Labour efficiency

Project details
The overall aim of this project was to measure, identify and demonstrate factors affecting dairy farm labour productivity.

The project:

• Developed a standardised, usable and farm based system for measuring key performance indicators for farm labour productivity across the range of dairy farm activities

• Identified grazing systems to have the lowest times with more traditional farming types having the highest. Total mixed ration systems were in-between. The grazing systems showed a strong relationship between increasing herd size and reduction in labour input but this relationship was not as strong with the other systems.
• Provides opportunities to review labour alongside Milkbench+ and also allows benchmarking within discussion groups. This allows promotion of best practice and/ or how to improve labour efficiency.

The methodology used was adapted from previous AHDB Dairy studies looking at labour use. A database has been developed which splits labour use into non specific and cow specific tasks. There was a wide variation between systems in terms of total time and cow specific tasks.