How Farmbench works

By signing up to Farmbench and inputting your data, you will be able to access live reports at any time via your personal account on the website, enabling you to reliably compare your farm’s performance to similar businesses completely anonymously.

Every single cost can be allocated so you can drill down into your unit cost of production to help you budget and track performance. In addition, once your farm is registered you will be invited to take part in facilitated discussions, where you can review industry data as a group. These insights will enable you to identify and evaluate best practice, making informed decisions to improve your bottom line.

Ease of use

Signing up to Farmbench couldn’t be simpler. Once you have followed a straightforward registration process, all you need to do is enter your physical and financial data relating to one production cycle. The data can then be submitted to AHDB for checking and validating if required, before being included in the anonymised benchmarks.

Time

We are aware that the majority of farmers and growers don’t have time to be stuck in an office. That is why we have designed the most intuitive programme that is simple and easy to use. The length of time inputting the data takes varies depending on the number and size of enterprises within each farm business. However, many farmers find that they already have a large proportion of this data to hand and therefore the process is far shorter than initially expected. Alternatively, you can choose to give access to your consultant or advisor via the dashboard and they can input the data on your behalf.

Key Performance Indicators

We know that each farm is different, which is why we have chosen performance indicators that will give you the most useful and accurate indicators of your strengths and weaknesses as a business. They fall into one of three categories:

Financial – the sales of crops or livestock, your business costs and margins.
Physical – such as marketable yield, or daily live-weight gain.
Ranking – how do you compare against group regional, national and international averages?

Farmbench requires all users to input data using the same rules, making it easier to make accurate comparisons across businesses. This enables consistency and produces robust and reliable comparisons between different production systems, across different enterprises.

So, why Farmbench?

Farmbench is a quick to use, confidential and fully validated tool, which helps you to identify your business strengths and weaknesses. Understanding your costings will allow you to reflect and fine tune, to ensure you can make informed decisions for your future as a sustainable business. These will help you to weather any uncertainty, grow your business and inform succession planning and crucial decisions for all members of your farming business.