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 30 full-time and casual staff, and 75,000 stock units across the farms, with a sheep to cattle to deer ratio of 55:41:4.
The business is mainly breeding and finishing, but a growing portion of the business is focused on genetics with an elite cow programme, plus a sheep programme both focused on high quality eating and intramuscular fat among other performance traits.
For the last two and a half years, Jacques has been overseeing the Horizon Farming operation, managing staff, purchasing decisions, financial planning, and everything in between.
“It’s quite hard to pick what I'm exactly going to be doing at times, because sometimes you're fighting fires and sometimes you're looking into the future…but yeah, that's my job,” smiles Jacques.
Technology is an important aspect of Horizon and something that Jacques is very passionate about, describing himself as a ‘techie’. He used FARMAX in-depth at in previous roles including BakerAg – and is Silver Accredited – and has made a big push for the Horizon team to use FARMAX and FarmIQ across the farms.
His ultimate technology dream is for the ‘three F’s’ to come together seamlessly without any double-entry: FARMAX, FarmIQ and Figured. He’d also like to see lifetime traceability of each animal, from when it was tagged on farm, all of its life events on farm and then finally its kill data. Information like this would enable Jacques and the team to work backwards and help them make breeding decisions.
The ultimate decision-making tool
When he started as general manager, he put two farms on FARMAX straight away, and now that’s up to four, with the remaining two due to be added in the near future.
Jacques wants to train his team up in FARMAX and away from spreadsheets, both to utilise the wealth of farm information they have more effectively and to counter the unpredictability of the seasons and the hard truth that they can’t count on ‘normal’ periods of growth every year.
Jacques explains that his farms have seen two years of dry springs and autumns, excellent grass growth through mild winters and the highest grass growth occurring in January – very unusual for the Hawkes Bay!
FARMAX is a vital part of being prepared, as Jacques can create multiple scenarios covering the ‘what ifs’: what if autumn is dry again? What if we get too much rain in the winter? Having these scenarios already mapped out means he knows the numbers that could play out and what steps need to be taken – there are no nasty surprises, because all the possibilities have already been accounted for.
“For me, [FARMAX] is just the ultimate decision-making tool. As a farmer, you've got your gut feel, you ride around, you can see it. And this to me…confirms that thinking or it can show you a picture that you might not have seen. Maybe an opportunity or a threat.
“It puts some real facts and figures around it. So, it’s not just a gut feel decision, it's backed by the numbers too. This means you can justify the decision as this is the information you had at the time and that decision was based on that,” asserts Jacques.
Jacques knows the FarmIQ and FARMAX teams well, regularly talking with the support team and the product development team. It’s a mutually beneficial relationship with Jacques suggesting new features or bug fixes, the product team actioning those in the software, and then Jacques testing out the app changes with his farms and data.
Originally, the Horizon team was only using FarmIQ for the mapping, so they switched to a different tool to save a bit of cash, but within six months they knew “it wasn’t going to cut the mustard” and came back to FarmIQ.
Jacques worked with Russell Mackay, FarmIQ’s head of sales and marketing, to get the Horizon farms back on FarmIQ with better pricing (thanks to the pricing restructure in 2024 that moved away from a stock-based pricing model, plus introduced a multi-farm discount) and a more advanced pack, and ensured the team was using all the functionality they needed to be able to collect rich data that enabled more confident decision making.
“FarmIQ and FARMAX are a pretty big part of where we want to take Horizon…I don’t think I could achieve the goals that I want to without [them], which is a pretty big statement, but it’s true.”
Jacques Reinhardt
One source of truth
All of the Horizon team use FarmIQ, with most of the staff only needing to open the mobile app once or twice a day to enter fuel usage or log an animal death or treatment, but the farm managers and Jacques use it much more frequently. Jacques says for the Horizon team, FarmIQ is all about record keeping, being able to access all that information at your fingertips and “it being our one source of truth”.
He also really likes the integrated dashboards in FarmIQ such as the FARMAX one: team members who might not use FARMAX can still view the dashboard within FarmIQ and get a quick overview of the graphs and key numbers they need to know.
The new mobile app is making a huge difference to Jacques’ and the team’s overall experience with FarmIQ too.
“10,000 percent better than the old one. The old app was one of the reasons that I used to get a little bit annoyed with FarmIQ because the app did not take the notebook out of my pocket and that’s what you need to be able to do.
“The new app probably doesn't do that perfectly either, but it's a lot better. The mapping's huge and it's getting better all the time…it’s way better,” he says.
“FarmIQ and FARMAX are a pretty big part of where we want to take Horizon…I don’t think I could achieve the goals that I want to without [them], which is a pretty big statement, but it’s true.”
Information overload
Adoption of technology on farms and the wealth of information are two of the biggest changes that Jacques has witnessed throughout his career. He can remember it wasn’t that long ago there were no EID tags or cell phones – instead there were brass tags on the stud animals and faxes and landlines were the main form of communication.
“Ten years ago, not many farmers had a smartphone and now they've all got them. Now they've got things like Halter and they're moving the cattle on their phones. The information that we get now around nutrition, animal intakes, more accurate weighing and information on animals – that is making us make better decisions.”
There is no doubt that more farm data is better for farm planning, decision making and outcomes, but on the flipside, it can add a bit of a mental toll when you are overwhelmed with information, believes Jacques. Something as simple as the weather can become more of a burden when you’re surrounded by information about it.
“I run five or six weather apps on my phone. It drives me crazy when climatic pressure is on; it does consume a bit of my time,” he explains.
A decade ago, you’d watch the weather on the six o’clock news and if there was a sun icon it was going to be sunny; if there was a rain icon, it was going to rain – and that was that. Now, Jacques says, with all the weather apps – and knowing how much of an impact weather plays in farming – it’s easy to spend a lot of time analysing something that you can’t control.
“There are good and bad sides to data: it can be a bit overwhelming in one sense and makes more work, but I make better, more precise decisions because of the information that I have, which, ultimately, means better farm outcomes.
“The good thing about FarmIQ and FARMAX is at least they can help manage and analyse all this data – simplifying it and making it user friendly.”
