Our Services

At Agribusiness Concepts, we ask you 4 questions.

1. What does success look like?

Let’s think about what the ideal result looks like - If a new approach works for you, what could you achieve? HINT: quite often we don't have the answer and it's only when someone asks us that we are prompted to explore and come up with a new solution.

 

2. What problem needs solving?

A problem well understood is 90% solved, so let us explore and better understand the issue.

 

3. What do we stop doing?

A hard one - we are very good at giving ourselves another job.
What tasks, that upon review, do not contribute enough.

 

4. What else should I know? Is there an elephant in the room?

The story is relayed where the chair of a significant publicly listed entity says to his CEO “tell me what I don’t want to know”.
Quite clearly the question is framed in such a way that the CEO can openly communicate the issues that are uncomfortable, but when placed on the agenda, are resolved and make a fundamental difference to the organisation’s performance. 

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Consulting

Family Boards

Livestock Intelligence

The foundation step is to make sure you can ask yourself the essential question, do I know where my business is, and where is it going?

It all starts with understanding your balance sheet - a simple statement.

As a farmer, you oversee a multi-faceted and dynamic business with lots of moving parts. We will encourage you to think like the CEO of a significant business, because you are.

You are responsible for finance, biology, agronomy, economics, engineering, fertility, and people.

An essential process of any successful business is maintaining oversight of all the variables that, when harnessed, accelerate the business and deliver to the most important shareholder, you.

We will

  • Ensure your financial management processes are in place
  • Help you develop an appropriate business strategy
  • Provide a business oversight

 

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The decision to enact a family board with the ability to facilitate effective decision making is a powerful one.

It provides an environment where significant strategic development can be explored and encourages decisions that fundamentally improve  your business performance.  By including an external chair or non-executive participant, you introduce skills and experience that you do not currently have, as well as a ‘fresh pair of eyes’. 

A Board environment provides a process to deal with those hard but significant issues, when resolved, take the business forward.

The Board has several tasks which are primarily to:

  1. Guide strategy development
  2. Allocate resources
  3. Monitor performance
  4. Ensure compliance with appropriate legislation.

It also performs one other significant undertaking - it sets the risk appetite and ensures that the risks to which the business is exposed and the processes set to manage those risks, are identified.

A Family Advisory Board facilitates the risk  / return debate and asks what is an acceptable return for the risk it undertakes.

If any of the above comments trigger a reaction in you, it may mean that these issues are relevant to your business and a Board may be a valuable addition to your enterprise.

Importantly, a Board is a support mechanism to the principal decision maker which can be a lonely place.
 

The adoption of an Individual Animal Management (IAM) approach is a significant opportunity to change agricultural inventory management. With higher values currently being experienced for livestock, understanding, and managing, that investment and associated risk is a critical business process.

It's more than buying hardware, it's changing your business processes.

It’s about looking at a livestock business more intensely and objectively identifying productive animals.

Some questions you can ask are:

  • What is my ideal animal, for example?
    • A 280 kg heifer that joins, calves in Oct – Dec and re breeds
    • A 65 kg ewe that weans 22 kg (carcase weight) at 15 weeks
       
  • As a sheep producer what are the benefits by lifting my weaning percentage to 143%
  • Can I reconcile my livestock inventory?
  • How many animals by class do I own?
  • Is there a trading enterprise, can you track weight gain, profit per head per day, and monitor buy / sell relationships over time?
  • Do you have a process for identifying fertility performance?
  • Can you identify performance relationships i.e. fertility / body weight / condition score?

We can help you build an Individual animal management plan for both sheep and cattle.

For sheep, our philosophy is guided by the Precision Sheep guidelines and the research developed by Richards, Semple & Atkins with a view to identifying the top and bottom 25% by growth, fertility, carcase, and fleece.