You are already paying for those hours. The decision was made the first time somebody walked off in the middle of the afternoon and nobody wrote it down, and it will be made again next week by whoever happens to be standing there when the request comes. What the release costs the farm is not the wage of the hour. It is that nobody can say in advance which people on the place can be called away without notice, and that two people asking the same thing get two different answers from two different mouths.
The radio goes off and the tractor operator leaves the field, because pasture is burning on the other side of the road. Nobody asks whether that counts as working time, because nobody asks that during a fire, and nobody asks afterward either, because it is over.
The following week another employee asks for a morning off for a volunteer workday at the school, gets a different answer from a different person, and the first one finds out from the second. Neither conversation left a mark anywhere, so the third request will be improvised too, and the day it lands on the morning the farm cannot lose, the person deciding will be discovering the problem and solving it at the same time.
Is a released hour a cost the farm carries or a favor it grants?
A cost, and the FAO counts a released hour among the resources a farm spends. The SAFA Guidelines, the framework the FAO published for assessing sustainability in food and agriculture systems, define what investing in a community draws on, and name the three resources plainly: “time, human resources, funds”. Employee hours sit in the same list as money, under the same heading. A farm that lets a tractor operator go for four hours has spent something it owns, exactly as it does when it lends out a trailer.
The trailer goes on the community support record, which counts the goods and the machinery that leave the gate. Hours of a person get a page of their own, on purpose, because a trailer needs a date it comes back and a person needs a rule saying who may say yes. The difference in practice is that the trailer is missed at four o’clock and the hours are never counted at all.
Who gets called out on the other side of your road?
Somebody who is not being paid for it, and the further out the road, the more certain that is. Zhang, Murray, Funk and Marter assembled a statewide picture of rural fire capacity in California and open with the reason the question matters: “Rural fire response in the USA continues to depend heavily on volunteer personnel”, whose numbers have been falling for decades. Of the 851 departments the state registry lists, “approximately 54.6% are classified as volunteer or mostly volunteer”.
In the twenty-one counties those authors class as rural the figure climbs: volunteers are on average 67.5% of the fire response personnel there, against 18.8% in the urban counties. Those are California figures under United States registry rules, and they are not your county. What a reader anywhere else can do is the cheap version of the same count: ask the nearest brigade, station or rescue group how many of the people who turn out are unpaid, and how many of those hold a job during the day.
The answer decides who is standing in front of you when the request arrives. With two employees, one of them on a volunteer roster is half the labor that can disappear without notice, and that is a harder thing to plan around than the same situation on a place with twenty. Small margin makes the written rule more necessary, not less.
Does the outside commitment stay the size it was when the person joined?
It does not, and it grows from the volunteer’s side rather than from the farm’s. Kirstie McAllum spent time with ambulance crews at nine stations in Aotearoa New Zealand, interviewing volunteers and paid staff, and found volunteers chasing qualifications and calls until they “increase their on-road time far beyond the mandated minimum of one shift per fortnight”. The same paper records the other half of the arrangement, which is that volunteers sign on for that minimum and “they may pull back or drop out anytime”. These are conversations at nine stations of one organization in one country, so what carries across is the direction of the drift, not a figure to plug in anywhere.
Pressure comes from the other side too. The National Volunteer Fire Council, the association that speaks for volunteer fire and rescue services in the United States, lists among the reasons departments struggle to recruit “increased time demands, more rigorous training requirements, and the proliferation of two-income families whose members do not have time to volunteer”. That is a sector association describing its own field, and it is worth reading as exactly that.
Read the third item again, because it is the one standing in your yard: the association’s own account of who is running short is an account of people who hold jobs. Both readings point the same way for whoever runs the roster: the answer somebody gave you two years ago about how often they get called is out of date, and asking again costs ten minutes. Those answers go on one list, kept wherever the roster is kept, because a commitment nobody wrote down cannot be planned around.
What do the rules that already exist put in writing?
