Employee training can be tough to keep up with on a dairy, especially when new people are constantly coming through the door. DairyKind is one tool farms can use to make the process more manageable, with short, video-based courses for onboarding employees, keeping training accessible and tracking completion.
For Dr. Michelle Schack, dairy veterinarian and co-founder of DairyKind, the idea came from a gap she and her veterinary partners kept seeing firsthand. They often trained employees during herd visits, but those visits only happened periodically. When employees changed roles or left between visits, farms needed a way to keep training consistent even when the person leading it wasn’t on-site.
That need is amplified by turnover. Schack points to an average turnover rate of nearly 40% on U.S. dairy farms, which makes it difficult to ensure every employee receives the same instruction as people move in and out of different positions.
DairyKind started with those realities in mind, offering short training videos farms could keep on hand for onboarding and annual refreshers. Since then, the program has grown beyond individual dairy clients to serve dairy organizations, processors and retailers that want a clearer way to document and support employee training.
Training Beyond the First Day
DairyKind’s platform gives each employee a unique username and password. Once workers log in, their completed training is recorded in the system.
The platform offers more than 40 courses in English and Spanish covering animal well-being, animal health procedures and dairy farm safety. Courses include practical topics such as taking a milk sample or using an esophageal tube to feed a calf.
Managers can assign training based on an employee’s job role and add specific courses as needed. Completion records include the date and time of training, giving farms documentation they can use during audits.
For Schack, the documentation is one of the biggest benefits.
“You can watch a training on YouTube but then you still have to write down who took it and when and which module and what was covered,” she says. “But on our system, everything’s automatically tracked.”
Schack says past studies have found fewer than one-quarter of U.S. dairy farms conduct annual employee training, even though annual training is required for many animal welfare audits. She believes the problem is not always a lack of training, but a lack of documentation.
“With real-time reporting, you can log in at any time from any place and see exactly who’s done what on which team and who’s due for a retraining,” Schack says.
The ‘Why’ Behind the Work
Training an employee to follow a procedure is only part of the job.
Schack says DairyKind’s videos are designed as foundational training, giving employees the expectations behind a task along with the steps required to complete it.
“We talk about common shortcuts and mistakes that we see on farms and then we also go through what the expectations are in terms of animal well-being,” she says. “Every job on the dairy affects animal well-being.”
The videos are generally five to 10 minutes long, making them something an employee can return to without sitting through a lengthy training session.
That can be especially useful for procedures employees may not perform every day.
An employee might learn how to tube-feed a calf during regular training, for example, but later find themselves alone in the calf barn trying to remember every step.
“They’re like, wait, what was I supposed to do again?” Schack says. “There’s a lot they have to remember. There’s a lot of things we’re asking these employees to do.”
Having a five-minute refresher available gives the employee another resource before they carry out the task.
“Giving them a source that they can go back, ‘Oh, let me just rewatch that five minute video again,’ and now, ‘OK, now I feel more confident to do this the right way,’” Schack says. “That’s really powerful.”
Building a More Knowledgeable Workforce
The need goes beyond making sure employees know the steps in an SOP.
A recent study discussed during the Dairy Blackbelt podcast looked at 112 milkers across 16 dairies and found an average knowledge score of 49%. Schack says the findings point to a gap between knowing how to perform a task and understanding why the task is done.
“We knew the procedure, right?” she says. “And I think that these on-the-job trainings were very focused on the SOP, the steps of the procedure.”
Video training can add another layer by explaining the reasoning behind those steps.
For Schack, understanding the “why” can help employees make better decisions when they encounter something outside the exact situation they were shown during training.
“We need to talk about, this is the esophagus and this is the trachea,” she says, using tube feeding as an example. “These are two different tubes and this is how you can tell you’re in one versus the other.”
The goal is to give employees enough knowledge to understand their work rather than simply repeat a series of instructions.
“Those types of things help empower employees and give them the skills and the knowledge to do the best job they can do,” Schack says.
Training Still Happens on the Farm
Schack isn’t suggesting video training replaces hands-on instruction. Instead, she sees it as a tool to support the training already happening between managers, supervisors and employees.
On-the-job training is important, she says, but farm employees don’t always have the same background, skills or knowledge. Trainers can also be rushed or may not be experienced trainers themselves.
A video gives employees somewhere to go when they need a refresher.
For dairy managers, it also provides a way to keep training moving as employees change roles, new workers arrive and existing employees need retraining.
As dairy farms face increasingly detailed animal welfare audits and greater expectations for accountability, Schack says training systems can help farms stay organized.
“The training requirements and audits and evaluations that dairy farms have to go through are just becoming more and more strict,” she says. “We’re looking for more and more accountability, and this is one tool in the toolbox to help dairies complete their required trainings.”
For more on labor, read:
