Technology for Farm Labor Management

This is Tim Hammerich of the Ag Information Network with your Farm of the Future Report.

Taking care of employees is an important part of modern farming. FieldClock co-founder Joshua Farray says technology can help in a variety of ways, and the benefits range from easier management to better compliance to lower costs.

Farray… “All these little things just eat away and you're outta compliance, you're overpaying, you're underpaying. That's a problem of its own. The other aspect of it too is labor is just getting more expensive everywhere. And like particularly in Washington state, you know, the adverse effect wage rate, which if you're using H2A you have to pay attention to. It's $17.97 this year. You're paying almost 18 bucks an hour, and you're gonna be paying overtime now, which is changing. So you gotta be tracking people's hours accurately so you can pay 'em overtime properly so you can pay 'em according to the minimum rates. And then there's also things like if they're doing piecework, you gotta pay that right too, which means there's a whole separate formulation for, you know, how many hours were they actually on the clock. You don't want to make an Excel spreadsheet and go write all your pen and paper into Excel and then try and figure out how much piecework someone generated in the work week, and then figure out how many minutes they were actually on the clock to find out what their rate is. We just do all that for you.”

Farray said they just rolled out scales so they can pay people by harvested weight, and they are planning automated notifications of important real time alerts about their workforce.