Strategic planning and control of special crop growers by means of the balanced scorecard

In today's economic environment special crop farmers are faced with increasing challenges as to their competitiveness. Volatile markets, climate change and its consequences, rising production costs, minimum wages and competition for land use affect farmers due to permanent structural change. While the area under production does not increase, the number of farms decreases as farms grow bigger. Bigger farms lead to bigger challenges for management in terms of strategic planning and farm control. One management instrument which seems to lend itself to the task but which, to date, has been employed neither in agriculture nor on special crop farms, is the balanced scorecard. Based on an empirical survey among special crop farmers to evaluate strategies and reference numbers in order to test how suitable they are as indicators of operational profits, this study presents examples of balanced scorecards. By means of a cluster analysis, various types of strategies followed by different special crop farmers could be identified for which a balanced scorecard was set up with the most appropriate reference numbers to measure success as to perspectives concerning financial matters, internal processes, market and clients, learning and development, as well as staff and lifestyle.