Investing in the future of dairy - one graduate at a time
Seb Bodle | Service Technician | Deosan & Agora
At Terravest, we believe the dairy industry’s future depends on who we bring into it - and how seriously we invest in them. Seb Bodle’s story is a good place to start.
Seb came to us straight out of a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Canterbury. He grew up around agriculture — St Paul’s, a school with a strong farming focus — but chose commerce as a broad foundation, curious about where it might take him. When he finished university, his father Kip, who founded Deosan over twenty years ago and was launching a new venture called Agora, suggested Seb come and help out for a couple of months.
A couple of months became full time. And full time became something he genuinely loves.
“I jumped in for a few months and ended up really enjoying it. I’m now working full time, sitting across the two companies and doing a bit of everything in between. Now that we also own DTS, this opens up even more opportunities”.
— Seb Bodle, Service Technician
No two days are the same
Seb’s role spans two distinct but complementary businesses. With Deosan, it’s hands-on shed work — hygiene checks, teat spray unit set-ups, chemical management. Five or six sheds a day, roughly an hour each, working around milking times and the season. It’s practical, physical, and demands good relationships with farmers.
With Agora, it’s a different kind of work. Checking the Agora Hub App, monitoring sensor alerts, managing IoT gateway connectivity, installing weather stations, and working across the team on what needs replacing, fixing, or upgrading next. Agora is, as Seb puts it, “very much the new space in dairy.”
The technically interesting problems keep him sharp. Figuring out how auto washers work in newer sheds — often without instructions, just working it out from first principles — is the kind of challenge that suits someone who came to the role with fresh eyes and no preconceptions about how things should be done.
What surprised him most
Seb expected the work to be straightforward. He knew farmers. He didn’t expect quite how much depth dairy farming carries — the science, the systems, the seasonal rhythms. But what surprised him most wasn’t the complexity of the work. It was the people.
“What surprised me is probably just how many good people there are in the industry. I know sometimes farmers get a tough rap, but there are some really good people and some loyal people.”
— Seb Bodle
Dairy farming in New Zealand is deeply personal. Many of the farms Seb visits are family businesses — operations passed down through generations, run by people who are genuinely passionate about what they do. That culture of loyalty and hard work is something he didn’t anticipate, and something that’s shaped how he approaches every farm visit.
Building the pipeline: the Terravest Graduate Pathway
Seb’s experience is part of what convinced us to formalise what we’ve been doing informally. We’re building a structured 24-month Graduate Pathway Programme — and we’ve reached out to Lincoln University to establish a long-term partnership around it.
The programme is built for agricultural graduates who want real technical depth, hands-on experience across the dairy chain, and a clear career pathway — not a graduate rotation that leaves them wondering what comes next.
Graduates who complete the programme are well positioned across on-farm technical service, milk quality and compliance advisory, dairy hygiene sales, MPI and DairyNZ audit roles — and for high performers, international opportunities in dairy markets across Australia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East.
Seb is, in many ways, the proof of concept. A commerce graduate who jumped in curious, found people worth working with, and built real technical capability across two businesses. That’s what this programme is designed to create — deliberately, at scale, for the next generation.
Grow with us
If you’re an agricultural graduate ready to get your hands dirty and build something real — we’d like to hear from you.
careers@terravest.co.nz