Farm Business Management: Labour Budgets
by Understanding the labour budget.
The need for listing available farm resources have been major concern for most authorities, it including areas of land of different classes, available labour force, capital resources and also the attitudes and managerial ability of the farmer, the aim of this listing is to ensure the budgeted plans are feasible, that is, they do not require more resources than any likely to be available. To make the feasibility check, then it is necessary to estimate the resources requirement to compare with the quantities available.
An estimate of the labour requirement of the farm plan is known as a labour budget. In its simplest form it involves the calculation of the total standing man-day requirement for the plan. This total requirement is calculated by multiplying the number of hectares of each crop and number is each class of livestock by average annual requirement per hectare and per head of stock. An obvious difficulty arises due to the different seasonality of various types of work, the total seasonal labour requirement for individual enterprises come together. It is the seasonal work peak which determines the regular labour needs.
We really need to estimate the labour requirement month by month (or week after week) or at some other suitable interval. Even where labour can be hired on a temporary basis it is useful to estimate when and how much of it will be needed. Hence it is always advisable to prepare a labour budget for any farm plan
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