Townie built a business ‘translating’ farm lingo
Gemma Adams was just 23 when she stumbled across a business idea while struggling to get her “townie” head around the farm lingo her husband used on their farm.
Her husband Terry, a born and bred Taranaki farmer, would explain job-related tasks to her by drawing with a stick on the ground or use language that puzzled her.
Being dyslexic, Adams said the difficulty in communicating with him planted a seed that had now grown into a successful business.
From her office in Hāwera, she sells high-resolution aerial maps, checklists, signs and whiteboards that help farmers organise their work and communicate more effectively with their co-workers and employees.
Recently, she has been working for clients in Australia, Chile, Ireland and the United Kingdom, as well as closing a deal with a technology company in the agribusiness sector in New Zealand.
Hers is a success story that has been written about in Women’s Weekly and Dairy Farmer Magazine, but it’s no overnight success.
You could argue it began when Adams met her now husband, Terry, in high school. While he went into farming straight after, she studied computer design at Waikato University in Whanganui.
Three years later, she came back to Taranaki and was hired as a graphic designer by a company in New Plymouth.
“I hated it. I didn’t hate the company, I just didn’t like sitting inside ... and the jobs that you got to do back then were so boring. So I convinced Terry to let me come farming and then I realised I didn’t really know how to do it.”
She found she spent a lot of time trying to catch up because it was so difficult to communicate with her husband. He talked in “farm lingo” and she was a “townie”.
“It’s this massive puzzle, but farmers kinda think that they are communicating right. Then I was like, ‘I need to make myself a map’ and so I just made myself a map that I would put in my pocket,” Adams said.
She also started using whiteboards, checklists and signs to improve their communication and workflow.
The map would help her visualise and learn about the areas of the 180-hectare farm, while the checklists gave her a better understanding of what she needed to do.
“It led to us not being in each other’s pocket all day.”
Then she thought if it worked for her, other farmers could use communicating tools that would let them provide clear instructions to their workers.
So while she was learning the job on their South Taranaki farm, her design background was nurturing an idea that could make farm management easier.
“I’d work on the farm during the day with the kids and then at night I would put them to bed and I’d go out to my little cabin outside. I was so excited to get outside and work at night," Adams said.
In 2018, she opened Viz Link, her business to help farmers manage their property better with simple tools to improve communication and understanding.
Adams said for the first three years, she would use a drone to capture the graphic information of the properties or farms she was commissioned to work on.
But with time, she noticed she could access the same graphic information by using GIS (geographic information systems) to create high-resolution maps of places.
Now the business has an office in Hāwera and ships high-resolution GIS imagery, maps and whiteboards across the world.