In 2009 neighbouring Waikato dairy farmers, Fran Allcock and Joyce Brown, decided to organise a series of conferences for smaller herd farmers. They realised that the needs of smaller herd farmers are different from large herd farmers and that there was an opportunity to develop events specifically for them.
They started by gathering an enthusiastic group of volunteer farmers to form an organising committee and then enlisted the support of DairyNZ. The formation of the SMASH Trust and some highly successful conferences were the result.
The feedback from those first conferences was overwhelmingly positive and since then the team has gone from strength to strength.