Strong farm businesses are built on a combination of sound financial management, efficient production systems, informed decision making, and the ability to adapt to change. B+LNZ is inviting Expressions of Interest from sheep and beef farmers to join a Focus Group designed to help participants benchmark their business performance, identify opportunities for improvement, and build long-term profitability and resilience.
What is a Focus Group?
A Focus Group is a small group of farmers who come together around a shared opportunity or challenge to drive meaningful, practical change within their farm businesses.
Focus Groups are outcomes-driven and focused on achieving real on-farm results. Participants work alongside other committed farmers, supported by facilitators and subject matter experts, to investigate opportunities, test ideas, and apply new learning directly within their own businesses.
Groups meet regularly over one to two years and are intentionally limited in size to encourage participation and peer-to-peer learning.
Why join this Focus Group?
By joining this Focus Group, you will:
- Understand how your business compares against relevant industry benchmarks
- Identify opportunities to improve production, profitability, and business resilience
- Develop practical skills in analysing farm performance data
- Confidently benchmark your farming business’s financial and production performance using industry agreed KPI’s
- Learn strategies used by high-performing farm businesses
- Explore the key drivers of profit, productivity, and wealth creation
- Improve your understanding of farm financial performance and business efficiency
- Strengthen your ability to evaluate investment and diversification opportunities
- Discuss succession planning and long-term business sustainability
- Build trusted relationships with progressive farmers facing similar opportunities and challenges
- Apply practical learnings directly to your own farm business
The programme is designed to help participants build stronger, more profitable, and resilient farm businesses through continuous improvement and informed decision making.
Focus Group overview
This Focus Group consists of approximately eight workshops delivered over two years.
The programme uses benchmarking as a foundation for identifying opportunities within participants' businesses. Workshops will examine the key drivers of farm performance, profitability, and business resilience, helping participants understand how production performance influences business outcomes and long-term wealth creation.
Where appropriate, B+LNZ benchmarking and Economic Service data will be used to help participants understand how their business compares against industry performance indicators.
Workshop Topics
Planned workshops include:
- Benchmarking and Farm Performance
- Financial Performance
- Production and Profitability
- Building Resilient Farm Businesses
- Business Growth and Wealth Creation
- Succession and Future Planning
- Market and Value Chain Opportunities
- People and Leadership
Programme requirements
Participants will be expected to bring your own laptop and farm and financial data.
- Attend and actively participate in Focus Group workshops
- Commit to agreed actions between meetings
- Share relevant business performance information where appropriate
- Contribute openly to group discussions
- Support collective learning across the group
The programme is funded by the B+LNZ Levy. Participant costs are limited to travel only.
Who should apply?
This Focus Group is suited to farmers who:
- Have access to the financial and productive data for their farm
- Are motivated to improve their farm business performance
- Are interested in understanding how their business compares against industry benchmarks
- Are open to learning from both data and peer experiences
- Want to strengthen the profitability and resilience of their business
- Can commit to attending all Focus Group sessions (except where unavoidable circumstances arise)