AHDB Farmbench Facilitation Fund

Tender description

AHDB are seeking suppliers to recruit farm businesses with an arable enterprise to use the benchmarking programme Farmbench. Farmbench is AHDB’s new flagship, cross sector benchmarking programme, for use by farmers and their advisers across the UK. The programme allows users to enter data to calculate total unit costs of production, gross and net margins and anonymously compare business performance to regional and national datasets. It helps businesses to identify strengths and weaknesses, which can be used to draft a plan to improve performance. For information, Farmbench currently covers combinable crop, potato and beef and lamb enterprises and by October 2018 it will be extended to cover dairy enterprises. For the purposes of this contract, a number of suppliers are sought to: 1) Recruit new farm businesses to Farmbench. Each business must grow at least one combinable cereal or oilseed crop in harvest years 2018 and/or 2019 2) Support those businesses in uploading their data to Farmbench 3) Validate each dataset ensuring completeness and accuracy 4) Bring the farmers and/or farm managers together into groups to discuss the figures and share knowledge AHDB are seeking a number of suppliers to recruit in total, 2400 new farm businesses to Farmbench, with 1200 each for harvest 2018 and harvest 2019.