the conditions over to the centre here. So the dairy farm staff need to start working 40-45 hour weeks, and regular weekends off, not just rostered days off. 

In the next video I'm gonna talk about what it would look like for a dairy farmer to transition their staff from sort of the 60 plus hours per week over to the 40 plus and what its gonna cost them. 

And I guarantee you right now, if the dairy industry could do that the majority of the staffing issues will just go away. ...

Are Dairy Farm Workers Well Paid?

I often hear dairy farmers say "farm workers work hard, but they are paid well too"

Well are they?

I thought I would look at three scenarios and compare them to a few jobs in town. 

They are:

Entry level dairy farm worker 

18 years old
1 years dairy experience
No tertiary qualifications 
Is likely to break things/crash things/stuff things and generally do stupid things at any time with no reasonable explanation.

Herd manager/experienced dairy farm worker

25 years old
3-4 years dairy experience
No tertiary qualifications
Good understanding of pasture management
Competent operating all farm machinery
Can run farm unsupervised for a week if given good instructions

Farm Manager

25 Years old+
Competent at all aspects of running a dairy farm
Can manage staff
Can plan all aspects of farm management such as wintering, mating etc
Capable of financial budgeting

The three aspects of a dairy job that are important are, the total wage, the hours worked and the value of the accommodation provided.

Accommodation

Housing is provided on a dairy job, simply because most farms are a long way from towns or villages where rental houses may be present.

What constitutes accommodation varies wildly from, a one bedroom prefab placed in the middle of the tanker track. To a typical New Zealand style 3 bedroom home.

Laing Homes have been selling a lot of these 3 bedroom houses as farm worker accommodation.

They are 84 square metres which is small by NZ standards for a 3 bedroom house, but they are ok. They are warm and keep the rain out.

They cost about $120,000 installed. Which includes everything such as services, drive way & council documentation.

I'll assume one of these houses is used for our calculations.

So what is this accommodation worth?

Whats the rental of a three bedroom house 30 minutes drive from the closest town worth?

We could say that it costs the farm owner $120,000 to build, interest at 7% equals $8,400/year.

Or we could assume the farm owner is like a land lord and should get a return for the investment.

A 10% yield from a total investment of $120,000 equals $12,000/year.

I'll take a figure halfway between the two and say that the 3 bedroom home is worth $10,200/year or $196/week.

If we look at townships surrounding Christchurch the rental rates for a similar home would be about $300/week. Which is in post earthquake conditions where rental properties are in hot demand.

The Total Wage

I'll assume the following yearly salaries. I think they are about right. Please leave a comment if you think they are wrong.

Entry level dairy farm worker
$35,000/year

Herd manager/experienced farm worker
$45,000/year

Farm Manager
$80,000/year

Total Hours Worked

I visited a friend from my university days over the Christmas holidays. He is a farm worker on a 800 cow dairy farm near Oamaru.

He arrives at the cowshed at 3:30 am. One worker get the cows in and the other washes the vat and gets the shed ready for milking. He has 1 hour for breakfast and 1 hour for lunch and finishes at 5:30 most days.

Thats a 12 hour day when you take off 1 hour for breakfast and 1 hour lunch.

While these hours are not uncommon, I'll assume that a 12 hour day is the top end of the hours worked range.

At the mid point of the range I'll work on a 5:00 am start and a finish time of 5:00 pm, with 1 hour for breakfast and 1 hour for lunch.

Thats a 10 hour day

The bottom of the range I'll work on a 5:00 am start and a 5:00 pm finish but assume a 2 hour lunch.

Which is a 9 hour day.


I'll assume a roster of 11 days on and 3 days off.

I'll compare the farm workers wages to those of the building industry. This is because they are both outdoor practical type jobs and people could slot into either industry quite easily.

I would love to compare other sectors but I'm short on time.  

The building wages have been sourced from the Hayes 2012 Salary Guide.

