30/08/2026
A huge thank you to LeAnne for welcoming Tracy onto the farm and sharing her wealth of calf and dairy farming knowledge. 🐄
Well done, Tracy, for getting stuck in and experiencing the realities of farming first-hand, there’s no better way to understand our customers than to experience it first-hand!
If you’re looking to learn more about calves and calf rearing, we highly recommend following Leanne at Calf Chronicles.
Getting the taste for dairy farming first hand
The Shoof Intern
Many years ago, when I was teaching horse riding to children, one of the fundamental principles was that you can’t truly describe what strawberry jam tastes like to someone else. At some point, you have to get them taste it themselves. In the horse riding sense, get them to experience what it should feel like rather than just describe it.
This week, Tracy, the Marketing Manager for Shoof, came to taste the strawberry jam that is dairy farming. Not being a farmer herself, we had had a few conversations talking general calf stuff and she was genuinely interested in how some of the Shoof products stood up in a farming context. After all, it's one thing to pen all sorts of marketing write up about them, it's another to really understand the environment they are used in.
Through a few conversations, we built a rapport, and Tracy was brave enough to ask if she could come and spend a week working with us. Not visit for a few hours. Not stand at the gate in clean gumboots while we demonstrated a few products. Actually live with us, get up each morning and become part of the daily rhythm of the farm. That is an incredibly rare thing and pretty amazing in my book.
Companies often ask farmers for feedback. We fill in surveys, trial products and explain what works, what doesn’t and what we wish someone had thought about before it reached us. There is a limit to what can be captured in a feedback form, because a product is never used in isolation. It is used with cold hands, in driving rain, while calves need feeding, cows need checking and three other jobs need doing. It has to fit into a whole farm system, with all its time pressure, compromises and moving parts.
To understand that, sometimes you have to see it through our eyes, touch it with your own hands and logic through how each part works. And so the Shoof internship began.
Tracy worked with the fresh calved cows collecting first milkings, Brix testing and managing the colostrum through to the calf, scrubbed what seemed like a million water buckets, fed and taught calves to drink, milked cows, observed calvings and pitched in wherever she was needed. All day, every day, for the best part of a week.
She sat around the dinner table with us each night while we reflected on the day, with loads of quality questions about what she had seen. Right before we all pulled our gear back on and headed outside again for night checks. She didn’t just see the jobs, she experienced the full rhythm of farming over a busy calving period.
And man, did this week give her the full experience.
There were scouring calves, cows breaking out, freezing mornings, pouring rain and then enough sudden warmth to have us all peeling off layers like weirdly dressed st*****rs. As if that was not entertaining enough, she also watched me drop the clutch on the two-wheeler, ride directly into an electric fence and fall off.
But she saw the deeply human side of farming too. Together, we watched one of our favourite cows give birth and celebrated the safe arrival of her calf. The following day, that same cow died. Tracy witnessed the tears and grief that came with losing her. In less than 24 hours, she saw how quickly farming can move from joy and relief to shock and heartbreak.
There was no polished or carefully curated version of our farm this week. She saw the highs, the lows, the good, the bad, the trade-offs and all the imperfect bits in between. She saw the constant decision-making, the frustration, the humour, the exhaustion and just how deeply we care about the animals we look after.
That is why this experience has been so powerful. Because she did not come here assuming she already understood farmers just because she worked for a company that supplies them. She was prepared to step completely outside her own world, become vulnerable, ask questions, get her hands dirty and learn from the people using those products in real life. It takes courage and humility to do that.
Customer feedback is valuable. But living with your customer, working beside them and seeing the world through their eyes is something else entirely.
I have enormous admiration for Tracy for being brave enough to do it. I am sure the experience will make her better at her job, but I think it did something valuable for us too. Her questions made us stop and explain the hundreds of decisions and small details that have become instinctive to us. She didn’t just listen to what we do, she wanted to understand why we do it.
That is where this became more than a product trial or a week of customer research. It became a genuine exchange between someone who helps shape how products are understood and the farmers who must make those products work in real life. That kind of connection is rare, and incredibly powerful.
And she cleaned my microwave, so frankly, Shoof may never get her back. I may be preparing a counteroffer for her employment.
Tracy arrived wanting to see farming through our eyes. By the end of the week, she wasn’t standing on the outside looking in. She was pulling her wet gear back on after dinner and heading out for night checks with the rest of us.
That is the difference between asking someone what strawberry jam tastes like and being prepared to taste it for yourself.
It has been an absolute pleasure and privilege to welcome Tracy into our home and have her become part of our farm for the week. I hope she left with a deeper understanding of farming, because we were certainly left with enormous respect for her willingness to truly understand us.
Picture of Tracy herself with her “freshies” learning to feed
