7 Records Keeping Importance Every Farmer Should Know

What is Farm Records Keeping?

Farm records keeping involves recording all forms of vital activities that took place on the farm using records-keeping systems. Records keeping on monetary transactions, medications, inventory on feed, machinery, and assets of value to the farm.

What are 2 types of record keeping?

You’ll discover it’s your production against your finances when you’ve set up your farm and everything is working for you. keeping records may differ from farm to farm but the two (2) categories which cut across every farm are Production and Financial records keeping.

Production Records On The Farm

Your production records include things like eggs laid, production mortality, feeding quantity during a certain period, and medication records, to name a few. This form of record provides you with a comprehensive account of previous events.

Production records help you to track your progress and make the necessary adjustment when things are not going well. On the other hand, when things are working perfectly, that is a signal you need to keep up the good work and maintain your records keeping policy.

Financial Records On The Farm

The farm’s production operations depend on finances and are detailed in the financial records. These data reveal how much money or profit the firm makes and how much money it spends and also loses. Produce sales, operating expenses like the feeding of farm animals, equipment purchases, depreciation records, inventories, and accounts payable or receivable are all included.

Financial record is key and enables the farmer to make future projections. The success of a farm can easily be determined based on its finances. However, in the absence of records on finances, net profits can not be estimated to track the progress of the farm.

What is the important of record keeping?

When the opportunity arises, a farmer can benefit from keeping records in a variety of ways. True, “opportunity comes but once,” but it only comes to those who are prepared.

You can’t rely on your memory, and in the event that you need assistance, the organization will only accept proof of work in paperwork.

1. Financial assistance like loans

Banks, government funding programs, and micro-finance institutions will award a fund or a loan mostly based on records keeping requirements. Farm records basically, show how wealthy the farm is and the potential of paying back if the finance firm should grant you the loan.

In exchange for financial assistance, your farm could be used as prospective bank collateral. Investors may desire to hold a share in your farm if they perceive a demand for it in the business world. Inventors rarely approach farms, especially in Ghana; but, good record-keeping can attract investors who can help financially.

2. Farm Management Purpose

A farm’s good management is always based on previous events that occurred on the farm. Disease infestation can strike your farm at any time, and if you keep excellent records, you can readily trace management tactics from a successful year of production and compare them to those from the next year. This can reveal what you’re doing correctly or incorrectly.

It’s difficult to train new workers to retain farm records if the habit of not keeping them has been established. Also working according to farm plans can be assessed from records keeping.

3. Disease Troubleshooting

It’s critical to keep track of the feed source, medication, and any external items. An infection outbreak could occur, and pinpointing the cause of an infection on your farm can be difficult at times.

If you acquired your feed from a source that was contaminated in any way, you can easily swap sources. Most poultry farms prefer mixing feeds from other farms rather than going to a commercial feed milling center, so this is a common occurrence.

4. Finance management

Farm expenses for operations, production, and maintenance should all be taken into consideration in order to see which farm finances are flowing towards profitable output and which aren’t. A typical example is records of farm finances spent on machinery can be used to identify machines that are inefficient and need to be replaced.

In any type of business, tracking profit and loss is one definite way to determine whether you are progressing or not.

5. Farm Future Planning 

You will rely on the successes and failures you have experienced in your business when planning for the future of your farm. Only thorough records will enable you to make well-informed adjustments in the future.

It’s amazing how a daily input of events may take your farm business from 0 to 100 in a matter of days. If no records are kept, the farmer will be blind to failures and will not detect them.

6. Produce Price Management

Every manufacturer wishes to make more money, but market pricing limit this. If you have a high production cost on a product, offering it at a higher price than the usual market pricing may cause your product to be labeled as overly expensive.

Tracking production costs from records keeping can help you improve output so that you don’t have to worry about affecting market prices and instead put your produce in a good price bracket.

7. Budgeting

Farm records include information for budgeting and planning on the farm. A farmer planning to change his or her farming activities needs to know what outputs to expect, as well as what costs and receipts to expect.

Finally, these seven reasons highlight the need of maintaining accurate record-keeping on your farm. When it comes to production and finances, your farm’s business history has an impact on its current state.