Rob Macnab – Agribusiness Advisor At Total Ag Ltd.
Challenges
- Accessing and sharing farm information
- Making staff accountable/responsible
- If too much time is spent communicating, not enough time is spent doing
- Dealing with staff moving on – they take all their experience and information with them
Benefits
- Less time looking for information and more opportunities to act on it
- Staff take responsibility and ownership for getting the job done
- Communication is more productive
- The diary function is a rich source of historical information for new recruits, allowing them to see what happened, when, and what the results were
Objective
Rob Macnab’s role as an Agribusiness Adviser deals with the total farm system: budgets; feed profiles; recruitment; strategies etc. Day-to-day that means he spends a lot of time sitting at the kitchen table with farmers, giving them confidence to farm so they can get on and do what they do really well.
As a tool to connect all levels of a farming operation, Rob needs to be able to recommend a farming software solution that’s highly flexible. It needs to be accessible remotely, and wherever you’re located across the country. It also needs to be easy to use – both from an input perspective and for those who need to manipulate the information stored. Finally it needs to be highly adaptable to the broad range of information that needs to be captured – from farm diaries to stock levels to health and safety reports – and great value for money.
The Cloud Farmer Solution
“Cloud Farmer fits the bill of being a repository of information so everybody’s got the same information to work from. It works very very well in a corporate sense, especially its interconnectivity and functioning remotely.”
Cloud Farmer allows information to be easily captured and shared across all aspects of the farming operation. Once data is stored in Cloud Farmer it’s easy for everyone involved to access the information they need at a moment’s notice.
Diaries, task setting and communication tools make it easier and more efficient to communicate across a farming business. Better communication comes with more accountability. When everyone knows what should be happening; the focus becomes on getting it done and doing it right.
Adding Cloud Farmer to a farming operation doesn’t just make it easier to capture data; it also makes it easier to deal with time consuming tasks like recruitment and audits. The diary function makes the handover of roles easier as there’s both history and accountability for new people joining the farm. Audits become as simple as generating a report before the auditor arrives.
Benefits
Cloud Farmer is improving farm performance.
“Cloud Farmer is empowering our people to take real ownership of their jobs.”
Farm staff are more accountable to the tasks they are given and have more visibility of their own impact on results. Diary functions and task setting make it easier to track what everyone is doing.
Cloud Farmer is making time more productive.
“I can make sure I’ve read the Farm Manager’s diary before I speak to him so we can use our time more productively. It unburdens the Farm Manager if he writes it down because it becomes my responsibility to read it.
Rob used to spend his time chasing information but when a farm signs up to Cloud Farmer; he can spend his time interpreting it instead. Farm Managers no longer have to produce monthly written reports because the data can be extracted from Cloud Farmer. When Rob sits down with a Farm Manager they both already know everything they need to know about performance – so they can focus their time on improving business instead.
We used to expect written reports from Farm Managers every month. By using Cloud Farmer we don’t need them to do that anymore. By entering the data and keeping the diary up-to-date they’ve already done it.”
Cloud Farmer is improving communications, at all levels of the farming business.
“For us, Cloud Farmer means less time discussing things and more time getting things done.
Cloud Farmer is cutting down the communication time. For example when the trustees go out on the farm and have a list of things they want to do, they can put it into Cloud Farmer and that means we don’t need to have a formal meeting where they tell us that. We know that they wanted 5 actions to occur and 4 out of the 5 have been done now and the 5th one has a plan around it so everyone is a lot more comfortable.”
Cloud Farmer reduces the negative impact of staff leaving.
The driver for getting Cloud Farmer was that all the information resided with the Farm Manager and when he left there was a huge gap. We knew we couldn’t allow that to happen again and that was a key driver to get Cloud Farmer.