Name

Helen Ovens

Location

Aberystwyth

Key Specialism

Facilitation skills, business benchmarking, carbon emissions management

Sector

  • Livestock

Why are you an effective Advisor?

  • Helen has 25 years wide-range experience of rural and agricultural development, focussing on business development and supporting agricultural businesses through change. 
  • An experienced team manager and player, taking a focussed, outcome-based approach. 
  • Helen’s multi-disciplinary skillset lends itself to one to one and farmer group advice, as well as taking a systems approach to issues facing farming and natural capital management. 
  • She is a fluent Welsh speaker.
  • Helen has strong facilitation, data collection and advisory skills, with a focus on one to one and farmer group work
  • She has extensive experience in rural and agricultural business improvement, expertise in benchmarking across a range of enterprises
  • She professionally qualified and experienced in carbon auditing and farm emissions action planning
  • She has a focus on sustainable resource use relating to food production and land management, compliance and good farm practice principles, including animal health and welfare issues
  • Examples of this expertise includes the delivery of carbon audits across Wales to Farming Connect groups during 2022. Experienced in using both Agrecalc and Cool Farm Tool to generate carbon footprints and then undertake mitigation action planning with farmers.
  • Recent evidence of Helen’s expertise includes supporting the AHDB Strategic Farm Programme. Responsible for benchmarking farm businesses against a range of KPIs, for a wide range of ruminant businesses across the UK, and then coordinating technical advice into the enterprise, and ensuring effective knowledge exchange to the industry of business improvement principles. 
  • Helen is an EIP project broker for a suite of farmer led animal health projects, assisting the farmer groups with concept development, funding application and project delivery. 
  • Helen facilitates annual business club meetings for the Bee Farmers Association (BFA), collecting KPI detail and working with UK commercial bee farmers to benchmark, discuss and implement business performance improvements.  

Qualifications/Achievements/Experience

  • 1995    BSc Rural Development from the University of East Anglia
  • 1998    MSc Crop Protection, SAC Aberdeen
  • 2021    Basis Soil and Water
  • 2023    BASIS Certificate in Greenhouse Gases, Climate Change and Carbon Mitigation 

Top Tip/Quote

“Be curious and find out what motivates the client, then work within that frame of reference, using business performance detail which actually means something to them. Most of all, be friendly, useful and professional.”