Wage Comparison- Entry Level Dairy Farm Worker

At 55 hours per week the dairy worker is $0.50 cents above the minimum wage, which I would classify as a low paid job.

If this person is working a 66 hour week the hourly rate is $11.68. If they work a 60 hour week then the hourly rate is $12.85. Both rates are below the minimum wage. Which is illegal. 

At 50 hours per week this person would be earning $15.42/hour which I would classify as an ok pay rate for the skill level.

I am yet to find a dairy farm worker working less than a 50 hour week, if they exist then let me know. I won't be holding my breath though.

I have included a hourly rate before and after rent costs as this allows us to compare with a dairy worker more accurately.

I have assumed that the building cadet and the McDonalds staff are renting a three bedroom house and split the rent with 3 flatmates.

The McDonalds wages are based on a standard crew members rate, which is achieved after about 6 months of service.

Clearly McDonalds is a low paid job!

The building cadet and farm workers total package after rent is very similar with the farm worker receiving $63/week more than the building cadet. But the farm worker is working 10 hours per week more than the builder.

So on an hourly comparison the builder is paid $1.71/hour more than the farm worker.

Wage Comparison-Herd Manager

I have assumed that the builder and the herd manager have a house to themselves. This means the builder has to pay full market rental of $300/week.

Here we see that the herd manager is earning about $200 more per week than the builder of a similar experience. 

When we look at it from a hourly basis, we see that a herd manager working a 55 hour week is doing much better than the builder who works a 45 hour week. 

But if they worked 66 & 60 hours/week, then I'd call that average pay. At 50 & 55 hours/week, I'd consider that to be well paid in my books.

If you were my friend in Oamaru working an average 66 hour week then he would be better off as a builder, because he could earn the same money, but work a whopping 21 hours less.

Of course we haven't included the option of the builder working a 55 hour week. Which would increase his pay.

Wage Comparison- Farm manager

Its quite possible the managers house is likely to be the old farm owners house and would be a much better house than the Laing home used above. So the house value may be more than I have used.

Anybody managing a 800 + cow herd will not be working less than 60 hours per week and depending on staff numbers and the ability of the employees, it is quite possible that they regularly work 70 hours or more a week. (I know because I have done it!)

So, is $28.91/hour based on a 60 hour week, considered well paid?

This manager will be running a business with an asset value of over $10 million dollars and will be responsible for managing farm working expenses of over $1.5 million dollars and they will be managing a team of 4-5 staff.

Compared to the building foreman, the managers package looks more attractive, but again it depends on the hours worked. Even at a work week of 65 hours the farm manager is doing better on an hourly rate than the builder.

But I wonder if a farm manager of 800+ cows is better to be compared to a site manager as opposed to a foreman.

Conclusion 

To clarify, I'm talking about wage & salary employees. Not contract milkers or share milkers. Share farmers are self employed and can work what ever hours they like. An employee only has their wages to show for their time They don't benefit from capital gain of stock or a rise in the milk price. For this reason I think the hours worked is important.

Another point is, there are many varied employment conditions on farms and building sites. I think the examples above represent typical conditions. 

So, are dairy farm employees well paid?

I would say that based on a normal work week of 50 hours they would be well paid, but unfortunately a 50 hour week in the dairy industry is as rear as hens teeth.

At the entry level I would say farm staff are low paid and it is common place for these employees to be receiving less than the minimum wage. These are the positions that are being filled by imported staff such as the Filipino workers.

These workers would be better off working as a labourer in the building industry.

Herd managers are about even with a builder of a comparable experience.

Farm managers are about the same or slightly better off than their counterparts in the building industry.

I would disagree with the statement that "dairy farm workers work hard, but they are well paid". 

I think they work hard and get average pay.

But as you can see its not that hard to get the wages into the well paid zone. If farmers could knock 2 hours off each work day, then their employees would be in the well paid zone.


Almost all other professions have some sort of hourly rate and hours worked are monitored. The dairy industry is based on working until the job is done. The result is a culture of excessive hours.

