Yeah.

Uh, and so, which was actually funded by, um, a Walsh Fellowship, which is from Ireland.

So my, um, PhD supervisor, Dairynz anyway, was, um, Jenny Jago, who had just come back from a year sabbatical over in Ireland, and so they'd set up this sort of joint project.

It was 20- this was 2010 kinda, kinda era, and, um, the Irish were sorta gearing up for this, uh, milk quota kinda coming off and, and this anticipated wave of expansion, and so milking was one of the things.

"Well, if we're gonna expand, how are we gonna do that more efficiently?" So there was this project around milking efficiency, um- And yeah, did a year's data collection here in New Zealand.

A big part of that w- was one was a, a experiment at, at Live Farm, and then the other one was actually v- going out and visiting and collecting data off 80 farms around New Zealand that had rotary dairies and milk meters to, to be able to automatically, autonomously kinda collect some of that data.

Second year was off to, um, Ireland for a year and did- Nice ... same sort of thing, uh, at, I guess, Moorepark over there.

So, can you tell us a little bit more about that extended lactation project? What was it actually designed to set up or, you know, set up to try and understand better or try and achieve or problem that it was trying to solve?

So what piece of that overall talent infrastructure do you think has had the biggest effect on keeping your best people?

I think that in any walk of life, if people feel like they're not being developed and it becomes repetitive, they're likely to find something different to do or somewhere different to do it.

So I think there's a big pressure, which there should be, on employers to make the learning experience of your teams strong from day one.

We always kick off our onboarding sessions with our new hires by basically thanking them for trusting us with this stage of their career, whether that's someone coming out of school, whether that's someone switching jobs, someone coming out of business school, mid-level hire, senior level hire.

As an employee, you have an incredible responsibility, which isn't just about making payroll every second week.

It's very much around being part of the learning and career development of everyone who walks through your door.

And whether they're going to be there for a year, 10 years, 30 years, whatever it may be, you have to have a commitment to making sure that there's a betterment and an improvement.

And now that you're backed by Grant Thornton's skill and resources, So how does that combination change what you can deliver? And what does that work look like day to day now?

Why would you do it?

Absolutely.

And yeah, so our systems have been designed very carefully around matching that feed supply and demand, which as we know is fits around that annual cycle.

I guess the background to this piece of work, I suppose there's a few different angles to it.

Where we initially started was some work looking at our international competitiveness, thinking about a sort of 20, well, at the time, this was in the early 2020s, looking at that 2030-40 type horizon, so like a decade out, where our systems were likely to be, where the systems of our international competitors were likely to be, and where might there be gaps or risks, I suppose, for us, or equally opportunities.

And those are a bit of a formal exercise there to identify those.

And one of the things that came out of that it was a risk around labor availability and the word was actually substitutability which I guess is probably code for flexibility and yeah how having people on farm into the field having sufficient people on farm to the future and how that was a bit of a risk particularly given the context of our labor productivity, which if you go and look at the statistics has been pretty flat at around that 145 kind of cows per FTE since about 2010.

yeah, I think we all

Please tell us how does or how do the S26 Ultra's AI tools streamline daily tasks and improve workflow efficiency?

You know, for SMEs, you know, nine times out of ten, you don't have an IT shop.

Nine times out of ten, you don't have a scale of employee base, someone to do everything.

You're wearing multiple hats.

You're juggling multiple tasks in a day.

I think I saw a stat yesterday.

a couple years back that 97% of all Canadian businesses are SMEs.

Paul, how do Samsung Knox and privacy settings or features protect sensitive business data in an AI-driven environment?

Mm-hmm.

And it just slowly started to take off.

It took time, but I, I'm quite cautious, so, you know, I was quite happy that it didn't kind of take off straight away.

Uh, yeah, it was a slow burner really.

And then I slowly got into, you know, I upgraded my rig after, uh, maybe three, four years, and then, uh, I just kind of started to get calls from other places that people had heard.

Uh, and I, I remember film coming down to shoot location down in, uh, just on the border between England and Wales in the summer, and they'd obviously looked up in the local, uh, booklet, union booklet, and just gone down, "Oh, there's a Steadicam guy here.

Who's Paul Edwards?" So I got tried out and it kind of worked.

I, I want to, uh, leave you, uh, with the question that I leave everybody with, um, which is, uh, advice for someone getting into the business today on how to succeed and/or maybe something you have learned along the way that you wish you knew when you started out.