Knowledge in Ag is Power - Part 2: Building a Farming Business From Scratch
Show Notes
Owning a home these days is hard enough, so what about building your own farm from scratch?
Dr Lexie Leonard is a vet, an animal health trainer and a farmer who is building her own farming business alongside her husband and their young children in Balmoral, Victoria. Originally from the suburbs of Melbourne, Lexie would never have predicted she would grow up to be a farmer.
And it has been a steep learning curve at times. In part two of this collaboration series with RIST, Lexie shares her story of how she gained the skills and knowledge to run a farm and grow the business. She talks about the importance of goal setting and prioritising time to help you achieve your big dreams.
The road to farm ownership may not be easy, but it is possible.
Thank you to our episode sponsor: Rural Industries Skill Training (RIST)
More about RIST:
We are a leading independent provider of Training & Education for the Agricultural Sector.Located in the heart of Victoria's Western District, RIST are your Local Agricultural College with a National Reach. TOID4198
This podcast is produced by the Rural Podcasting Co.
Links:
https://www.instagram.com/aleonardvet
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Dr Lexie Leonard: 0:03
And whenever we sit down and think, oh my gosh, this is too hard and what are we doing, we think of that goal and for us it was essentially having the freedom to have our own farm and raise our children and be able to decide what we're going to do each day.
Kirsten Diprose: 0:22
Welcome to Ducks on the Pond by the Rural Podcasting Co. I'm Kirsten Diprose, so lovely to have you here, and you just heard the voice of Dr Lexi Leonard, who lives in Balmoral in Western Victoria. Lexi wears multiple hats in ag she's a practicing farm vet, an animal health trainer and a farmer. But she would never have predicted this, growing up in suburban Melbourne. This is part two of our Knowledge in Ag is Power series made in collaboration with Rural Industry Skill Training or RIST. In the last episode we focused on the knowledge needed for stepping into managing the family farm. This is more about building a farm business from scratch, and there are some great nuggets of wisdom in this one. Lexi has always had a love of animals, particularly horses, which really put her on the path to becoming a vet, then meeting and marrying a stock agent and now together they're building their own farming business, piece by piece. It's not easy, but she talks about how they're making it work. Let's meet Lexi.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 1:34
I grew up in Melbourne in the sort of southeastern suburbs as non-rural as you can get. We had a few family friends that lived in the country or rurally, and some of my grandparents, really good friends, did. So there were weekends here and there that we'd go out to the country and we'd ride a horse, ride a motorbike. It was all very fun, but I didn't grow up on the land or even really thinking that I would live rurally, so it's sort of just something that happened quite organically in the background.
Kirsten Diprose: 2:08
But you obviously had a love of animals because you became a vet.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 2:13
Yeah. So I decided I wanted to become a vet, probably later in high school. I did definitely have a love of animals, but somewhere in there and you know, no one's really sure how it happened I've decided I loved sheep and cattle and that was going to be my passion. And given that I was from the city and we had no sort of real direct connections with anyone in agriculture, I thought being a vet was the easiest way to go about it.
Kirsten Diprose: 2:40
That's why I decided to have a crack at getting into vet school, which I did and then moved towards a more sort of livestock focus career in veterinary during my time at vet school. I love it. No one knows how the love of sheep and cattle arose, so you actually went to study being a vet for farm animals as opposed to pets, I think actually, it probably started that I always wanted to be a horse girl and wasn't allowed to.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 3:07
Why is that? Because my parents were. It was just one step too hard, I think, for them, like we definitely didn't lack for any other extracurricular activities, but getting into horses was just probably a bit beyond them, which I can appreciate. Now, being a parent even being a parent in the country you know it's just makes everything a bit one step too hard. So I just wanted to do as much as I could with things that involved horses, sheep and cattle, and so then, you met your husband, and that was probably the next stage in your journey.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 3:43
Yeah, it was. So I met him when I was doing a vet placement in Hamilton. We met at the pub after sheet bench Anyone who's been to sheet bench and sort of knows what that's like and yeah, it was sort of one of those things. We met at the pub, we sort of hit it off. He happened to be living in Kedoblin at the time and I had a job interview in Dubbo a couple of weeks after I met him so I thought, oh, why not, I'll go and see him? And it just, yeah, it snowballed from there and I guess that was really my real big introduction into agriculture was through him. He grew up on the land and was working as a stocky at the time sort of how that started.