A few final points

Just a quick note, I had a bbq last night and there was a guy who was a private in the army. He left the army a year ago and got a job in forestry. He is paid $22/hour up to 55 hours, everything over 55 hours is paid at an overtime rate. 

Another friend is a labourer for a construction company in Christchurch. They are looking for more labourers who will be starting on $20/hour.

I was also talking to a friend who has an agricultural contracting background. He said junior staff will start on $18/hour and the operators of the bigger equipment will be earning $30/hour.

It's clear to me that dairy farm staff have options, often paying better than the dairy industry or providing better hours of work and sometimes both. 

Dairy farmers have to compete for good staff and the fact that the industry rely so heavily on international staff is an indication that their jobs are not as attractive as other jobs. 

As the Christchurch rebuild begins to take off, I can see an exodus of farming staff flocking to the city to take these unskilled positions. 

The Elephant In The Room

I do not like to talk about how people hated their time on a dairy farm. But after 15 years involved in the dairy industry I think I have a pretty good understanding about happens on many farms.

I represent the people who have been dairy farming and have left the industry, because that is what I did. I looked at my options and decided that there were better opportunities out there, than dairy farming.

I’ve seen and read a lot of stuff over the years on dairy staffing issues, most written by dairy farmers or those closely associated to the dairy industry. Much of it is not objective because of the simple fact that they are current dairy farmers. They are still dairy farmers because they obviously don’t have a problem with the way things are currently. Therefore most of the conclusions that are made are overly positive and miss the mark, in my opinion.

If you want to know why people leave the dairy industry, it makes sense to ask the people who have left.

For the last 10 years I have read reports about employment relations on dairy farms, I’ve heard experts at discussion groups and field days talk about the issue, I’ve read the dairy exporter for years and I’ve poured over the Dairy NZ web site. There is a lot being written and said about time management, communication skills, goal setting, HR compliance, performance management, how to communicate with your foreign employees etc  but in all this time I have only heard or read of three people who actually mention the great elephant in the room.

That’s the NUMBER OF HOURS WORKED.

The terms “work life balance” and “time off farm” get mentioned all the time in reports, articles and at field days. But no one actually gives it any real priority.

I thought I would outline all the dairy jobs I have had in the past and explain my experience so you can see where I am coming from.

My first real job that was not on my parent’s farm was when I was 17 years old in 1997. It was for a sharemilker who lived next door. During the summer, I would have to be on farm at 5:00am and I would get an hour for breakfast and an hour for lunch. If all went well I would be finished afternoon milking at 5:30. So that was a 10.5 hour day. I would get every 2^nd weekend off.

I worked for the same employer (who is a good bugger) in between university study and after uni for a number of years and the hours stayed much the same.

After university in 1999 I went to work on a dairy farm in Dunsandal where the hours were around the 60 hours per week.

In 2009 I took a manager’s position on an 800 cow dairy farm owned by a large corporate. I got 1 day off every week, but as manager you were still responsible for the farm on your day off. I ended up working 80 hours per week.

I relief milked on a property near Invercargill at Christmas 2008 on an 800 cow farm. The sharemilker employed two staff and was waiting for a Pilipino. The person who got the cows in was getting on farm at 3:00 am in order to have cups on at 4:30. They would finish milking and have 30 a minute breakfast and 30 min to an hour for lunch before heading out to get the cows in at 1:00pm. Milking finished at 6:00pm. This worked out to be a 13 hour day if they got an hour for breakfast and an hour for lunch (which they didn’t). The two staff would alternate getting the cows in so every day was not a 13 hour day. If you didn’t get the cows in you got an extra 1 ½ hours’ sleep and did an 11.5 hour day (Yeah). I later learned the sharemilkers wife left him and went back to Holland.

Gillian Searle did a study called “The reality of a career in the dairy industry” for her Kellogg Rural Leadership Course in 2002. She conducted a survey of dairy farm employees.

