Lydia Farrell

Lydia is building her career as a farm systems and modelling scientist after joining the research team at DairyNZ in 2022.

She enjoys working on newly broken fields of research, such as extended lactation systems. Lydia is motivated to produce practical options that help farms become more resilient and sustainable while remaining profitable.

Alongside her involvement in the extended lactation research, she has also enjoyed modelling work she has carried out on farm case studies for adoption of plantain and dairy beef systems modelling. 

“My role is to try and see how adoptable an idea is, how it would work in practice and how it affects farm profitability,” she says. For Lydia, part of the process involves investigating these ideas using computer simulations, followed by taking it a step further and testing it at a farmlet scale.

Lydia grew up on a Northland dairy farm and then attended Lincoln University where she completed a Bachelor of Agricultural Science with Honours. After she graduated, she interned at AgResearch and DairyNZ where she enjoyed her involvement with six research teams across the two organisations. She followed this with a PhD at Massey University, and spent time at Teagasc in Ireland, modelling Irish sheep farm systems and measuring sheep methane emissions.

Lydia is motivated by working with a team of people who are willing to try new things and challenge the status quo, but who are also grounded in reality. “As a team we brainstorm ideas,” she says. “Then there is the expertise available in the team to evaluate them and see if they will work in practice.”