New Entrants to Farming: Using Figures to Make Money – Event Summary

New entrants to farming from Morayshire and the North East of Scotland met to discuss how to ‘Use Figures to Make Money’.

Samantha Stewart from SAC Consulting was the main speaker for the evening and she gave an in-depth presentation along with practical sessions highlighting the importance and power of numbers.  The group benchmarking and Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) whilst showing that this need not be complicated. She provided examples of how different calculations could be used in practice.  Samantha emphasised that unless you are going to do something useful with any data collected (e.g. weights, EID recording etc), then it is pointless collecting the information to begin with.

Samantha’s presentation also explained how to read your annual business accounts.  Moving onto partial budgets and their importance in helping you make simple and quick daily decisions on farm. These can be used in the simplest of circumstances e.g. the cost benefit of putting another 10 kg LW on finished cattle or whether or not to by a neighbouring block of land.  The group took part in putting together a partial budget for selling finished lambs vs selling them store.

The final part of Samantha’s presentation looked at benchmarking against similar businesses – “find someone who is doing something well, and copy it!”  Learning from other businesses that are working well is also key to success for your business, this can be achieved by benchmarking your business using programmes such as FarmBench (https://farmbench.ahdb.org.uk/)

This workshop generated a lot of good discussion which allowed those attending to take home some very useful information that can be put into practice on-farm.

Take home messages included:

• If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it
• Use data you have collected in a contructive way to analyse and make tweaks to your business
• For a suckler herd a good KPI would be kg of weaned calf per kg of cow
• An excellent target for lamb growth rates would be 300g/day
• Weigh scales are a key piece of kit on beef and sheep farms
• Use partial budgets to make strategic decisions on farm, such as whether to finish lambs or sell store