To know what worker turnover costs your farm, multiply the number of people who left in the year by what one departure costs you. Neither number comes ready-made. The turnover calculator on this site does the sum in a minute, and it also gives the turnover rate: the people who left divided by the average size of the crew. Eight departures from a crew that averages twenty people is a rate of forty percent. At $3,000 a departure, those eight cost $24,000 in the year.
Three choices move both results: the months you count, the crew size you divide by, and what one departure costs on your farm. Write those choices on one page, which this article calls your turnover record, so that next year you can compare the new figures with these.
At the end of a season the crew is back to its usual size, so few farms count how many came and went in between. The harvest gang filled back up, and the December payroll looks like January’s. Each departure still cost the farm something: the job left empty, and the months a new hire needed to learn it.
Which crew size should you divide the turnover rate by?
Any of three, as long as you write down which one and use the same one next year. You can divide by the crew in a single month, by the average of the counts at the start and at the end of the period, or by the average of the twelve monthly counts. On a farm with a harvest crew, the three give very different rates.
The calculator follows a step-by-step method for analyzing staff turnover, published in 2021 by Zaballa and colleagues in a peer-reviewed journal. Their average crew is the values existing at the start and at the end of the period, divided by two, so the figure you type under “Average workforce” is that average. The method was written for any workplace, not for farms, but the arithmetic is the same on any payroll.
Picture eight people all year, plus thirty-six hired for a four-month harvest and let go when it ends: forty-four at the peak. Thirty-six people left during the year, and that is the number you divide by the crew size.
The year starts and ends with eight people, so the start-and-end average is eight, and 36 ÷ 8 is 450 percent. The average of the twelve monthly counts is twenty (eight months at 8 people and four at 44: 64 + 176 = 240, and 240 ÷ 12 = 20), and 36 ÷ 20 is 180 percent. Divide by the peak month, 44, and you get about 82 percent. Nothing on the farm changed between those numbers; only the crew size you divided by did.
None of those crew sizes is the correct one. Two rates compare only when they divide by the same kind of number, so beside the result write which one you used, with its dates, and use the same one next year.
The months you count matter for the same reason. If you count January to December, a harvest crew hired in November and let go in February shows up as hires in one year and as departures in the next. Write down the first and last month you counted, and count the same months next year.
Which turnover rate answers your question?
There are three, and each one answers a different question. Zaballa and colleagues give a formula for each: one for staff planning, one for how much of the crew you had to replace, and one for how many people chose to leave. The calculator gives the first two, and you can work out the third by hand.
The first, which the calculator calls the classic rate, averages hires and departures and divides that by the crew. The authors use it to measure the staff turnover index for the purposes of human resources planning: on a farm, when you plan next season’s hiring.
The second, the separation rate in the calculator, counts only departures. The authors use it to analyze the losses of people and their causes, and with it you see how much of the crew you had to replace. The forty percent of the crew of twenty is this rate.
The third counts only resignations, the departures the worker chose, and leaves out the jobs the farm ended. The authors use it to study the departures that are a consequence solely of the attitudes and conduct of the staff.
The calculator cannot give the third rate, because you enter only counts, and it has no box for who decided each departure. Yet with the third rate you can answer what many owners want to know: are people walking away, or is the farm letting them go? Take two farms at the same forty percent. On one, seven of the eight departures were resignations; on the other, seven were contracts ending. They do not have the same problem, and with the first two rates you cannot tell them apart.
To work out the third rate, add one column to your list of who left and mark on each line whether the person chose to leave or the farm ended the job. Count only the ones who chose to leave and divide by the same crew size.
Is a forty percent turnover rate high?
No published figure answers that for a farm. A study of nurses in a Brazilian hospital, which worked the rate out month by month, notes that there is no consensus on an acceptable rate and that some authors put it at about 3%. That is a monthly rate from another kind of work, and it cannot be set beside the forty percent in the example, which covers a year.
Turnover also differs between kinds of farm work: a crew built around a picking season usually loses more people than a dairy crew, and neither number is wrong. The rate worth comparing yours against is your own rate from last year, worked out over the same months with the same crew size.
Why does the month someone leaves change what it costs?
