On a Saturday morning in June 2013 as I read the Australian spread out on the kitchen table, I came across an article with a picture of a farmer from Western Queensland, gun in hand and cattle in the background with a story of how his options of survival for him and his stock were diminishing and how a bullet may have to be the next option for his stock.
I’d never really been hooked or interested by agriculture but had experienced it through a one week stint fencing on a farm near Panola in South Australia during my school days and exposure to angora goats through by best friend from school’s parents, goat stud business. I was aware of drought as a concept but never really understood its complexity. But here I was face to face with the story and something inside me made me turn to Tracy and without knowing what we would do I said “We need to do something about this” and she agreed. “So what are we going to do” she said, “I don’t know but leave it with me” I responded.
Over the coming days I made some phone calls to people in the ag business in Queensland, one being Agforce, a leading farmers membership organisation. The receptionist said we don’t do farmer assistance when i asked her what they we doing to support farmers, but she did mention a group in Western Queensland called Aussie Helpers and said their founder Brian might be able to help you.
Never scared of the phone and its potential I called Aussie helpers and spoke with Nerida, Brian’s wife who said Brian was out at the moment and would call me upon his return. Brian was always on the road as I was about to learn and so when we connected I asked him what help farmers needed.
His answer true to aussie form was pretty straight to the point, “fodder” he said. Now a city boy, passionate about marketing and with little knowledge of farming said, “Whats fodder”? to which he said “hay” and I said “ah, ok , so they need hay.”
I said to Brian I needed a few days but leave it with me and I’ll come up with a fundraising campaign I can run for you that will help you get the money you need for hay.
One thing when you have no marketing budget, your campaign has to explain very simply what it is and does and how people can engage in it. Over the days following I kept asking myself how can we ask Australians to support farmers but donating for hay? Then it came to me, what don’t we ask Australian’s to Buy a Bale of hay.
The first thing I did was jump online and see if the domain name www.buyabale.com was available and it was so I registered it and then looked for the .com.au, both available, I took both. In speaking with Brian I understood they had little ability to knock out a website or how to connect a payment gateway for donations so i said, “I’ll build it, host it, run it for you and I’ll send the funds through your payment gateway direct to you account.” Simple enough a week later after meeting Brian in Brisbane on one of his many trips, the website was ready to launch.
During one of our conversations Brian mentioned he was member of Bartercard and had a lot of dollars and no idea how to spend them. A member of Bartercard and previous trade co ordinator I saw an opportunity to leverage a number of relationships through Bartercard, one especially was going to change our lives for ever and a bold call made all the difference.
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