Empowering Farm Owners to Create Employee Stake in Farm Business Success

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Commodities

Practices

• Farm Business Management: business planning, labor/employment
• Sustainable Communities: employment opportunities

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’ comprehensive guide meets this need by helping Southern farm employers address the legal and practical implications of structuring employee contracts to include (1) bonuses, (2) pay raises, and (3) health and retirement benefits. 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. A worksheet will accompany the 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 disicussions 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.

1. 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.
2. 3 producers in the Southern region assume leadership among peers on proactive prevention of employee turnover after participating in the Producer Experience Team process. 
3. 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.