New Entrants to Farming: Benefits of Benchmarking (Borders) – Event Summary

New entrants to farming in the Borders recently attended a workshop on the benefits of benchmarking their farm business performance.

AHDB’s Benchmarking Manager Doreen Anderson led the workshop and explained the benefits that benchmarking provides, emphasising the added value that can be gained by doing so in a group environment.

Doreen provided the attendees with some demonstration financial reports from AHDB’s new benchmarking program Farmbench.  The reports contained a financial breakdown of enterprises from several anonymised farms to allow comparisons to be made.  An example of one of the reports can be found here.  This highlighted the benefits of group discussion when interpreting benchmarking results.

AHDB’s Farmbench is a free online benchmarking tool that can be used by any farm business in the UK.  More information and registration instructions can be found on the Farmbench website here.

Agricultural Consultant Andy Baird then concluded the worjshop by highlighting other forms of benchmarking that could be used to better inform decision-making.  Andy’s presentation can be found below.

Take home messages included:

• Benchmarking can be a very effective tool to help better inform your decision-making and farm business planning
• AHDB’s new Farmbench program is free to use and available to all UK farmers online
• Don’t focus too much specifically on the numbers, but more where you are compared to other similar businesses
• Much more value can be gained from benchmarking in a group environment, where differences can be explained and context applied.