Farm Business Planning

Your Farm Business Plan gets into more of the detail, and operational decisions, coming out of the Strategic Plan. It is looking more at the short to medium term.

By setting clear goals and targets, your Farm Business Plan will work through how to utilise your resources to achieve your goals. You will consider what you are already dong – what you need to do more of, less of, better, or different.

Risk Management is an important consideration. We are being made aware of more and more risks all the time. Burying your head in the sand will not make them go away, but careful consideration and management can help mitigate them, and reduce their impact on you and your business.

Sustainability is another more common phrase these days. Your plan must be sustainable from a farm and financial point of view, as well as environmentally.

Within your Farm Business Plan you will establish systems to measure performance consistently, and monitor it against targets. Breaking goals down to smaller steps will allow monitoring of progress along the way, and highlight where and when change is needed, rather than just getting to the end and hoping we got there!!

Ultimately your Farm Business Plan will need constant review. It needs to have flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, but must come back to focusing on achieving the goals.

Your Farm Business Plan is just formalising much of what you are already doing, but provides focus and ‘lays it all out’ for your business partners and trusted advisors.

When setting goals and targets, they need to be:

Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time based = SMART

and you can add Evaluate and Review to be even SMARTER!!