Employers need reliable information to make good decisions. Employee compensation is a critical part of attracting and retaining high-performing employees. Managers need accurate and detailed data to compare how they are doing relative to others in the industry. Cornell Ag Workforce Development will run the 2024 Farm Employee Compensation Benchmark throughout March. All farm participants who enter valid, usable data about one or more of their farm’s employees will receive a report and be invited to participate in a follow-up webinar to discuss the findings.
The process is easy and only takes about 10 minutes per employee to enter:
- Select one or more employees who worked for you in 2023.
- Gather your data about the regular and overtime hours they worked and how much pay they earned in 2023. Most farms will have this readily available in payroll records.
- Gather your data about the non-wage benefits they received and how much the employer paid for them. Include items such as the employer-paid portion of insurances and retirement, value of any paid time off, estimated market value of any provided housing, and other items such as provided food or clothing.
- Enter the data you collected along with other simple, descriptive information about the employee’s position in the 2024 Farm Employee Compensation Benchmark.
- Repeat steps 1-4 to enter data about another employee.
Farms with more complex workforces should enter multiple employees. Choose a few representative frontline employees plus any middle managers or even more senior managers in the business. We will collect information from a large number of farms of all types in New York and other states, and we will be able to separate the data by farm type (dairy, fruit, vegetable, greenhouse, etc.) in order to provide more specific and customized reports.
There is no cost to participate and farms who provide at least one usable employee entry will receive a report of the results and an invitation to attend a webinar discussion of the findings. All information that you enter will be kept confidential. Only aggregate data, with no way to identify farms or individuals, will be published or shared.
