“United Feeds in Northern Ireland is a manufacturer of blended and compound feeds for dairy, beef and sheep. They were looking for a new way to help connect their sales and customer services team with their farmers. While they had digitalised much of their mill operations and customer data management, there was a remaining gap in how they interacted with farmers. To this end, together with the FarmHedge team, United Feeds began to explore a simple mobile app that farmers could use to easily order feed at any time of the day.”
CEO, FarmHedge
Sales Manager, United Feeds
Farm visits remain an essential part of creating and maintaining the connection between an animal feed company and their customers. Livestock farmers seek the best advice and need to know their feed supplier understands their objectives and can deliver the right product. One company is exploring how to improve the highly personalised interactions that take place in the feed business. United Feeds in Northern Ireland is a manufacturer of blended and compound feeds for dairy, beef and sheep with production facilities in Belfast and Dungannon. They were looking for a new way to help connect their sales and customer services team with their farmers. While they had digitalised much of their mill operations and customer data management, there was a remaining gap in how they interacted with farmers.
INNOVATING ANIMAL FEED SALES AND CUSTOMER-SERVICES
Creating the space for innovation can be a big challenge for companies. In the animal feed business it is particularly challenging as companies go from one busy season to the next. The United Feeds ethos is centered on a commitment to provide innovative nutritional solutions and a comprehensive on-farm advisory service which is backed up with a complementary administration, production and delivery service to meet the individual farmer requirements.
Clarence Calderwood, United Feeds’ Sales Manager was interested in exploring new technologies that could help streamline some parts of the order receipt and processing elements of the business. There was no ‘off-the-shelf’ solution available, however in May 2020 he came across FarmHedge, a technology company providing bespoke digital tools for the agriculture industry. FarmHedge had already established a strong presence in Austria where it’s platform and mobile app was being used widely in farm input sales and crop procurement.
Together with the FarmHedge team, United Feeds began to explore a simple mobile app that farmers could use to easily order feed at any time of the day. The app needed to be able to allow the customer to choose his specific rations and delivery requirements which would then link directly to the United Feeds customer service and/or operations department. There was also a requirement for the team of nutritional advisors to remotely access a mobile dashboard which could be used to track farmers ordering activity, change feed product availability on the app and share other data directly to customers as required.
A CASE STUDY IN INNOVATION
The project to build the feed ordering tool commenced in November 2020 and its success would rely on a close partnership between United Feeds and FarmHedge. John Garvey, the FarmHedge project lead, acknowledged that they would need to be highly responsive to the needs of their client if they were going to be successful. “When we started the project, we knew that the design of the digital tool would change from the initial plan and would continue to evolve as sales, customer services and farmers started using it.”
FarmHedge initially built simple sketches of both the app and the dashboard, identifying the features that were expected to be essential. These sketches were reviewed by members of the sales and customer services team at United Feeds. One of the specific issues for United Feeds was that farmers or sales reps sent feed orders to customer services either by phone-call or email. Customer services then uploaded this information to their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. For each order, this requires some effort for the farmer as well as United Feeds personnel. The original plan was for the app to empower farmers to order their bespoke feed mix at any time of the day with the order information automatically uploading to the ERP system.
As John Garvey observes, “Innovation of this type only works if there is early and frequent feedback from users of the software”. At the early stages of the project, the FarmHedge team would do short calls with United Feeds to establish some operational limitations – like next day delivery, optimising orders between their two mills, minimum weight limits on orders. “Once we had the basic requirements, we focused on getting a very simple working version available for testing. It was then that we started to get a really good flow of ideas from United Feeds in terms of how the tool should work best. Too often, software companies attempt to fully specify a project in advance of user testing leading to expensive and shiny software that isn’t used.”
EMPOWERING FARMERS TO ADOPT INNOVATION
As the project progressed it became apparent that the sales representatives would become important users. The FarmHedge team optimised the dashboard to make it available to them on their mobile phones and extended the range of features available to them. The United Feeds sales representatives can now update product information while on a farm visit, they can invite farmers to the farmer-app via SMS or WhatsApp and they can also submit orders in a standard format via the mobile dashboard. This significantly reduces the workload and communication bottlenecks around repeat feed orders, provides real time order information to both farmers and the sales team and creates more time for sales and customer services teams to focus on other aspects of customer management and advisory activities.
For FarmHedge, this has been another step for them in building smart, low cost digital solutions for the agriculture industry. John Garvey continues to work closely with United Feeds and continues to be excited by the willingness of companies to embrace innovation and rethink how they do business. “For us, working with United Feeds has been a really positive experience. We’ve had an opportunity to put our design principles into action and empower our client to really innovate and build a tool that works for them and their farmers.” He believes this is just the beginning and opens the door to further innovation with feed companies where they can consider additional features to help reduce costs and enhance the farmer’s connection with the feed company.
United Feeds’ Clarence Calderwood notes that the pandemic has changed how they connect with farmers but he expects the role of technology to continue to be important in shaping their business into the future: “The use of new technologies like those provided by FarmHedge continue to support our relationship with farmers and create easier ways of working together”.
About John Garvey
John Garvey and his co-founder Bernardino Frola started FarmHedge in 2016. John has a family background in beef farming and has spent over 20-years in academia undertaking research into market systems. FarmHedge’s first client was the major agribusiness RWA, headquartered in Vienna, Austria. They designed a software system that empowered RWA to more easily trade with Austrian cooperatives (selling farm inputs and buying crops). This B2B trading system is now connected to a mobile app that allows the cooperatives to streamline their order/offer management system to Austrian farmers. FarmHedge continues to seek unique projects that help agri-companies innovate and simplify their operations. Their work with United Feeds is the first of its kind in the animal feed business.
About Clarence Calderwood
Clarence Calderwood is Sales Manager with United Feeds. He is deeply knowledgeable about the feed business with more than 25 years experience in the industry. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Clarence has placed an emphasis on the role of new technologies in maintaining the connection and sharing of important information with farmers. The collaboration with FarmHedge was a natural next step, which created a digital tool for their sales and nutritionist team to seamlessly connect both with farmers and their own customer services team.
