Helping Kiwi Farmers Get ‘Lean’

When former Toyota engineer Jana Hocken found herself living on a dairy farm in the Manawatu, she soon realised her manufacturing background could come in handy. Now she is on a mission to help other Kiwi farmers become more efficient using ‘lean’ systems.

Dairy farming was the last thing on Jana’s mind when she was enjoying the bright lights of Europe during her previous life as an engineer. Born in the Czech Republic, Jana’s family moved to Christchurch as refugees when she was two years old, then shifted to Australia when she was nine. A gifted student, she studied mechanical engineering at Monash University in Melbourne alongside her twin sister, who did the same degree.

Jana started out working for Toyota in Melbourne as a quality engineer in weld and press, before she and her sister decided to move to Europe. While many expats end up in London, they had their sights set on Belgium. “It just so happened the European headquarters for Toyota were in Belgium, so I managed to get a job there,” she says.

“My sister got a job with Procter and Gamble, who also had their European headquarters over there.” During her five years in Brussels, Jana not only became an expert in the car manufacturer’s famous ‘lean manufacturing’ principles, but she also met her husband Mat Hocken, a Kiwi from a dairy farming family who was working for a European Union policy consultancy. They eventually moved back to Sydney, where Mat worked for the Australian Federal Government in trade finance and Jana worked in management consulting, teaching lean principles to other companies.

Jana says the decision to ditch their big-city corporate careers and move to the Hocken family dairy farm near Feilding was made during a holiday in the Amazon. “We were in these little canoe things for about 10 hours to reach a remote area and the rain was bucketing down on us. We spent a lot of time discussing whether we still wanted corporate careers. Mat was a bit tired of being in the corporate world and we thought, well, why don't we try the farm?” 

The self-professed “city girl” admits the new lifestyle was a massive adjustment for her, having got used to living in places like Sydney, Brussels and even Paris. “It was quite a difference, mainly because I was used to working around a really international crowd, so going to rural New Zealand was a bit of a shock in terms of the mindset. Having said that, being an engineer, I'm quite practical, and I do like nature and animals.”

Mat also took some time to adjust to life on the farm, even though he had grown up there before going to university and joing the corporate world. “I remember coming back and I was there with all the team, and they said, “Oh, just strip these cows and check if they’ve got mastitis.” And I didn’t actually know what stripping a cow was. I had built my career up to a certain point and now I was starting again, but I enjoyed the challenge.” 

As a newcomer to farming, Jana noticed several things that stood out to her as a bit odd. One of them was the long hours people were working, particularly during calving. “It was seven days a week, really long hours. And I thought, “This doesn’t happen really in any other industry. Is it sustainable?” When I was on farm, I would see the same problems pop up over and over again.”

Jana says she had two ‘aha moments’ : one of them occurred when she was heavily pregnant with the first of their three children, driving around the farm late at night in the pouring rain trying to find calving pulleys for Mat to help a distressed cow. The second incident was on Valentine’s Day, sitting on a farm bike watching Mat try to improvise a fix for a broken trough, because he didn’t have the right tools with him.

“There were things like this that would happen, and I just started thinking, “I really have a hunch that the stuff that I’m teaching companies all over the world actually might be relevant to farming”,” Jana says. “And so we started just applying some of the tools, and particularly some of the more strategic as well, like the communication tools; just getting processes on paper so that people understood what was expected.”

Some of the changes they introduced on their farm might seem like no-brainers for those accustomed to the corporate world, such as having team meetings at the same time each week. “We introduced standard work weeks to improve efficiency, because what was happening was we’d have three people show up at the one place to try and do three different tasks, and it just would create duplication and inefficiencies and chaos,” Jana says.

They also installed visual management boards in each of their dairy sheds, a tool Mat says has made it much easier for their staff to keep up with everything that’s happening on- farm. “We've got information on safety, on what's going on this week, the maintenance, schedule, the actions, the problems, the animal health, the milk production, the milk quality, all of this information. Whenever anybody goes into the team room has a cup of tea or has a sit down, that's all there.”

Jana and Mat saw promising results from their new systems, and they were soon approached by their processor, Open Country Dairy, who knew about Jana’s experience with lean. “They said, "Hey, would you be able to develop some training for farmers?" And I thought, "Yeah, okay, why not?" So I did, and we piloted it with about 150 farmers, and actually there was a massive appetite for it. And it just kind of went from there,” she says.

