Dairy Management From Around the Globe


Key lessons from Saudi Arabia.


Dairy Management From Around the Globe

Nick Cooper is a former employee of Advanced Nutrition, we caught up with him in Saudi Arabia. Nick worked with us back in 2015 as one of our Ruminant Specialists and has since moved to work as the Executive Manager at the Al Tukhaim Dairy.

We’ve been talking to Nick to get some feedback and comparisons from the UK and Saudi Arabia, to see if there are any lessons we can learn from a seemingly different and extreme environment. Bryn Davies will also be travelling to Saudi Arabia (once Covid restrictions have eased again!) to exchange knowledge from the UK dairy industry.

This week we focus on good team management to help improve productivity.


Nick manages 120 staff at the Al Tukhaim Dairy, all of varying nationalities. The dairy unit holds 7,800 cows, including 3,300 milking cows, 3,000 heifers as followers and 1,500 bulls in the fattening unit. This may be a far cry from a number of dairy farms in the UK, however, Nick believes that the principles of management are the same. Whilst Nick has had to really put a huge focus on people management due to the sheer number of staff there, he thinks it’s important that farms in the UK do the same.

Nick comments, “Having a passion for cows is easy, managing staff is the challenge.”

The team at Advanced Nutrition understand the importance of people management and the role they have in moving your farm forward. Dairy units will continue to grow in size and people are at the forefront of this growth, so we think it’s important to make sure you have the right team on board.

We’ve picked out some of the key points to consider for successful people management on your farm…

  1. Understand the strengths and weakness in your team.
    Nick comments, “The dairy I work for is family owned, just as dairy units are in the UK but the key difference is how that unit is viewed – as a business. So, the first part of people management for us is to get the right people in the right roles by understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your team.”

    This can be difficult for a small family team, so it’s important to see the benefits of getting it right. This also comes down to thinking about the wider team on your farm and the experts that you bring in to help deliver your shared vision. Consider people’s personalities within this to help with team motivation.

 

  1. Motivate your staff
    Nick Cooper continues, “It doesn’t matter whether you are managing two or two hundred people, if you haven’t got them on board sharing your ideas and if you can’t motivate them, then you’re not likely to get them to work at the best of their ability.” If your staff are not on board or even stressed at work, this filters down to the animal’s environment and they will be stressed too.

    After working for some progressive farms in the UK with Advanced Nutrition, Nick understood that motivating staff is really important, whether that is through pay or incentives or simply by feeling part of your vision.

 

  1. Communication
    The success of your business relies on a shared understanding of its goals. So, always be clear what those goals are, have regular meeting to assess them and check everyone is still on board. Regular feedback from staff will also help you to improve on your KPI’s, they can also provide you with some valuable ideas.

 

  1. Continual learning
    Nick feels that a more ‘hands off” approach giving staff the chance to learn from their own mistakes will in the long term foster a more trusting relationship with staff. He also feels that training is important and at regular intervals so that staff can understand every aspect of their job but continue forward with the same shared vision.

    Again, this also extends to the wider farm team. Advanced Nutrition has a shared approach at the heart of our consultancy. Getting the right team together is important, but this also needs to be right for the farm. The advice that we give for one farm may be different to what we give to another. At the end of the day we have to view farm’s as a business with their own unique strengths and weaknesses. We also have to consider the views of the whole farm team, so of course the goals of the farmer need to be addressed but the views of the vet, for example also need to be considered.

 

If you’d like to find out more about Advanced Nutrition’s shared approach to farm management, then please get in contact with your local Ruminant Nutritionist or call 015242 63139.

 

 

 


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