Next-Gen Planning & Budgeting for Sustainable Farming

Effective budgeting and planning is a recognised feature of the most productive and sustainable farmers in the United Kingdom. With changing subsidy support; high agricultural price inflation; and performance uncertainty from climate change, the importance of planning and budgeting has never been greater. Nevertheless, the vast majority of farmers do not regularly carry out planning and budgeting on their farms.

At the heart of this lies a technological challenge: to carry out effective planning and budgeting, farmers must be able to handle and interrelate hundreds of production variables, to build a meaningful picture of likely outcomes. Or, they are left planning at the very highest level of aggregation, which becomes a meaningless exercise in practice. There are no effective intelligent planning and budgeting tools available for farmers today.

Developments in foundational data technologies and cloud computing, alongside growing farm data and understanding of analytical value, mean it is now becoming possible to face this complex technological challenge.

We propose a 12 month project, led by the farm data analytics leader YAGRO, in collaboration with two high performing farming companies, Brixworth Farming and RH Topham & Sons. The project aims to deliver a working, commercialised web-service feature to the UK arable farming community; allowing intelligent multi-year planning and budgeting, and thereby helping farmers test, optimise, and track their farm strategies. Not only would this help short-term seasonal productivity by optimising performance; it would also support farmers to transition through change, whether that be reacting to climate change through cropping adjustments, or meeting Net Zero ambitions through regenerative farming practices.