Building farm business resilience

Join AHDB and Farming Connect for a webinar with strategic dairy farm hosts, John and Anna Booth, to find out how to increase business resilience.

Building a resilient business is vital for withstanding variations in milk price and input costs. From a strong core business there are options to generate additional income through on farm diversification and off farm investments. 

In this webinar John and Anna will be joined by Oliver Hall, Senior Farm Business Consultant at The Andersons Centre, to discuss how the team at Rhual Dairy can ensure that they are managing a resilient business, and what to consider when investigating options for diversification. 

In this session you will learn about: 

• The importance of financial monitoring and budgeting
• The main KPIs to use for assessing performance
• Options for diversification
• What to consider when diversifying
• The unique challenges of share farmers compared to owner occupiers and tenant farmers

About Rhual Dairy

Based just outside Mold in North East Wales, Rhual is a 220ha farm, of which 182ha is grassland (of which 50% parkland), 21ha maize, and 11ha spring barley.  The farm has operated under Nitrogen Vulnerable restrictions for many years.  

This all-year-round calving herd of 336 Holstein Friesians averages 8,472litres per cow per year at 3.89% butterfat and 3.29% protein. All replacements are home reared and calve at 24 months old, contributing to their low replacement rate of 22%.  A new transition cow shed has been built to enable better management and transition of dry cows pre and post-calving, plus recent refurbishments to cow housing such as improved ventilation, LED lights on a timer system, and increasing available cow feed space. 

After both graduating from Harper Adams in 1997, John initially worked as an assistant farm manager and Anna a dairy specialist, before beginning their share-farming journey at Rhual Dairy in 2001.  Since 2001, they have grown stock numbers, output, and improved farm infrastructure considerably. Their aspirations as Strategic Farmers is to continue developing their resilient system and increasing production from their 91ha Parkland, both while building more free time into their daily operations for their family. 

Find out more about Rhual Dairy’s story by visiting www.ahdb.org.uk/rhual-dairy

About Oliver Hall- The Andersons Centre

Oliver Hall is a partner and Senior Farm Business Consultant at The Andersons Centre.

About Strategic Dairy Farms

Strategic dairy farms help farmers learn from each other through regular on-farm meetings where we will share key performance data and showcase what the best farmers are doing. 

They form part of the Optimal Dairy Systems programme which aims to help dairy farmers lower costs and increase efficiency by focusing on either a block or all-year-round calving system. 

The growing network of strategic dairy farms have calculated key performance indicators (KPIs) for their enterprises which are shared at meetings and published online. These are physical and financial performance measures that are critical to success. Farmers can benchmark their businesses against these KPIs and identify areas for improvement.

Follow the programme and find other local SDFs at www.ahdb.org.uk/farm-excellence