How data analytics are helping farmers reduce input costs

For this month’s Member Spotlight, we met Louis Clabburn, Head of Member Services at AF Group Ltd, to understand how they are using data to support their Members.

With rising costs, changing political landscapes and other unprecedented challenges, managing finances is at the forefront for farming businesses. When it comes to input costs, Louis emphasises how valuable data is in making informed and effective purchasing decisions to maintain a sustainable business.

Saving your farming future – and finances

With a staggering £332.7 million turnover in 23/24, AF is leading the way in providing a one-stop shop to manage farming businesses efficiently. With almost three thousand Members, the non-profit co-operative is harnessing a vast amount of data to offer its Members competitive prices on their input costs.

“We’re processing about 30,000 invoices a month, and we’re collecting a lot of product and pricing data from those invoices,” Louis states.

“We need to keep proving to Members the value of being part of the co-operative. So, we’re working with a knowledge transfer partnership through the University of East Anglia, using our data and their resources, to benchmark our prices across different products.”

What can data tell us?

At AF, the team are invested in helping Members understand and interpret their data, ultimately giving more intelligence back to the farming community in a new tool that they’re about to launch.

How does this stack up on farm?

In 2024, AF Members achieved an average saving of 14% across their input costs purchased through AF, plus an added reduction of admin hours across their business.

Soon, using the myAF portal, Members will be able to access benchmarking for many products in one place, including feeds, fertilisers, machinery parts, and more, condensing time spent researching and making decisions.

“It will consolidate into one portal, so it’s really easy, very accessible, saves time, saves farmers a lot of money because we benchmark everything, and we’re using real data to benchmark our prices in the market”, Louis states.

Join the conversation

This interview took place at Groundswell 2025, where Louis described the benefits AF have had from Agri-TechE membership.

“It’s really valuable to get ideas, insights, knowledge share and talk to people about what works, what doesn’t work and just be quite open and honest about things,” Louis states.

Find out about Agri-TechE membership, and see who else is in the Agri-TechE community in our Member Directory.