BUSINESS MANAGEMENT
Empowering their people with choice - Jared and Victoria Clarke and daughter Isabel.
Meeting worker expectations A Canterbury sharemilking couple have adopted the Kanban workplace management system to run their farms. Anne Lee reports. Photos by Redbox Photography
O
rganisation is a colourful affair at Jared and Victoria Clarke’s 2000-cow Canterbury sharemilking job. That’s because the couple have embraced a Kanban system to manage a lot of the non-routine tasks on the two-farm, two 50-aside herringbone dairy operation. It allows team members to choose what jobs they do and when they do them – all within reason of course. The system is more typically used in tech-style corporate businesses and fits into what’s called an Agile management system. The concept is one of a number to 28
come from a DairyNZ initiative called New Workplace Designs which has looked at ideas that will help dairying meet workforce expectations as we head towards 2030. (see page 35) Jared was one of nine South Island dairy farmers to join the initiative last year and says he got on board because creating better workplaces is vital to the success of the sector and dairying. “Dairying is actually a great job with amazing opportunities but somewhere along the line we’re mucking something up as an industry because often dairying isn’t seen as a workplace of choice.” Jared and Victoria have seen the
positives for themselves and seized all the opportunities they could in their dairying career so far. Having met at Lincoln University they worked for 2007 New Zealand Sharemilkers of the Year Matt and Julie Ross for eight years, working their way up the ranks, buying cows and leasing them back to the farm until they took the leap to large-scale sharemilkers themselves. The pair are in their fourth season sharemilking for Richard and Chrissie Wright, also award-winning farmers, on their two adjacent farms near Mt Somers. As well as stepping up to take on the
Dairy Exporter | www.nzfarmlife.co.nz | August 2020
