Progress report for EDS24-065
Project Information
Employee turnover is a serious problem for farm businesses as operators encounter challenges with recruiting and maintaining trained workers. Turnover isn’t just a quality-of-life problem, it’s also a financial problem hurting the overall profitability of farm businesses. It’s significant enough to hinder the growth and stability of sustainable agriculture. In 2022, 350 farm jobs in North Carolina were filled by U.S. workers, but reports show that virtually all of them quit before their contract expired. Why? Workers say the top reason they leave positions on farms is the lack of compensation and benefits for the work performed. Without these incentives, farm employers are vulnerable to labor loss which translates to lost time, money, and resources, risking the viability of the farm business.
Farm employers need forward-thinking compensation and benefits aimed at keeping their employees. Incentives of bonus pay, raises, and health and retirement benefits incentivize longevity in a career on the farm through more control over one’s economic future and a greater return on their hard work. Farm employers are vulnerable to turnover if they don’t have a plan for advancing employee compensation alongside profitability. For employers wanting to create a forward thinking compensation plan, many don’t know how to do so in alignment with the law.
Farm Commons’ series of four comprehensive guides on employee benefits meets this need by helping Southern farm employers address the legal and practical implications of structuring employee contracts to include bonuses & pay raises, health benefits, and retirement benefits. First, A Basic Roadmap to Farm Employee Benefits is an overview guide that highlights why employee benefits matter, outlines common benefit options, and provides an at-a-glance comparison chart to help employers determine which option(s) would be the best fit for their operation. Second, Offering Bonuses and Pay Raises to Farm Employees describes the best practices and legal considerations of bonuses and pay raises. Third, Offering Health Benefits to Farm Employees describes important legal responsibilities of common health benefit options, including group health insurance, QSEHRA, and health stipends. Fourth, Offering Retirement Benefits to Farm Employees describes important legal responsibilities of common retirement benefit options, including SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, 401(k), payroll deduction IRA.
Our guides aren’t just pages of text about the law, athough we provide detailed knowlege. They are plain-language and interactive with reflection exercises and activity prompts incorporated into the text, empowering readers to understand and identify what they need to do to develop creative compensation packages that mitigate the risk of employee turnover according to their goals, budget, and scale. Reflection questions are included in each written guide to help producers identify which options they want to pursue.
We don’t stop there, recognizing that opportunities to discuss these options with peers is key to developing new practices and behaviors. We will convene a group of producers in the Southern region who want to develop employee stake in their business to review and discuss their lived experience in relation to the guide, in what we call the Producer Experience Team (PET). We will collect their feedback to incorporate into the final guide. After publication, we will host a webinar promoting the guide where attendees will learn about employee-stake building through bonuses and benefits with PET members sharing their experiences pursuing these options. Webinar attendees will also have the option to engage in small group discussions to share their ideas and questions with peers to help build their confidence in ideas for moving forward in a supportive, peer-based environment.
This multi-modal approach to education empowers farm employers with options for beginning the process of creating employee stake in the business, creating a cohesive plan for how they want to move forward with opportunities for peer support along the way.
- 300 producers improve their knowledge of the 3 options for developing employee stake in farm business success. This is 48% of the 625 producers this project will reach.
- 3 producers in the Southern region assume leadership among peers on proactive prevention of employee turnover after participating in the Producer Experience Team process.
- 65 producers feel empowered to implement one of the 3 options for employee stake building in their farm business. This is 10% of farmers reached through the project as a whole, consistent with past experience.
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation Summary:
As an education project, the project succeeds in acheiving it’s objectives to increase knowledge and empowerment when producers access the guide, attend the webinar, and use the interactive opportunities to formulate their own plan. The project succeeeds in it’s objective to increase leadership when farmers participate in the Producer Experience Team (PET), and go on to tell their stories in the webinar. Both the guide and webinar empower folks to deploy 3 options for developing employee stake in farm business success in the Southern region. The guide provides indepth information while the webinar provides key insights that are reinforced by the guide. Both have interactive elements that lead learners to apply the information to their own situation.
This content is highly applicable to every Southern farm with employees or with plans to hire, and it is presented in a way that can be immediately implemented. The PET drives outreach on the ground, where we recruit and develop knowledgeable stakeholders whose experiences become compelling stories to promote the guide to their individual community networks. We will also highlight their stories in the interactive webinar where the PET members will facilitate small group discussions with their peers. We will promote this through social media features, on our website, and in email newsletter campaigns, utilizing multimedia storytelling.
