Hired labor plays a significant role on dairy farms, with more than 9,000 jobs provided by New York dairy farms in 2019. As farm size grows, hired employees provide a larger percentage of the labor required to operate 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 and change from 2011 to 2020”. Since then, hired labor costs have continued to increase. This paper presents updated trends, costs and changes over the last seven years through 2024.
From 2018 through 2024, 110 farms utilizing hired labor participated in the DFBS for all seven years. With this balanced data set, change can be looked at over this time frame. On these 110 farms, hired labor grew from 87.7 percent of all labor on the farm in 2018 to 89.3 percent in 2024.
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