Farmers adapting to risks and markets (FARM) project

So, John Hickson, living at Baldry here, Castle Hill. We bought this place sort of 16 months ago and we're just trying to learn how to farm it really profitably.  

Yeah, so we're running a kind of self-replacing Merino enterprise here, joining shade over half of our years to a terminal. 

And then we're trading cattle opportunistically on the side. We tend to sell our terminal lambs as stores, kind of at the end of spring, whenever spring cuts out, and then keeping Merino wethers, usually shearing them once and selling them. It's the system that we're trying here, but we're probably going to change that a bit over the next few years as we get used to a new environment really. 

 I feel like there's probably always been pressures in farming. Farmers have probably always dealt with variable climates. Feel like if you wanted an easy industry or lifestyle, maybe you wouldn't always go and pick farming. 

But over a long term, as a long-term investment, farming, or agriculture in general, and land has been a good vehicle to accumulate wealth. 

My experience in the southern environments is very limited. We joined the local benchmarking group to try and see how we're comparing against other people in the district that are running similar enterprises. 

For us being new to the district, there's a lot of benefit in that, in not just comparing, I suppose, it's actually seeing what enterprises are profitable. We've got a lot to learn, and see how other people are doing stuff, and trying to find a few people we might follow a bit more closely talk to, contacts, and how are you doing it, and trying to design systems that will work well for us too. 

We don't have any local knowledge really, and so, as Dad said, we're trying to learn about a southern system. 

So we're probably trying to fast-track to that 50 years of experience, or 30 years of experience that we don't have here. So yeah, I feel like that going off farm and speaking to people is really important for us. 

You could speak to 50 people in this area and get 50 different opinions about what we should be doing, but you go in there and you see how everyone's actually going, and you can ask the people who are actually doing well and go, "Well, what, why did this work? Why did this not work?" And see past the noise a bit. 

We're dealing with actual data in there, and so you can go to the pub, you can go to the football and, you know, everyone's sold the top price pen of lambs or the top price pen of calves, but that doesn't necessarily translate to profit. I think a lot of it has come back to that productivity's a big part of it, and price is something largely out of our control. 

So you find that actually we're always talking about price, but it's really production and working out how to run the actual numbers of stock that are going to make us profitable, and trying to do that in the least cost manner, I think, and keeping your costs under control, and also keeping yourself are sort of, what would you call, resilient against tough seasons. 

Well, I think everyone will learn a lot from each other for, you know, why numbers are good, why numbers are bad, and we'll find there's a lot of stories to all that.  

Every industry like there's access to so much data and one of our problems is so much data you can put in every platform but you spend a lot of time trying to put all this data in and sometimes it's not actually in a usable format to get back out or something that's actually adding any value to your business. 

Whereas by putting this data into the benchmarking group we're hoping to get out, probably looking at the key figures or the key performance indicators that we want to look at for our business.  

Hopefully we can fast track a few mistakes and learn from other people what they've done well and what they've done wrong. 

And really learn what I suppose decisions or what things in this environment are really driving profit and what the best producers around here are doing that's really making them successful compared to say the average. 

Yeah, so probably just trying to look at those best performers and yeah, potentially model a business or pick out the parts of their business that we want to model here on farm. 

So I hope we're in three years' time we're well on that track, we're a profitable business and we're in a position where we can expand our business. 

I'm Andrew. I'm one part of a family farming business in the Central Tablelands with my brother Stuart and mother and father. 

If somebody asked me what I wanted to do when I grow up, all I wanted to do was be a farmer. 

What else would you want to do? 

I wanted to leave school in year six and, and be a farmer, and Dad said, "No, it's a bit early yet." 

Anyway, it's what I love doing. I've always done it. I don't know why I love it, but it beats working for a living, I suppose. 

Doesn't mean we always get it right, but at the end of the day, this is where we've grown up, and, yeah, love spending a life trying to grow a life.  

Self-replacing Merino enterprise is the main thing we do. Add in some Hereford cows and some trade cattle and higher rainfall. Trying to match the right wools of those Merinos to the weather we have. 

The old saying that farming's a lifestyle has never sat very well with us because if that was the case, you'd just be doing it not to make a dollar out of it and just for the fun of it. 

But farming is... yeah. Some people get surprised, oh, farming's a business. Well, of course it is. There's a lot of money tied up in it. So to do it well, to do it better, as well as enjoying every bit of that, yeah, it's a good lifestyle. It's a hard job, but we enjoy it so much. But you just want to make that enjoyable business a profitable business. 

We've just signed up our family business here for the next three years with the Local Land Services benchmarking program. I'm really excited to see where it can take our business.  

It wasn't that our old systems weren't working, it's just that we knew we could do better. Yeah. And so with our monitoring, I think we had a bit of fatigue and frustration about what information we had and how we were going to use it. 

We could anecdotally tell you roughly what parts of our business were taking our time and what was taking our money and what was giving us our money. When the LLS program came up, after talking about wanting to be in a benchmarking program for some time, we saw it as a great opportunity to be in with peers from our local environment who had similar enterprises, similar enterprise mix, and get involved in a good group of people. 

We know a lot of information, and not bringing some rigor around how we measure that information and react to it can actually become frustrating in you know that you want to get an outcome out of some data, but you're just missing a few key points, and it'd be great to have a bit of guidance around some of that.  

Measuring more to manage better to get to a point where we can improve our business, improve our minds. 

Get a better idea of where we're going as a long-term plan, as a business.  

Personally, I want to see more environmental resilience in our business. Along with the resilience in our business will come a resilience for our own relationships as business partners. We have to get along or the business won't work. 

So we enjoy having time away from the farm from time to time, and we need to do that without the guilt. I'd like to hope we can, we can turn those, other factors that we can't control, markets and weather, into good profits here into a profitable year and future years, and use that knowledge we pick up in this year or two and keep building that knowledge on top of that for future years to come, and pass it on to our children as they become involved in the business. 

In three years' time, I'd love to see us have more systems and processes in place so as that we can have the freedom and confidence to step away from our business when we like, and still have a profitable enterprise running and, have the forefront the happiness of all the business partners.