There is presently a significant and widespread effort being made to encourage the adoption of benchmarking practices in the rural sector by agricultural research and development organisations and farmer groups. I hope they will continue to work together and coopt other agencies to increase the coordination of the various benchmarking activities that are around. This data has now been further developed into a software package for the grains industry that can more precisely measure the performance of individual farm businesses. Through a mechanism such as this it is possible to make vital regional information more available and in a useful and cost effective way. The software has been set up so that users can define their own geographic area of interest using the map of the GRDC agroecological zones provided.
Users can select any one of the zones.
Alternatively, users can select a specific area of interest by drawing the outline of the region on the map, by using a set of built in predefined regions or a region they have previously defined and saved to a file. Towns and roads can be added to the map to help users in identifying their region of interest. When a zone or region has been selected, a table of data is displayed. These include data on the physical characteristics of farms in the region, their financial results and benchmarking performance. Each table not only shows the average for these regions but also the performance of the top 25 per cent of farms.