This fact sheet authored by PRO-DAIRY business management specialist Jason Karszes was shared in the January 2024 PRO-DAIRY e-Leader newsletter, distributed to an email list of nearly 7,000 dairy producers, agriservice, and legislators.
Hired labor plays a significant role on dairy farms, with more than nine thousand jobs provided by New York dairy farms in 2019. As farm size grows, hired employees provide a larger percentage of the labor needed to work the farm. In 2021, authors J. Karszes and C. Wolf presented an in-depth look at hired labor on larger dairy farms over a 10-year period in E.B. 2021-05 “Hired Labor on New York State Dairy Farms: Costs, Efficiency & Change from 2011-2020”. Since then, hired labor has continued to increase in cost. This paper presents updated trends, costs, and changes over the last seven years through 2022.
The Dairy Farm Business Summary & Analysis Project (DFBS) is one of the longest applied research efforts within the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University that interacts directly with rural stakeholders of the land grant mission. The DFBS started as a project in 1956 and works with dairy farm families to analyze financial and business performance over time, with the objective to improve business and financial management within the dairy industry using modern analysis techniques and historical farm data.
PRO-DAIRY is a nationally recognized extension and applied research leader serving dairy farms for more than 30 years.
