Finding employees for your dairy operation can be tough, and retaining the staff you already have can sometimes be an even bigger challenge.

An employee handbook is an important document that all farms should have. The purpose of a handbook is to outline the expectations the farm has for their employees, as well as including rules and policies. Although the details of the contents of the handbook will vary from farm to farm, there are many online resources that can help your farm put together a handbook with the essential information. Here are a few employment policies to include in your handbook that are particularly beneficial to dairy farms.

During several in-depth interviews with dairy owners and managers regarding personnel management, we often heard about challenges and the difficulties associated with managing people. However, in most cases, mixed in with those challenges were bits of human resource (HR) “gold.” The purpose of this article is to highlight a few of those best practices and provide some insight into how you might incorporate something similar on your dairy.