Farmer Focus: Business review reveals surprising results

This time last year, my Farmers Weekly submission was centred on my plans post Rachel Reeves’s inheritance tax Budget.

I said in that winter article that I would spend next year spending more time “on” my business rather than “in” it.

This means more business planning and fewer days disappearing into the workshop pretending that organising the socket set is a strategic priority. 

See also: 11 new pulse varieties join PGRO Descriptive List

About the author

John Pawsey

Arable Farmer Focus writer John Pawsey is an organic farmer at Shimpling Park in Suffolk. He started converting the 650ha of arable cropping in 1999, and also contract farms an additional 915ha organically, growing wheat, barley, oats, beans and spelt.

Read more articles by John Pawsey

Better late than never, I have just finished the first week of deep diving into parts of the business where we are exposed to the greatest amount of financial risk.

To date, that work has been focused on what we do with our own land and the land that we farm for others rather than the diversified income bit. That will be dissected in a couple of weeks’ time.

There is no doubt that the Sustainable Farming Incentive has saved all of our businesses over the past two years of lower-than-average harvests and disappointing prices.

Fingers crossed for a better-thought-through 2026 offer.

Contract farming agreements have gone under the knife, with some surprising results.

A couple of farms where recent results have been poor, when their performance has been thoroughly investigated over the past 10 years, have proved to be better than expected over that time period.

However, some adjustment may have to be made. 

On my own farm, I’ve just finished an exercise of taking all running headlands out of crop production, just leaving a regular-shaped lozenge in the middle for growing food.

I need to drill down into several years’ worth of yield maps to really understand the yield benefits as well as the impact on fixed costs and productivity, but initial findings suggest a positive financial outcome.

Income from those areas is currently based around Defra payments for scrub creation, but as yet I have taken no account for potential payments for increases in biodiversity or carbon.

More investigation is needed.

I’m really enjoying this time for blue-sky thinking. I appear to have become obsessed with partial budgets.