The survey found:

60% of respondents had been in their current position for less than 6 months.

45% of respondents received 2 days off a fortnight.

58% expected to work more than 60 hours per week in the spring.

63% expected to work more than 50 hours per week in the summer.

55% expected to work more than 50 hours per week in the autumn.

Over 90% of people said they enjoyed their job or nearly always enjoyed their job.

One of Gillian’s conclusions were:

The primary weakness of dairy farm jobs for employees under the age of thirty are the

long hours of work.

My old lecturer at Lincoln Rupert Tipples has done a lot of work in this area and has published quite a few papers. Here are a few excerpts:

Dairy farming is often seen by young people as hard, dirty work with long, unsociable hours. Wilson & Tipples found the dairy farmers/dairy farm worker population worked longer hours than the New Zealand working population; 40 percent of employees, 45 percent of employers and 49 percent of those self-employed without employees worked over 60 hours per week compared to 10 percent of the total New Zealand working population working more than 60 hours per week. (Wilson & Tipples, 2008). Certainly, long working hours are an issue.

In addition to the long working days, rosters are typically long. They are routinely 11 days on and 3 days off or 12 on and four off (Pangborn, 2010). These factors led a Caring Dairying project brief (2010) to suggest that many large dairy farms are not farming in a socially responsible way.

These two reports back up what my experience has been. That dairy farmer’s work long hours compared to the rest of the country.

I was staggered, but not really surprised to read the figure reported in Gillian’s report that 60% of staff had only been in their current job for less than 6 months! That shows a huge turnover rate of staff. I believe this figure because; again my experience has been the same.

After running my own business for 5 years I stepped back from the day to day running of the business and took a manager’s position on an 800 cow corporate dairy farm in 2009. I moved my family to this remote part of Canterbury and looked forward to experiencing and learning from a well-resourced and professional company.

When I got there in September, all but 1 of the original staff (who started in June) was still there. The manager had gone and a steady stream of farm hands had come and gone before I got there. On my first day at work, one worker announced after morning milking that was not coming back after breakfast. The farm was constantly under staffed, as soon as we recruited a new staff member another one left, leaving us under staffed, which again increased the hours worked for every one else.

I left after 3 months. It was no surprise to learn later that all the remaining staff had left by the end of the season.

The Dairy NZ “Go Dairy” website has a “day in the life of adairy farmer” page. The example day starts at 5:00am and finishes at 5:00pm, with an hour for breakfast and an hour for lunch.
Let’s assume we use an 11 days on 3 days off roster as mentioned above by Ruppert. So in the first 7 days of the roster they will work a 70 hour week (Mon-Sun@10hr/day) then the remaining week they will work 40 hours (Mon-Thur@10hr/day) before having three days off. So they work 110 hours before a break.

Even the web site designed to promote dairying (and you would think they would give a best case example) has a worker working a 10 hour day.

In 2004 I started my business in Invercargill and I employed a delivery driver. I would often get a call at about 4:30 in the afternoon from a customer wanting an item delivered. I would say to the driver “on your way home at 5:00, can you just do this delivery quickly?” After a few weeks our driver said to me “every time I do a delivery on my way home, I end up working an extra 30min that I don’t get paid for”. Now I was a bit taken back, on the farm I had always worked until the job was done. But I was concerned that the level of customer service would suffer if my driver was reluctant to do late deliveries. So I agreed that I would pay him for 40 hours per week and if he did any hours over that I would pay him time and half. A normal week for my employees is 8:00am to 5:00pm Mon-Fri with 30 min for lunch and morning and afternoon tea breaks. That works out to be 42.5 hour per week.

I let my staff manage their own workload, so as long as customer demand is being met promptly and they are achieving the various KPI’s that I measure. Then I don’t really care when they do it. When we are really busy in the winter months, I am always encouraging my team to conduct deliveries on Saturday mornings or do a few late nights if you need to in order to fit all the deliveries in. Sometimes they do.

