Employee Management and Animal Care: A Comparative Ethnography of Two Large-Scale Dairy Farms in China

SIMPLE SUMMARY: China’s dairy industry is growing and restructuring to favor large-scale dairy farms. The lead author lived on two large-scale dairy farms in China and conducted immersive fieldwork where she participated in daily cattle care alongside the workers, conducted interviews with workers, and collected relevant documents. We found that employee management critically shaped animal care on both farms. Workers reported improvements to animal care on both farms, attributing these to improved employee management practices. Our findings suggest that cattle care may be improved through employee management practices such as fostering a positive organization culture, ensuring better working conditions, and incentivizing farm workers. ABSTRACT: Farm management can directly and indirectly affect animal care. We explored how farm management affected animal care on two large dairy farms in China (anonymized as Farm A and Farm B). We used a mini-ethnographic case study design whereby the first author lived for 38 days on Farm A and 23 days on Farm B. She conducted participant observation and ethnographic interviews with farm staff positions within five departments in Farm A and six departments in Farm B. In addition, she conducted 13 semi-structured interviews (seven on Farm A; six on Farm B). We used template analysis to generate key themes. On both farms, workers believed that animal care practices had improved over time, due to three key employee management factors: 1) organizational culture, 2) competency of worker and management, and 3) an effective incentive system. Our results suggest that animal care may be improved in this context by: 1) promoting a culture in which workers have ‘grit’ and are eager to learn, 2) ensuring basic worker wellbeing, and 3) using animal care outcomes as performance indicators linked to pay.