“The training was a great exercise.
“It gives you a suite of techniques you can mix and match to tailor to your audience,” Dodunski, who works for Totally Vets at Taumarunui, almost exclusively with farm livestock, said.
“Just to have more tools in your toolbox for interaction with groups is also very useful for my one-to-one interaction with farmer clients too.
“You learn how to ask questions differently and to plant seeds of ideas for people to make decisions, rather than simply putting forward your idea.”
Having grown up on a lifestyle block she always felt cheated at not being raised on a commercial farm. She began an agricultural science degree at Massey until an animal health paper really spun her wheels and she switched to veterinary science, with a focus on agriculture and farm systems.
“I was fortunate to have a far-sighted boss early in my career who got me into extension so I have done a lot of that over the past 15 years. I found that incredibly valuable. It made me aware of the mistakes we make in biffing lots of information at people rather than getting them involved in learning.”
Dodunski’s group is largely concentrating on basic extension around best practice, focused on hill country.
“The group members are all young farm managers or owner-operators in hill country, mainly around Taumarunui. There is no point in learning lots of new stuff if you have not got the basics. They want a really good springboard around applying best practice to our hill country here.
“It is not about big changes. Hill country has limitations on how to manage things like grazing and rotations but it is about learning about how to be successful in our environment here.”
The group has been established for about a year and Dodunski is impressed by members enthusiasm and receptiveness to learning.
“Most recently we have had Josh Verhoek, a science extension officer with Ballance Agri-Nutrients in to talk about nitrogen, which they found very useful. We did a session on feed budgeting because that is my particular soapbox. We also did RMPP’s Taking Ownership of Your Financials workshop, which they thought was great too.
“For our next meeting we are probably looking outside of the farm gate, particularly at McDonald’s. They are very interested to understand where product goes and why.”
