In farming, effort on its own doesn’t guarantee progress. Farmers and their accountants need to know how to turn hard work into ground gained, building a road map that takes more uncertainty out of farming. That’s exactly what this Southland farmer is doing.
The problem in dairy farming is that someone can work twice as hard as the farmer next door and finish the season in exactly the same place.
While it’s an industry that requires hard work, the amount of effort doesn’t always repay itself. To better understand how to apply that hard work in a way which creates the most return, farmers need to know their numbers at each moment, whereas most of the time they arrive months after the work is done.
For farmers, it means their biggest calls of the year are often made on instinct, not data. And for the accountants and advisers supporting them, it means that by the time they are brought into the conversation, the big decisions have already been made.
Southland dairy farmer Tom Severn is trying to do things differently. Along with his accountant, James Harvey from McCulloch & Partners, he’s taking more uncertainty out of his farm business by focusing on visibility and planning ahead. Or, as Tom puts it, making it easier “to get up at those early hours because you know that day it’s going to be financially successful.”
On most farms, the financial picture describes a season that’s already finished. A budget would have been built at the beginning of the year (though often discarded later as it goes stale), but by year end the really useful data comes from the production information that has to be assembled in hindsight.
This isn’t a failure of effort from anyone on the farm team. Compliance work is retrospective by design: accurate and necessary, but pointed backwards. The accountant produces a thorough account of where the farm has been, and the farmer receives it months after the decisions it might have shaped.
Nothing about this feels broken at the time. But when a mid-year decision can’t wait and you don't have the numbers to back up any one path, it's a real gap.
The simple reality is, you can’t plan for future decisions when you’re only looking in the rearview mirror.
Learn more: Building a Farm Team to Navigate the Road Ahead
Tom Severn arrived from outside the industry, moving to Southland with his wife Kate and three children under five. They now run a dairy farm together, a business he had to learn from scratch, supported by James Harvey, a partner at McCulloch & Partners in Invercargill.
“He's had to jump into the space without having that knowledge,” said James. “And I'd say what makes it click for him is he understands the drivers of the farm and he's able to look at those drivers and then take those drivers into the financial part of the business, which is key.”
“You can be a busy fool in farming,” said Tom. “You can do a lot of stuff and not actually make any ground any better than the next person who's doing half as much work.”
Tom describes his farming goal as building a business he can step back from, becoming more “passive” so he has more time to spend with his kids. In order to achieve that goal, he knows he needs to be able to measure what he’s doing against a result while there’s still time for him to change course.
James and the team at McCulloch & Partners understand that they also play an important role in this.
“You can be that typical accountant where you can just look at the numbers and tell them, ‘You’ve had a good year because the profit looks good’,” said James. “But that means nothing to net profit when you have to take into consideration drawings, bank repayments, and again, performance on-farm.”
Key to Tom’s goals is having access to live data, which comes through Figured.
When both Tom and James are looking at the same live view, which they can access on their phones, it removes the admin that usually sits between a question and answer. As Tom puts it, James doesn’t need to ring him to ask for a stock rec, because he can already see it.
From there, they can also start to build out a plan of what the future looks like, creating a road map for the farm that helps Tom know that the effort he puts in today will have a material benefit to the farm tomorrow.
“By mapping out what you're doing on Figured, you can see: right, I'm doing this, this is the result, this is our feed inputs, this is the output from the cows,” he said. “I use Figured probably too much. I use it a lot. I log in on my phone a lot. It's an awesome tool for me to road map our year.”
“We just try and take a whole lot of uncertainty out of it by fixing things. That's the basis of it. If we know we get a certain return by fixing this many things and we just need to farm, it's a lot easier to get up at those early hours because you know that day it's going to be financially successful.”
For NZ accountants and farming teams, Figured handles the compliance work while keeping production data connected to the same financial plan, so it stays current through the season rather than being rebuilt at the end of it. For dairy farms, that means:
The result is a shared position. Farmer and accountant open the same file and see the same numbers on the same day.
The outcome for farmers is that they can see where the season is tracking at all times. When it comes time to review a payout or make a stock decision, the impact on cashflow is visible straight away and the plan updates around it.
The outcome for accountants is that it makes their work more cost effective, more efficient, and much easier to scale across clients. When you don’t have to scrounge for information before a client call, or rebuild an old spreadsheet, you can spend more time offering meaningful advice, generating more value for the farmer and improving that long-term relationship.
Learn more: Why Succession Planning Is New Zealand's Next Big Advisory Opportunity
Tom and James aren’t outliers. Across New Zealand, more dairy teams are shifting from a financial picture that reports the season past to one that helps them navigate the season coming.
“You've got a lot at stake as a farmer,” said Tom. “It's a little bit bigger than your house mortgage. You've got to remember that. Yeah, because there's things out of your control. Sometimes success is just to get through without having a divorce.”
To read more about the three things forward-looking dairy farm teams do differently, download our free Dairy Insights Brief.