Industry good - DairyNZ

from Dairy Farmer NZ June 2022

Milk Monitor Rising costs will be challenging

DairyNZ’s new GoDairy, Go Now campaign is highlighting the benefits of working in dairy and the opportunities available to jobseekers.

Go dairying, go now

Jane Muir

DairyNZ solutions and development leader advisor

With calving just around the corner, filling any gaps in your team is likely to be top of mind right now.

Unemployment is at a historical low and many sectors, including dairy, are finding it tough to get staff. Getting both Kiwis and international workers onto dairy farms in time for calving is a priority for us all.

To help attract Kiwis, DairyNZ’s new GoDairy, Go Now campaign is highlighting the benefits of working in dairy and the opportunities available to jobseekers. It also points candidates to the latest sector vacancies.

The campaign is helping raise the profile of the jobs available and it’s then up to farmers to ensure those are great jobs.

In such a competitive job market it’s important that your job ad is accurate and appealing. As people increasingly seek work-life balance, there’s a growing expectation that roles will offer good rosters and hours. Adding in factors like flexible milking, development opportunities and a competitive salary package will make roles more appealing and help you attract quality staff.

Coming up with fresh ideas on how to improve your workplace – to both attract new staff and keep the ones you have – is a challenge. But I encourage you to explore what you could do to attract and keep good people.

DairyNZ has a new webinar on recruitment and retention online that has some great tips from other farmers and a rural recruitment specialist. Visit www.dairynz.co.nz/ffseries

Where farmers are struggling to fill a position locally, workers can come into New Zealand through the dairy border class exception.

Sustained advocacy by DairyNZ led to the Government increasing the number of international dairy workers. For 2022, the number increased from 300 to 800. The minimum wage requirement for these international workers is $28.

The process is much simpler than last year, as there are no isolation or MIQ requirements. There is also no cap on farm assistant numbers. With air travel opening up again, booking flights is becoming easier too.

If you will need an international worker on board this spring, we recommend you apply now to allow time to work through immigration processes.

If you have an on-farm dairy role available, list it at nzfarmsource.co.nz/jobs

You can list a vacancy, even if you’re not a Fonterra supplier. The campaign we have underway now directs job applicants to farm positions advertised on Farm Source.

If you’re having trouble filling a role, and want to apply to bring an international worker into NZ, the dairy class exception visa is a good option to consider. The visa is currently the only pathway to bring in international workers. n

with DairyNZ

Nurturing strong women

By Cheyenne Nicholson

The diagnosis of a rare type of cancer has led a Waikato farmer to establishing a business to help others.

Putting yourself out there on social media for the world to see can be daunting and comes with an abundance of challenges, but one Reporoa dairy farmer is doing just that to create an environment for rural women to work on their fitness and be connected.

Sarah Martelli never set out to be a personal trainer, but it turns out it’s become her calling in life, as has a life on the land.

Growing up a townie in Mt Maunganui, it took a chance meeting in a London pub with a Kiwi farmer to start her on her path to the land and eventually to starting her health and fitness business.

“I was overseas on my OE and met my husband Mathew in London when we were 21 years old. We spent the next four years living in the UK and travelling around Europe before we came back, and I met his family and saw the farm for the first time,” Martelli says.

Not quite ready to settle down into life on the family farm just yet, the couple did a stint in Melbourne. Mathew decided to do his building apprenticeship to qualify as a builder, while Sarah went into the travel industry working for Flight Centre.

But after four more years of city life, the cows were calling and Mathew decided it was time for them to head back to New

Zealand to work the family farm.

After eight seasons on the family farm, they got the opportunity to enter into an equity partnership with his parents to purchase a small farm in Reporoa to begin the next chapter of their farming careers.

“Mathew’s brother took over the family farm from us. His parents have always been very supportive of all the kids, so when it came to succession planning, the conversations were very open and honest from the beginning. We feel very grateful for everything they have done for our whole family,” she says.

Their 141ha farm is home to 380 cows and is predominantly run by Mathew and two full-time staff, with Sarah oncall for the busier times of year. For the most part, her time is tied up in juggling kids’ activities, school and community involvement and her business, Strong Woman.

Strong Woman was born out of both life challenges and her keen eye for a gap in the market. 2015 saw her embark on a battle with a rare type of cancer called Choriocarcinoma, which turned her life upside down.

“In a nutshell, it was a horrid time and I wouldn’t wish chemotherapy on my worst enemy. It’s an ordeal that changed me forever, but I guess it was the catalyst behind Strong Woman and how my life is today,” she says.

During her journey, she went from fit and happy to barely able to walk to the letterbox. Wanting to take her life back into her own hands, once officially cancer-free in April 2016, she started on her health and fitness journey. She shared everything on Facebook in the hopes of helping and inspiring other women to get fit and healthy, the foundation and the why behind Strong Woman.

