Rob Evans
Smedley Station
Managing a 5,000ha sheep, beef and deer farm whilst training 22 cadets is no easy feat. Rob Evans discusses how FarmIQ is helping the team at Smedley Station run a more efficient and effective farming operation while providing the cadets with valuable on the job experience.
Smedley Station
Rob Evans
Location: Hawkes Bay
Farm area: 5,554ha
Farm type: sheep, beef and deer
"One of the big drivers to start using FarmIQ was to expose the cadets to the software so they can go out and use it in their jobs once they leave here...I could obviously see the benefits for the young people, but I could also see the benefits for our staff as well," says Rob.
Increased visibility
Before FarmIQ, Smedley Station wasn't using a lot of technology—relying solely on a monthly stock rec and feed budget on a piece of paper which Rob would manually load into the computer. Having FarmIQ means records are updated daily giving Rob increased visibility of what’s happening on farm. He can now see what’s happening on all three blocks whenever he needs to.
Increased visibility means he can now make calls such as purchasing and selling stock right there and then, rather than wasting time working out what is going on and talking to different members of his team.
“There’s no point having an EID animal running around out there and not using the data when we’re recording it anyway, we might as well put it into the system where we can track it. That’s where FarmIQ is really easy and anyone can on a smart phone can do it, pretty sure even my father could even do it.”
“FarmIQ takes the guesswork out of decision making, because all of the information we need is right there."
- Rob Evans, Smedley Station
More decisive decision making
"There's no point having an EID animal running around out there and not using the data when we're recording it anyway. We might as well put it in FarmIQ where we can graph it and track it."
With all this valuable data at his fingertips, Rob can review animal performance with his stock managers to work out what is happening on farm now and make the right calls about what to do next.
“FarmIQ takes the guesswork out of decision making, because all of the information we need is right there. For example, if our weight gains have gone through the roof, we can decide we don’t need to go chasing the big weight gains. We can pull them back and use the feed on the stock that needs it most. We are in the position to make that call because what we’ve got in FarmIQ is showing us that we’ve already hit our targets or are above them.”
Audit time is a breeze
Having animal records available not only helps the team at Smedley track their progress, it also makes life a lot easier when the auditor comes knocking. Not only is everything all stored in one place, FarmIQ also automatically populates a range of templates and reports that reduce the time burden of compliance.
“Rather than having to find a book and a calendar, we can just pull up FarmIQ and go well here’s all our animal health, everything’s right here, batch numbers, the whole works, all loaded."
“I’d definitely recommend using FarmIQ, just from what we’ve got out of it in a short time and what we can see it doing is pretty big.”
