With rising costs, changing political landscapes and other unprecedented challenges, managing finances is at the forefront for farming businesses. When it comes to input costs, Louis Clabburn, AF Head of Member Services, emphasises how valuable data is in making informed and effective purchasing decisions to maintain a sustainable business.
"With a £332.7 million turnover in 23/24, AF provides a one-stop shop to manage farming businesses efficiently. With almost 3,000 Members, we harness a vast amount of data to offer our Members competitive prices on their input costs.
“We process about 30,000 invoices a month, and we’re collecting a lot of product and pricing data from those invoices.
“We need to keep proving to Members the value of being part of the co-operative. So, we're working with a knowledge transfer partnership through the University of East Anglia, using our data and their resources, to benchmark our prices across different products.”
"Our team are invested in helping Members understand and interpret their data, ultimately giving more intelligence back to the farming community in a new tool that we're about to launch.
“We've taken all the invoice data we have and combined it with information on our Members’ buying habits, to produce a report showing them when the best time to buy was, how much they could have saved by doing it this way, how much they could have saved doing it that way. It’s open and transparent, completely independent, benchmarked openly, which is fantastic.
“Next, we will build a forecasting model to help Members understand the effect of future purchasing decisions.”
"In 2024, AF Members achieved an average saving of 14% across their input costs purchased through AF, plus an added reduction of admin hours across their business."
"Soon, using the myAF portal, Members will be able to access benchmarking for many products in one place, including feeds, fertilisers, machinery parts, and more, condensing time spent researching and making decisions.
Our new AF Benchmarking Tool launches soon
“It will consolidate into one portal, so it's really easy, very accessible, saves time, saves farmers a lot of money because we benchmark everything, and we're using real data to benchmark our prices in the market.”
Read our Member Stories to find out how we're helping other AF Members to make the most of their membership.
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AF is a member of Agri-TechE.
