Stockies: Born on a Taihape Sheep & Beef farm

When I was running a Taihape sheep and beef farm a few years ago, I couldn't stop thinking about how much money the livestock industry was leaving in the paddock and on the road. Everything cobbled together between diaries, WhatsApp, text messages, websites and phone calls. None of it built for buying and selling stock.

We spend a lot of time scrolling through chats, checking websites that haven't changed, thumbing through diaries (or trying to read them after they've been through the wash), and waiting for someone to get back to us. It means lost time, extra cartage, and day trips to look at animals we'd never buy with better information. A couple of unnecessary truck movements a year on a single farm is thousands of dollars. Multiply that across sheep, beef and dairy and you're easily into the tens of millions in dead money. Even more now, given the price of stock and the cost of diesel.

It's no-one's fault. Everyone's busy and would rather be outside than in front of a computer. Nobody has time to fix it, and there's a severe lack of outside investment in this corner of the sector. Still, we need tools that share the right information between the right people, and preserve what farmers and agents bring to the table — the experience, the relationships, the judgement. Other industries have this. Why can't we?

So when a serious back injury sidelined me from farming, I used my background in tech, along with capital earmarked for a farm deposit, and I started building. The first version was rough, but it picked up solid interest at Fieldays in 2024, so I kept going.

From day one, it had to be independent. In an industry this competitive, the people using it need to know it's built for them. Trust is half of what makes this market work in the first place. On that basis, we've built, tested, listened, re-built and torn our hair out a few times, and what's come out the other side works for everything from a small farm to the largest agency.

Now Stockies is used by some of the biggest farming and agent operations in New Zealand. It's truly built for remote, rural New Zealand — no signal, no worries.

To the farmers and agents who trust Stockies with your business — we couldn't thank you more. We hope you're seeing the value, because you're contributing to the improvement of our industry by trying something different. If you're thinking about it, now's a great time to give it a crack.

Cheers,
Tom

Tom PlattsFounder, Stockies · New Plymouth