Modelling the amount of time that is needed to manage a farm with a given production portfolio and subsequently to run the agricultural sector of a country has been an important strain of research in agricultural economics research around the world in the late 20th century. Although other challenges of the farming sector have ousted a large part of international discourses on methodological issues of time measurements and questions of appropriate aggregations, the labour time requirement for farm tasks remains an essential aspect of farm workload. Thus, labour time models still can and should deliver support for different actors in the agricultural sector.
The family of labour time models in Switzerland builds on several decades of practice-oriented research. Today three applications are in use: (i) PROOF for modelling production times, (ii) OFFWO for modelling office times and (iii) LabourScope for upscaling the modelled times for individual work tasks on farm level. The use cases of these applications are manifold.
The Excel-based modelling tools PROOF and OFFWO allow to precisely define a workflow and adjust their influencing factors in detail. In science, users benefit from this depth of detail when it comes to modelling the working time required to apply a new technology, for example for a hoeing robot or a resource-saving working method with reduced herbicide use. However, these two applications require in-depth knowledge of modelling conventions.
The labour time models from PROOF and OFFWO form the basis of the online application LabourScope. In Switzerland, training in both agriculture and rural home economics places particular emphasis on work planning. LabourScope meets the need for a freely available tool for calculating the workload at farm level for both agricultural production as well as the farm household. By working with LabourScope in education, users gain an understanding of the variety of tasks that need to be allocated within the available time budget. On the farm, where workload analyses are often initiated or supervised by consultants, LabourScope helps to show the current workload on the one hand, but it can also show the working time requirement in the individual production branches and thus can support the decision-making process when, for example, the herd is to be enlarged or new technology purchased. Yet, little is known about the effects of a decision driven by reasons of temporal workload on social sustainability. This should be subject to further investigations.