In the first of our blogs on life at Wilson Wraight, we are concentrating on the original role here, the Farming Consultant.

My name is Tom Bart, I am an agricultural consultant at Wilson Wraight and have been since May 2022.

If I don’t have any meetings planned for the beginning of the day, I’ll start my day by either heading straight to the office for around 8am or checking the crops on an estate I am involved with managing directly. I find it really rewarding seeing the life cycle of the crops we grow and understanding the financials and management that goes into it especially having attended the nursery on the estate as a youngster.

Once back in the office. I’ll respond to any emails, check the crop markets, and then knuckle down with some figure work whether that be a farm budget for the year ahead, a farm report of the year previous or a cashflow update to understand how a business is performing throughout the year. I enjoy using my brain to determine what works and what doesn’t in creating a sustainably profitable farming business.

Lunch time arrives and I’ll usually take a stroll into Bury St Edmunds with colleagues and if the weathers nice, through the abbey gardens. I enjoy working in Bury and socialising with the team outside of the office.

If I’m working on a big project, my afternoon will continue with farm business analysis work.  Otherwise, I’ll usually use the afternoon to go through any work with my team or prepare for any meetings we have coming up.

The rest of my role involves meeting with clients either in the office or on farm, where we walk through the analysis work I’ve built for them and help answer any questions whilst I get to know the inner workings of each individual farm.  There’s never two days the same just as no two farms are the same.

I am extremely lucky and grateful to have been brought up around agriculture and can often be found away from the day job applying what I’ve learned so far in my career to the home mixed enterprise farm. The knowledge and expertise that our team possesses is invaluable to our clients and to everyone in the office as we strive to mitigate and outweigh the loss of the basic payment scheme together.