Being awarded a 2017 Nuffield Scholarship will enable Hunter Valley based farmer Sarah Sivyer to travel overseas and visit innovative small scale farming enterprises.
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Ms Sivyer runs Just Been Laid, a pastured egg business at Eccleston on the Allyn River. Just Been Laid produces just under 10,000 eggs a week from 1500 birds that roam on pastures and are housed in mobile sheds.
Returning to the 700 hectare family farm, following a successful agribusiness career that included working for Rabobank, Mr Sivyer is delighted to receive one of the five scholarships awarded in NSW - in her case the scholarship was supported by the NSW Department of Primary Industries (DPI).
Nuffield will provide each recipient with a $30,000 bursary to fund a 16-week program to undertake research into their chosen study areas across the globe.
She is the fifth generation of her family to live and work on the property which also supports a cattle breeding enterprise. Ms Sivyer holds an MBA from Oxford University and has a background in continuous improvement.
“Being able to bring continuous improvement and innovation philosophies into what we are doing on the farm has been really advantageous to our business operations,” she said.
“In combination with a premium product and the trial of our new subscription distribution method, we have been able to grow the business and initiate conversations with our customers about topics such as biosecurity, a critically important issue for farmers, which is often misunderstood by the broader community.
“Simply differentiating a product based on premium quality is not enough - we focused on continuous improvement and innovation as a way of striving for excellence in our production and also in our product, to meet the needs of our livestock and our customers, now and into the future. "I am very grateful to DPI for their support of the scholarship and look forward to working closely with them".
She is planning to travel to Italy, the Netherlands, Japan, and the UK and seek out smaller scale farms using best practice systems.
“It’s an opportunity to learn as much as possible from those farmers and the supply chain they use,” she said.
“On our own farm we have diversified and in doing so hope to increase production and become as cost effective as we can – for example using the chickens to boost soil fertility and pasture growth.”
Ms Sivyer has been a greater supporter of the fledgling Slow Food Markets held fortnightly in Maitland as they offer small scale producers a rare opportunity to connect directly with their customers.