With more and more farmers are turning to diversification practices like holiday lets and farm shops, it’s never been more important to allocate some of your resources to create a good marketing strategy that will help you stand out from the crowd. Jonathan Birch is Creative Director at the digital marketing agency Glass Digital. Here, […]

How should I diversify? The enterprises that generated the highest incomes in 2017/18 were food processing and retailing enterprises, letting out buildings, and renewable energy (excluding solar energy). However, not all types of diversification will suit your farm. You will need to take into the account your farms location, characteristics, the resources available and factor […]

66% of farm businesses in England have diversified in some way, but what return are they seeing for their efforts? How does this sound? On average farms need to invest £10,500 (fixed and variable costs) to produce an output valuing £22800. This generates a farm business income of £12,400. In other word, there is £1.18 […]

For many, diversification is a viable way forward in a time of economic change within the agricultural industry and the UK as a whole. In the 2017/18 financial year farms on average generated a farm business income of £12,400 from diversifying out of agriculture. This represented 22% of the farms business income which was more than farms generated from agriculture (£10,400) for 23% of farms.

With Brexit on the horizon there are some big changes coming to the agricultural industry. No longer will we be able to rely on payments under the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy as the UK develops a new policy framework for agriculture. The European market is also important for UK exports and imports, and international trade […]

Although UK agriculture as become more efficient over the years, when compared to the technical efficacy and performance of principle international competitors, the industry faces a huge challenge. Cornish Agriculture faces an additional challenge with its geographical location and the distance from the principal markets for its produce. As you can see, international agriculture is […]

So how do you remove the elephants from the room when it comes to succession planning? Perhaps we can use a technique from business circles known as a ‘premortem’. It involves imagining at the start of a project that it has failed, allowing those involved to visualise why, so revealing the potential pitfalls and allowing […]

Yesterday I went on a stress awareness course run by Healthy Cornwall. I thought that I would share with you the four tools the course leader shared with us. 1. A jar of positivity I had heard of this concept before but have never been inspired to implement it. I suspect that it was because […]

There are many sources of stress in the farming environment which can impact on us both psychologically and physically. In theory, we should worry about the things that are within our circle of influence and not the things we can not control (outside our circle of influence). Easier said that done, we know. There are […]

“I’ll think of something.” That’s a farmer’s answer to every problem – and usually they do as they’re incredibly resourceful, talented people with an amazing work ethic. They do it until it comes to their own wellbeing. Many of you reading the words ‘farmer’s wellbeing’ are probably starting to feel uncomfortable, a bit flushed and […]