The AgFirst Northland team offers a full range of skills and experience in dairying, sheep and beef, sustainable land management, soil mapping, soil conservation, land drainage, protection forestry and environmental management.

Team members have worked with leading farmers to develop and demonstrate intensive and profitable but environmentally sustainable beef and dairy grazing systems. Recent projects have identified potential for significant increases in profitability from pastoral land throughout the north, particularly on larger Maori land holdings.

Projects involving Maori land holdings have also helped match land uses to the inherent natural characteristics of the land, including arable land uses, market gardening, pastoral farming, production forestry, manuka management for honey and retirement and protection of land to encourage regeneration of indigenous vegetation.

Members of the AgFirst Northland team fully understand the variability of land, climate and seasons within the region and can help you realise the potential of your land while maintaining high environmental and animal welfare standards.

Key Services include:

Business Planning

• Helping you identify where you want to be and how to get there.

Labour Structures

• Advice on the best labour structure for your business
• Advice and preparation of employment agreements, contract milking and sharemilking agreements
• Dispute resolution with a focus on conciliation

Enterprise Analysis

• An assessment of the status of your current farming practice.
• Finding policies that suit you best, how to manage them and determining what they will return.

Feed Planning and Farm Modelling

• Bringing your farm and your business together, helping identify opportunities (such as short-term trading options).

Financial Planning

• Assisting you to prepare cashflow and financial budgets for expansion, refinancing or other opportunities.

Benchmarking

• Confidentially comparing your business with average and top farmers so you can identify your opportunities.

Sustainable Farming Systems

• Developing best-practice systems so you can demonstrate that your farm, forestry or horticultural practices are sustainable.
• Helping you to meet and document compliance with market and regulatory environmental standards.
• From finance to fertiliser, we can offer a whole-system approach to ensure your farm is achieving your goals and giving you confidence in your decision making.

Precision Farm Mapping

• Accurate paddock areas and effective grazing areas, farm infrastructure including water reticulations systems, effluent systems and application areas.
• Natural resource mapping including soils, vegetation/land use types, land resource inventory and Land Use Capability.
• Maps produced using the latest aerial imagery, comparisons with earlier imagery, one-off site imagery and GPS.

Whole Farm Planning

• Development of environmental, land drainage, farm shelter plans and base-maps for biosecurity plans and other farm activities or assets.

Farm Business Teams

• Encouraging you to develop partnerships with key members of your agribusiness team.

Leading Edge Technology

• We use sophisticated farm analysis tools such as Farmax to assist in decision making.

‍