Drilling into your fixed costs to sow a profit: Basingstoke

With the future of annual support payments now known, it is now even more important that farming businesses prepare for future financial robustness and take the opportunity to analyse every operation and cost involved. Therefore, this meeting will be based on farm cost analysis; discussing, identifying and dissecting the largest capital expenses of a cereal operation (labour and machinery), helping to pinpoint possible avenues to improve future margins.

About the farm

Hugh Crosbie Dawson, with his father, has worked on the 1,161 ha mixed Freefolk Farms near Basingstoke since 2011. The 800 ha arable cropping is split across owned, rented and contract farmed land. The farm’s rotation includes milling wheat, spring barley, oilseed rape and peas, all grown on predominantly chalky soil. In addition to the arable enterprise the farm has 150 dairy cows and 500 breeding ewes. There are three full-time arable staff as well as a herdsman, Hugh and his father. A min-till approach is adopted where possible, although the farm has used the plough this year for the first time in 15 years, in order to combat grass weed pressure. Other enterprises on the farm include commercial lettings, self-storage and a solar farm. Hugh’s ambition for the business is to reduce fixed and variable costs, increase efficiency and make further use of precision farming methods. During the Monitor Farm programme Hugh is also interested in benchmarking with other farmers and exploring break crops.

For more information contact Paul Hill, AHDB Cereals & Oilseeds Knowledge Exchange Manager for the South East on paul.hill@ahdb.org.uk or 07964 243699.