Farm benchmarking is an essential part of farm financial management and involves evaluating a farm’s performance metrics—such as productivity, costs, and profitability—against those of similar farms or industry standards.
Engaging in this process will help you to understand your operational efficiency, pin point your successes, and identify where money is being wasted.
Benchmarking
AHDB
AHDB offers a service call Farmbench. It’s an online tool that allows you to compare your farm to similar businesses.
It’s available for beef, lamb, combinable crop and sugar beet enterprises, and will allow you to evaluate the performance of your farming business.
Registering with Farmbench allows you access to a Regional Farmbench manager, who will help you to use the service and analyse your data.
Examples of what Farmbench data can tell you about your own business and how it compares to others can be found here: Farmbench: Knowing your cost of production can help your business in the future
Farm Business Survey
The Farm Business Survey is the official source of farm income figures in England & Wales.
Joining the survey will provide you with insights into all your operations and enterprises, pin point your successes, and help you make further savings.
Once you’ve joined, you’ll be able to:
- Compare your business to other businesses in the FBS
- Use the Projection Calculator to calculate projected margins into the future
- View Regional reports by farm type
Agrii
This episode of the Tramlines podcast from Agrii discusses benchmarking performance for arable farmers
Farming Investment Fund Schemes to Improve Efficiency
These competitive productivity grants are split into small grants (Farming Equipment and Technology Fund) and large grants, including Farm Productivity Grants, Slurry Infrastructure Grants, and Calf Housing for Health and Welfare Grants.
Recent Analysis of the Farming Investment Fund from the NFU, including how to apply
Financial Advice
- ADAS provide a consultancy and advice service, click here to contact.
- NFU Mutual provide a financial advice service, click here to contact.
Further tools that will help with farming activities can be found on the AHDB website: click here.