Kirsten Diprose: 4:32
Great Love blossoming at Sheepvention. So how did you come back to where it all began for you?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 4:34
in the Western districts of Victoria. Yeah, in a little bit of a roundabout way, I was working as a vet in Dubbo and he was overseeing a livestock property in Kondo and one day we just decided, oh oh, why don't we have a crack at doing this ourselves? So we leased 100 acres at Mansfield in northeast Victoria and I got a vet job in Mansfield. So we we moved down to Victoria to start our farming journey and we bought 300 sheep and a motorbike and, you know, a secondhand feed cart and kind of away we went from there and eventually we did outgrow the farming over in Mansfield. Size wise and sort of farm value wise, it got a bit out of reach. So we thought we'll head back to the western district where our grew up.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 5:25
You know it's known for being the best sheep farming country in australia, depends who you ask. But it, yeah, it just it worked out really well and I managed to also get another vet job in hamilton at the time. So the timing just sort of seemed really good and we came back over here, started off, yeah, around ham, and you know, eventually over five years we've ended up just seeing a small block, balmoral and leasing. Our main farm is a lease farm just south of us at Gringy Galgota. So that's where we are now.
Kirsten Diprose: 5:58
And you talk about having a crack. I mean you've really built a farm essentially from scratch, Like that's no mean feat.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 6:06
Yeah, well, it kind of. Yeah, there definitely hasn't been a linear journey. There's been a lot of buying and selling, a lot of leasing, a lot of adjustments, a lot of starting on 50 acres, 100 acres, like that's where we started. We started with buying, buying like trays, truck tray loads, like we'd buy 200 sheep. That's sort of where we started and built from there. So it's definitely possible to do. It hasn't been easy. It's still not easy, you know, like it's. It takes a lot of sacrifice, financially and personally as well. You know, in in the beginning we were both working full time off farm to get started, so that meant a lot of farming on the weekends, after work, before work. We, you know, missed out. Yeah, we were in our early 20s when we were doing this, so we missed out on a lot of, you know, weekends away with the boys or the girls or things like that. But I think we just had one singular focus in getting this done have you had a vision of like what you want it to be Like.
Kirsten Diprose: 7:13
Have you got like a five-year plan, a 10-year plan, or has it really just been sort of opportunistic with what comes up and what the markets might be like?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 7:24
A little bit of both. We definitely started with a 10-year goal, which was to have 5,000 ewes on a farm, whether that was leased or owned. It was sort of a bit blurry and then we've sort of kept hold of that 10-year vision and let the rest of it almost evolve a bit organically. Definitely, taking advantage of markets when possible, taking advantage of land opportunities that come up when they work for us, letting go of ones that don't work and not getting hung up on things is also another one. So we're not fixated on how we get there, but we definitely had a 10-year goal which we reached. I think it was at about five years. We've reached the 10-year goal. So then we've readjusted the, the 10-year goal and it's.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 8:13
It's definitely not set in stone, but having that 10-year goal as a bit of a, as a guiding light, really helped focus in our decisions we've made on the way, and whenever we sit down and think, oh my gosh, this is too hard and what are we doing, we think of that, of that goal, and for us it was essentially having the freedom to have our own farm and raise our children on our own farm and be able to decide more or less what we're going to do each day. So you know, this morning was the first day of school and kinder for our two girls, so I was able to sort of block the morning out and go. I'm going to take them but their first day. I think things like that are really special to be able to do.
Kirsten Diprose: 8:56
And what's the farm look like now. Like what have you got on it? What's the size? If you're comfortable saying that, I hate asking that question, but you know, like where's it at now.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 9:05
Yeah, so we have 200 acre block. That is our home, that's the one we own near Balmoral, and then the main farm is a lease farm at Gringis and that's just over 2,000 acres. There's not much on it at the moment because of the season that we're having. We've been in a bit of a de-stocking phase ahead of the water and feed issues. So at the moment we're joining 2,000 ewes and we've got 4,000 lambs in a feedlot. But in previous years we've been running 9,000 ewes, which is still quite lowly stocked really for what the land could potentially carry. But we consider ourselves traders of sheep, so we don't have the exact same system every year and that flexibility has really helped us through our building phase because we're able to well, we just essentially trade sheep and cattle depending on on what the market's doing. So we don't really have a set farming system which, yeah, allows us to have a lot of flexibility in in how we farm yeah, that's really interesting.
