Accounting and finance students have been competing to run a virtual dairy farm, with prize money paid out based on the gross milk income of five dairy cows for the 2016-17 milking season.
AccountingPod director Judith Cambridge said the amount the winners stood to gain in the ‘Cash for Cow’ contest was about $10,000 for running the farm over 22 days.
The winner of the simulation competition was Victoria University accounting and finance student Rebecca Matthews. Runner up was Matthew Morrison from Otago University, and third place went to AUT student Samson Cheng.
Cambridge, a Queenstown chartered accountant, said AccountingPod had been developed as an educational portal plug-in which aimed to teach students about real life business using cloud applications.
“We don’t care if a business student in the middle of Auckland’s CBD is studying dairying, we’ve achieved two of our outcomes – giving students exposure to New Zealand business, and teaching them about cloud business tools,” Cambridge said.
A dairy farm was chosen because the dairy sector has a “huge” amount of data which was used in the competition.
“It’s based on a real dairy farm, it’s real data but you can’t identify it and we pump that data from the dairy farm into each students’ ledger.”
The 300 contestants used Xero’s farm business software, and the data included the farm manager’s monthly report, his walk around the farm, and links to news articles that were relevant.
The top students had to present their third quarter results at an online meeting, and had to come up with an idea to add value to milk.
Panel member Gideon Clewlow, head of rural development at the ASB, said the winner Matthews, who is not off a dairy farm, provided a high quality presentation.
“Rebecca was a deserved winner of this competition. She demonstrated a strong understanding of her craft and used the competition software to demonstrate this. She researched the topic and demonstrated a good macro understanding of farming. Her innovative product idea ‘Latte Therapy’ was well thought out and could work in the real world,” Clewlow said.
By: Gerard Hutching
Source: Stuff.co.nz