There are many ways to manage the paperwork side of ag labor. On the newest episode of “The Packer Podcast,” Nico Cabral, director of marketing for labor management software company FieldClock, shares the farming background of its founders and the inspiration that led to the company as it is today.
Founded by Ryan Vickery, Jeff Moser and Joshua Farray, the company uses smartphones and computers to replace manual labor tracking clipboards and time cards and turns them into a robust database for productivity tracking.
“Now when the job is done, you don’t have to go into the office and move all of these records into a spreadsheet and then move them again into payroll at the end of the week,” he says. “It’s all about efficiency and tracking to the second what type of productivity you’re getting on your farm.”
While the average age of a grower continues to rise, Cabral says it’s important for growers to understand that just because a literal paper trail might have worked in the past, with labor costs at an all-time high, it’s important growers know exactly what’s happening on their operations.
Cabral, who grew up on a farm in Northern California, says his father’s mantra was “work smarter, not harder,” and that sentiment is echoed in the type of solution FieldClock aims to provide growers.
“We’re trying to put a piece of technology in their hands that makes things easier for them,” he says. “The good thing is farmers are good at overcoming hardship. If there’s one thing that farmers can do, it’s adapting to change, so even though that tech is a stigma, we’ve noticed in a lot of our clients that overcoming that barrier is easy for them.”
And he says sometimes growers learn more about their team once the farm moves to digital labor tracking. Cabral says a client was surprised to learn an employee clocked in around 7:30 or 7:40 a.m. when other employees started at 7 a.m. While the employee had to drop off his kids at school, prior to FieldClock, the employee had listed his start time at 7 a.m. and had been doing so for many years.
“You look at that extra 30 minutes they’ve been getting paid for, however many years and we’re talking thousands of dollars,” he says. “In their head, they think ‘Oh, it’s a minor discrepancy,’ but minor discrepancies compounded over time turn into major dollars.”
Another client, he says watched production numbers in real time on the FieldClock app and noticed the production from one crew one day slowed down significantly. And after looking into the issue, the crew said fruit quality had dropped in that block being harvested.
“They made the decision to move the entire crew across the street and their estimate was they probably saved about $3,000 in additional costs that would have been incurred if they would have just stayed on that block,” he says.
