Big Drawcard for Corporate Farmers

FarmlandsPRO is not just a game-changer for owner-operator farmers and growers. Larger customers are also showing strong interest in what it can offer.

Farmlands Business Development Manager Sam Connor says the new solution has already become one of his key selling tools when talking to large agribusinesses, such as a large dairy farming group he met with recently who don’t currently work with Farmlands. “The meeting was specifically around FarmlandsPRO. Its functionality was one of the key reasons that they might bring their business across to Farmlands.”

Sam says FarmlandsPRO is unique in the New Zealand marketplace, and what sets it apart is the breadth of functions and tools it offers farmers and growers. “There are other offerings that might have a crossover of one aspect of FarmlandsPRO, but not as an entire product offering. You'd almost describe it as FarmlandsPRO is the iPhone, while some of the other offerings are just the apps within the iPhone.”

In the corporate space, contracting inputs is an important mechanism to fix pricing and guarantee supply out on-farm. FarmlandsPRO gives them the ability to request these contracts as well as view and manage existing contracts, which Sam says will make managing large-scale farming operations much easier. “If we look at nutrition, it gives them live visibility of their total contract allocation as well as how much they've used and what's left.

“Our customers can also request to release off those contracts as well, so if they've got 100 tonnes of products contracted, used 50 tonnes and need another two tonnes for the coming week, they can click the button and request it be delivered out on-farm. They can choose where it is delivered, the farm manager's name and who needs to be notified about the delivery. This really puts all that information into the farmer's pocket on their mobile.”

Another benefit of FarmlandsPRO to corporate farmers is being able to track and compare input usage across multiple farms. “If you’ve got 10 farms of the same size, you might find one of them is using far less product than they should be, or they might be using too much,” Sam says. “It's a prompt for any operations manager to check what’s going on.’”

Although FarmlandsPRO will undoubtedly support greater efficiencies and bulk buying, leading to cost savings for shareholders, Sam says it’s also a great example of Farmlands as a business offering value outside of just pricing. “This is effectively providing the customer with what we see behind our tills, so it's really giving an open book to them on the best possible price available to them and empowering them to make their own strategic buying decisions and control the flow of farm inputs into their business,” he says.

“I speak about it from the dairy space, because that's what I'm focused on. But it relates across arable cropping farms, it relates to sheep and beef, horticulture, everything really.”