October 2020

Next stop, the marketing team!

Since spending time on farm gaining practical experience with one of the UK’s top pig producers, I have been working with ForFarmers’ marketing and communications team on lots of exciting projects. I’ve been focussing on the pig business, but the team covers the UK pig, poultry and leisure markets which includes the Farmgate and Marsden’s brands.

The variety has been huge; during my time, I been helping to coordinate prospecting activity for VIDA, our starter feed brand, learnt a lot more about the feed range, and inputted into plans to help producers move away from zinc. I am excited to be getting involved in these projects, including a trial which I can tell you more about later in the year. I’ve helped to plan social media content across the ForFarmers’ growing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn pages, and I’ve even done a spot of raffle prize shopping for the charity raffle we support at the National Pig Awards. All this whilst balancing how to make sure my fellow employees cannot see that I have my onesie on during skype meetings!

One of my projects has been reviewing the pig, poultry and leisure areas of the ForFarmers website to ensure the information we have on there is as user friendly as possible. My report will be used to help make improvements, so I look forward to seeing the end result. The project has taken me completely out of my comfort zone but it’s allowed me to see the industry from a different perspective and also given me a good excuse to brush up on my product knowledge! The placement with marketing has been a look behind the scenes into all the different activities that go on, all working towards the bigger vision for the business.

The challenge of working from home

On a different note, this month has made me appreciate everyone that has been working from home the last seven months, having personally spent the first lockdown working outside on a farm. I’m now dealing with the challenge of working from home, with the extra struggle of putting up with my flatmate's daily Scottish gibberish. I have resorted to daily autumnal walks, food and regular dance breaks to keep the motivation going. The variety of the everyday tasks and the upbeat energy of my colleagues in our meetings have been greatly helpful.

Happy November lockdown!

This month I will be finishing up my main projects with marketing and starting my transfer over to the technical team where I will be getting involved with all things nutrition. I look forward to updating you in a month on how I am getting on with wearing my science hat and coping with lockdown round two!