Job Description

Farm Assurance Manager- 12 month FTC

Home based role + (travel to farm required)

Do you want to play a crucial role in protecting the Arla brand through proactively working to maintain and ensure world-class quality and animal welfare on Arla farms?

Arla Foods UK are looking for someone to join our Global Agriculture Centre of Excellence Team on a 12 month FTC, and help us bring our mission to life across our UK Farmer Member population.

Arlagården® is our global farm standard which plays a crucial part in protecting the Arla brand through our third-party audit set up. The Arlagården® team are part of the Global Agriculture Centre of Excellence team which aims to:

* Drive knowledge and development on sustainability, farm standards and agriculture

* Develop tools and scalable practice to enable transformation both on and off farm

* Lead Arla Foods into the future with expertise insights and knowledge

About the role

As a Farm Assurance Manager you are the person responsible for ensuring that our Arlagården® Farm Assurance Programme is conducted according to global principles and procedures. You will be the key link between a number of key parties in our quality assurance setup – the global Arlagården® leads in Arla that define the global standards and auditing processes, the local Arlagården® farm-facing team that co-ordinates communication and support for Arla farmers in the area and the external lead auditor in your area, who will ensure that audits are conducted in a fair and consistent way across all markets.

*Whilst this is a home based role, you will be required to travel to farm regularly, providing technical farm and process expertise/guidance, working in close collaboration with the UK farm-facing Agriculture team.*

Specific tasks

* Work with the Arlagården® team to ensure aligned decision across all Arla regions

* Support the third-party audit body, SGS to identify good practice and topics for calibration by monitoring their performance through on farm visits and data

* Liaise with and support the Agriculture team to effectively manage challenging cases

* Liaise with Agriculture to identify topics that would help members comply with Arlagården®

* Manage the Red Tractor scheme via a certification body to ensure milk is collected from approved members

* Contribute to the development of the Arlagården® scheme which includes management of projects

* Update SGS and Agriculture on amendments and train them as necessary

* Liaise with the commercial team

Skills & Competencies

Functional skills

* Auditing or advisory experience is essential, as well as strong experience in the dairy industry

* Able to use IT programmes including spreadsheets, power point, word and audit management apps

* Understands data and can paint a picture with it to inform decision making

* Excellent communication and when necessary, persuasive skills with members and colleagues, some of whom are not native English speakers. An understanding of the impact on the member of a giving a difficult message

* Strong presentational skills

* A good understanding of milk production and animal welfare on dairy farms

Personal competencies

* Confident in communicating with farmers including conflict resolution

* Self-motivated and organized and prompt at dealing with tasks and requests

* Enjoys team work and joint decision making

* Happy to adapt to different audiences and situations

* Global mindset with a talent for collaborating across teams

Working Requirements

* A full driving licence

* The role is home-based with the ability to travel across the UK- sometimes at short notice

* Ability to travel about 5 times/year to Arla areas in Europe

You will have an excellent understanding of milk production and dairy farming and the ability to clearly explain requirements to farmers and colleagues. You will be confident and strongly believe in fairness to all Arla farmers and happy discuss an audit outcome or answer a question. Team working will be something you enjoy while accepting that as part of a team the final decision might be consensus driven.

Next Steps:

If you have any questions, please reach out to Olivia Pine, Talent Acquisition Partner at Arla Foods. The closing date for this position is the 29th of October, only CV’s sent in via this link will be considered.

Please note we are not partnered with any recruitment agencies for this role. We kindly ask that recruitment agencies do not submit speculative CVs on behalf of candidates, as these CVs will not be considered under the agency ownership and will be accepted as a gift. We encourage interested individuals to apply directly through our official channels