Turnover events of animal caretakers and its impact on productivity in swine farms

Abstract

Attracting and retaining quality animal caretaking personnel is one of most pressing issues the US swine industry currently faces. On-farm employee turnover can be costly and have an impact on productivity. The primary objectives of this study were to describe the amount of animal caretaker turnover events that occurred in a single year in eleven swine farms, and to investigate associations between employee turnover events and two subsequent production parameters of interest: number of pigs weaned per sow (PWS) and pre-weaning mortality (PWM). A retrospective cohort study was conducted with eleven commercial farrow-to-wean swine farms belonging to two vertically integrated multi-site production systems within two swine production companies. Human resources and production data for the year of 2019 were obtained monthly from each farm. The primary predictor of interest was the occurrence of an employee turnover event, defined as ‘voluntary’ (employee decided to leave or quit) or ‘involuntary’ (employee was terminated by company decision). The primary outcomes of interest included the monthly average PWS and PWM. These associations were assessed with 1-, 2-, 3-, and 6-months between the turnover events and the outcome. Linear mixed effects models were fit in STATA 15, with system and farm included as random effects. To account for temporal and seasonal trends of production, season and the monthly production were included in the models. There were a total of 152 turnover events, with 4 and 148 turnover events in systems 1 and 2, respectively. The average turnover, calculated as a percent of total turnover among full time employee positions, was 92 % (SD = 62 %; Range = 8–217 %). Improved production efficiency in both monthly PWS (p = 0.01) and PWM (p = 0.02) was observed with the occurrence of an involuntary turnover event two months prior, after controlling for season, previous month production, farm, and system. For the PWS outcome, there was a significant interaction between an involuntary turnover event two months prior and monthly county-level unemployment rate (p = 0.02), indicative of the improved performance being most profound at the lowest levels of unemployment rate and diminishing at the highest levels. Turnover of animal caretaking personnel in farrow-to-wean farms was confirmed to be highly variable and high for the majority of farms in this study. Furthermore, animal caretaker turnover was associated with subsequent trends of production efficiency, warranting closer consideration of prioritizing managerial efforts in worker recruitment, training and retention.