Cow-calf producers needed to fill out study and participate in project on unpaid labour on ranches
Most cow-calf producers do not know how much unpaid labour they are performing on their farms.
A new survey and study headed by Kathy Larson will determine the number of hours producers spend working on their operations and how much that labour is worth.
“Time and time again, I’ve just found that for many producers, it’s a guesstimate. They don’t track their hours,” said Larson, one of the provincial contacts for the national cost of production network managed by Canfax.
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“Then on the flip side, when you ask them why they’re not doing certain practices, or what things are barriers, it’s always, ‘I don’t have enough time,’ ” she said.
Larson thought about creating a simple Excel or Google spreadsheet so producers could track their time if they wanted. But by doing a study, the industry will have some more accurate labour benchmarks, conducted over a production year and by category.
“I have another ulterior motive,” said Larson, a professional research associate at the University of Saskatchewan’s Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.
“I’ve had engineering ag tech researchers come to me in the past, and they’re developing ideas, and they want to know what the time savings might be like.”
The information can provide benchmarks to producers who may be tracking their time. They will be able to see how they compare in areas such as calving, producing feed and doing administrative and office work.
“I’ve had some producers say, ‘yeah, I really want to know my time because I do some custom feeding. I don’t feel that I’m appropriately building in my time to what I charge,’ ” said Larson.
People have ideas in their head about how much time they spend doing things, but recall bias tends to blur truth and reality.
“We tend to underestimate how much time something will take,” said Larson.
The data collected from this study will help producers identify where they are time-efficient and where they could improve.
Saskatchewan Agriculture is funding the project.
Producers who live in any part of Canada can take part in the survey at https://www.surveymonkey.ca/LabourStudy. Participation in the study is voluntary, and to be eligible, a cow-calf producer should have at least 50 cows.
Producers in Saskatchewan can participate in the time-sheet tracking. A question within the survey will lead them to that option.
Larson has already reached out to Saskatchewan producers who initially participated in the Saskatchewan cost-of-production network, and some of the producers are already filling out time sheets.
She is recruiting producers through publications and industry organizations. Saskatchewan producers who use the timesheet to track will receive some financial compensation.
There are two options for time tracking:
- Where producers track their time daily on a spread sheet.
- Where producers track their time one week a month for 12 months.
Larson said more people have signed up to track their time daily.
She is currently trying to recruit 35 cow-calf operations for timesheet tracking and has 17 ranches already involved. She’s hoping more than 400 producers across Canada will take the time to fill out the survey, which will take about 30 minutes.
Larson will accept more participants for the timesheet tracking until the end of April. The participants will then be tracking their time for 12 months.
“Obviously, there are some people who will end (timesheet tracking) a few weeks before the others, but with the online survey, I’ll expect responses until the end of June,” she said.
The results of the study should be available by the end of summer or early September.
“People are signing up because they want to, and some are real keeners and I can see they’re in there, multiple times a day, putting in hours,” she said.
Others have printed off the timesheets and are filling them in by hand.
The survey and study are both confidential. Larson has created a OneDrive link that is unique to each producer, so they can use their timesheets. She can also make a timesheet available on Google Spreadsheets.
For more information, email kathy.larson@usask.ca or call 306-966-4025.
Source: producer.com