Overall, the target market is Southern farm operators with the capacity to implement employee stake building options in their labor programs. At the same time, this project does have a smaller core market. Farm employees have the most to gain from this programming, but indirectly. They have much less power over their employment circumstances than their employers, however becoming aware of these options can increase their confidence to discuss employee stake building options in their place of employment. Directly, farm employers have much to gain by implementing legal options for developing employee stake in farm business success as it directly correlates to reduced risk of voluntary turnover (employees choosing to leave). We want to attract an audience that is a mix of both farm employers and farm employees. Many farm employers in our audience are justice minded and want to increase workplace equality, and this vetted audience has expressed demand for this curriculum giving us a strong outreach base to begin with.
In our outreach we will target producers who grow using organic methods and/or sell directly to consumers because they have the most to gain from participation in this program. This is because farm employment law is more problematic for direct to consumer and organic producers as they utilize more labor in producing and marketing their crops. In addition, farm law as a whole has been written and designed with the larger-scale commodity-style farm operation in mind. As such, when farm law is applied to smaller, organic, and direct to consumers, many issues result. Some laws do not address application to alternative farms, leaving the farm operator guessing. Some laws fit the alternative operation quite awkwardly, forcing some difficult compromises. In other cases, alternative farms are ignored altogether, leaving farm owners uncertain of their obligations.Our guide and webinar resolve these issues.
Given that our core audience is about 65% female, many female farm operators will directly receive this guide through our email distribution. They will also be in the recruitment pool for participation in the Producer Experience Team and webinars. Farm law trainings appear especially attractive to women for a number of reasons. Many women fill the role of risk manager on the farm, and they lead responsibility for risk mitigation. Many women find our programming to be a much more approachable way to learn, as compared to seeking the advice of an attorney. Women also tend to engage more fully with the peer-based components of our programming, giving them added success in the program.
The focused, results-oriented nature of the program drives guide and webinar outreach. Farmers clearly know what to expect with “3 options to develop employee stake in farm business success” and they rightly presume they’ll be given the keys to implement those steps. With clear deliverables and subject matter promoted widely through social media and email newsletter campaigns that our agricultural organization affiliates readily promote, we usually have no trouble filling at least 35 spots in the webinar and reaching at least 300 views of our guides.
Our network includes producers and sustainable agriculture organizations nationwide, including strong representation in the Southern region. We will recruit participants for the Producer Experience Team through our network relationships, and we are confident we will be able to draw on this same network for promoting the guide and associated webinars.
Our outreach plan for the guide and webinar is as follows:
The guide will be published during a “Farm Employment Law Week” virtual celebration in Winter 2025. During this celebration we will officially publish the guide and will host the webinar to promote the guide. The webinar will be hosted after the publication date and will present a portion of content from the guide as a means to promote the guide.
We will create a marketing package that includes descriptive text about the guide and webinar both in a long format for us in emails and blog posts, and in a short format for social media blurbs, accompanied by visuals depicting employment on the farm. We will promote this content on our website page banners and blog, sponsored social media posts on Facebook (2,000+ followers) and Instagram (1,000+ followers), and at least twice in our monthly The Sprout newsletter (5500+ subscribers) in the 8-weeks leading up to guide publication. We will also promote the guide and webinar on the Farm Commons Podcast, in 2 special episodes leading up to Farm Employment Law Week where we describe the value of the new guide and explain why farm employers will want to attend the interactive webinar. We will also work with the Producer Experience Team and sustainable agriculture organization partners to do outreach to their audiences using our marketing package to promote during this same time period.
Finally, the webinar presentation will be delivered in-person as interactive workshop session at Carolina Farm Stewardship Association’s Sustainable Agriculture Conference where we will distribute hard copies of the guide to attendees. Farm Commons has presented at the CFSA Sustainable Agriculture Conference several times in the past, and each time we have achieved at least 20 attendees.
In 2024, we drafted and finalized four resources: First, Basic Roadmap to Farm Employee Benefits is an overview guide that highlights why employee benefits matter, outlines common options, and provides an at-a-glance comparison chart to help employers determine which option(s) would be the best fit for their operation. Second, Offering Bonuses and Payraises to Farm Employees describes the best practices and legal considerations of bonuses and pay raises. Third, Offering Health Benefits to Farm Employees describes important legal responsibilities of common health benefit options, including group health insurance, QSEHRA, and health stipends. Finally, Offering Retirement Benefits to Farm Employees describes important legal responsibilities of common retirement benefit options, including SEP IRA, SIMPLE IRA, 401(k), payroll deduction IRA.
Beginning in 2025, we have already begun outreach to circulate these guides, offered an Experienced Team cohort for feedback, and are organizing webinars.