Sentry Farms is an employee-owned farming and land management company. They farm some 15,000 hectares throughout the UK including cereals, oils, livestock and dairy.

- Benefits from benchmarking
- Fertiliser
- Machinery
- Repairs
- Harvesting
- Labour
- Benchmarking and the potential for the future

Benefits from benchmarking

	Benchmarking and reading glasses work in a similar way, they both help us see detail beyond the obvious Trevor Atkinson Technical Director Sentry Farms

Sentry has a reputation for leading edge farming, and benchmarking has been one of their secret weapons for over 25 years.

According to Sentry’s Trevor Atkinson: “The solutions to many of our problems were staring us in the face, but benchmarking forced us to confront the issues. It makes you look beyond the normal performance measures and examine other, very revealing parameters.”
 

Fertiliser

Trevor Atkinson points to several practices at Sentry that were introduced as a result of benchmarking including one relating to fertiliser.

Previously, farm managers used their individual approaches to setting the amount of fertiliser to apply. But Sentry compared fertiliser usage with yield across the group and it was clear they needed a more precise method. In particular, many farms were overusing fertiliser.

"In the chase for extra yield, it's very tempting to over apply inputs. The quickest way to improve farm profitability is often to examine and control each cost very carefully," Trevor concludes.

Sentry introduced a balance sheet to link input with output. The higher the yield, the more potash and phosphate is extracted by the crop from the soil. So if yields are lower than expected, the next application of fertiliser can be reduced whereas higher yields need extra next time.

This more scientific approach, applied across the group, helped to reduce fertiliser costs by 10% with no drop in yield.
 

Machinery

Machine hours per hectare is another key figure for Sentry. It covers planting, maintaining and harvesting the crop. The chart shows how greatly it used to vary.

Trevor remembers one farm in particular, run traditionally and to a very high standard of workmanship – its machinery and labour costs were very high compared with similar farms.

When the farm saw the evidence of Sentry’s work, it decided it was time to modernise and change from a multi-pass system for seeding (ploughing, harrowing and drilling) to a single pass system.

As a result, machine hours were cut by half, saving £21 per hectare, without any reduction in yield.

The range of machine hours per hectare across the group has now been narrowed to between 2.5 and 6. Even so, it leaves plenty of scope for improvement. Assuming 200 hectare farms and a machine cost of £25 per hour, that adds up to a difference between £12,500 and £30,000.
 

Repairs

In such difficult financial conditions, many farmers have been forced to run equipment for longer before replacement. It then becomes more important to maintain and repair machinery effectively. But Sentry's benchmarking showed that older equipment can be cheaper to maintain.

By spreading good maintenance practice through the group, Sentry extended its average equipment life from 3,400 to 4,300 hours without increasing repair costs. The saving was £11 per hectare.
 

Harvesting

When Sentry identifies a problem or opportunity, the team digs deeper. So for combine harvesting, they collect a lot of detail including tonnes per hour, hectares per hour, downtime, repair cost per hour and cost per tonne.

Farms using the same equipment can perform very differently, as the next chart shows.

Sentry worked with the combine manufacturer to develop a training day. During the day, everyone raised their problems and exchanged ideas. They shared tips on driver management, machine settings, decision making at harvest time, maintenance and grain handling methods.

"There are lots of reasons why two farms are not completely comparable. But differences like these were too large to be explained away," Trevor recalls.

The 2002 harvest saw a dramatic improvement with a 30% increase in tonnes per hour. Harvesting costs dropped from £6.70 to £5 per tonne.
 

Labour

Labour costs are another vital factor in farm profitability. Normally, large farms enjoy economies of scale and lower labour costs per hectare.

But smaller farms can sometimes use ingenuity to be labour efficient. Two nearby farms in the Sentry group suffered above average labour and machinery costs. Putting their heads together they agreed to pool labour and machinery, while still operating as separate businesses.

Rapidly, they cut labour and equipment by 12% while also increasing yield.

Benchmarking and the potential for the future

Sentry began benchmarking soon after its formation in the 1970s. The broad range of farms within a single organisation gives Sentry a strong base for benchmarking. By banding together, they can employ experts like Trevor Atkinson. Says Trevor,

"Benchmarking allows our farm managers to learn from the trials and tribulations of other units, without having to make the same mistakes themselves."

Sentry doesn't believe in simple league tables showing who has the best farm. They know that different farms excel in different aspects, so everyone in the group learns from each other.

They use a wheel to illustrate benchmarking scores. A score near the centre of the circle is low and near the rim is high. So the example farm in red has a higher cost than average in most categories.

Despite the benefits already reaped over many years, Sentry recognise the potential for more improvement.

Every year, they refine their approach to benchmarking and put different aspects of their farms under the microscope to improve efficiency and profitability.

Trevor Atkinson concludes: “Falling incomes and rising costs have almost eliminated our farming profits. But benchmarking is a proven tool and we need to keep using it, to improve our business and help us hang on in there.”

< Return to main Cutting Costs page