[Bigdreams]

Who here has written a business plan for their smallholding? I'm going to do one even though we have no land yet but I feel having it all properly planned out will help us achieve our goals and help us get the land that we want.

If you have written one how did you source your information for it if you hadn't already started the smallholding?

Any advice and guidance will really help as I want this to be a long term success and eventually more than a hobby but as I've no major experience (looked after families chickens, been on a couple of pig keeping courses, read books etc) I not sure on figures and also facts!

Thank you lovelies!

Fruity 

[doganjo]

Field to Farm have a basic one you can build on.

[Bigdreams]

  Ooooo thank you Doganjo 

[benkt]

I started with a big spreadsheet, something like the pig calculator you can download from here but with a separate sheet for each of the parts of our farm, e.g. veg, pigs, eggs, christmas geee etc. This worked really well to help us nail down what we had to achieve in order to get the farm running properly. Where I didn't have figures I think I asked on here! Although mainly we were doing what we'd done before in a back-garden scaled up to a smallholding.

The main downside was that I didn't really pay much attention to the path to that goal. Its taken us four years to get to the stage where the farm can pay me regularly and I think it could have gone a bit more smoothly if we'd had a clearer plan for how to get there.
 e.g. the christmas geese and turkeys do really well for us and have very little capital outlay so I should have started them sooner. Same for our hatching in schools - makes good money for little effort and a capital investment of a couple hundred quid for an incubator and brooder - its also a good way to get your name known locally.
Finally, we went for breeding sows too early - should have built up more experience and a bigger market for the meat beforehand as they are very expensive to keep.

[doganjo]

A spreadsheet is fine for the figures, but the narrative is best laid out as in the type of document Field to Farm offer. Tables can be imported into the Business Plan from an excel spreadsheet.

That's how I lay them out anyways and I've been doing it for 40 years. As I said it's a basic one - didn't want to scare you with anything complicated.

[Bigdreams]

Thanks Benkt  certainly sound like a plan would be a good idea. We have definitely thought about pigs (I really like the Large Black) and thought previously about chickens. The other thing is do we find a small bit of land and build up from there and maybe have to relocate to achieve what we want to or go for something a bit bigger and have it longer term?
I shall be using your business plan template doganjo to figure that out!!