Meet your Blogger
Mark Hall
Syngenta Business Analyst
Welcome to my Syngenta website Business Blog
With increasingly volatile markets for crops and radical political changes across Europe, it’s an incredibly fast moving and dynamic position facing arable growers. As the Syngenta UK Business Analyst I spend my time assessing how these factors will affect farmers’ future decisions.
Having spent five years as a Velcourt Farm Manager and seven years with Strutt & Parker, as agronomist and farming consultant, I will be using the Business Blog to keep you up to date with some of my thinking on the future direction for farm businesses.
I would welcome and appreciate any comments on my Blog entries; please do use the feedback button to get involved at any time.
Farming costs up 28% since October 2006
Anglia Farmers Ltd have recently published the latest figures from their Agricultural Inflation Index. The index is intended to reflect the changing expenditure experienced by a prudent farmer and the results show a 2.1% rise from September 2009 to February 2010. Since the index started in October 2006, the 100 representative products it surveys have seen an overall price increase of 28%. The...
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Key challenges for farmers in 2010
I think the key challenge for farmers is that although margins for combinable crops look like they will increase over 2010 due to lower fertiliser costs, the amount of money which needs to be invested per hectare to achieve these margins will be higher than it was a few years ago. That’s because, since 2006, arable farm operating costs have increased by around 26%. So growers need to manage this...
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Long-term grain contracts - managing risk?
I’ve just returned from speaking to a group of agronomists and consultants in Perth who told me a variety of spring barley contracts had recently become available to farmers based on supplying a tonnage over a three year period. Varying proportions of the price each year could be locked in between £110 to £130/t with some linked to feed barley or wheat prices. The audience felt this was quite an...
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