Ginny Stevens on getting back into farming with Mobble
Half an hour south from Wagga, you’ll find Mobbler Ginny Stevens and her family at their Mangoplah property. The Founder of Active Farmers and mum of three started working on her husband’s family farm six months ago, recruiting Mobble along the way to help with the transition.
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Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your farming operation?
We live on a farm at Mangoplah, half an hour south from Wagga. My husband Andy and my father in law Mike are involved in the operation today. We have about 6,000 ewes on the property at the moment and a bit of cropping as well, but phasing that out and moving more into sheep.
We have 3 kids, Henry and Issy who are 5, and Will who is 2.
How long have you and the family been farming for?
Mike and Vicki bought the farm when they got married, and they lived on the farm for 40 years before moving to Wagga. Andy has been back on the farm for almost 15 years and I’ve lived here for 8 years. I’m sort of the ultimate jillaroo at the moment. I spent a lot of my childhood living on a farm and then did work in the NT as a jillaroo when I finished school. From there I did Ag Science, worked in the banking industry and started Active Farmers, and I’ve just started working back on the farm since July.
What sparked your interest in using Mobble?
Firstly because Carly works there! That’s how I heard about it at least and on the grapevine I'd heard of other people using it. When I looked into it, it just made so much sense to use it because it’s just so great having the farm map on your phone and you can see where all the paddocks are etc. So for me starting out on the farm, it’s been a really good tool to teach me where all the paddocks and sheep are and it’s probably saved a lot of arguments!
It’s saved a lot of time for me to be potentially calling Mike and Andy and asking them questions when I can just look on my phone and figure it out myself. So that’s sort of what drew me towards Mobble - helping with that transition back to the farm.
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In a few words, what does Mobble mean for you?
- I think Mobble is really efficient. You can pull your phone out and really quickly look at where your sheep are and go straight to your reports and print off stock numbers if you’ve got a meeting coming up. So you save a lot of time.
- It’s also a great management tool in terms of getting a birds eye view of your farm, looking where to move sheep and having a really good record of how long they've been in paddocks for. We’ve got a lot of sheep now and we’re moving towards rotational grazing so we have a lot of mobs and it’s quite hard to remember where all the mobs are because we’re transitioning from Dohne to Composite sheep.
- It gives you confidence that your records are OK if you get audited. You’ve got your facts and figures and history so it gives you confidence that you’ve got everything in one spot. Being able to go back through your records easily and figure out when did you last drench or when did you last vaccinate. We’ve got a lot of confidence that it’s all there in an easy spot to find.
Can you think of a time when Mobble helped make a day to day decision or help with a roadblock on the farm?
When we’re doing our lamb-marking, we can put all the data into Mobble and easily calculate how our percentages are going. So for us we can separate out different breeds - analyse them in their own groups. That was just really good information to have that we could work out easily for planning next year. Figuring out if we’re getting enough lambs, are we not, which paddocks were doing better than the others. That’s a profit driver for us - how many lambs we mark so having Mobble available to see that data and see what mobs/breeds/paddocks are doing better has been great.
If you could travel to your farm in 20 years time, what would you hope to see?
We are moving to 100% composite sheep flock and building numbers and hopefully by then we’d be at capacity and have some really good genetics and be turning off a lot of sheep. We’ve got a pasture renovation program we’re doing so hopefully by then we wouldn’t be cropping anymore, we’d just have pastures and lucerne.
Hopefully we’d have a bit of irrigation set up as well. Mike and Vicki have done a great job with landcare and putting in tree lots in so there’s only a little bit more to do there. Also it’s really important to us to consider the sustainability of the farm and environmental factors; using solar and making sure we have enough trees, making sure there’s no erosion happening, and keeping good ground cover.
Hopefully by then we might have a few kids helping out on the farm as well!
Why would you recommend Mobble to another farmer?
Particularly if the business has a couple of staff members, it helps get everyone on the same page. It’s a really good tool to communicate information. It’s brilliant for onboarding new staff as well. Everyone’s using the same tool collectively. Nobody’s got separate notes in their top pocket notebook. You’re all looking at the same information, the same data, the same map. Mobble just saves a lot of time with miscommunication so you can get on with it and focus on other things.
To learn more about how Mobble can help your farming business, visit www.mobble.io.