Another year, another to-do list
A New Year needs a new to-do list. Elite benchmarking farmers with joint venture farming businesses in JVFG are the best at driving costs down. For farm business performance they already know they are in the top 10% in the UK. But they want to be even better. How? The answers are in the top priorities on their to-do lists for 2019.
“Our machinery costs are still too high. Partly because we have roots in the business, so we are supporting bigger machines than we should, but machinery outputs are not good enough. That’s what we need to work on. How we get those costs lower is something we need to think on and work at quite hard.” Jamie Symington, L Symington Farms
“Pelham Farming has gone from being at the top of the JVFG tree to almost at the bottom. We’re not as efficient as we need to be because we have had our acreage reduced. We’ve been overtaken, sadly. That’s something we need to address.” Edward Hitchcock, Pelham Farming Ltd
“For 2019 we need to get more acres under our machines. Our costs are too high on cultivations.” Katie Worral, Pelham Farming Ltd
Katie Worral of Pelham Farming Ltd and member of JVFG.
“Day to day we have the intention to get the job done but now with benchmarking every task and how long it takes we want to be working as efficiently as possible.” James Whatty, Assistant Manager Landsman Farming
James Whatty – benchmarking relies on recording every task accurately.
“Into this New Year I’d like to look more at our recording technique as a whole. I think we need to be a lot better on our time sheets as we had a lot of hours in ‘general’ and we need to know more about what is done in that time.” Alex Baines, Granta Farming
“Benchmarking with JVFG has highlighted where we have excessive costs in some part of our operation and that’s what we have to be working on.” Richard Pearce, Landsman Farming
Charles Matt, Brixworth Farming, hoping for more efficient way to capture data day-to-day.
“What I’d like to see this year is a more efficient way of capturing data day-to-day. With better capture it will be faster, easier to ‘sense check’ and sort any anomalies in the data we record for labour and machinery costs and not all be left to the last minute to enter.” Charles Matts, Brixworth Farming Company
“There are a lot of things we have to pay attention to. A key focus of mine is to produce a reasonable crop of Spring Barley, a crop that is the basis of a lot of our rotation and to fight blackgrass.” Richard Hartley, Manor Farm LLP
“We will be looking at our combine policy. Ownership could go over a longer term, could reduce our costs, albeit with a chance of increasing our risks.” Tim Merry, JV Farming
If you would like to hear more from these businesses and are interested to join them at the next JVFG meeting do contact JVFG Chair Tim Merry through his email chairman@jvfg.co.uk .