Don’t Procrastinate
As harvest quickly approaches for Pacific Northwest farmers, it is vital to ensure that you are harvest ready. It is of the upmost importance to dust off the machines, plug them in, charge them up, and turn them on. If you have new crew bosses and employees who have not used the products yet, I recommend you give them a brief introduction to the machine before they start with harvest. If you need a refresher on how to use the machine or the web portal, a 2ndSight representative can set up a quick meeting through a phone call or via Zoom, which will get you right back up to speed.
Bookkeeping Solution
Handling thousands of punched timecards can lead to disaster, but we have a solution, and that solution removes timecards from the equation altogether. As many of you know, the labor tracking services such as ours provide an alternative to the dreaded paper timecard. Counting punches on paper timecards often leads to payroll mistakes, and finding the appropriate paper timecard when an employee later questions paycheck information can be next to impossible. Instead, with the touch of a button, all your employees’ hours and working data gets uploaded into a web portal account that allows you to track their hours, overtime, piece wages, and other data at the touch of your fingertips.
Countering Record Inflation
As we all know, unprecedented inflation levels (up 8.6% in 2022 alone!) have been making business more than difficult as the year goes on. Did I mention that this level of inflation is a 40-year high? In addition to inflation driving up costs for products upon which farms depend – fossil fuels, fertilizers, and parts-another major cost increase this year has been cost of labor. So far this year, farm operators have been paying their hired workers an average wage of $17.22 per hour, which is up 8% from this time last year. In addition to skyrocketing wages, new labor laws in many states such as Washington, Oregon, and California are also eliminating the agricultural exemption on overtime hours, resulting in many farms having to choose between paying workers more and getting them for fewer hours.
A solution to this? Automate labor tracking. In today’s situation, every hour, and, frankly, every minute matters. Paper labor tracking and manual time entries should be a thing of the past. The labor alone of manually entering information one employee at a time keeps office workers at their desk for additional hours every week.
Technology may be intimidating to some, but if there is a time to invest in technology and farm automation, the time is now. Our goal is to produce systems that are straightforward and simple for even to some of the least tech savvy folks to use. On top of that, we offer constant customer support with a customer service line.
2nd Sight’s goal is to “Engineer Better Solutions for the Ag Industry,” and our solution to the current large-scale labor inflation is our FairPick and FairTrak automated labor tracking systems.