Kenny’s Creek: Connecting owners with managers and on-farm activity

Embracing tech across farm operations

Nick Burton Taylor founded Kenny’s Creek, a beef cattle operation located in Boorowa, New South Wales, more than 25 years ago. His aim was to produce premium Angus cattle herds, through production efficiency and quality genetics.

Today, Ben Raynolds manages the company’s Breakfast Creek Station. The 3,300-hectare property is the base for the Kenny’s Creek heifer breeding program and commercial female herd. About 1,000 calves are bred there each year and up to 3,000 head of cattle are traded.

In recent times the company has implemented AgriWebb farm management software, installed remote water monitoring on its tanks, raised Wi-Fi towers for farm-wide connectivity and trialled individual cattle monitoring with mobile ear tags.

“It used to be that the croppers were getting all the technology, with GPS on their tractors and yield monitoring, and the livestock cockies got a bit left behind,” Raynolds says, “but now we’ve really caught up. We’re utilising technology as well as any other enterprise.”

Keeping staff connected

Kenny’s Creek has two properties on the South West Slopes of New South Wales; as well as Breakfast Creek south of Boorowa there’s Hillgrove to the north. AgriWebb makes it simple to coordinate staff operations and track what’s happening across both properties.

In his role as farm manager, Raynolds finds it easy to assign tasks such as treatments and sprays for the week ahead. “Being able to look at your whole property on one screen and go through all your mobs and crops in one place makes it a lot easier.

“On a day-to-day basis AgriWebb has allowed us to get a lot of the information out of my head and then into a platform where the staff can access it.”

At the same time, Raynolds knows exactly what his workers are up to. Whether they’re moving mobs or delivering treatments, he doesn’t have to chase them up for particulars; it all goes into AgriWebb. “They’re able to update that straight away and I can see it.”

AgriWebb also takes care of the detailed records for Kenny Creek’s AI and embryo transfer programs, where all the vet drugs need to be applied in a timely fashion.

“Between the two farms, you can’t be everywhere all the time, checking for yourself,” Raynolds says. “Because we’re recording all that information through AgriWebb, we know that everything’s been applied correctly and on the correct day.”

Passing audits with ease

Having data stored with AgriWebb takes the stress out of any audits that Kenny’s Creek has to undergo, whether it’s for a grass-fed accreditation scheme or an LLS (local land services) audit.

“Before AgriWebb, when I got audited there were a lot of pieces of paper lying on the table and probably a few drench packets that had been written on, which isn’t a great look – they tend to look a bit longer then,” Raynolds jokes.

Now, it’s much simpler. “You just give them the tablet; you can find everything that they want, as far as things like inventories and batch numbers.”

Increasing accuracy and efficiency

The implementation of AgriWebb at Kenny’s Creek has replaced the tried and not-so-true notebook-to-Excel system. “I’ve put two notebooks through the wash when I started and that wasn’t really great for record-keeping,” Raynolds admits.

“We used to find that it was fairly laborious keeping the Excel and we were coming up with a few mistakes, especially between the two properties,” he says. “Using AgriWebb, being able to do it on the go, means that a lot of the time the information being fed into it is more accurate.

“You’re not spending those nights in the office putting things together for your monthly or quarterly reports – it means we’re spending more time at home with the family”.

“We’re able to focus on other management tasks – bigger picture stuff than that mundane data entry – and it’s making the property become better organised and more profitable,” says Raynolds.

“I think it’s a really exciting time to be in the livestock industry.”

To see how AgriWebb can improve your farming enterprise sign up for a free trial now.