For longer than most people in the Bay can remember, animal industry stalwart Vet Services Hawke’s Bay (VSHB) has been ensuring all beasts – from sheep to bearded dragons – get the care they need.

Over the past seven decades, the business has grown from a one-vet practice in CHB to an incorporated business of five practices located in Napier, Hastings, Waipukurau, Dannevirke and Masterton.

“Sixty, seventy years ago you couldn’t get a vet down here,” says business manager Brendan James.

Vet Services Waipukurau

“That was pretty typical for rural areas in New Zealand in the late 40s and 50s, even throughout the 60s and into the 70s. At the time, agriculture science was evolving and vets were only just starting to play a more prominent role in the productivity of farms.”

However, Brendan says CHB farmers saw the value of a good vet early on, with a group of farmers getting crafty in 1949 and forming the CHB Farmers Veterinary Club, where they pooled their resources together to establish the district’s first professional veterinary practice.

“The club members collaborated and contracted a vet to come and live here to service the farms in the area,” he says.

“This was pretty typical of what was happening across New Zealand; farmers had to get creative to get vets into the regional areas.”

Thanks to the initiative of a few farmers almost 70 years ago, VSHB is a thriving business today. Incorporated in 1974, it now employs in excess of 50 staff and has plans to expand their Hastings and Waipukurau buildings to better service their clients.

Brendan admits that while the business may not have the same problems attracting staff to the district, vets are still in pretty high demand countrywide, with only around 130 graduates coming out of Massey University each year.

“These grads are highly sought after,” he says. “So, like the farmers’ club before us, we still have to get creative about how we recruit.

“One effective way has been to offer scholarships to students; another drawcard for us is that we can offer them time in a mixed animal practice.

“These types of clinics are becoming less and less so but it gives graduates an opportunity to develop their general veterinary knowledge before they decide what line of clinical expertise to follow.”

While it is these points of difference that have served VSHB well, Brendan says the team is well aware that the business can live and die with the seasons.

“Thanks to some good rain, the dams are full and farmers are in a position that they do not normally find themselves in in that they are trying to find animals to eat the grass,” he says.

“As a consequence, the market is lifting and the sheep and beef guys, the dairy guys and the deer farmers are generally feeling pretty positive at the moment.”

Brendan explains that if it is a dry season then the number of animals disappear out of the area to be fed elsewhere where there is grass.

“We ride the lows and the highs from that point of view, and I am probably oversimplifying it. It is quite a simple business for us on the large animal side, we live and die by their good or bad fortunes.”

In terms of the small animal side of the business, Brendan admits it is driven by how well the Bay is travelling economically and is well measured at the Hastings clinic.

“You may have noticed Hawke’s Bay is bursting at the seams in terms of people wanting to move in here,” he says.

Forward thinking has allowed one CHB start-up to move farmers into the 21st century – by keeping their heads in the cloud and their boots on the ground.

You wouldn’t know that Cloud Farmer took flight from a farm half an hour out of Waipukurau with scant access to the Internet four years ago. Designed by AgRecord, the program has essentially transferred the trusted notebook onto the computer.

“Cloud Farmer is a really simple way for farmers to capture, store and share operational data from their farms,” says AgRecord managing director Gretchen King.

“Before, the way the majority of farmers captured this information was to write it down in a notebook and then come home and transfer it to the diary. Our program eliminates this last step.”

While Gretchen may not have invented the program (she and her husband bought it from a friend in 2013), she certainly saw its potential on any farm, anywhere.

“A friend of mine Ginny Neal came up with the original program. At the time, Ginny and her husband managed Castlepoint Station in Wairarapa and she designed the program because she was sick of having to chase up staff for time sheets and tallies.”

So, necessity being the mother of invention, Ginny built the first version of what is now Cloud Farmer.

“She built a small version for their farm; it was basically an intranet and they used Wikispaces, and while it was as clunky as clunky, it worked,” says Gretchen.

“One of the downsides was, however, they had to build it from scratch for every single client.”

Despite this, Castlepoint Station won a local farming competition, which gave the program some media attention. It was then that business for the program boomed.

“Ginny asked if we, myself and my husband Leyton, wanted to buy the program as she didn’t have time for it anymore. So we did and we set about making it more designer and user-friendly,” says Gretchen.

“What Ginny had done for us though through her program was show us that there

was a need for something like Cloud Farmer, what was being used in the application, what wasn’t, what was needed and what was wanted.

“That was huge, because often people have a long list of wants, which makes it hard to pick out what their needs are.’

With a good base program to start from, Gretchen and her team set about addressing other issues with the program.

“The biggest challenge was keeping Cloud Farmer simple,” she says.

“There are other programs out there but they involve really sophisticated software, often beyond what most farmers – who are used to jotting down notes on the back of a cigarette packet – are willing to learn.

“Our points of difference are the simplicity of the program and our ability to be able to customise it for each individual business. Those are great strengths to have.”

After addressing the challenges something new to an old sector can bring, Gretchen knew the next step would be to design a smartphone application.

This came to fruition last year with the launch of the Cloud Farmer phone app, which syncs with the original computer program.

“Farmers can use it just like they would their notebook, collecting information on the go, with or without Wi-Fi coverage.

“With the app, farmers can jot down tallies, staff hours, drench records, log hazards, you name it. It’s just as quick as writing it in your trusty old notebook,” says Gretchen.

“The data from your app syncs back to your main Cloud Farmer desktop system.”

Thanks to the app, all staff members can have access to the same information, be it diaries, maps or job lists.

“Before, the boss would tell you the day’s plan as you were heading out with your dogs, all the information would be stored in his head. With Cloud Farmer, all staff members have access to this information and they can input their own information or file their time sheets and tallies for the day. “So it now becomes about transparency of information and getting everyone involved in the work; in terms of creating a team culture, this is great.”