Extension 350 (E350) has considerably widened the time-honoured farm discussion group approach of farmers helping farmers.
Private farm consultants are group facilitators and counsellors as well as delivering their one-on-one advice and skills.
The seven E350 consultants, used to working with the more motivated farmers either in farm business upper quartile or wanting to get there, are now working in the middle of the bell curve.
The project is designed to develop and improve such businesses in performance, well-being and the environment.
Its partners are Beef + Lamb New Zealand, DairyNZ, the Ministry for Primary Industries, Northland Regional Council and regional development agency Northland Inc.
Planned expenditure is $4 million to $5m, including in-kind support from the partners.
The scheme has 10 clusters running for three financial years in an overlapping time line.
Group one, which is two dairy clusters and one sheep and beef, runs from mid 2017 to 2020.
Group two (with two dairy and two sheep and beef) runs from 2018 to 2021 and group three (all dairy) from 2019 to 2022.
A cluster has five target farms, each with a mentor farmer and five associated farmers.
One professional farm consultant a cluster works with the five target farmers, helped by the mentor farmer.
That’s 35 farms in each cluster – 350 farms out of Northland’s 2000 livestock farms.
Target farmers, mentor farmers and consultants meet about 20 times over the three years and target farmers have to adopt plans, implement improvements and make written reports every two weeks.
They also attend a mark-and-measure course on goal-setting and have whole farm assessments and farm environment plans drawn up with the relevant regional authority or industry-good body.
Associates participate through regular emails, annual field days and associate meetings.
Once a year all participants are invited to a recognition dinner with a motivating guest speaker – last week that was former All Black and Northland businessman Eric Rush, last year it was mental wellness advocate Mike King.
E350 project leader Luke Beehre said the design and delivery acknowledges a broad-brush technique will not work because each farmer is different and needs a tailor-made package.
“We adapt, build in flexibility and contract the right consultants.
“But two simple tools are used in all cases, every time they report – a well-being barometer and an environmental question.”
Target farmers are asked to rank themselves from one to 10 on the well-being barometer.
“The answer is a conversation starter and gets around the reluctance of farmers to talk about themselves.
“The environmental question is along the lines of what has been done on-farm since the last meeting.
“Hopefully, that is a spur to achieve regular work on things that might get shunted by the day-to-day farming tasks.”
Beehre paid tribute to the target farmers because change is always hard, especially in the first 18 months.
Likewise the mentors, who invariably end up doing more than initially outlined though the scheme can’t pay for their input.
“Our funding partners have also put in significantly more than their contractual commitments.”
Recently, the steering group was split in two forming a governance group that meets quarterly and an operational group meeting monthly.
Though the funding partners are part of both groups their representatives are different, with the appropriate skills.
On the administration side Beehre is helped by project manager Liz Campbell and assistant Jan McPhail and that adds up to two full-time equivalents in the budget.
They organised 15 events between February and May, including public field days, mentor training and the recognition dinners.
The database of reports and performance measures is starting to build up, eventually to be evaluated by AgResearch with input from B+LNZ and DairyNZ on technical matters.
E350 chairman Ken Hames, a farming and community leader from Paparoa, said MPI sees Northland as a pilot study on a larger scale to replicate the earlier success of the Northland DairyNZ focus farm experience of Alister and Lyn Candy, Okaihau.
“Then two partner farms that followed proved it wasn’t a fluke – the Lunjevichs in the Far North and the Andersons near Wellsford.
“It may look complicated but really it is a simple cell unit replicated 50 times.
“Where it does get complicated is in the back office for keeping the records and ensuring accountability for public funding.”
Hames said one sticking point is the amount of time needed for a consultant to build a cluster before beginning the three-year term.
For example, nationally recognised consultant Trevor Cook, a Feilding vet, began work before Christmas to meet the July 1 start date for a stage-three cluster.
The other six consultants are Northlanders Tafi Manjala, Gareth Baynham, Kim Robinson, Kim Leigh-MacKenzie, Karla Frost and Neil Smith.
Manjala, who has contracts for two dairy clusters, said the involvement of a wider team for each target farm makes the mode of consultancy different to his normal way of working.
“We get more perspectives, which has advantages and disadvantages, and we always have to bring it back to what is relevant for that farmer.
“The mentor farmers are a powerful influence because they have been there-done that, unlike me.
“Our target farmers have added expectations to put the agreed plans into action because there are several fellow farmers asking about progress.
“At first the target farmers might have low motivation but they catch up to the higher motivation levels of my private clients.”
The E350 concept will travel to other regions, both Hames and Beehre believe, but will need passion among the participants and some local adaptation.
