Making financial data ‘fit for purpose’ for small-scale growers was the mission we set ourselves as part of Organic Centre Wales’s Better Organic Business Links (BOBL) project.
There is an absence of tailored information on the viability and productivity of market gardens and small-scale horticultural holdings growing for supply chains in Wales (but of course not just Wales!). The problem is exacerbated by a lack of financial skills/knowledge of new entrants, for example on setting prices, estimating the cost of production and uncertainty about choosing a business model.
We designed a horticultural costings tool to try and account for the complexities of complex systems in an easy to use step-by-step format that should allow the grower to compare the cost of different crops /crop groups and their margins, in a meaningful way.
