Scheme helping to upskill farm advisors

Usually their reminiscing doesn’t stand up to the harsh light of reality. But sometimes, just sometimes, that torch reveals a truth.

There was a ‘good old days’ in my profession, a time when a farmer had ready access to advice about a change to the industry or the impact of a new technology or regulation on his or her business. That advice came from farm management professionals, people with decades of experience who had built a powerful repository of primary sector knowledge.

State deregulation and commercialisation during the 1990s saw its demise, and for many years the primary sector struggled against that huge swell of change, struggled to find solid ground.

Thankfully, that precious resource has been rebuilt, just in time for New Zealand’s farmers to tackle a new and very different wave.

It was all so different in the 1990s: the average farm had about 150 cows and ran a pasture-only system, staff management involved a chat with a couple of workers over a pot of tea, and precision agriculture was getting the milking done on time.

Today the average herd numbers at least 400, the modern dairy farm uses a wide variety of feed inputs and many farms have a lot more staff to manage.

Also, the operating environment is very different.

Environmental compliance, human resource management, increasing consumer expectations, health and safety regulation, volatility of product price and increasing requirements for governance are all examples of the changing workplace for the dairy farmer.

Then there’s the advance and opportunity of new technology -- big data, analytics and the much-hyped precision agriculture.

Farmers have a lot on their plates and for a long time they’ve had little to lean on, but that has changed because of hard work and innovative thinking by the Ministry for Primary Industries and organisations such as DairyNZ, who recognised the vacuum of knowledge and the implications for the industry in an environment of shifting consumer expectations and growing compliance.

Notably, the Transforming the Dairy Value Chain (TDVC) Primary Growth Partnership programme has implemented a national strategy of change on an unprecedented scale.

The programme is a seven-year, $170 million innovation investment led by commercial partners, including DairyNZ and Fonterra, and partnered by the Ministry for Primary Industries.

Over the past few years the programme has supported the upskilling of hundreds of rural professionals to help them tackle this new wave of compliance and opportunity. The work has restored and accelerated the capability and capacity of this important part of the primary sector.

This campaign of rebuilding has also involved veterinarians, research and training institutes, fertiliser companies and regional councils.

My own company AgFirst has helped provide that knowledge for rural professionals and has benefited in the rise in industry reputation and employment opportunities. We have benefited from TDVC support in an unprecedented accreditation process that emphasises best practice, provision of training and development programmes for rural professionals, and the creation of an environment where we can contribute more to building smarter, profitable and more sustainable businesses.

The work of DairyNZ, the NZ Institute of Primary Industry Management and leading farm management consultancy firms in developing the Dairy Farm Systems accreditation process is a good example of this endeavour – assessing the attainment of a minimum set of skills required to be a competent dairy farm systems consultant.

It involves a set of online assessment modules, submission of a detailed whole farm assessment report on a case study farm, and verification of competence by farmer referrals.

The farmer benefits through a whole farm assessment that can potentially dramatically lift productivity and profit, while ensuring the business meets its environmental obligations. The industry benefits by getting better, more educated advice.

This is just one example of how farmers, the environment and the wider economy have much to gain from this collaborative effort. There are many others.

• James Allen is managing director of AgFirst Waikato Ltd and chairman of AgFirst NZ.