The interesting point is over the last 8 years I have employed 5 or 6 delivery drivers and I can count on one hand the amount of times any one of them has worked more than a 47 hours in a single week. It’s not like they don’t have lots of work to do, because they do. They are free to work whatever hours they like as long as it is at least 42.5 hours per week. While not scientific, this example says to me that there is a point, where given a choice an employee will decide that the extra money is not worth the sacrifice of their free time.

The hours required by employers on New Zealand dairy farms is in my opinion the single biggest deterrent to attracting and retaining people in the industry. I believe until this issue is taken seriously by dairy farmers, they will continue to struggle to attract and retain good staff.


We need to be honest about these issues and talk about them. So feel free to let me know if you think I'm wrong? 

Attracting Young People into Agriculture

For the agricultural sector to be vibrant and healthy it needs to be able to attract the next generation of farmers. There are a few issues with attracting young people to farming in New Zealand, but they are different issues depending on the farming class.

As I mentioned in my last post, the average age of a sheep & beef farmer is 58 years of age, and I believe the main reason the next generation are not attracted to sheep & beef is the lack of profitability and cash flow, which in turn makes it difficult to progress into farm ownership.

The dairy sector has a slightly different problem.  I don’t believe the dairy industry has a problem of attracting people to take up self-employed roles, such as contract milking and share milking. There are more sharemilkers than there are sharemilking jobs at the moment.  The dairy industries progression path way has always allowed people to progress up the farming ladder.  While I do agree that sharemilking has its challenges and its future is by no means certain, the inability of dairy farmers to attract young people is not due to a lack of career pathways, like sheep and beef farming.

The main issue for dairy farmers is they can’t seem to attract and retain good quality employees. It’s important to distinguish the difference between a person working on a dairy farm as an employee and someone working as a self-employed dairy farmer. Dairy farmers are constantly struggling to find dairy employees. The gap has been partially filled by foreign workers from countries such as the Philippians and Brazil.

The question is why?

The sheep and beef farmers don’t have this problem, at least not to the same degree as dairy farming. Any farming position advertised that does not involve milking cows is swamped with applications. The positions I’m talking about are sheep and beef finishing positions, cropping, dairy grazing and general labouring positions on non-dairy farms.

My brother in law is a good example of what I mean. If you saw a picture of my brother in law, you would think he was straight out of a Speight’s advertisement. He’s got the RM Williams shirt, the moleskins, the boots, the belt buckle and most importantly a team of dogs! The interesting thing is he was brought up in town and he chose to go sheep & beef farming, that’s his passion.  His problem is every sheep and beef position that he applies for is swamped with applicants. This is for managerial roles as well as general farm hand positions. He has to compete with far more experienced applicants.

I got a txt yesterday to say he has reluctantly accepted a dairy job near Winton. He needs to pay the bills!

He is a good example of lots of people in the agricultural sector. They love farming but just not dairy farming. Working on a dairy farm tends to be a last resort.

Recently in a short space of time I have had three conversations that have really got me thinking. The first was my hair dresser, we got chatting and it came up that I was once a dairy farmer. She said “My partner worked on a dairy farm, just out of Oxford. He hated it and left after a few months”.

The second was a young couple we met one day. Over lunch I asked him what he did before his current job, driving a fork lift. He said he worked on a dairy farm for a year and then said “It was the worst thing we ever did”

The third was my doctor; he asked what I was going to do after I sold my business. I said I was going back into the dairy industry to which he replied “Isn’t that what you do when you can’t get any other job?”

There is definitely a big difference between a dairy farm position and a non-dairy position.

Over the next little while, I hope to delve into the reasons that I believe the dairy industry is not retaining good people. One of the main reasons I started Milking on the Moove is that I want to test, develop and promote farming practices that make dairy farming in New Zealand better. A dairy system that is attractive to employees will go a long way to making dairy farming better.