On Monday 2 March 2026, the owner of an Idaho dairy hires a hand at the $15 to $18 starting wage that the Idaho Dairymen’s Association reported in 2022. Over a full-time year of 2,080 hours, that is $31,200 to $37,440 in wages for one person. The owner can list the hand’s tasks: milk, feed, clean. The owner cannot yet say what result the job owes, who the hand answers to, or what the hand decides without asking. A job description is one page per role, and it needs those three things before it needs the task list. Write them for every role, the owner’s and the family’s included.
What does a farm already have for the task list?
An occupation code is a public list that describes each occupation, task by task. The United States publishes one, O*NET, and its entry for farmworkers who tend farm and ranch animals has 19 tasks, ten core and nine supplemental. The list is free, and it makes a fair first draft.
Look at what it leaves out. Feeding and watering livestock has an importance rating of 86. Treating animals, or arranging for a veterinarian to treat them, rates 80. Ordering feed and arranging its delivery rates 77. None of the three says who decides to call the veterinarian or how much feed to order. Each farm settles that, and the code cannot.
So copy the task list last, as a draft, and correct it with the person who does the job.
Does a written job description raise profit?
Not by itself, on the one study that tested it. A Penn State team surveyed Pennsylvania dairies in 2001 for a project on well-managed farms. Of 80 farms, about half did not finish the survey, and 31 entered the profit analysis. The team tested four practices against return on assets, which is profit as a share of what the farm owns.
Written job descriptions for full-time workers showed no significant link. Neither did a written standard procedure or an annual review of full-time workers. One practice did: a bonus paid to workers for milk quality, which the authors put at over 14 percent more return on assets.
Read that with care. It is one practice on 31 farms picked as well managed, and the authors wrote that their ability to promote people programs strongly was weak. The finding is a direction. It points at a named result, milk quality, tied to a consequence for the worker. A task list has neither.
The same paper cites earlier research that found job descriptions varying considerably across dairy farms, even where the position titles were similar or identical. A description copied from another farm therefore does not carry over. The result, the boss and the decisions are what tell two milking managers apart.
Write the result in a form you can check against a record, the way the bonus checks milk quality.
Who does each person answer to?
To one person, and the page says who. Penn State Extension’s guide puts a work relationships section in every description, with a plain rule: each position has only one supervisor. A supervisor is the person who directs the work and checks it. The guide adds that every position on the organization chart should have a description, and that most descriptions fit on one page.
An organization chart is a drawing of who reports to whom. A Wisconsin extension guide names two shapes. In a flat chart, all or nearly all positions report to the owner or manager. In a chart with levels, a leader stands between the owner and part of the crew. The same guide lists two gains from the chart: new hires see whom to ask, and the chart defines family roles that confuse people who are not family.
On the example dairy, the herd manager and the owner’s brother, who runs feed and crops, answer to the owner. Milkers and calf care answer to the herd manager. Feed hands answer to the brother. Drawn this way, a hand who takes orders from both the herd manager and the brother shows up with two lines up, and you fix that before the first disagreement.
Draw your own chart before you write the pages, and give each box one line up.
What does each person decide without asking?
The task list is silent on it. In the O*NET answers for this occupation, 54 percent said the job gives a lot of decision freedom without supervision, 17 percent some, 14 percent limited and 14 percent none. It is one occupation with four different answers, so the code cannot give the answer for your farm.
Write it role by role, in two lists: what the role decides alone, and what it takes to its boss first. The example dairy’s owner makes these choices.
| Decision | Who takes it |
|---|---|
| Call the veterinarian for a sick cow | The herd manager, alone |
| Order the weekly feed | The herd manager, alone |
| Change the milking times | The owner, after hearing the herd manager |
| Hire or dismiss a hand | The owner |
Your farm may draw these lines elsewhere. What matters is that the line is written and that both people have read it. The decisions of a manager go in a separate written agreement, explained in what the manager decides alone.
Write the limits of each role on its page.
What do you write first, and how long does it take?
Your own role, in an afternoon. Penn State’s advice is that the best way to begin is by writing your own. Then sit with each employee and write theirs together, because they may remember parts of the job you would leave out. Keep each description to one page.
Write on the page who covers the role when the person is out, drawn from the plan of who else can do the job. The decisions that stay with the owner are the ones a written succession plan later hands on, and writing your own role shows how many there are. When you give a person feedback, you both start from a standard written before the review.
Penn State’s guide says a description is never final and is reviewed at least once a year by the employee and the supervisor. What a signed description weighs in a labor dispute is a question for a labor lawyer where your farm is.
Start with the page for your own role.
A page that names the result, the boss and the decisions is one a new hand can use on the first day. It belongs with the people side of the farm and with farm management.