This workshop is for dairy farmers wanting to understand more about their farm’s finances and how to identify areas for better economic performance.
Owen and Anna bring very different areas of expertise, and have previously worked together in delivering training for dairy vets, advisers and other professionals in Dairy Farm Economics. This workshop is pitched for farmers, and has been designed to be very relevant to their needs as well as being practical. This will include more than looking at spreadsheets for two days!
Who is this workshop for?
This is an advanced level workshop providing high technical group information. It is suitable for farm owners, farm managers and herds-people working on any type of dairy farm system, and is most suited for those who have leadership responsibilities.
An important aspect of the Farming Connect Masterclasses is that delegates can share each other’s experience and knowledge: discussion around the topic is actively encouraged. Teaching is in a “workshop” style rather than in a more off-putting classroom manner.
Content
The workshop includes the following content:
- Costs of production; overhead costs, variable costs and rent/finance costs
- Interpreting farm accounts
- Other sources of economic information: costings reports; management accounts; benchmarking reports
- Budgets and proportional analysis: what it is, how to do it and industry norms
- Comparative Farm Profit: what this means and how to calculate it for your farm
- Costs of disease
- Vet spend analysis
- Dairy systems and profitability targets
- Key Performance Indicators: how to keep tabs on your own performance
- The characteristics of the top performing farms: what differentiates the top 25% and the bottom 25% of farms and some practical suggestions for how to get in the top
- Return on investment: increasing confidence with making calculations
- Case studies: getting to grips with basic information and calculations; applying these to your own situation.
Delegates are encouraged to work with their own financial data, where they can, in order to relate the workshop content to their own situation. No-one will be expected to share confidential financial information.
Tudors
Owen Atkinson is a RCVS Specialist vet in Cattle Health and Production, and has a Certificate in change leadership. He has many years’ experience of working with dairy herds of all types to improve their performance, mainly centred on better health, but also measuring and benchmarking a range of KPIs for other important production-efficiency parameters.
Anna Bowen is a farm business consultant working for The Andersons Centre, specialising in dairy enterprises. Anna has worked in farm consultancy for 17 years and also contract farms with a herd of 300 Spring block calving dairy cows. She works with farmers across England and Wales providing technical, business, and strategic advice, with a focus on profitable farming from simple systems.
Dates & locations-
The location of the Masterclass is yet to be confirmed, once the application window has closed we will strive to locate as central as possible.
MasterBusiness Dairy 21-22/10/2025