Charles Morgan has developed AgriSmart, a new software programme that will make administration on farms easier. Charles, Briar and Daisy Morgan from AgriSmart.
After being stranded in New Zealand during the 2020 lockdown, Australian Charles Morgan and his partner decided to stay put and started looking for innovative software companies for potential work. He was keen on the agricultural sector and came across AgriSmart during his search.
“We were on our way to France when covid struck and changed our plans,” Morgan says.
“But I knew New Zealand had a strong primary sector driving its economy and I had been looking at global trends where I found a common theme between managing costs and increasing insights into ground-level business, as well as the growing interest in employee welfare.”
He has a background in software from previous roles in Australia and could see the potential software could offer to combine those elements from the global trends.
“I was keen to explore something technical that combines a few different aspects within a business,” he says.
“Things like payroll, finance, workforce management and health and safety, because it’s not just about paying staff correctly anymore – we need more information for the full management of employees.
“How do we manage their pay, their costs, their tasks, their health and safety, their welfare? And, it needs to be easy, managing in a single platform instead of being paper documents or a mixture of different logins.”
The AgriSmart concept made sense to him; it consolidates the different people management elements into one place, to help create clarity and drive efficiency for farmers. He also advocates for understanding the why behind things, particularly with more compliance hitting farmers.
“There’s a lot of frustrations around regulation and meeting compliance, but I think sometimes we need to remember it’s the consumers and supermarkets within the supply chain that are driving these global shifts – and it’s not just happening in New Zealand,” he says.
“Customers want a better understanding of who is supplying products and we need better systems and software to meet those requirements.”
He talks about utilising things we need for compliance, like timesheets, and how they could add further value to a business.
“Timesheets are created to pay people correctly, but when we combine them with a cost management system then people are tracking more than just labour costs, it helps them understand what is happening in the business,” he says.
“And it’s evolving from there; farmers need to think about what information they need to be collecting and managing and how they can empower their employees to collect the data for them.”
The AgriSmart system simplifies things for farmers. Rather than having six different tools to use, it is one platform to manage the employee workforce. And it is a simple solution for Fonterra suppliers to help satisfy their requirements within the Co-operative Difference, as Emily Eder has found.
“Some dairy farming friends had me worried that it was really hard to meet the people element within the Co-operative Difference,” Eder says.
“But when it came to it I realised everything was in AgriSmart.
“The questionnaire was asking if we could provide evidence for various things to do with our staff and I can prove everything from the system; there are heaps of reports I can print if I need to.”
Along with her husband Gerard, they sharemilk 1000 cows near Mangatainoka and have large numbers of staff to manage.
“A lot of our team are from the Philippines so it’s helped a lot with visa requirements,” she says.
“And although their English is reasonably good, they understand things better when they’re written down, so that’s been a huge benefit for us.
“We can add tasks and notes for our team (and) if they come back from days off it’s clear what they need to be doing.
“And if they finish a task early they can see what the rest of the team are doing and find someone to give a hand, which is great because our farm is so big you don’t always know where everyone is.”
She originally joined the programme after frustrations that no other software seemed suitable for the dairy sector.
“The average payroll system doesn’t cater for the uniqueness of dairy farming, we don’t work nine till five and rosters can be a bit all over the show,” she says.
But she raves about the suitability of AgriSmart and how much time it saves and keeps things simple. The team enters their own timesheet information, which shifts some of the responsibility from the employer to the employee and there are no excuses for health and safety as all the information is easily accessible.
“It keeps communication clear and open so there is no confusion,” she says.
“We had a complaint once about how a staff member was getting the cows in and since we had everything logged in the system, we could work out who it was and were able to have a discussion with them about it.”
She really appreciates the ease it creates for people management.
“We are really busy so tools like this are key to help us juggle everything,” she says.
