Chris and Teresa Moore
High achieving couple Chris and Teresa Moore have turned goal setting into an art form.
The two former townies have worked their way up in the dairy industry, collected a few accolades on the way, and are now in their second season working as 50:50 sharemilkers. They are milking 600 cows on a 180ha farm between Mamaku and Ngongotaha near Rotorua.
The couple, who won the 2009 National Sharemilker of the Year award, wouldn’t be without the tools of the trade and are not afraid to use different products and systems to boost their business. One of those tools is DairyBase, the national dairy farm business database that lets farmers record and report their business performance.
Teresa Moore says the benefits of DairyBase are plain to see.
“DairyBase is probably your best retrospective and analytical tool that you’ve got for financial and physical data. The data you can get out of it can make huge improvements in your system,” says Teresa.
Using DairyBase to benchmark themselves against other businesses has prompted the Moores to make changes. Analysing their mating results on the DairyBase physical detail report prompted them to overhaul their mating system.
The physical data from DairyBase made it clear to the Moores that they had a long mating period and calving spread, which was affecting their pre-Christmas milk. Having looked at all the data they made an informed decision to reduce their mating period from 16 weeks to 10.
“The DairyBase physical data gave us some really good pointers as to where we could go to make some amendments,” says Teresa.
“It doesn’t take long to go through your data. It’s like anything, the more effort you put into DairyBase analysing your business, the better off you are,” she says.
Every winter Chris and Teresa sit down and set goals. They have 14 focus areas which they can tie back to DairyBase. Staff management is one of those areas.
“We say to ourselves, okay, we did better than last year, our next goal is to hit industry targets or better. Later on down the track we will then use it to retrospectively analyse our system to see if we achieved it or not."
“For example, we can look at whether we should cut back the number of staff we have to enable us to hit some industry averages,” says Teresa.
The couple used DairyBase during the judging process of the 2009 Sharemilker of the Year Awards to identify the strengths and weaknesses of their business.
“The physical data in the areas of reproduction and milk production were extremely helpful, because a lot of the changes we had made, using that data, had huge financial impact,” says Teresa.
DairyBase allows farmers to compare their business, both against others and against themselves over time. The Moores, whose big goal is farm ownership, are looking forward to seeing the impact of decisions they have made reflected in future DairyBase reports.
Teresa wants to see more people use the tool.
“People just need to sit down, with their annual accounts and with their DairyBase information, and just go for gold,” says Teresa.
“Even if you spend an hour looking over your DairyBase results, I can guarantee it will outline some options that could have the potential to change future production and financial output.”