Last spring, my co-founder Brendan Allen asked me to address the topic of company culture during our FARMEYE team meetings. Now, Brendan doesn’t often ask me to take on tasks, but when he does, it’s always for a significant reason. I quickly realised this was an important request.
I hadn’t seriously considered talking about or documenting our company culture before. However, its importance became clear to me over the summer. We celebrated our seventh anniversary in mid-summer with a full team social and culture day. It was an immensely enjoyable event, offering everyone an opportunity to connect in a relaxed and informal atmosphere.
Four years ago, when FARMEYE was a relatively new company with just a small team, whom I referred to as “The Taughmaconnell Six”, there was no real need to discuss culture. The three founders, Brendan, Joe and myself were in direct daily contact with each of these six first employees. For the first couple of years, we operated out of an old portacabin at the back of my family home, a traditional limestone farmhouse in Taughmaconnell, South Roscommon.
Transforming Tradition: Our Organic Journey
When you’re working cheek-by-jowl, it’s very easy to communicate non-verbally. What you do and why you do it, is patently visible to your colleagues. Learning happens by osmosis, through a gesture, a look, or even a smile. Everyone on the team could see the respect for our natural and built heritage, or perhaps what some might call “madness,” that led my wife Eilish and me to renovate a 120-year-old limestone farmhouse rather than demolish it, despite all well-meaning advice to the contrary in the early 2010s.
The Taughmaconnell Six also witnessed first-hand our decision to convert our family farm to an organic system, a move made to preserve the farm and its soil for a fifth generation. Eating lunch together around a century-old kitchen table, we were literally surrounded by culture. Documenting or discussing culture seemed unnecessary; it was something you could feel—the culture’s essence was probably there at the table, perhaps even sneaking a bite of your scone during your break.
As FARMEYE has grown over the past few years from that initial small group to a team of over 20, the three co-founders faced a new challenge. We moved to a state-of-the-art office in Athlone and welcomed new colleagues from diverse backgrounds across the globe.
A Unified Purpose: Improving Lives and the Environment
The challenge of maintaining our company culture as the team expanded took me some time to fully recognise. In truth, I didn’t seriously consider it until Brendan requested it earlier this year. It became clear that we needed to instill and nurture the culture in our growing team – many of whom had never experienced the portacabin or shared lunch at a farmhouse kitchen table.
The vision held by me and my fellow co-founders is something we must communicate clearly and directly so that everyone on the team, from the General Manager to the summer intern, understands what we stand for and why we come to work every day. Our purpose is to improve the lives of land custodians and the environment. It’s essential to reward those who enhance and protect nature. To achieve this, auditable metrics are essential, and FARMEYE excels at developing technologies that verifiably measure nature.
Cultivating a Collaborative Culture
In 2019, we introduced an employee-centric company policy that included flexible working hours, an additional paid personal day each month, and the option for remote working.
While remote working offers numerous personal benefits and everyone universally recognises its virtues, it challenges us to integrate new employees into the company culture. It’s difficult to convey values over a Zoom call or inspire team-building online. We continually strive to improve how we operate and communicate as a team at FARMEYE, but our blended approach—50% office-based and 50% remote—has proven effective in providing a balance that suits most individuals and fosters a thriving collective. The team has wholeheartedly embraced the collaborative culture in our new office, and the conversations around the kitchen table are just as vital as those across the office desks.
I am truly honoured to lead this group of talented and exceptionally dedicated individuals whose positive feedback recently earned us a place on The Sunday Times’ list of best place to work last month:
Cultivating Connections: The Heart of Farming
Last weekend, as I bounced around in the dusty cab of a John Deere tractor, turning hay in a field my grandfather last ploughed with a horse long before I was born, my thoughts drifted back to him and his ways. Paddy Finneran deeply rooted himself in the heritage of the stony soils of South Roscommon. He was a man who valued the importance of farming, and he also knew that people and community were even more important.
For decades, if anyone in the area needed a field for a sporting or community event—be it athletics, Gaelic football, soccer, handball, or even pony racing—Paddy always had a field available, often putting his farming tasks on the long finger. Although a staunch GAA man, Paddy knew that bringing people together, no matter the sport or occasion, was one of the greatest contributions he could make with his time and land. Inclusivity was a given.
Togetherness: The Foundation of Our Success
The five-acre field I was tedding, was called the “football field,” and for 50 years, it hosted the annual Taughmaconnell Feis, a day-long celebration of music, art, sport, and culture. The farmhouse itself, where I now live with my young family, was also known as a “ramblin house” and regularly hosted dances and card games. Although the Feis and the football field are now memories, the importance of bringing people together remains a core value I hold dear and one that is central to the FARMEYE team.
Together, Humility, Respect, Innovation, Verification, Endurance & Resilience – “Thrive” is the acronym for FARMEYE’S values, and the first letter, “T,” stands for Togetherness – the collaborative spirit that underpins all our successes, both within and beyond this dynamic, thriving company.
The Taughmaconnell Six are; Emma O’Grady, Eoghan Coyle, Eimear Mahon, Nicola Auchmuty, Gearoid Finneran and Sean Duignan
