Terry Buckley, Buckley Innovative Farming Pty Ltd
THIS IS HOW ACHMEA KEEPS FARMERS FARMING
South Australia-based potato farmer Terry Buckley talks about risk management and the “really good” service provided by Achmea Farm Insurance
“Our farm is located Northeast Mount Gambier, it’s a mixed farming enterprise. We run sheep for prime lamb production and grow potatoes for processing for crisps and French fries for export. It’s a family farm business, going back four to five generations, but largely, my parents got it going from there. It used to be 104 acres in Adelaide Hills, and we’ve been working at expanding it ever since.
Potato farming and risk management
The biggest risk we have on farm is too much rain. Not many farmers have trouble with too much water, but in our case, we’re growing potatoes in a clay sort of soil. A lot of the time you’re irrigated all summer to grow your potatoes and if you get rain on top of that, it doesn’t take long before it’s gone from wet enough to too wet. Potatoes are very expensive to grow. You can lose a lot of money, very, very quickly on potatoes.
The other big risk is a general fire, you can lose all your sheep. We run a lot of sheep and if you lose your fences, you lose your sheep. We’ve got quite a bit of equipment that we have had from scratch, that’s very hard to replace. In the event of a large fire, you certainly need to be well covered.
Achmea Farm Insurance
We don’t generally change businesses much, when we are getting good service. When we were looking at options, Achmea Farm Insurance was the first place we looked, we liked what we saw and now we’re here.
A “really good” claims experience
When choosing a company, pricing is a prime concern. Some insurance companies will sell it to you but when it comes to the crunch of helping you out, they aren’t there anymore. Achmea Farm Insurance seem to have a genuine interest in the industry. We’ve had one or two claims we’ve had to do and so far, our experience has been really good.
Local service
Our experience with Kaydee Rogers (local Achmea Farm Insurance Specialist) has been good, she’s a nice lady. When you hear the horror stories of people not being covered, you have a lot of questions. Kaydee was really good, she was able to answer our questions or get the answers from further up. So, at this point in time, we haven’t got any complaints at all.”
Terry Buckley, Buckley Innovative Farming Pty Ltd, South Australia
Website: Buckley Farms