Ask most livestock producers what the biggest difference between a high performing site and a low performing site and they would tell you the on-farm labor. Sites with good managers perform well, sites with poor management perform poorly. FarmStreams entire business exists because of this fact. Drilling deeper a good indicator of management quality would be the amount of time an employee is on the site. A 45 minute walk-through and leave is going to have different results than a site that has an employee on site for 10 hours each day. Its just common sense.
One of the benefits of using FarmStreams is that we can watch over all of the systems for a farm worker while they are gone in a much more intelligent way than the existing alarm systems in the marketplace. Its almost like extending the management time on a site with software and advanced automation instead of a person. Its a tough concept to embrace; but it can really be true particularly in systems where the labor force is stretched thin or even the supervisor level is stretched thin allowing workers to take shortcuts because they know that they have a good chance of getting away with it.
So what is our solution?
First, monitor the entire site to ensure all systems are working at all times. We talk about this at length in the blog and will continue talking about ways we do this.
In addition, install sensors such as door sensors or motion detectors in common areas. Collect the information and transmit it to the cloud via the MultiSense sensor gateway. The calculations would be very easy. Last timestamp in epoch millis minus the first timestamp in epoch milis converted to a decimal hour should be a pretty accurate time on site. The full suite of alerts for an upper manager would be available. Less than a certain threshold triggers an alert. Fully customizable. Also the full reporting/dashboard graphs would also be available.
I have had personal experience with some barn workers and its often hard to believe them as much as I want to. When we have feed problems on the site they are never there. They left an hour ago. They weren't planning to come until 3pm today, whatever the situation might be 9am or 6pm the story is the same. Like any business you have good employees and you have bad employees. I would not say that me calling them and them not being near the site means they are bad. It could be coincidence. However if the monitoring sensor kept track of human activity on the site each day you now have a way to go back and know what is going on with that employees time.
As one industry exec recently told me. Trust, but Verify
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