Because a new hire takes months to reach full output. Jiří Duda and a colleague, management researchers at Mendel University in Brno, in the Czech Republic, wrote a paper on the costs of employee turnover in business, not on farms. In it they reproduce a schedule in which a replacement works at about a quarter of normal output in the first month, half in the second and three quarters in the third.
| Month on the job | New hire’s output | Output lost against a seasoned worker |
|---|---|---|
| First | about 25% | about 75% |
| Second | about 50% | about 50% |
| Third | about 75% | about 25% |
The table is in months, not money. What you lose while a new hire learns is output, and on a farm output is not worth the same all year. If someone leaves right after harvest, the replacement’s three learning months fall when the work can wait. If the same person, at the same wage, leaves three weeks before harvest, the first month, the one at twenty-five percent, falls when the work cannot wait, and a day-rate hand from outside, if you can find one, often costs more than the worker who left.
On the payroll the two departures look identical, and in the turnover rate each counts as one. The second can cost far more.
The same paper counts the output lost while the replacement learns as an important part of what a departure costs, next to temporary cover and the manager’s time. It is also the part a farm rarely writes down, because it leaves no invoice. Which cost weighs most changes from job to job, so in the calculator you enter your own cost per departure instead of a borrowed one.
Where does the cost of one departure come from?
From your own records: the wages, overtime and invoices of your last replacement. Whatever figure you use is multiplied by every departure, so an error in it is repeated for each one. At $3,000 each, eight departures cost $24,000; at $4,500 each, the same eight cost $36,000.
Rurivia calculation from the eight example departures above, at $3,000 and at $4,500 each.
You will not find your own cost per departure in the calculator or in any published study. If you have no replacement on record, the nearest published figure is in a brief that Kate Bahn and a colleague wrote for the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a United States economic research group. They pooled thirty-one case studies, none of them on farms: replacing a worker cost averaging about forty percent of the position’s annual pay, with a median near twenty-four percent.
Borrow the median rather than the average: half the replacements cost less than the median and half cost more, while a few expensive jobs pull the average up.
Better than borrowing is to work out what your most recent replacement actually cost, from its payslips and invoices, and to mark which figures you estimated. A separate article on this site, What belongs in the bill for replacing a worker who left, has the seven costs that go into that bill, one per line. Two of them leave no receipt, the days the job sat empty and the learning period, and people often underestimate them.
Why doesn’t a planned departure cost the same as one you could have prevented?
Because a planned departure leaves no job empty. Split the eight departures from the crew of twenty in two: the ones you planned for, such as contracts that end with the season, and the ones a different decision might have prevented.
A temporary contract that ends with the harvest has a date on it: the farm planned for it, the job never sat empty, and if anyone replaces the worker, the learning falls outside the busy weeks. A skilled tractor driver who leaves mid-season for a better offer leaves an empty job, a replacement learning at the worst moment, and the loss of what he knew. Each counts as one departure, so multiplying all eight by a single cost adds two different kinds of departure together.
Sorting departures after the person has gone is too late for this season. On the time sheet you may see an earlier signal: someone about to leave has often been missing days in the months before. The pattern of those absences hints at the cause. Many short absences often come from a crew too small for the work or a schedule with no days off, and a few long ones from an injury or an illness the job itself may have caused. In the article Many short absences or a few long ones, on reading a crew’s absence record, you will find how to tell the two apart while there is still time to act.
What one departure costs you also sets what a careful hire is worth: a hire that avoids one departure saves you that amount. The steps of that kind of hire are in the article on a written hiring process.
Where to start
Set aside an hour with last year’s payroll, the crew list and the paperwork from the last replacement, before the next hiring season opens.
A rate with no note of the crew size you divided by cannot be compared with anything, not even with your own rate from last year. And if you multiply every departure by one cost, you add the planned departures and the preventable ones together as if they cost the same. Neither note fits in the calculator, which is why you keep this record next to its result.
The most useful lines on the record are the preventable departures, each with the decision that might have prevented it. With them, next season’s talk with your foreman can be about whether people left over the pay, the schedule or the way they were treated, instead of about whether forty percent is a lot. For the other records and decisions that go into running a farm, start at the farm management guide on this site; the people library has more on hiring, pay and keeping people.