Back to Blog

A full-circle moment for Rural Professional Award winner

Carla Muller, principal consultant, shareholder and director at Perrin Ag, is the very deserved Beef + Lamb NZ Rural Professional of the Year for 2026.Carla has been with the Rotorua-based Perrin Ag team since 2019, although she works remotely farm a sheep and beef farm in Whakatane, with her partner and children.“My role at Perrin Ag is really to help the team with any weird or wonderful projects that come across our desk. So I get to be involved in a huge variety of work, everything from tec...

Product update: EIDs on mobile, tasks, and a BCS graph

You can now search for an individual animal, view its history and grab important information while out in the field - whenever you are connected to the internet. This is super valuable as you won't need to go back to the office or shed to look up stock details on the web app - the info will be right there on your phone instead.Search for animals using either EID, VID or birth IDView key information on each EID animal, including last weight, projected weight (if available), last body condition sc...

FarmIQ updates: grazing stock, paddocks, Flexi-stock report and more

See stock you've got off farm with a grazier in your stocklist, including the mob name, breed, age and number of animalsWhen stock that you own have finished with the grazier, you can add them back into your FarmIQ farmWhen bringing them back, you can enter details such as date, time and weight, add them to a paddock, and add them to a new or existing mobThe new grazing stock feature are available in all FarmIQ packs....

Emma Ractliffe and Carla Muller win top industry awards recognising rural professionals

L - R: Russell Mackay, Emma Ractliffe, Alex Coddington, Carla Muller, Claire Teutenberg and Greg Dryden...

Latest FARMAX updates

We've added live weight and capital value per-head to the stock rec report, bringing critical data related to the numbers of closing stock, their weights and capital values for a specific period into one report. These changes let you see the quantity and value of stock on farm in a format which is great for reporting to managers, owners or the board....

FarmIQ product update: harvested feeds, shape block files, universal search

Manage harvested feeds on your mobile, with the ability to sell it or store it (add it to your inventory). You can create a new feed product or add it to an existing one, and you can store the feed against a location, such as a silo or silage bunker. Inventory numbers will increase automatically if you store the feed....

FarmIQ product update: Horses, map capabilities, people management and more

📱💻 Horses as stock If you’ve got horses on farm, you can now add them as stock in FarmIQ!Create transaction activities including sales, purchases, births and deathsMove horse mobs between paddocks, log animal health treatments, and record weights and breeding informationSpecify horse age and sex from a range of in-built options, including foals, yearlings, fillies, geldings, colts and stallionsSpecify the breed from a list, such as Appaloosa, Clydesdale and KaimanawaYou can sti...

Search underway for Emerging Rural Professional of the Year

Nominations are now open for the the Rural Professional of the Year Awards.We're proud to be working alongside the Institute of Rural Professionals and Beef + Lamb New Zealand in supporting emerging and experienced rural professionals from all corners of the country. These awards recognise individuals working across New Zealand’s rural sector who are making a meaningful contribution to farmers, businesses, and the wider industry. Applications are open to a wide range of rural profess...

The joy of always looking forward

Hononga is a fourth-generation family farm owned by the Peacocks: Marcus and Georgie run the 600-hectare farm in the picturesque countryside of Waipukurau in Hawke’s Bay, with Marcus’s great-grandfather having first established the farm back in 1908.It’s still very much a family affair, with Marcus managing the day-to-day farming with Georgie, and their children lending a hand when they are home from university.In addition to their 600 hectares, the Peacocks have two lease blocks – 100ha...

More technology means more precise decision making

Jacques Reinhardt has been a man on the land for over 20 years. He’s been a junior shepherd, a farm manager at Castlepoint Station, an agribusiness specialist for BakerAg – and he was a finalist for the 2023 Zanda McDonald Award. Now, he is thriving in his current role: General manager of Horizon Farming Ltd.Horizon Farming is a red meat farm operation in Hawkes Bay, covering approximately 7,560 effective hectares and divided into six different farms.It’s a massive operation, with close to...

Latest FARMAX updates

There have been lots of enhancements to FARMAX released in the last week, with the main two being expense tables and the cover screen in FARMAX Dairy.Expense tables in FARMAX Red Meat and Dairy are now customisable, enabling you to add another expense category - such as wearable tech - and keep it separate....

Growing the ag industry with a collaborative, community-minded approach

Isabel Schmahl – the 2025 FarmIQ Systems Emerging Rural Professional of the Year – grew up in Germany, followed by stints in Turkey and Russia, before moving to New Zealand almost 10 years ago.What was originally meant to be a year of travel down under turned into many more, after Isabel worked on different farms across the country, then started working on a sheep and beef farm in Geraldine and fell in love with New Zealand agriculture and farming.“I'm pretty much from a city background, b...

Out on the farm: Summer 25 - 26

Head of Sales and Marketing, Russell MacKay, has a fifth-generation family sheep and beef farm near Queenstown. Here's his farming update as we round out 2025....

