Farmbench closure FAQs

After several poor cereals and oilseeds harvests and the resulting restrictions to available budgets, there is less Cereals & Oilseeds levy funding available and hard prioritisation choices have had to be made.

The decision has been made to end the Farmbench service to focus investment on new services that would make benchmarking more widely available. Farmbench is only viable as a joint service when both Cereals & Oilseeds and Beef & Lamb participate; with Beef & Lamb levy income also falling due to a reduction in beef and sheep numbers, it has become increasingly difficult to sustain the service across both sectors.

Decisions on where to invest the available funds will be made by the respective sector councils.

Sector councils are comprised of levy payers and collectively make decisions on behalf of all levy payers. The sector councils were consulted and are charged with ensuring the greatest value for all levy payers so consensus decisions were taken.

The Farmbench website will remain available to users until 30 September 2026 to complete activity relating to the 2024/25 production year, or to download reports and data.

We are committed to completing the current annual data entry activity for both the Cereals & Oilseeds and Beef & Lamb sectors. For Cereals & Oilseeds, activity for data relating to harvest 2025 is almost complete. For Beef & Lamb, activity on the 2024/25 production year will be completed over summer 2026.

Yes. For beef and lamb producers, data entry and validation will be complete by early July 2026 and reports will be generated and sent later that month. Farmbench managers can help you access and download reports for your farm.  

Farmbench remains open until 30 September 2026 for users to access their reports and to generate benchmark reports containing anonymised comparison data.

For both sectors, comparison data will be accessible for the 2024/25 production year but not for 2025/26. 

We may use aggregated and anonymised data for specific research and analysis purposes, as outlined in the Farmbench privacy statement (log in required). 

You can export your data in report format using the Excel option in the reporting section, and support will be available from your Farmbench manager on how to do this. Please request this support by 31 August. You will need to establish whether this Excel format is compatible with the benchmarking platform you choose. 

No, external access by users, consultants and stakeholders will not be possible from 30 September 2026. 

No. Once Farmbench closes on 30 September 2026, no consultants, stakeholders, or farmer users will be able to use Farmbench. 

No. Farmbench will close on 30 September 2026 and it will not be possible to log on to the system after this point. 

Yes. Our Cereals & Oilseeds Engagement Team are discussing a number of options other than benchmarking, for groups to consider, such as farm business resilience, for their meetings in winter 2026/27. These will be developed over the next month or so and we are keen to hear from group members if there are any subjects they think it would be good to discuss. Please contact your regional Knowledge Exchange Manager to discuss further.

If your beef and lamb group would like to continue meeting to discuss business issues other than benchmarking, our Beef & Lamb Engagement team will provide an annual meeting until, and including, 2027.    

Both the Cereals & Oilseeds and Beef & Lamb sectors have jointly agreed to investigate options, including running a proof-of-concept trial, on a replacement for Farmbench which includes automatic data sharing from farm software. However this will not be ready for winter 2026/27 

We are exploring how the expertise within the economics and analysis directorate can be leveraged alongside existing and new datasets to deliver such insights.  

These publications are based on Farmbench data which will no longer be collected with the final dataset available for the 2024/25 production year. We will therefore explore the ongoing publication of these summaries as part of our broader review into our cost of production and benchmarking activity.

In the first instance, please contact our Customer Service Team on 024 7518 9300. Based on the nature of your question and whether you are a Cereals & Oilseeds or a Beef & Lamb levy payer, they will ensure you are contacted by the person best placed to answer. 

Support will be available from AHDB throughout this period, through your local Farmbench manager, your regional Knowledge Exchange Manager, or centrally from the Customer Service Team. The Farmbench team will not be contactable after 30 September 2026.