Why collaborate

Collaborating with others can help you reduce costs and add value to your farm business, as well as providing many other potential financial and lifestyle benefits.

Measuring the value of collaboration is difficult because of the variety of different levels and types of collaborative ventures and because many of the benefits are not financial. However, many of our case studies, espechially in the arable sector, show significant financial savings on the cost of labour and machinery.

Other potential benefits of collaboration might include:

• Sharing of knowledge and ideas
• Sharing of risk and capital outlay
• Increased satisfaction and fun of working with others
• Improved machinery specification, improving efficiency
• Additional time to purse other interests or business opportunities
• Increased management capability, bringing forward progressive ideas

The following example demonstrates average cost savings of sharing labour and machinery, based on average 'before and after' costs of a range of collaborative ventures managed by Grant Thornton. The average saving of farms used in the calculation was £72/ hectare after joining the partnership, which has been achieved by using larger machinery, more efficiently between farming partners.

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• What is collaboration
• Why collaborate
• Getting started: points to consider