Farmers

All farmers will also find helpful ideas for their business in the Make/Save Money section. We have divided this section into five headings.

Business Strategy. We believe that farmers, just like any other business, need to have a competitive strategy – something they excel at and that sets them apart from others. We have developed the Farm Scorecard that is designed to help farmers think about how they can best compete. There is information and Worksheets that can be used directly or with farm advisers. We have also included some short video clips. These show farmers talking about what they have done to stand out from the crowd to gain competitive advantage.

Business Clubs. Our vision is for a network of Farm Business Clubs implementing improvement ideas for their members. Business Clubs work best when they have a strong facilitator and when the farmers that participate use information to benchmark their operations. We have provided an explanation of benchmarking, a list of service providers and case studies showing how farmers benefit from being members of a Business Club.

Differentiation. A good knowledge of the market and consumer behaviour can help farmers make better business decisions. All types of farm whether commodity or niche suppliers or whether the products are sold direct or through a long chain can benefit from understanding key trends in the market. Market Info contains a growing Library of background details on consumption trends, links to free information and farmer case studies.

Production Excellence. We are not providers of technical advice on, for example, agronomy or health. Instead we can look at business processes and find ways of reducing non-value adding activity. Using tools developed in other industries we can demonstrate how improvements can be made to, for example, on-farm processing, harvesting, planting and transport.

Collaboration. Farmers working closely with their processors and customers further down the chain find ways of identifying cost savings and quality improvements. There are case studies and descriptions of the methods we have pioneered that show ‘collaboration pays’.