"You can be a busy fool in farming. 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 Severn, Southland farmer
Tom Severn came to dairy farming from outside the industry, learning the trade from scratch with his wife while raising three children under five.
Balancing farm and family life hasn't been easy, which is why Tom focuses on taking the uncertainty out of his business by fixing things and working smarter — gaining better visibility over what he's doing, and validating that the effort he's putting in is getting back a return.
James Harvey from McCulloch & Partners is key to gaining that line of sight. Working from the same Figured file, Tom and James can see how feed inputs are translating into production, check stock numbers on their phones, and map out where the business will land in the future instead of just waiting to see how last season finished.
Watch their story to see how Tom and James use Figured to create a road map for the farm, building towards a business Tom can eventually step back from to spend more time with his kids.
Transcript
Tom: There's never a dull day in dairy farming. There's always something that wants to kill your cows, break machinery, or the weather just wants to put you off doing anything. Farmers are most likely always under duress, right? They're always quite tired. You don't know when you go and catch up with them at 10:00 a.m. if they've been up since 5:00 or they've been up since 9:30.
James: Tom came into dairy farming from outside dairy farming, so he's had to jump into the space without having that knowledge. 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.
Tom: I'd be naive to think that to run a farm, Kate and I can do it just by ourselves. We need to lean on trusted partners. We couldn't do it without the McCulloch & Partners team. Crikey, I'd make some hell of a poor decisions on tax.
James: 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." But that means nothing to a net profit when you have to take into consideration drawings, bank repayments, and again, performance on farm.
Tom: James has queried me, can you do more cows? Can you milk more of this? And I say, well, geez, we're tapped out — or yeah, possibly. So they understand, like, well, actually, where can you get more benefits? You can be a busy fool in farming. 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: 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. 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.
We came here with a one-year-old and a three- and a four-year-old. So that was tough — to manage your family as well as have to learn something from scratch.
James: You know how hard that is when they're one and two, a few years old. And then Tom, I can give them a bit of a boost that's going to get better, and it has. I think that's key — it's not just talking about their business but also talking off-farm, and also just making sure they've got a balance, a balance of life.
Tom: I'm 40 now, so 10 years' time our eldest will be 18. I'd like to be able to step away and be a bit more passive, bit more available for the kids.
You've got a lot at stake as a farmer. 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. Yeah.
Learn more about how connected farm teams are solving planning challenges in NZ dairy by downloading our Dairy Insights Brief.
