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Help Centre

Welcome to the Help Centre — your starting point for support, guidance, and answers about the Farm Business Survey (FBS).

Whether you’re a farmer taking part, a researcher using our data, or simply exploring the site, this page will help you find what you need.

Data Guides

Explore easy-to-follow, online help guides to get the most from our data tools and dashboards.

These guides are all available as online content — no downloads required. Additional guides will be added over time.

How to use the FBS Dashboard

Step-by-step guide to navigating the online data dashboard, filtering results, and comparing across sectors.

Understanding performance ratios

Learn what they mean, how they’re calculated, and what they say about farm business efficiency.

What is Farm Business Income (FBI)?

A breakdown of this key financial metric and how it’s used in analysis.

How we classify farm types and sizes

Understand the farm classifications used across all FBS outputs.

How to benchmark your farm using FBS data

These guides are all available as online content — no downloads required. Additional guides will be added over time.

Frequently Asked Questions

Have a question about taking part, your data, or how the survey works?
Visit our FAQs section to browse answers to the most common queries.

Read our frequently asked questions
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Want to explore the data behind the reports?

You can explore this data yourself using the Farm Business Data Dashboard.

Visit the data dashboard

How to use the FBS Dashboard

The interactive dashboard brings together key results from the Farm Business Survey (FBS), helping farmers, researchers, policymakers, industry experts and students understand trends in farm performance over time.

What you can do:

View single-year results or three-year averages dating back to 2005/06.
Filter results by farm type, size, region, performance band and more.
Explore key metrics including Farm Business Income (FBI), outputs and costs, diversification, and productivity.
Interact with charts – hover to see details, toggle series on/off, zoom in, and download graphs or datasets.

How to use the dashboard:

Hover for details: Move your cursor over a chart to see values, labels, and data points.
Toggle series: Click items in the legend to show or hide them. Double-click to isolate one series.
Zoom & pan: Use the toolbar in the top-right corner of each chart to zoom in, move around, or reset the view.
Download charts: Save any graph as an image (PNG) using the camera icon.
Explore data tables: Under each chart you can view and download the background data.
Confidence intervals: Some results display error bars, showing a plausible range based on the survey sample.

Understanding performance ratios

Economic performance for each farm is measured as the ratio between economic output (mainly sales revenue) and inputs (costs). The inputs for this calculation include an adjustment for unpaid manual labour. The higher the ratio, the higher the economic efficiency and performance. The farms are then ranked and allocated to performance bands based on economic performance percentiles:

  • Low performance band – bottom 25% of economic performers.
  • Medium performance band – middle 50% of economic performers.
  • High performance band – top 25% of economic performers.

What is Farm Business Income (FBI)?

For non-corporate businesses, Farm Business Income represents the financial return to all unpaid labour (farmers and spouses, non-principal partners and their spouses and family workers) and on all their capital invested in the farm business, including land and buildings. For corporate businesses it represents the financial return on the shareholders capital invested in the farm business. Note that, prior to 2008/09, directors’ remuneration was not deducted in the calculation of Farm Business Income.

Farm Business Income is used when assessing the impact of new policies or regulations on the individual farm business. Farm Business Income is essentially equivalent to financial Net Profit, however, the measures slightly differ because Net Profit is derived from financial accounting principles whereas Farm Business Income is derived from management accounting principles. For example, in financial accounting output stocks are usually valued at cost of production, whereas in management accounting they are usually valued at market price. In financial accounting, depreciation is usually calculated at historic cost whereas in management accounting it is often calculated at replacement cost.

How we classify farm types and sizes

From 2010/11, farms have been assigned to a farm type based on the European Commission (EC) classification system based on a farm’s Standard Output (SO) as laid out by Commission Regulation 1242/2008. Whilst the UK is no longer bound by the regulation, to maintain continuity use of this classification system is continuing at present.

Standard Output is a financial measure for the total value of output of any one enterprise, per head for livestock and per hectare for crops. For crops, this is the main product (e.g. wheat, barley, peas) plus any by-product that is sold, for example straw. For livestock it is the value of the main product (milk, eggs, lamb, pork) plus the value of any secondary product (calf, wool) minus the cost of replacement. The measure is based on 5-year averaged coefficients for prices. Averaged prices are applied to reduce the impact of price changes on farm type classifications and are periodically revised leading to series breaks within the published FBS data.

Each farm is assigned a total SO by aggregating the SOs for its agricultural enterprises and assigning a farm type based on the proportion of the total SO derived from different enterprises. The varied nature of the definitions used for the EC particular types of farming does not permit a simple description to be given of all of the main types adopted in the Survey, but the chief characteristics may be summarised as follows:

  • Cereals: farms on which cereals, oilseeds, peas and beans harvested dry account for over two-thirds of their total SO (holdings with more than two-thirds of their total SO in set-aside are excluded from the survey results).
  • General cropping: farms with over two-thirds of their total SO in arable crops (including field scale vegetables) or a mixture of arable and horticultural crops; holdings where arable crops account for more than one-third of total SO and no other grouping accounts for more than one-third.
  • Dairy: farms where the dairy enterprise, including followers, accounts for over two-thirds of their total SO.
  • LFA grazing livestock: farms with more than two-thirds of their total SO in cattle and sheep except holdings classified as dairy. A farm is classified as in the LFA if 50% or more of its total area is in the EC Less Favoured Area (both Disadvantaged and Severely Disadvantaged).
  • Lowland grazing livestock: farms with more than two-thirds of their total SO in cattle and sheep except holdings classified as dairy. A farm is classified as “lowland” if less than 50% of its total area is in the EC Less Favoured Area.
  • Specialist pigs: farms on which pigs account for over two-thirds of their total SO.
  • Specialist poultry: farms on which poultry account for over two-thirds of their total SO.
  • Mixed: farms where crops account for one-third, but less than two-thirds of total SO and livestock accounts for one-third, but less than two-thirds of total SO. It also includes holdings with mixtures of cattle and sheep and pigs and poultry and holdings where one or other of these groups is dominant, but does not account for more than two-thirds of the total SO.
  • Horticulture: farms on which fruit (including vineyards), hardy nursery stock, glasshouse flowers and vegetables, market garden scale vegetables, outdoor bulbs and flowers, and mushrooms account for more than two thirds of their total SO.


The Less Favoured Areas (LFA) classification was established in 1975 as a means to provide support to farms where natural characteristics (geology, altitude, climate, short growing season, low soil fertility, or remoteness) make it difficult for farmers to compete. Within the LFA are the Severely Disadvantaged Areas (SDA) and the Disadvantaged Areas (DA). The SDA are more environmentally challenging areas and largely upland in character. The distinction between LFA and non-LFA farms is generally applied to grazing livestock farms.

Farm business size in the United Kingdom is measured in Standard Labour Requirement (SLR) rather than by Standard Output grouping or land area. The SLR of a farm represents the normal labour requirement for all the farm’s cropping and livestock activities under typical conditions. This is measured in Full Time Equivalents (FTE), which is the number of full-time workers required. The SLR is calculated from standard coefficients applied to each enterprise on the farm. The standard coefficients represent the input of labour required per head of livestock or per hectare of crops for enterprises of average size and performance.

Farm business sizes are defined as follows:

  • Spare-time – Less than 0.5 FTE
  • Part-time – 0.5 to less than 1 FTE
  • Small – 1 to less than 2 FTE
  • Medium – 2 to less than 3 FTE
  • Large – 3 to less than 5 FTE
  • Very Large – 5 or more FTE

How to benchmark your farm using FBS data

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