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Managing risk when hiring employees on the farm

An Ohio attorney says one area of risk management that doesn’t get enough attention is farm labor.

Ryan Conklin with Wright & Moore law firm says it can be challenging to protect the farm when a bad employee hire is made.  “Whether that person is committing criminal acts or that person is an undercover investigator, those are things that are very difficult to insure against – almost impossible,” he says.  “You could end up taking a tremendous loss for your operation just because of this one event of making a bad hire.”

He tells Brownfield the best way farmers can protect themselves is to be informed.  “You have to be very diligent in collecting information on the front end so you can make that informed decision,” he says.  “Then, kind of on the back end of that, once you have that information it’s not just good enough to have it.  You have to verify its accuracy.”

Conklin says background check information verification is one of the most important steps in hiring employees and can help prevent significant damages to the farm in the future.  But, he says, it is often skipped.

He says he knows how much damage can be done from personal experience.  “My family was involved in an undercover videotaping incident on our family dairy farm in Plain City, Ohio,” he says.  “I understood from our experience with our farm what we did wrong and what we could have done to prevent such an event from happening.”

More information can be found in handbook produced by the Ohio Farm Bureau and Wright & Moore.

AUDIO: Ryan Conklin, Ohio Farm Law