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.

Still need help?

If you can’t find what you’re looking for, or want to request data, give feedback, or ask a question — use our Contact & Request Form.

Want to explore the data behind the reports?

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

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