How two diverse farms reduced one of their overheads by 60%

It can seem like an uphill battle given the challenges presented to us by A, B and C (short for Adverse weather, BREXIT and COVID-19).

With uncertainty a given margins can be eroded quickly; it is now more important than ever to track the elements which you can control in your business that affect your bottom line – input cost-efficiency is vital.

Robert Hambidge farms 266ha outside Dereham and Nick Padwick is Estates Director for 2,000ha Peddar Farming at Dersingham.

While these farms operate on different scales, both have opted to upgrade their crop recording software from an older software to Geofolia to help them ensure input efficiency in terms of cost and time.

Peddar Farming covers five farms in total, two of which are home farms with an aim of reducing fixed costs and improving gross margins.

“Farming has lots of challenges over the next five or six years, so we are really starting to look at what we are spending. Not only is Geofolia less expensive than our previous software, we can use it on different desktops and the operators have all got it on their mobile devices”, explained Nick.

Peddar Farming initially tried Geofolia on a 30 day free trial though Nick says “we actually made the decision to purchase after 10 days”.

The trial was fully supported by Nick’s local Landmark consultant and set up was straight forward thanks to the ability to import field outlines from the RPA. Geofolia is available on 30 day free trial for the rest of 2020.

Watch the video to find out how Peddar Farms benefit from Geofolia:

Robert sees staying compliant with ever changing rules and regulation as a challenge for his business too, but finds Geofolia very helpful for this. “I particularly like the Agrobase agchem database which flags up any issues as you input them.”

Both Robert and Nick 100% recommend Geofolia to other farmers with Nick saying “Geofolia really allows the farmer to take control of the farming business.”

Managing input cost-efficiency with Geofolia

1. Ask yourself: ‘Do I really know the true costs of all of my fields, activities and crops?’

You need to have a fair idea of what every field activity and operation is going to cost you before you start. Input costs go beyond that of seed, fertiliser and chemicals – are you accounting for true machinery and labour cost of those activities too?

With Geofolia, you can easily view your true costs on a per hectare or per hour basis for every activity, as a guide for more accurate costings this year when budgeting.

Extract from part of a Geofolia Field Activities report, displaying cost per activity

2. Planning: Are you looking at the bottom line with every planned activity?

Do you consider the cost of an activity or application before or after it is done? As you plan your activities, Geofolia can show you the impact on each field’s profitability in one quick screen.

Easily view a snapshot of impact of planned and completed activity on a field’s bottom line with the Geofolia field dashboard

3. Could you benefit from benchmarking?

It can be useful to gauge how you are performing against others, using a tool like Farmbench but even more so, assessing your own performance against previous years is a useful tool when planning.

The information to benchmark against others and previous years is easily accessible on one screen in Geofolia.

The main Geofolia dashboard allows you to benchmark your own performance in one simple screen

4. Does your current crop recording software give you the information you need – easily?

If you are spending hours updating your records manually on a spreadsheet, or using an older software but not necessarily yielding the information you need to guide decision making – are you using your time resource efficiently?

Both Robert and Nick agree that Geofolia has enabled them to save time on keeping records with Robert confirming, “the app is fabulous, you just click a field in the maps and tell it the job you’ve done adding inputs if you want.”

“It is inherently simple, which means less time doing paperwork and more time actually farming.”

Nick Padwick & Andy Cooper using the Geofolia Mobile App while field walking