Assessing the Performance of the Farm Business Plan Session 22: Assessing the Performance of the Farm Business Plan CAPACITY BUILDING OF SMALL FARMERS IN ENTREPRENEURSHIP DEVELOPMENT AND MARKET ACCESS TCP/PHI/3402

OBJECTIVE: By the end of this session, the participants shall have evaluated farming operations at the end of the production year using the farm records and existing benchmarks

Assessing the performance of the farm business plan Things I should do Again Things I should do differently My farm goal My Production plan Physical Resources and Inputs Labor planning Marketing Profitability Cash Availability Risks 9 Record Keeping

Process Organize participants into groups of 3-5 participants with same enterprises. Tell the participants to review past targets, e.g farm goal, production plan, market plan, etc. and assess how well they performed vis-à-vis targets. Each group should identify for each item of the business plan whether they think it is something that they should do again, and whether they should do differently. For those who achieved their goals, encourage them to discuss the key factors that contributed to their success. For those who did not achieve their goals, ask them to identify the things that prevented them from achieving them. Ask each group to present what they have discussed. Encourage discussion. And take note of the elements that contributed to achieving and not achieving the results.

My Farm Goal Did they follow (strictly) their plans? Key questions: What was my farm goal? Did I achieve it? Did they follow (strictly) their plans? If the plan did not work, what were the weak elements? Why were they weak? What should they have done differently? What parts of the plans went well? Can they be repeated?

My Production Plan Did it give the results they wanted or expected? What problems did they have? What worked? What did not work? What should be done differently next time? Is there anything that dictates that it is not technically feasible to produce this product? Soil? Climate? Slope of land? Elevation?

Physical Resources and Inputs Were the resources and inputs available when they needed them? How were the prices? How would they rate the suppliers in terms of reliability, price, quality of product, etc? Would they change suppliers? Would they change products?

Labor Planning Was the family labor available as planned? If not, why not? Did they hire all the labor they needed? Was the timing right? Was the cost as they had planned? How efficient was the labor? Did they have enough labor? Too Much? Too little?

Marketing Did they meet their targets? If not, why not? Did they get the prices they expected? If not, why not? Did they get the marketing costs they expected? If not, why not? How were the markets? How many buyers and sellers? Did it work as you planned? Did you use the transport as planned? If not, why not? What was the quality of their produce? What will you do differently next time?

Profitability What success did they have with their enterprise profitability? Where the planned costs same as the actual costs? If not, what was different? Did they manage to save costs? If so, how? Was the profit as planned? If not, why?

Cash Availability Do they have enough cash for the enterprise? If not, which month do they have shortfalls? What did they do about it? How close was their cash flow plan to what really happened? What was the difference? Why? What sources of finance did they finally use? How accurate was their assessment? What more have they learned? Which is the best source? What attributes helped you decide?

Risk What risks did you think you would face last season? What plan did you put in place to handle the risk? Which of those risks did you actually face? What happened and how did you handle it? What risks did you face that you did not expect or plan for? What happened and how did you handle it?

Overall Process What did this evaluation tell them about farm business plans? What was the most valuable lesson they learned from this evaluation?

Record keeping Did they actually keep the records up to date? If they did, what help did the records give in the evaluation? For those who did not keep records up to date, how easy/hard was it to do the evaluation?

by reason and evaluation” Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation” Vannevar Bush

Thank you and Have a Nice Day!