Taking things a step further, she decided to go back and study to become a certified personal trainer so she could help other women with their journeys.

“The thing with life is the days pass you by anyway. A lot of people are a bit

Waikato farmer Sarah Martelli was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer called Choriocarcinoma and she has since set up a business called Strong Women.

cautious of going back to study as adults and say ‘oh, but I’ll be such and such an age by the time I finish studying’. The way I see it, whether you do the study or not, you’ll still be that age in however many years. So if you’re working towards doing something you love, you have to go for it,” she says.

She also noticed the gap in her local community of places for rural women to go if they wanted to work out.

“Living rurally, especially with having kids, who has got the time to drive into town to go to a gym? It’s so hard to make the time when you’re pulled in so many directions. Farm life can also be quite isolating, so I wanted to create this community where women could feel supported, make friends and feel like they belong.”

So Strong Woman found its niche, rural women. It started out as a local venture teaching fitness classes on the local school sports field. Over the past five years it has turned into an online members’ community that runs group fitness classes and personal training sessions.

“There are some big players in the world of online fitness now. For me, I’ve realised that I want to keep what I’m doing on the smaller side of things so it can be a more personal experience. Obviously I want my business to grow, but not too big that our members feel like just another number. Keeping the personal contact with ladies is really important to me,” she says.

While she has the technical knowledge of personal training, she has had to enlist some help on other parts of the business. Not being very “techy”, initially her biggest challenge was getting a website set up. She enlisted the help of a friend’s sister, a website developer, to make her website and ensure it was done right the first time.

“My biggest learning from this whole business journey is that if you don’t know how to do something, source someone who does and get it done properly,” she says.

Having already garnered a good social media following, the marketing largely took care of itself, but it took some time for her to grow in confidence both in herself and to hit the post button.

“I look at my first video I posted compared to a recent one, and I can see the change in confidence. When I first started filming things, I had no clue what I was doing,” she says.

“Camera angles and audio recordings were all so foreign. It’s so hard to film yourself working out and then chuck it on the internet. But over time, the more I did it, and the more I started to view myself as an expert in what I was doing, the easier it got.”

Her audience and clients appreciate her down-to-earth nature and her ability to share the ups and downs that life throws at her. But she discovered quickly that if you’re going to exist in the digital world, you have to grow a thick skin.

“There will always be critical people out there, and you have to figure out ways of dealing with that. For me, it’s just logging out sometimes and setting boundaries. Social media can consume you if you let it, and you have to live in your real life more than your digital one,” she says.

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Sarah Martelli helps out on the farm during busy times such as calving.

Like many new business owners, enlisting the help of a business mentor was highly recommended and something she wanted to do to really refine her niche and the direction she wanted to take the business. But like finding the right partner in life, finding the right business mentor can take some finding.

“I initially found a mentor who I think I just didn’t relate with that well and didn’t really have an understanding of the rural communities I work in. They wanted to take the business in one direction and I saw it going in another. While the relationship didn’t work, it did clarify things for me a bit, and I learnt that lesson that you shouldn’t take the first mentor that comes your way. You have to find someone you gel with,” she says.

With the addition of her certificate in exercise nutrition, she has been able to broaden her offerings to clients and help women be the healthiest version of themselves.

“I love nutrition coaching because I spend time with these ladies, they trust me, and I really feel like I’m making a difference in their lives and their families’ lives. Our kids watch our every move, so they’re picking up on the healthy habits their mums are learning, so it has a really positive flow on effect,” she says.

Looking back at the last five years, she says she wishes she could go back in time and tell her past self about the importance of setting boundaries and just how wedded to her diary she would become. As often happens with new business owners, she lived and breathed Strong Woman when she first started, working feverishly on every new idea, posting on social media and all the behind the scenes business things.

“Life really is about balance, and in the early days I often let work consume me. I’m getting better though, I’ve established boundaries like putting my phone away at nighttime. Having downtime from devices is

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Strong Women is a health and fitness business born out of both life challenges and Sarah Martelli’s keen eye for a gap in the market.

important on many levels and it’s also about setting a good example for my kids,” she said.

As a pro-planner, she schedules everything in her diary, even down to her ‘me time’.

“You have to make ‘me time’, whatever that looks like, a priority. So treat it like a meeting or an appointment. I’m lucky with Strong Woman because it’s flexible, and I can make it fit around whatever else is happening in life.”

During both her cancer and business journeys she has come to cherish and appreciate the amazing support of the rural community. As an active member of Dairy Women’s Network and Rural Women NZ, she’s made connections and friendships that have played a big part in her life.

“Everyone knows someone who can help you out or give advice, and I really encourage other women starting businesses in the rural space to lean on that community. As rural women we are incredibly lucky to have such great support networks available to us,” she says. n Sarah, husband Matthew and their children Charlie, Grace and Ruby farm at Reporoa, Waikato, milking 380 cows on 141 hectares.