The group meets regularly to talk about ways to improve their farm businesses and profits.
“I think we’re going to be able to dig fairly deeply into people’s businesses and work out their cost structures and help them with that – where they’re making their income from and where they can make some efficiencies,” member Martin Coup, who’s also a new farmer director on the board of Beef + Lamb New Zealand, said.
Facilitator and AgFirst consultant Steve Howarth said when he advertised a meeting about action groups in the B+LNZ e-diary 50 farmers expressed interest and 30 turned up, resulting in four new groups, including the Waitomo one, being formed in the area.
“The overall goal is to encourage and support individual group members to reach their farm business goal.
“Every farm is different and has different goals but as a group we have a lot of horsepower and we’ll use the benchmarking to have good fact-based discussions and bring in experts where we can to help them,” Howarth said.
Coup said it is important to him to have diversity in the sheep and beef farming group.
“There’s quite a range of ages and I guess by having diversity you’re going to see a whole lot of different things and get a whole lot of different pictures from different people about what they want to achieve and, by having that diversity, we’ll all be able to help each other in that.”
Younger member Alan Dudin is keen to hear about the latest technological developments and get his business “ticking along a bit better”. He sees benchmarking as an important part of that.
“I don’t really know how we stack up against a lot of other businesses of similar size and scale around the region.
“I want to see what’s working best for other people and take some stuff on board for our business really,” Dudin said.
The members have decided to open-up their financials to each other, meaning there’s no way to massage their figures to shine a better light on their businesses.
“Take something simple like weaning percent for your sheep. You can cut that a lot of different ways,” Howarth said.
“Is it the number of ewes at tupping, ewes at scanning, ewes at lambing? You can make it look a lot better but with Farmax it’s standardised so you can’t touch them.”
One of the ground-rules is that no private information is shared outside the group.
“What happens within our group stays within our group. No one else is going to know about that.
“It was pretty big to say we want to put our names against those figures because some of these guys haven’t been in groups before but I think that’s going to be really powerful and if they can make an extra $100/ha then it’s all worth it, isn’t it. That’s what we’re there for,” Coup said.
Dudin believes that openness will make the group work and lead to greater profitability.
“With benchmarking we can drill down to what actually works and it’s getting the numbers behind that which is key really,” he said.
“It’s around the horsepower that you can bring to the table through the other people and, to be fair, most people who are involved in these groups are committed. They want to improve.”
The RMPP Action Network was set up following research into how best to get not only new information to farmers but how to help them act on it.
“We looked at a whole lot of models on what was the most efficient way to do that,” Coup said.
“One-to-one would have been great but it was just so costly and with one-to-many, say 45 in a big discussion, people didn’t necessarily go home and make changes.
“But if you say within a group of nine farmers that you’re going to go home and you’re going to feed your ewes better or change your genetics or put a crop in then the next time they see you, they’re going to ask, ‘Have you done that?’ and hold you to account.
“I always think if you’re going to do something, tell someone and that kind of holds you to it.”
It’s up to the members of each group to decide what they want to focus on be it financials, practical on-farm action or personal development.
“That is the beauty of the Action Network. There is flexibility to design something that suits the individual group,” Coup said.
Each farm business is eligible for $4000 kick-start funding, which is pooled to pay for a facilitator and to bring in experts.
Participants are encouraged to be open and honest and to freely express their opinions.
Howarth recalls a farm tour where pasture quality was being discussed. One farmer ripped out a handful of grass and described it as “crap quality”.
“The owner could have taken that quite negatively but the group got into a good discussion and we drilled right into it. It was saved feed for cows over the winter and had probably been locked up too soon. So, there was a good positive outcome that came out of that.”
Coup has high hopes for the group.
“I had the Action Group experience and I believe in it. I just think if you haven’t had it, what have you got to lose?
“You can only learn – you’ve got nothing to lose on this and it’s not going to cost a heap of money because RMPP is providing kick-starter funding.”
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