The Dairy Foods Extension and Harvest New York team members are always trying to keep their fingers on the pulse of the most pressing current issues in dairy food manufacturing. Over the past several years, we have heard increasing mention of trouble attracting and keeping strong candidates amongst various departments within dairy plants. While many efforts have been made to bring these issues to a head, the lack of quantitative data has made finding a solution difficult. This gap in information has also hindered our ability to find a starting point. In order to kick-up our efforts to address workforce issues, it is imperative that we gain information. Is dairy industry pay comparable across the board? Which departments in plants face the most pressing issues in the Northeast- Maintenance, Quality, Sanitation? While the overall workforce is aging out baby boomers, how do dairy plant employees compare? Most importantly, where do we start?
Our Harvest New York Dairy Processing Specialists are teaming up with Cornell’s Agricultural Workforce Development program to construct a workforce benchmarking survey that will be going out in Q4 of 2018. The survey will ask individual plants about their workforce challenges including department turnover and general demographic information. All of the information we receive back from plants will be averaged out to create benchmark results. While each individual plant’s information will be anonymous upon submission, each plant will receive their own results back along with the benchmarking data. Therefore, factors such as starting pay, department turnover and benefits can be easily compared.
It is critical we do this to quantitatively identify areas of focus for future workforce development projects. This information will provide much needed insight for: 1) Individual plants to use as a tool, 2) Education institutions for development of future programming, and 3) The ultimate sustainability of a strong dairy processing workforce. We urge plant leadership to keep an eye out for correspondence about this much needed survey in the near future. If you have any questions, please reach out to Barb Williams: bw495@cornell.edu, or Anika Zuber: adz8@cornell.edu.
