Farm vet and clinical director Hannah Batty has travelled the world to learn new ideas that will help achieve positive changes for her clients and her practice.
Hannah, who works at LLM Farm Vets in Shropshire, was given the opportunity to expand her knowledge in this unique way through the Nuffield Farming Scholarship, a charity that aims to develop agriculture’s future leaders.
Here, Hannah shares how she hopes the findings from her travels across South America, Australia and Europe will help the dairy sector and colleagues in her own and other farm practices…
Eleven years into her career as a farm vet, Hannah Batty is still passionate about clinical work and loves the hands-on, practical side of being a farm vet, from calving cows to getting stuck into preventative health and farm profitability.
Having progressed in her role to become a clinical director of LLM Farm Vets in Shropshire six years ago, she also manages people at the practice and is equally passionate about supporting the team to be the best they can be.
To boost her knowledge and discover new ideas and ways of working that can benefit her colleagues and the wider dairy industry, Hannah applied – and was accepted – for a Nuffield Scholarship.
With support from VetPartners and LLM Farm Vets, who agreed for Hannah to take extra leave, she used the scholarship to travel to Canada, Australia, Chile, Brazil, the Netherlands, Ireland and Scotland over the past two years, where she visited a range of businesses to find out what they do well and bring her findings back to the UK.
Her travels took her to a diverse range of locations, from the vast landscapes of a Tasmanian dairy farm and a Brazilian beef farm – where she explored the pastures on horseback – to the 117th floor of a Melbourne skyscraper to meet the CEO of a dairy business with 69,000 animals.
She delved into how each of these businesses communicate with their teams, achieve best practice and put people at the heart of everything they do.
Hannah says she felt participating in the scholarship would be the perfect way to learn how to manage people to ensure farm health, welfare and profitability targets are met.
Hannah said: “Alongside my clinical work, my responsibilities include managing our vet tech team, making strategic decisions for the business, looking at how we can continue to support our farmers and help develop their businesses, and spotting opportunities for training and new products.
“The Nuffield Scholarship scheme appealed to me because I loved the idea of challenging myself, broadening my horizons of global agriculture and being able to uncover new ideas to support our clients. Rather ambitiously, I first applied when I was a year out of vet school and the panel correctly identified it was a bit too soon. I kept the idea in the back of my mind, though, reapplied in 2023 and was delighted to be accepted.”
Nuffield scholars undertake a mixture of scientific and people research when they are on their travels, and the aim is to use these findings to support their own personal development journey and help them contribute positively to the future of agriculture.
Hannah added: “In my application I had to say what I believe is important and pertinent to British agriculture. For me, this boils down to people, processes and potential. As a vet, you go on a lot of farms where you see health challenges, but you may also see people management challenges. I often hear about business challenges on farm that are similar to those I’ve experienced as a clinical director.
“I have a theory that happy cows mean happy people, and happy people mean happy cows. I wanted to do the scholarship so I could explore this further and come up with practical tips and tools for dairy farmers, to help them make their places of work happier, more fulfilling and more successful for the people as well as the animals.
“I do believe you see animal health benefits if you’ve got people on the right track, doing things correctly.”
Practice support
Hannah is a graduate of Nottingham University Vet School and joined LLM as a dairy intern. She has thrived at the practice and was promoted to clinical director in 2019. However, it was only in the last six months of her degree that she decided to specialise in livestock.
“As a farm vet, I felt I could make a difference to the individual animal, the whole herd, and also to the farm business,” she explained.
“The LLM team and VetPartners have been amazing and they could see how the scholarship would benefit me, our clients, and the practice,” Hannah continued. “I did learn a lot and I’ve been sharing this with my colleagues here and across VetPartners and with farmers. Knowing I had the full support and backing of the practice was really important and I’m incredibly grateful to VetPartners and our LLM family for allowing me to have gone on this amazing journey.
“A lot of what I’ve learned is team focused and the road to making positive changes starts with thinking why are we here, who’s within my team, and how will we achieve our end goal? To be successful, you must all know what the goal is, and articulating this clearly and sharing it in with the team will get buy-in and build a shared sense of purpose.
“Even more importantly is recognising who you are and you need to understand yourself first. If a leader doesn’t have a strong sense of self and the ability to appreciate how they communicate and interact with people, they might end up offending team members unintentionally or communicating things in the wrong way.
“To be successful you also need to think about how you are going to achieve your goals, starting with the desired outcome, as opposed to the process first. Getting a team on board with a desired outcome and then asking them to help come up with the solutions or protocols will get much better buy-in and commitment.
“Lastly, and I know it sounds obvious, but I’ve found that it’s vital to make time to talk. People management doesn’t just happen naturally, and particularly now farms are typically getting bigger, we’ve got to create time to talk and to enable us to have these conversations that build trust. This will allow us to be open, problem solve, and to find solutions.”
People above technology
To help Hannah’s research benefit clients as much as possible, LLM is looking to run a farm management people skills workshop series with clients and create discussion groups to support them.
Hannah said: “The future of farm vetting is changing and being able to diversify our income streams and offer support to farmers that is readily accessible and understandable is important.
“I think farming has potentially been behind other industries in terms of how it has supported its employees, carried out appraisals or developed team members. But if we want to recruit and retain good people in the industry, it needs to get better at this support. For example, we can help them come up with appraisal forms that they can use to do a useful review of the team to support them most.
“There’s a real opportunity for people, including vets, who are skilled in this area to offer advice to farmers. It’s nice knowing that sometimes you can go to a farm to solve a cow health problem and then chat about ‘people health’ problems at the same time.
“At the end of the day, if we don’t have people involved in milking cows, how are we going to milk cows? A lot of people think technology is the answer, but we still need people to look after that technology.
“Rather than fearing people management, we need to see it as an opportunity to improve how we communicate and motivate teams.
“Throughout my travels during the scholarship and no matter what country I was in, one message rang loud and clear – people are the most important thing in the world.”
To hear how VetPartners supported Hannah to travel the world as part of the Nuffield Farm Scholarship, see the video below:-