Friday, March 29, 2024

The middle of everywhere

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Dairy farming in an isolated valley in the middle of the upper South Island and employing staff, Jesse Huffam and Renee Mason have developed a successful way of attracting and growing their staff around a team culture that helps to retain engaged and happy workers.
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Not long ago Jesse Huffam and Renee Mason were employees getting on with the job at hand, and they remember the importance of getting a pat on the back when they did the job well.

Today they are contract milkers on a 970-cow Dairy Holdings farm at Springs Junction, a remote settlement cradled between the Southern Alps and the Victoria Range with a long drive to just about anywhere. Christchurch is 2.5 hours to the south, Nelson two hours north and Greymouth 1.5 hours west, so staff need to be happy in their job because escape is a long way away.

It’s also cold, very cold, at 480m above sea level where frosts bite hard and send temperatures plummeting to minus 11C, while baking in summer to 43C this year.

Trapped in a freezing, isolated location isn’t for everyone and Renee says no amount of money can entice some people to live there. Before moving south they lived in Piopio, southwest of Te Kuiti, which would be considered pretty remote for most Kiwis, yet they still found it challenging turning up at Springs Junction with a toddler and another on the way at the beginning of winter.

Even getting to the nearest kindergarten is a 40-minute drive to the tiny mining township of Reefton – with an overnight bag in the car in winter in case the road closes. Now they go there several times a week for kids’ activities, rugby or social catch up over a decent cup of coffee.

“It was about changing your mindset,” Jesse says, “from the middle of nowhere to the middle of everywhere.”

On the plus side, they’re part of a dairying community largely made up of five large Dairy Holdings’ farms along the length of the Maruia Valley, with contract milkers and staff farming about 4500 cows between them.

In their contract with Dairy Holdings on the farm called More Cow 1, Jesse and Renee provide all the capital equipment and pay 20% of the bought-in feed costs, among other costs.

They pay $60 for extra calves to raise themselves, which helps build their equity, and Dairy Holdings then leases those animals back into the herd. That adds up to 120 head this year.

Since they arrived at the 354ha Springs Junction farm, they have employed two Indian cousins in their mid-twenties as farm assistants – Gurvinder and Surjeet Singh, who have taken on the simpler names of Gary and Jimmy. More recently Tony Stewart has joined the team as 2IC, with a young family.

“It just doesn’t work out for younger people around here,” Renee says. And sadly, many Kiwis applying for jobs don’t pass the compulsory drug test.

“Whereas foreigners are much more driven to stick around because they have a steady income.

“Most foreigners are learning on the job and you have to take that into account when you’re hiring them and realise you’re teaching them a lot of practical jobs. You have to be realistic about what to expect from them.”

Both Gary and Jimmy had worked on dairy farms before, though two years ago Jimmy was working in McDonald’s, so both are keen to learn skills. They also wanted employment together and the opportunity to have the same rostered time off and holidays, so Jesse and Renee have made that happen to keep them happy at Springs Junction.

“We’ve always stuck to good rostered time off, even through calving. Your time off is your time off and we’re not going to try and contact you while you’re off,” Renee says.

Knowing how daunting it was for them when they arrived in the isolated valley, Jesse and Renee’s goal is to make their staff feel at home and appreciated.

“It wasn’t that long ago that we were employees,” Renee says, “and it sometimes only takes one sentence like saying ‘you did a really good job with that’ and it can be enough. It gives staff a good buzz and it’s about keeping that positive energy around you as a team. It’s sometimes the passive things that make people happy about being here.”

Staff are offered salary packages within the budget, with room to improve their performance and skill level to give them a vested interest to stay in the job. That also helps Jesse and Renee retain their staff in a challenging location. While Gary and Jimmy get the chance to learn more skills and gain qualifications through Primary ITO courses – which are encouraged and paid for by Dairy Holdings – and fuel to get down to Christchurch together for time out and catching up with friends, Tony gets calves and opportunities to increase his skill level.

Upskilling Gary and Jimmy will help them gain 2IC jobs in future, which will tick another box for citizenship. In the meantime those skills benefit both parties on the farm.

“They become an asset to our business because they’re driven to get where they want to go and if we help them, both parties are benefiting,” Renee says.

“It’s not always about giving them what they want, but meeting them in the middle. So when our Indian staff both wanted to go to India, we met in the middle so it was good timing for both us and them to go together.”

In their previous role, Jesse and Renee managed seven staff including Filipinos, Chileans, South Africans and Maori and it was a simpler relationship compared with being the boss who pays them.

“You could socialise with them and have a laugh,” she says.

“We were motivators to get the best out of them.

“If something went wrong, it didn’t affect your bottom line,” Jesse says.

“When you’re employing them yourself, you have to be a lot more on to it and the line can get blurred if you’re treating them too much as friends.”

From the outset, they set the tone for the employer-employee relationship to ensure the door is always open for staff to ask questions, but keep their distance socially. Staff houses are inspected three times a year and staff know their boundaries, while having their own needs appreciated such as time off that works well for them.

Being young employers, Jesse and Renee resolved to keep that line very clear and came up with 10 guiding principles to separate farm life and family life, with the right team helping them reach their goal.

They’re emphatic that getting that right and having the right team working with them helped them win this year’s West Coast-Top of the South Share Farmer of the Year title and the DairyNZ Human Resources Award.

All the Dairy Holdings’ farms in the valley follow a simple grass-based system on country that rolls over flats and terraces. It’s extremely stony ground underneath, so stony the tanker track just had the soil pulled back and the soil flipped to create it.

It now has irrigation from two centre pivots over 100ha for about eight weeks of summer. Increased irrigation this year has prompted the lift in cow numbers to eat the increased pasture production.

The season begins with the first calves from August 20 and good growth through late spring and early summer produces enough supplement for the year, with four cuts of balage producing 1t/ha last season. The herd is milked twice a day until mid-January before dropping to once a day in mid-January and drying off about May 20.

Through June and July the farm, sometimes covered in severe frosts, has negative growth and the cows winter on HT swedes that averaged 15.5t/ha and covered 54ha this year. This past season they produced 251,000kg milksolids from 880 cows on the 300ha milking platform of this grass-based system, and everyone has their role to ensure it works efficiently.

“Once a week when everyone is rostered on, we have a whiteboard in the shed with everything that has to be done during the week, so everyone has an idea of how the week is going to plan out,” Renee says.

“Gary does all the pasture walks because he’s consistent and is a fitness freak who likes walking, while Tony is quality control and does most of the tractor driving because the others aren’t confident with that yet.”

Most jobs are written down in a procedures manual.

“If I fell down and broke my neck, you can read the manual and be away,” Jesse says.

On the periphery is Dairy Holdings’ management if problems ever arise, as well as the other contract milkers along the valley who get to visit each farm five times throughout the year.

“You have like-minded people and the security of knowing that if you did have a problem or didn’t know how to do the budget, you have a team of accountants in the office to help you.”

Jesse and Renee’s 10 guiding principles

• Spend quality time together as a family
• Seek out people in life with good positive attitudes and good work and life ethics
• Focus on factors within our control
• Adopt management strategies to create margins
• Keep our business associates informed and always keep our word (under-promise and oversupply)
• Continually analyse what we are doing, looking for better and more efficient ways of doing things
• We will only be as good as the standard we set ourselves – becoming the best in our field
• Never compromise our integrity
• Good business is where both parties are winners
• Continually challenge ourselves, believe in ourselves and enjoy ourselves.

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