Friday, March 29, 2024

Planning for success

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Lance Graves hasn’t always been managing cows and grass. And a few years ago he says he would never have imagined winning Farm Manager of the Year for his region in just his second season in the industry.
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Lance grew up in town and left school at 16 to complete a mechanic’s apprenticeship. He “worked on the tools” until he was 21 before moving into earth-moving machinery. He spent four years on that, eventually working his way up to be foreman in a quarry.

“There were some regulatory changes in the industry and I decided I needed to follow my heart and go dairy farming.”

Lance and his wife Mel, who is a physical education teacher in town, put a tenant in their house, landed Lance’s current role as herd manager for 50:50 sharemilkers Willy and Sally Bosch, moved out to the country and haven’t looked back since.

“When I was still at the quarry I started doing my Diploma in Agriculture through Lincoln University and was doing some relief milking on the weekends, and I’d come home from doing that and be bouncing off the walls, I loved it and it’s what I needed to be doing.”

Lance picked up the Westpac Financial Management and Planning award, and said his win as Farm Manager of the Year took a while to really sink in.

“We got home that night and looked at the prizes and went wow, then the alarm went off at 3.30am the next morning and it was just business as usual.”

The couple also have a grazing business they started a year ago to help grow their equity base.

“Initially when we came here we wanted to buy another house, but Willy and Sally sat down with us and made us look at what we were doing and where we were going, they threw the idea about buying stock. We weighed up the options and the return potential is much more than what we could get on a house so that’s what we did.”

A friend of theirs bought a 400ha block that needed stock on it so a partnership was struck up. They have grown their numbers and bought another capital line of 40 heifers this season.

Goal-setting is the key to their success. The couple have created a vision board which lives on the fridge, and have taken part in Dairy Women’s Network strategic planning days as well as using DairyNZ resources. Their long-term goal is 50:50 sharemilking or equity partnership by the 2020-21 season, with shorter-term goals along the way to help them get there. The couple recently accepted an offer of a management job on a 400-cow system 5 farm in Taranaki, which ticks off the goal of getting Mel into the industry and getting to the next level in their dairy farming careers.

“This farm has taught me how to grow grass and how to farm a low-cost and low-input system profitably so this new job is a complete 180-degree change, which is what we wanted. We have had people say that we should be contract milking by now but at the end of the day I’ve only worked for one couple, so we are willing to sacrifice a few years and go and experience the other end of the scale – we think it’s crucial to us going forward. We want to be able to walk into any farm and have a basic understanding of how it works.”

Although the awards are a bit of hard work and a bit of short-term pain at times, Lance says he wanted to encourage others to get involved, with the advice and feedback received being “something you can’t put a price on”.

“There have been days where I want to sit down the back paddock with my legs and arms crossed and sulk a bit but you have to dig your toes in and just get it done. I love what I do, and I wish I had the career change sooner.”

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