Three jurisdictions have written down some part of this, and none of them wrote down the same part. The instruments are of different kinds, one a recognition program, one a statute aimed at the employer, one a statute aimed at the receiving organization, and the shape underneath them is the same: somebody names what is being released, on what terms, and how the release is evidenced.
| Where | The instrument | Who it binds | What it puts in writing |
|---|---|---|---|
| New South Wales, Australia | NSW Rural Fire Service Supportive Employers Program | The employer, voluntarily | That leave is granted to attend emergencies during work hours, and that the volunteer is not left worse off financially |
| Argentina | Ley 25.054, article 17, as rewritten in 2014 | The employer, public or private | That the activity is a public duty and the volunteer loses nothing by being absent or late because of the service; and that absences for training are capped at ten days a calendar year and have to be justified in writing |
| Brazil | Lei 9.608, article 2 | The receiving organization and the volunteer | That the arrangement runs under a signed instrument naming its object and its conditions |
The Australian program, run by the state fire service, recognizes businesses that grant volunteers “leave to attend emergency incidents during work hours without financial disadvantage”, and 248 businesses had received a certificate and 72 an award in the five years after it started in March 2013.
The Argentine statute, in article 17 as it was rewritten in 2014, obliges the employer, public or private, to treat the volunteer firefighter’s activity as a public duty and to leave the person free of economic, employment or standing harm arising from absences or late arrivals caused by performing the service. It then does the one thing the other two never do, which is write a number: absences for a training convocation may not exceed ten days in a calendar year and have to be formally justified. The Brazilian statute, in article 2, requires that voluntary service be carried out under a signed instrument that states its object and the conditions under which it is performed.
What none of the three settles is your number, and none of them settles your calendar. The Argentine ceiling counts training days in Argentina and nothing else. How many working hours a year this farm will release before the hours turn into a deduction appears in no statute and no program. Neither does the list of days on which this farm will ask a person to stay, which is the fourth decision and the one that has to exist before the morning it applies to. Both are the employer’s lines to draw, both are blank on almost every farm, and that is why the same request gets a fresh answer every time it is made.
Who signs the release, and who signs it when that person is off the place?
Someone named on the drawing, and a named substitute, because the shortage is not being solved from the other direction. The same California study compiled the responses that turn up in the public record, and at agency level they are “greater public outreach and recruitment visibility, partnerships with educational institutions, broader support for training costs, and leadership or management practices intended to improve retention”, while at wider scales they are “grant seeking, regionalization or consolidation, tax incentives, or related legislative benefits”.
The authors are careful about what that list is: “These strategies are synthesized here as reported policy and management responses rather than formally evaluated interventions”. Read the list for who is in it. Every item belongs to a fire agency, a school or a legislature. Not one belongs to the employer, and the employer is where the hour physically comes from.
Naming the signer is half the job and applying the same answer twice is the other half. Cornell Agricultural Workforce Development puts the second half plainly, telling farms that commit to a written handbook to “follow through and implement policies consistently”, and to plan on updating those written policies “on a regular basis, at least annually”.
A rule that two people apply differently is two rules, and the team will find the seam faster than management does. Write the position rather than the person, the way it already appears on the farm org chart, then write the second position that answers when the first one is away, because the request that arrives at two in the afternoon does not wait for anybody to get back from town.
What has to be on the line in the notebook?
Four things, and it fits on one line: name, date, how many hours, and who authorized it. The record is not bookkeeping for its own sake. In Argentina the law protects the emergency absence outright and then attaches paper to the other kind, requiring that an absence for training be formally justified and capping it at ten days a calendar year. A ceiling only exists where somebody is counting, and a formal justification is a document somebody has to produce, on both sides. The farm that never wrote a line has nothing to hand over on the day it is asked for, and nothing to look at when it wants to know how the year actually went.
Once the lines exist they answer the question the farm started with. Count the hours already released this year and you know whether the number you wrote in the rule is generous, mean or simply invented. Count them by person and you know who to ask before you build the roster for the week when nothing can slip. The rule and the list also belong in the stack handed to whoever arrives next, alongside the first-day list, because a rule that lives in one person’s head produces the improvised answer again the first time that person is not there.
The number is written before the request arrives, the line is written after each release, and at the close of the cycle the two get read against each other. Control, in the language of the four functions of management, is that sequence and nothing else. Running it on what this farm owes the people outside the gate, on paper somebody else can check, is what the sustainability axis is for.
Where to start
Half an hour for the rule, ten minutes per person for the question and five more to read the page back to them, one minute per release from then on. Paper is enough. The last item on the list runs on somebody else’s clock, not the farm’s.
Four decisions go on that page, and the last one is where most farms stall. Writing the list of closed days means saying out loud that there are mornings when this place will ask a person to stay, and the person who reads that list is the same one who will hear the radio go off. Deciding it in advance is what lets the answer come fast and come out the same way twice. Deciding it at the gate is how one person ends up hearing no on Tuesday because somebody else already heard yes on Monday.