Get your evenings back
Caroline Smith runs her own beef and deer farm near Te Pohue in Hawke’s Bay. Before making the switch to Cloud Farmer several years ago Caroline had at least five different notebooks for recording stock movements, treatments, spraying and one for the dogs, cats and horses. Now all she has is her smart phone, which is always with her.
After a long day Caroline would get home and have to write up what she’d done that day, “I’d get distracted at night with the kids and think I’ll write that up in a minute. Two days later I’d come back to it and think shit what did I do”. With Cloud Farmer Caroline is able to enter info on the spot, “once I’ve weighed and drenched the animals I’ll make an entry straight into Cloud Farmer before packing up out of the yard. Once I’ve finished for the day, I really have finished for the day.” says Caroline.
Stress free compliance
Spending an extra five or 10 minutes every time Caroline does something on farm pays off by making audit time a stress-free event. “MPI were most impressed when they came to do an audit. I was able to quickly show them records for chemical inventory, my stock treatments, the diary/notices—they were amazed and just ticked everything off!” says Caroline.
Embrace technology
Caroline was quick to adopt Cloud Farmer after a neighbour mentioned it to her, it was a no brainer and complemented what she was already doing on farm “we already use a bit of technology on farm, I use a drone a lot and have sensors on all of the water tanks and we use the Cash Manager app.” Caroline likes apps because they make her life easier—she looked at other farming software but it had too much analysis and IQ for what she needed, “Cloud Farmer doesn’t tell you how to farm, we tell it what to do.” says Caroline. Cloud Farmer has streamlined the recording of day-to-day farm info on Chipinga, her advice to other farmers is, “you should have done it ages ago. Take up the free trial and see for yourself how good it is”.