Using their 450ha Grassmere Dairy farm as both a laboratory for lean methods, and a classroom for demonstrating them, Jana quickly expanded the Lean Farm programme and even wrote a book, The Lean Dairy Farm, which she published in 2019. While she initially focused on dairy farming, she has worked with farmers and growers across the sector, including sheep and beef and horticulture. “Although they each have their own unique challenges, they are all facing several common issues,” she says.

For those unfamiliar with lean, Jana says it is a holistic management approach. “It is based on looking at your business in the eyes of a customer, which farmers can find hard to do, and identifying what it is you’re doing that's actually adding value. Anything that doesn't add value is considered waste, and the idea is that you aim to eliminate or reduce that waste as much as possible.”

Jana says lean systems can help all producers, whether the product is cars, milk or blueberries. “The ultimate goal is that you're able to deliver your product in the most efficient, effective way at the lowest cost, with the highest quality, and the safest process, and you are able to tick the box in terms of the highest animal welfare process, the most sustainable and ethical, and environmentally friendly process.”

She admits she encountered some initial scepticism from farmers convinced their way of doing things was the right way, but the overall reaction to her ideas has been positive. “A lot of farmers literally had ‘aha moments’ and said, “You are absolutely right”. I remember talking to this sheep farmer who was probably in his early nineties, and he came up to me at the end of a speaking event I did, and he said, “You are so needed. I could tell you horror stories, this is so important in this industry”.”

New Zealand farmers aren’t the only ones looking to Jana for help. She has advised rural businesses in several countries and has recently been asked to assist the European Union with its ‘Resilience For Dairy’ project. “They've identified that lean is a key strategic enabler to help dairy farmers across the 18 European countries become more resilient and sustainable,” she says. “It just shows that this is actually a proven methodology.”

Despite the strong interest from local farmers exposed to her ideas, Jana says New Zealand and Australian farmers are about 10 years behind Europe and America in adopting lean methods. “Americans absolutely love lean, and so do many countries in Europe. And it's interesting because when you look at their farms, in Ireland and UK and the Netherlands, they have 150 cows maximum. They're tiny family businesses, and yet they see the value that this brings.”

Interest in more efficient farming methods is likely to increase, as Kiwi farmers and growers stare down a number of economic, regulatory and environmental challenges. Mat, who holds several industry roles such as Chairman of the Rural Innovation Lab and independent advisor to MPI’s Sustainable Food & Fibre Futures Fund, says a key aspect driving the need for efficiency is the shift away from relying on rising farm prices to fund expansion.

“Dairy farming for a long period was driven by capital growth,” he says. “You could buy a farm, improve it, work hard, and with capital growth, you could be a successful farmer. You could buy another farm, buy another farm, and as long as you could pay your interest costs, farm values were rising. It's very much flipped around now; you need to be a profitable business. Your capital growth may or may not be there, but the banks and everyone wants to ensure that you are a cashflow-driven business.”

Mat says staffing and people management is another common issue among farmers they work with. “There's a saying, “People join a company but leave because of their manager”. I think people work for farmers and they're good people, but they come across as bad managers. I always say everybody's a bad manager unless you get some process, and if you've got a good process, you actually take a lot of the work off a manager.”

Jana says farmers often ask about how to create a good culture, and the answer is in the processes and systems you have in place, rather than just the people. This was demonstrated when the senior management team of a large South Island farming business came to visit their farm. “We had one of our young guys who's 21, he ran our team meeting in front of them. They were blown away. This guy has had no farming background, but we put him into an environment that has the processes and systems where he's able to develop and thrive.”

With economic conditions remaining tough for many farmers, Jana says cost reduction is a big focus for the sector, and a lean approach can help with this. “What lean focuses on is your internal locus of control, which means the things you can control in your business: what you can do, how you do things, why you do things, when you do things. There's no point complaining about interest rates or what milk prices are doing.

You’ve got no control over that. You need to focus on the internal things that you've got control of.” Jana says a lot of the things she teaches are quite common in other sectors, but many Kiwi farmers have gone straight into farming, so they have never had experience in any other job or different business environment. “They might not be called lean, but it's quite common to have some safety processes around, and HR processes and all these kinds of things. Farmers may never have experienced that, so it's no fault of their own, they just aren't aware of some of the tools that exist.”