Kirsten Diprose: 10:09
So being a farm animal vet is definitely a great skill to have coming into farming, but how did you actually learn how to farm and the business of farming and going out and doing it?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 10:22
Yeah, a lot of trial and error on my behalf. I've learned most of it really from my husband, Al. You know he's been farming his whole life, not on his own farm, but learning off a lot of different farmers. You know he's farmed in Western District, Queensland, South Australia, all over the place. So I think listening to your elders, so to speak, learning off, learning from a lot of people, is pretty much how I've learned how to farm.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 10:49
I think the fundamentals of how I learned came from going through vet school is we did more or less the Lifetime you program as part of our sheep and cattle subject. So we learned those fundamentals at vet school which I think are absolutely critical for anyone. That's farming is if you can have the basics of nutrition and animal health, then not the rest of it is easy. If you can have the basics of nutrition and animal health, then not the rest of it is easy, but you can have a really solid base from which to go forward on. So that's something that I think has been really important for me, especially coming in a little bit green.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 11:27
And then the business of farming was something I learned, i't know, as we started to try and run a farming business. There's definitely a big difference between farming and running a farm business. So Al and I have done quite a few farm business courses throughout our time to help augment that skill. Essentially, it's amazing what you don't know when you're young and just, yeah, starting out. But definitely skills like budget, cash flow, budgeting, learning how to talk to banks, learning how to talk to accountants and how to get what you need out of them, what paperwork you need just all that kind of stuff has been very helpful to learn along the way in which I didn't. We did it backwards. We started and realized what we didn't know and went and did the courses. But in hindsight it would have been nice to start off with something first, but it's just how it went.
Kirsten Diprose: 12:22
I think that's life, though when you're doing something big, like you're building a farm business, there's different stages and phases that you'll go through, and I think we're moving to this idea more broadly now about education is something you do throughout life. So, yes, you might do something straight out of uni and get a really big skill. You know you're a vet, but that idea of you know you're never going to know everything. There's always something you can learn, absolutely, absolutely, and you know there's always something you can learn, absolutely, absolutely.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 12:52
And you know, there's always something I'm learning, I feel like, every day, or things, little skills and gaps as a farmer, that I don't know finding out a lot this year, that I don't know how pumps work for water, and that's something I'm learning very quickly how to get the water systems up and running, and I guess if people have grown up on farms, it might be a skill like that they take for granted. But if you're new to farming, that might be something, like me, that I've never, really ever, had to deal with before until it becomes a problem that we deal with every day.
Kirsten Diprose: 13:27
How do you find the time? I think a lot of us would love to learn all these things and do all these courses, but we just think, oh, how am I going to find the time?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 13:36
Absolutely. I do wonder that myself. I think one thing I have learned over the years is there is always time, and it's about not necessarily prioritizing but carving out some time to do something if you think that's really important for you. And there might be stages of life where you know going to school or doing a course is not going to suit you, and that might be if you know. If you've just started a new job or you've got young children or things like that, and if you work for someone, it might be a matter of talking to your employer about a course that you might think enhance your skills, and most employers will be really happy to help you find times and things like that, because if you're going to enhance your skills, you're going to become a better employee and worker for them as well. Or if you do work for yourself, then it's just about really deciding something's important enough to make time for and then committing to it deciding something's important enough to make time for and then committing to it.
Kirsten Diprose: 14:36
Someone once said to me it's investing in yourself, and so, rather than seeing this time gone, it's time invested, in which case you come to the other end.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 14:41
Yeah, absolutely, and if you do feel you are very time poor, taking a bit of time to choose a course or something that you feel will really benefit you, so you are excited to do it, as opposed to feeling like it's just something you have to do to tick a box I think that's something I found in agriculture especially, but probably applicable to a lot of industries is there's no such thing as just ticking a box. You might do a course, tick the box, say you've got the certificate, but if you never actually learned the skills and embedded them and then can apply them, it will show up that box is being ticked but isn't actually being utilised.
Kirsten Diprose: 15:21
I've never met a farmer that is a tick the box kind of a person.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 15:25
Most of them aren't.
