Helen Korzec

Time management is essential to productivity when running a business, especially a dairy farm. It can relieve the stress and organize your tasks into more manageable components, and also help reach long-term goals. Next time your to-do list feels overwhelming, try the time management matrix to help plan, prioritize and delegate tasks. Read more to find out what this tool is.

As a farm owner, it can be challenging to schedule formal sit-down trainings for your employees due to busy schedules and difficulty in finding speakers to come out to the farm. However, simple conversations in passing can be a powerful teaching tool for employees. These quick touch-ins and engagements with employees are known as “toolbox” talks, which are tips, rules and tricks of the trade that can be stored in your employees’ toolbox for their day-to-day work.

Often it is difficult to truly measure the return on investment of a herd monitoring system. Likely, everyone is aware of the savings on hormone injections and the ability to get cows pregnant quickly when they’re ready. These are just one cost benefit. In the last year I had a farm put in a herd monitoring system and noticed that once we started getting used to the system we had to seriously re-evaluate our labor force and day to day tasks.

Harvest season, a time where everyone is working long hours, fueled likely by Red Bull and determination. We are inundated with kernel processing, moisture, dry matter, packing, and the constant “do we have enough help” question. As we know with many jobs on the farm, it takes a quality team. It is easy to overlook safety of employees; yet harvest season can be the highest risk for injuries to employees. Here are a few “trigger” areas to look out for:

Several studies have shown that 20 percent of new employees quit within the first 90 days, putting more weight on a solid on-boarding process. When you are spending the time and money to bring in new employees, it is essential to retain them. A solid on-boarding process can help keep well trained and loyal employees on your dairy operation.

In 1907, Carnation milk coined the phrase “Milk from Contented Cows”. When the slogan was introduced it was supposed to show the consumer that the milk was coming from superior, well cared for cows, which were taken care of by caring farmers. Farmers today still search to create “the contented cow”, because just as they knew 115 years ago they know today that content cows make more milk. The massive difference between then and now, aside from all the advancements we have made in health, feed, and facilities, is labor.

What makes you hire someone to manage one of your dairies? What brings you to choose to foster growth and leadership within that person?” Lets re-frame the old thought of only a “workhorse”, or “he/she knows cows, “he/she works 14hr. days”. Our industry is shifting and as we grow and strive to be efficient and strategic, our answers should be changing to “what qualities do I want in a good manager?”

What is the best way to implement changes, gain compliance, and have a power team in our milking parlor? There are a few key factors to explore when you want to create a power team in your parlor:

Training is the key factor to gaining buy-in with the employees, yet we must continue to build a culture of being part of a greater team at the farm level and at the industry level, we can do this through networking. This will allow employees from farms to follow best in class management tactics from other farms and from industry. What do we mean by tie in? Tie-in means that we possess the scientific knowledge and we know the on farm protocols. Yet we must continue to grow the buy-in and there are a number of ways to foster growth and culture within our farms and industry.

Day to day tasks can get daunting, but whether you are a manager, herdsman or owner of a dairy, we know that the routines that take place on farms are essential to productivity and healthy animals. Being that routines are key, and as our industry shifts to highly efficient animals through the use of genetics, nutrition and technology, we are constantly tweaking these routines to achieve the maximum efficiency. But how do we make people effective and efficient?