UK farmers collectively spend over £5bn a year on feed and fertiliser. Almost all of it is bought through a sales model that has not changed since the 1980s — a rep, a relationship, and a price that reflects both. This piece argues that agricultural purchasing is ripe for disruption, that the technology to do it exists right now, and that the farmers who move first will have a structural cost advantage over those who wait.
Let's be clear about something that everyone in agricultural supply knows but few say plainly. The feed merchant's rep who visits your farm every six weeks, knows your family by name, remembers your father, and has been supplying your livestock rations for fifteen years is performing a genuinely valuable service. He knows your operation. He understands your requirements. He is reliable, responsive, and trustworthy in a way that a faceless online platform feels like it cannot be.
He is also expensive. Not personally — he is doing his job well and his employer is paying him appropriately. But the relationship you have built with him, and the loyalty you demonstrate by not shopping around, is priced into every tonne of feed you buy. The margin his employer earns on your account is higher because of your loyalty, not lower. You are paying, indirectly, for the relationship, the van, the phone, the salary, and the commission structure that keeps him motivated to maintain it.
This is not a criticism of reps or of farmers who value those relationships. It is simply a description of how the economics work. And in a sector where margins are under structural pressure from every direction — input costs, energy prices, supermarket buyer power, weather volatility, disease, regulation — paying a loyalty premium on your largest input costs is a luxury that the numbers increasingly cannot support.
The standard response from procurement evangelists at this point is to wonder why farmers do not simply get competitive quotes and buy on price. The answer is that the friction of doing so has historically been prohibitive, and farmers — who are running complex biological and financial operations with limited time and often limited administrative support — have made a rational calculation that the saving is not worth the effort.
Getting three competitive quotes on 500 tonnes of compound feed involves: contacting multiple merchants, providing detailed nutritional specifications, ensuring like-for-like comparison across different ration formulations, negotiating delivery logistics, managing the transition if you switch supplier, and dealing with the relationship damage if your existing supplier finds out you were shopping around. For a sole trader running a mixed farm, that is a week's work spread across a month of back-and-forth. The saving might be real but the cost — in time, in relationship risk, in administrative burden — has historically made it not worth doing.
This is the problem that technology can now solve. Not the negotiation — farmers are perfectly capable of negotiating. The friction. The administrative burden of running a competitive process. The specification writing, the supplier identification, the response evaluation, the comparison, the contract. If that work can be done in 20 minutes rather than a week, the calculation changes entirely.
The UK animal feed manufacturing sector produces approximately 15 million tonnes annually, with a market value of around £4.2bn. Fertiliser — nitrogen, phosphate, and potash — adds another £1.1bn of farm expenditure in a normal year, though price volatility following the 2022 energy crisis has made this figure highly variable. Together, these two input categories represent the single largest area of controllable cost on most mixed and livestock farms.
The market structure in both categories shows moderate concentration at the manufacturing level — a handful of major compound feed manufacturers and a small number of fertiliser importers and blenders dominate supply — but a fragmented and relationship-dependent distribution layer. It is in that distribution layer where the pricing premium lives. The manufacturing cost of a tonne of compound feed does not vary significantly between merchants. The margin between manufacturing cost and farm gate price does — and it varies with the buyer's negotiating position, purchase volume, and willingness to create competitive pressure.
Farms that buy collectively — through a purchasing co-operative, a buying group, or an aggregated tender process — consistently achieve prices 12–22% below what individual farms buying from a single merchant pay for comparable product. That is not a marginal saving. On a £180,000 annual feed bill, 18% is £32,400. On a 1,000-hectare arable operation spending £90,000 on fertiliser, 15% is £13,500. Year on year, compounded, these are business-defining numbers.
Agricultural purchasing co-operatives have existed in the UK for over a century. The NFU has run buying schemes for its members for decades. Co-op structures like Openfield have demonstrated that collective grain marketing works. The principle of aggregating demand to create buyer power in agricultural markets is well understood and well proven.
What has limited the reach of these models is the same friction that limits individual competitive procurement — the administrative burden of organising collective purchasing, managing the tendering process, evaluating responses, and contracting. Traditional buying groups require significant organisational infrastructure. They work well for large, well-resourced farming businesses and for the staff of agricultural co-operatives. They have historically not scaled to the individual family farm that wants to participate in a buying pools event without joining a formal organisation, attending meetings, or delegating purchasing authority to a committee.
Technology changes this. A platform that allows a farmer to describe their annual feed or fertiliser requirement in 10 minutes, join a pool with 30 other farms with similar requirements, and receive a competitive market price — without running the process themselves — makes collective buying accessible to every farm that wants it, not just those with the organisational infrastructure to participate.
Feed and fertiliser get the attention because the numbers are large. But the procurement opportunity on UK farms extends well beyond agricultural inputs. Insurance — farm combined, public liability, livestock, machinery — is bought by most farmers through a broker relationship that looks remarkably like the feed merchant rep model: trusted, long-standing, and priced accordingly. Energy — electricity and red diesel — is another category where farm buyers consistently pay above market rates due to infrequent tendering. Veterinary supplies, machinery servicing, PPE, and professional services (accountancy, legal) round out a procurement spend picture that, across a medium-sized mixed farm, can easily reach £400,000–600,000 a year in total.
None of this spend is currently subject to competitive procurement discipline on most farms. All of it could be — with the right tools and the right process.
We are not asking farmers to abandon their existing supplier relationships. We are asking them to test the market — once, on one category, with minimal effort — and see what the data shows. If the price you are currently paying is genuinely competitive, a market test will confirm it and cost you nothing. If it is not, the saving is yours to capture.
The rep will still be there. The relationship will still exist. But the price — for the first time — will reflect what the market actually is, not what loyalty has historically cost.
That feels like a fair deal for farmers who have spent the last five years absorbing cost increases that were entirely outside their control. At least this one is inside it.
Feed · Fertiliser · Farm insurance · Energy · Professional services. Tell us your annual spend in any category and we'll show you what the market will offer.