Farm Management assignment underway

Ever wondered what final year assignments are like? We will be following a group of FdSc Agriculture students who will be completing their Farm Management assignment over the next year.

The students will be required to complete six tasks for the module including a 3 year physical plan, budgets and estimates, a peer review and a Q&A time. This module is supported by a local farm, Longpools Farm in Hinstock, Harper Adams and Natwest, to help bring real life experiences to the class room.

Meet the girls’ team:

Sophie Hughes
“I live in Wrexham, where we have a 100 head dairy farm and a flock of commercial breeding ewes. I worked for ForFarmers on my placement year. The knowledge of the dairy industry I have acquired from working at home and on placement will hopefully be very useful when completing the farm tendor for the farm business management assignment.”

Katie Hughes
“I live in North Lincolnshire on an Arable farm. My placement year was spent at Emmett UK Farming specialising in fresh produce. I think that my practical experience within the arable sector will help with the cropping and rotations section of the assignment.”

Martha Guise
“I live in Suffolk. I worked for Cobb Agri, in Hereford, for my placement year where I’ve acquired a large amount of contacts in the industry. I hope to apply the knowledge I learnt from placement and previous farm experience to the assignment.”

Georgia Down
“I’m from an organic dairy farm in Dorset. For my placement year I worked on a mixed livestock farm in Herefordshire. I think I can bring organisational skills to the team, as well as contributing to the dairy input of the tenancy farm plan.”

Jo Langley
“I live in Somerset on a Dairy farm. I completed my placement year with Wessex Water in Dorset and Wiltshire. I hope to apply the skills and knowledge I gained during placement and previous experience working on a farm to this assignment.”

Sophie said: “This assignment presents a great opportunity for us to apply the knowledge that we have gained throughout our time at Harper Adams into a real life situation. This experience will undoubtedly help each member of the group who will be taking on roles within the businesses back home.

“Wyn Morgan, our lecturer for Farm Management, who’s teaching us skills that are helpful and can be easily applied to the assignment. These skills also help to identify areas for improvement and to then implement the changes. It allows us to gain greater knowledge of how a business runs as a whole and will hopefully shape us to run very successful profitable businesses in the future.

“In terms of the progress towards the assignment, we obviously all visited the farm two weeks ago. Since then we have been running through ideas as to what we want to do with the farm and planning the crop rotations.”

Watch this space to see how they progress!