Kirsten Diprose: 15:27
Or, you know, if it doesn't have some really highly practical application, it's like don't even want to know about it. Yeah, absolutely so. You mentioned that your husband taught you a lot of things because he grew up farming. How did that go Like? Is that an easy relationship to you know, be out on the farm when he's more skilled, or at least was at the beginning and had to?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 15:50
teach things. He's definitely more skilled I am with farming. I think I'm well. We've both been very lucky in that he is a real believer in the science of farming and sort of that education part of farming as well, which is great, because that's the only type of farming I knew was sort of the because that's the only type of farming I knew was sort of the scientific side of it, for want of a better word. So the way that I knew how to farm and the way that he was farming melded in really well together. So that was really helpful, I think, for me is that I came in with a bit of the same similar knowledge that he had. It's probably more of the practical skills, the practical side of farming, that I've really had to upskilling and definitely causes some frustrations from time to time when he's trying to teach me and it's just not how my brain works sometimes, which can be really hard. But we're getting there and I think-.
Kirsten Diprose: 16:48
Can you back a trailer?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 16:51
Not fast, definitely not very fast, but out of pure necessity you can back a trailer. You can most of the time get the auger motors running when the coffees have chewed them up, that's well done, you're doing better than me. Yeah, and most of the time draft sheep. But there's things that I think are just really innate in some people in agriculture, like stockmanship skills, which can definitely be taught, but some people pick them up a lot easier than others.
Kirsten Diprose: 17:20
I still really struggle to work a dog, I think growing up with it is what helps, right Like growing up doing it. I think it definitely does.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 17:28
Yeah, and some people just naturally understand livestock and stock flow more than others.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 17:34
I think some people are more mechanically minded than others.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 17:36
But that's also one of the great things about agriculture is it's such a huge beast of an industry that almost every skill is required to run a farm and also just to be part of the ag industry.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 17:49
So if you don't see yourself as the classic old cocky that whistles and the dog magically brings the sheep into the yards, there's a skill and especially these days with the technology involved, there's a skill for everything really. And if you want to be a part of the ag industry, I feel like anyone can nearly fit in somewhere, whether you're someone that's good on the computer and you can do the technical things that I can't do. I'm not very good on computers, but you know, with all these new monitoring systems and all of that all the way through to you know, the mechanics and the welders and the plumbers and all of those skills are needed to run a successful farm. And I think, whereas you know, maybe 20 or 30, 50 years ago there used to be a farmer who ran the farm and he was all of those things. These days there's the farmer or the manager that runs the farm, and then they bring in the people that are skilled in their areas of expertise to do the best job possible on whatever needs to be done.
Kirsten Diprose: 18:54
Yeah, I think you really hit on something there about the changing nature of farming and I think, women's roles in that as well. So of course there are plenty of women who can and do step in as that practical on the ground farmer struggle finding their feet if they want to be part of the farming business. In using their skill set which might not be, you know, backing a trailer and drenching sheep really proficiently.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 19:25
Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I have quite a few friends that maybe feel that way and feel like, because they don't have the same skill set as their husband or brother or dad might have on the farm, that there's no real place for them. But I feel like that's definitely changing. It's changing a lot with the newer roles that become available on a farm, but also with the increase in OH&S and safety on farm. There's a lot more that women can do now, perhaps being less physically strong than men, because we know now that men shouldn't be doing half the things that they do on the farm anyway. So there's better handling facilities getting put in, which means anyone can drench and vaccinate sheep or cattle because they're being properly restrained, and better design of yards and better safety in yards mean that you know anyone can muster and there's really, I don't think, a lot or anything that women can't do compared to men on a physical capacity these days, I do sometimes struggle to pick up down sheep when they're full of lambs and weigh about 90 kilos.
Kirsten Diprose: 20:37
I reckon they're there for those.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 20:40
These days, too, you can get these really cool contraptions on the side of your buggy or bike that pick them up for you. I remember watching Al pick up 120-kilo rams and just toss them around in the yard and just went oh my gosh, but no, we probably shouldn't be doing that anyway. Not good for your back.
Kirsten Diprose: 20:58
Well now even I suppose you know you've gone from trainee farmer to now trainer. That's exciting.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 21:07
Yeah, so I do some of the training at risk for their cert four and diploma ag students. On the animal health side of things, which I do love doing, I love being able to impart knowledge onto students that are willing to receive it, hopefully know that they can then take those bits back that are relevant to them and improve their farming systems or give them confidence that what they're already doing is the right way to go or, if they feel like they might want to try new things, help them work through that and set up systems and plans on their property. So, yeah, everyone is more confident in what they're doing on their farm and they feel more in control of the unknowns. So, obviously, you can never control the weather or things that might happen, but if you can set up plans and systems in place, then hopefully we can feel more confident that if unexpected challenges do arise, we know how to face them. You're still working as a vet as well. Yeah, I am still. Yeah, still working as a vet in the background. Yeah, in the background.
