Farmers spending fewer hours on farm but working more

Teagasc’s sustainability report for has shown that the average farmer worked fewer hours on their farm in the past three years than they had done a decade ago, but that they are more than making up for this reduction in labour in the hours they are employed off-farm.

Dairy farmers put in 2,545 hours on-farm and a total of 2,721 between on-farm and off-farm employment in the three-year rolling average for 2024.

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These figures were the highest hours of any sector for both farm work and combined farm and off-farm employment, equating to three-and-a-half hours extra worked in total per week compared with the cross-sector average.

The number of hours cattle farmers reported to work on-farm was four hours a week less than the same figure in 2015.

However, their increase in off-farm employment hours lowered the decline in total hours worked to just half an hour less worked each week.

The report shows that sheep farmers worked 170 fewer hours on farm in last year’s average than they had done in 2015, but an uptick in hours worked off-farm saw the overall hours worked actually increase by 80 hours over the year.

Tillage farmers also worked an additional 155 hours last year than they had done a decade previous while putting in fewer hours on their farm.

This trend of an increased proportion of working hours spent off-farm can also be seen from Teagasc’s finding that a decade ago, beef farmers spent around 71% of their working hours on their farm but that this fell to just 62% of working hours last year.

The same trend was witnessed with sheep farmers’ reduction in from 78% of working hours spent on-farm in 2015 to 68% last year, with the drop for tillage farmers being a lesser decline of 73% to 65% of hours worked.