Beef & Sheep Margins Improving

Eblex has released its latest benchmarking figures for English beef and sheep enterprises.  These relate to the year ending 31^st March 2013.  All enterprises show an increase in net margins compared to year earlier levels except for store lamb finishers, with the cost of buying stores being the significant factor in the decrease in margins this year. 

The table below shows net margins for the top third in each enterprise are positive except for lowland suckler herds.  But there still remains a significant gap between the top third and average producers; all ‘average’ enterprises show a negative margin, except for beef finishing up to 16 months.  In most of the enterprises it is the difference in fixed costs which accounts for the majority of the variation between the average and the top third.  Other areas which stand out in the beef enterprises, which may be surprising to some, is bedding costs.  Differences between the top and the average for the different systems range from £4.34 to £16.07 per head.

The latest figures come from Eblex’s new Stocktake Report which replaces its previous Business Pointers.  The new report aims to offer more detailed benchmarking figures and extra physical information for producers to compare their enterprises against similar ones – highlighting which areas they are doing well in and where improvements could be made.  The results are from actual figures collected from a sample of English beef and sheep farms.  The full report can be downloaded from http://www.eblex.org.uk/returns/stocktake-2013/