Farm employee turnover: track tenure, not the yearly rate

A lender in Bowling Green asks how many hands you lost last year, and you answer three out of ten, a turnover rate of 30 percent. The rate is the share of your crew that left during the year. One Wisconsin dairy manager estimated that each departure costs at least $2,500 to $3,000. That is one manager’s estimate, not a measured average, but three departures at the low end come to $7,500 a year. Track tenure instead: the months each person who quit, missed work or got hurt had been with you. At year end, count how many had less than six months, and fix the hiring and the first month where that count is highest.

Why does last year’s turnover rate tell you so little?

Because one person moves it, and so does the way you count. On a crew of eight, one departure is a turnover of one in eight, or 12.5 percent. A farm of 80 hands that loses ten posts the same 12.5 percent, though the two cases have little in common.

The counting method moves the number as much as the crew does. Billikopf and González surveyed dairy workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley and got two averages from the same interviews. Counting each worker’s current job up to the interview day gave 6.6 years of tenure. Counting only jobs already finished, from hire to departure, gave 3.5 years. Each method answers a different question, so a rate from another farm may not be counted the way you count.

The rate still has one use, which is answering the question a lender asks. What one departure costs is its own article. Do not use the rate to compare your farm with another farm’s.

How soon after they start do people leave?

Probably soon, though no source consulted counts farm departures by length of service. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that 20.6 percent of U.S. wage and salary workers had a year or less with their current employer in January 2026, against a median of 4.1 years. On a crew of ten, that is about two hands in their first year at any time.

That is a share of the people on the job today, not of the people who leave. It does not prove that quits pile up among the newly hired, and your own sheet gives the count that settles it for your farm. What you can influence either way is the hiring and the first month, not the twelfth. What goes into that first month is the first-day list, the short set of things a new hand needs before the first shift.

Do the newest hands really get hurt more?

The evidence points that way. Breslin and Smith studied lost-time injury claims in Ontario, Canada. They found that workers in their first month on the job were over four times more likely to have a claim than workers with over a year in the job. Claim rates also fall as time on the job grows, at any age. Their data cover all industries, not farms, so read the figure as a direction and not as a number for your gate.

A small crew will not show this by itself. Tonozzi and Layne surveyed hired crop workers in the United States and measured 2.9 injuries per 100 full-time workers a year in 2008 to 2010, down from 4.3 in 1999 and 2002 to 2004. A full-time worker there is 50 weeks of farm work. On ten full-time hands, that is 0.3 to 0.4 injuries a year. A clean year proves little, and so does a single injury. What points to something is the tenure of the few you do record.

What do you ask about each person who leaves or misses work?

Ask the start date, the role, the months the person had been with you, who ended the job, and why. The why is the part the rate never gives you. Billikopf and González asked dairy workers the main reason for each job they had left. Pay and benefits were the main reason in 29 percent of the 222 jobs. The other 71 percent had other main reasons, among them the dairy’s economic trouble, family matters, schedule and time off, housing and transport, and relations with management. So “they left for money” explains fewer than a third of the departures.

Absences answer a different question. Billikopf and González note that the period before a worker leaves may bring more absences, but that is a possibility and not a warning light. León and Morales studied a call center in Peru with 255 employees. They found that absence without a certificate moved independently of the intention to quit. A call center is not a farm, so read this as a caution. Count absences to find where the schedule or the task wears people down, not to guess who is leaving. Whether a few long absences or many short ones should worry you is its own article.

What does the sheet look like after a year, and what do you do with it?

It has one line for each person who quit, missed more than a day, or got hurt. In the example, a Kentucky farm with ten hands wrote five lines in 2026. The numbers are invented for the example.

In the yearly rate you see 30 percent. In the sheet you see that two of the three quits and the only injury came in the first three months. That is where to look: who recruited them, what they were told on the first day, and who they worked beside. Look at the hiring before you look at any one person.

The sheet takes about an hour to start and needs no software.

• Start one sheet with a line for every person who quits, misses more than a day of work, or gets hurt
• For each line, write the date, the role, the start date, and the months of tenure
• Add who ended the job or what happened, and one thing you will change on the farm
• Pull each figure from a record the farm already keeps: the time sheet, the payroll, the foreman’s notebook
• Write the name of the person who fills in each line, not the word “someone”
• At the end of the year, count how many lines show less than six months of tenure
• Start where that count is highest, looking at the hiring and the first month before any one person
• Date the sheet, and leave room for the initials of whoever filled each line

What a departure costs, once you can see the pattern, is its own article. The sheet is one more part of managing the whole farm, alongside the other articles on managing people.