Celebrating the future of farming: 2025 NZIPIM Awards now open

FARMAX-FarmIQ and the New Zealand Institute of Primary Industry Management (NZIPIM) are once again celebrating the outstanding individuals behind Aotearoa’s primary industries, with applications now open for the 2025 FarmIQ Emerging Rural Professional Award and the FarmIQ Rural Professional Award.The awards celebrate the dedicated professionals who are helping to shape the future of agriculture in Aotearoa - whether they’re seasoned experts or emerging leaders just starting their journey.The...

FARMAX Dairy Improvements

We’re focused on giving farmers and rural professionals the tools to make confident, data-driven decisions. Over the past few months, we’ve made a series of improvements to the engine behind FARMAX Dairy - our animal model, MOOSIM (Bryant et al. 2008). These updates sharpen model accuracy, particularly in high-input systems, and give users more visibility and control when it comes to feed demand, milk production, and body condition.These updates are based on user feedback, particularly aroun...

Smart farming: solar power & Halter tech

Last Wednesday, two of our Wairarapa sales and marketing team members attended the NZIPIM Wearable & Renewables Field Day at Taumata Island Dairy.Situated on a 450ha block, Taumata Island currently milks 450 cows with a production of 480 milk solids. With the goal of reducing operating and labour costs, farm manager Wade Hamlin says that the installation of their new FarmGen Solar system, in combination with Halter collars, is transforming how they run the farm....

Looking at the whole farm story

Matt Carroll always knew his future self would end up working in the agriculture industry, but he didn’t expect his path getting there would see him journey through different countries and rural careers, giving him a valuable understanding of the industry’s challenges as a farmer, a rural professional and a consumer.He studied ag at university, then got a job with PerrinAg where he spent almost three years before heading off to Scotland for a year. Once he returned to New Zealand he went ful...

The man behind FARMAX

Paul Marshall has been a key part of developing and nurturing FARMAX since 1988, back when the seeds of a farm modelling tool were just starting to sprout into an idea.“It's been a long journey, but it's very rewarding work that I love. I love getting every pixel just right,” smiles Paul.Back when the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries (MAF) looked after ag and farming, staff wanted to turn their science into something that would make a real difference to farmers. Paul worked with David M...

Farming in harmony with nature

Dean Candy is the farm manager of Oromahoe Trust, a sheep and beef outfit slightly inland from the Bay of Islands in Northland.Alongside Dean, a general farm hand and two junior shepherds manage the 1,050ha station, running 1,400 bulls through to finishing, and supplementing with terminal rams prepped for the Christmas market.Dean and the Oromahoe team recently were the 2024 Northland Regional Supreme Winners of the Ballance Farm Environment Award, recognition of their hard work to ensure that t...

Out on the farm: Summer 24 - 25

Head of Sales and Marketing, Russell MacKay, has a fifth-generation family sheep and beef farm near Queenstown. Here's his farming update as we near the end of 2024....

Playing the international game and telling the Kiwi farming story

“I left high school thinking I didn't want be a farmer and then now I want to be a farmer,” Conan laughs. “I've kind of made my way back to agriculture through the environmental space and then now with my own consultancy, which I've been doing for about 18 months now. I went a different route.”Conan Moynihan grew up on a family sheep and beef farm in a small town called Cave in South Canterbury. He ran the farm alongside his parents during and after university, and while he had the chanc...

Out on the farm: Spring 2024

Head of Sales and Marketing, Russell MacKay, has a fifth-generation family sheep and beef farm near Queenstown. Here's his farming update as we deal with a rough start to spring for many....

Opportunities abound for young professionals in the agricultural industry

Two weeks after winning the Emerging Rural Professional of the Year Award for 2024, Louis Batley said it still felt a bit surreal.“It's been pretty awesome actually. A lot of people have reached out and said congratulations, just a lot of people I wouldn't have expected, so there's been pretty awesome support.”It seems predestined that Louis would end up working in agriculture. He grew up on a fifth-generation hill country sheep and beef farm near Taihape and then studied agricultural scienc...

And the winners of the FarmIQ Rural Professional Awards are...

Agricultural and environmental consultant, Louis Batley, has been named as the FarmIQ Systems Emerging Rural Professional of the Year for 2024, the top contender in a field of highly impressive and talented nominees.Louis is a consultant at AgFirst, based in the Manawatū-Whanganui region, with expertise in climate change modelling, carbon accounting and farm systems analysis. He works alongside farmers, industry bodies and local and central government, and is very passionate about furthering th...

New info-rich FARMAX reports in FarmIQ

The team has been working hard on enhancing the integration between FARMAX and FarmIQ, and we're excited to share that if you have both tools, you can now see FARMAX reports displayed in FarmIQ as info-rich widgets.How the new widgets workDashboard data will be pulled from your FARMAX Monitoring file (FARMAX Advantage customers), for you to show in a series of widgets in FarmIQ. The widgets cover a range of feed, production and GHG KPIs, and include both forecasts for the remainder of ...