04 July 2023

Becoming the 50-hour farmer – reducing workload on dairy farms

Dairy farmers are now placing greater emphasis on quality of life, time off and time with family away from the farm as critical measures of family farm business success, those attending today’s Moorepark Open Day heard.

While long working hours increase the risk of ill-health and injury in agriculture and the wider economy, it is also a deterrent to young people entering careers in dairy farming.

With this in mind, a recent large-scale study was conducted across 76 spring-calving Irish dairy herds from February 1^st to June 30^th 2019. The aim of this study was to examine workload, time-use and labour efficiency, and the effect of labour saving strategies on labour demand.

Below, Conor Hogan discusses research work carried out in Teagasc Moorepark which examined the labour efficiency and input on dairy farms:

The studied farmers worked on average 60 hours/week during the 150-day study period and 63.5 hours/week during February and March. Although the top and bottom 25% of studied farms had a similar herd size (112 cows), the more labour efficient group worked 51.2 hours/week compared with 70 hours/week for the least efficient 25%.

The working day had a similar start time (06:47 vs 07:00), but the more labour efficient group finished the working day earlier (18:25 vs. 19:58). Maintaining the 16:8 milking interval is a fundamental component of the shorter working day on efficient farms with no negative impact on milk production. Within this system, a 6pm finish time should be an achievable key performance indicator (KPI) on farms from February to June.

Table 1: Work organisation effectiveness indices for top 25% and bottom 25% of farms from 1^st February to 30^th June

Unsurprisingly, milking was identified as the most time-consuming task on dairy farms, accounting for 31% of time input. Five practices were identified to improve milking labour efficiency that should be relatively easy to implement on most dairy farms:

• One person milking during mid-lactation;
• The milker not leaving the pit to feed calves during milking;
• Using a quad/jeep to herd cows to and from milking;
• Being able to operate cow exit/entry gates from anywhere in milking pit;
• Automatic cluster removers.

Calf care accounted for 20% of time in the peak months of February and March. Contract rearing calves pre-weaning and selling male calves were two activities that can significantly reduce time input.

Contractors have more efficient equipment than farmers to complete tasks such as slurry and fertiliser spreading, and can reduce or replace the need for additional farm staff and farm machinery. Although there is an economic cost to the farmer for contract rearing, additional use of contractors and investments in calf rearing equipment, studies have indicated that these additional costs do not significantly reduce farm profitability.

As part of the study, farm profitability was assessed for those farmers that had data available (n=34). The top 25% of farms for work organisation effectiveness had greater profit (€/ha), which agrees with previous studies. The greater profitability achieved on the most labour efficient farms indicates that the extra workload on less efficient farms does not contribute to farm profitability.

More generally, improved labour efficiency can also enhance many other key aspects of dairy farming, including improved health and safety for farm operators and creating more attractive workplaces. In many cases, the work practices required may not need large investments on-farm and should be relatively easy to implement. For others, larger financial investments may be required (e.g. automatic cluster removers and automatic calf feeders); grant funding is currently available under DAFM schemes and should be investigated on a farm by farm basis in terms of cost/benefit.

This article was adapted from ‘Dairy systems – farming today with tomorrow in mind’ paper by Grainne Hurley, Conor Hogan, Padraig French and Brendan from the Teagasc Moorepark Open Day book. To access this book and for more information from the Moorepark Open Day, click here.