Kirsten Diprose: 22:16
Animal health is obviously your trained skill. Has working in a farm or being part of a farm business helped in any way to kind of understand things, perhaps from the student's perspective of the challenges they might have and what they need to know about animal health, because you're not training people to become a vet.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 22:35
Yeah, absolutely. I think working on the farm and knowing firsthand that the challenges that livestock farmers face day to day or year on year has given me a really good insight on the practicalities of the application of animal health. So, like I said, coming out of uni they teach you the science of animal health and you sort of have the knowledge, but you really don't have the practical skills unless you come off the farm of of how to apply that knowledge and knowing how every farm, every farming system is different, every farm is run slightly differently, so what works on one farm isn't necessarily going to work for someone else. And being able to tweak the knowledge that I have so people are able to practically use it is really important. It's all well and good to tell someone what they need to do, but being able to tell them how they might go about it is just as important, I think. Otherwise a lot of things get put in a too hard basket and then they're never used and the same problems can keep arising over and over again.
Kirsten Diprose: 23:40
Yeah, what are some of the main things that people who do an animal health course want to learn and find really useful?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 23:49
So the main things I find people want to know from a livestock perspective is the day-to-day practical basics that they can apply or that they're already doing on their farm. So we talk a lot about drench management and worm control, vaccinations and what the different vaccines actually, the diseases they prevent and what those diseases might look like in different farming systems. So a lot of bacterial and viral diseases. Although they're similar to sheep and cattle, they can present differently depending on what sort of farming system you're running whether you're autumn lambing, spring lambing, feedlotting, et cetera. They can show up slightly differently. So how diseases show up in different systems, what vaccination protocols are useful for different farming systems, drenching as well and then also covering nutrition of sheep and cattle. So that's the other sort of big one that preoccupies most farmers minds throughout the year is am I feeding them enough, am I feeding them too much, and how much is this costing? And where is the where's the balance between it all? So that's the other big one that we talk about how to get that right.
Kirsten Diprose: 24:59
So where to next for you and your family and the growing farm? What do you want to? I suppose? Where do you want to be in five years?
Dr Lexie Leonard: 25:11
Well at this stage where we're sort of in the middle of a growth phase on our lease block, so we're building up our livestock numbers to match the acreage that we're currently leasing. This dry year has put a little bit of a dampener on that, but it's all right. You know, one step back, two steps forward, kind of thing. It's just a little bump in the road and we'll continue to grow. When it starts raining, it will start raining.
Kirsten Diprose: 25:43
If only there was a course on how to make it rain, right, yeah, that's right.
Dr Lexie Leonard: 25:47
I know I wish there are a few. There's a few things you can do to try and predict when it's going to rain, but it's not something I've looked into. I think I'll just wait until it does and then we'll make make plans from there, I think. But yeah, we're really happy where we're living at the moment. We've been a moral community. It's a fantastic community and, like I said, our girls are at school there, so that's a great place for them. So we're hoping to stay put for a while here and just continue to expand the farm and run it as well as we can.
Kirsten Diprose: 26:23
And that's it for this episode of Ducks on the Pond. Thank you to our guest, dr Lexi Leonard. This is, of course, part two of our collaboration series with RIST, an agricultural education and training provider. Check out the link in the show notes to find out more about them and go back to our first episode, if you haven't listed already, featuring Rachel McGrath, a dairy leader who has stepped up into managing her family farm business. Thank you for listening. You can follow us on Instagram, and we've got a Ducks on the Pond website as well.
Kirsten Diprose: 26:56
This is a Rural Podcasting Co production, and while you're surfing around on the web, does anyone actually say that anymore? Anyway, while you're out there, take a look at what Rural Podcasting Co does as well. We help rural people tell their own stories, and I also have a couple of other podcasts you might like Town Cries, which is a comedy telling the stories of small town Australia, and a new one about film, tv and media. It's a chat show called Two Smart Blondes, but I'll catch you right here on Ducks in the Pond very soon.
