Andrew Booth is known for his involvement in the local food scene through his farm shop – The Store at Foveran, near Ellon.
However, grass-roots farming remains core to his business at Savock Farm and following completion of a three-year monitor farms project, Mr Booth has taken on extra land as part of an ambitious plan to grow the contract farming side of the business.
Prior to taking on the new land, the family was farming 1,200 acres, of which 800 acres was owned, with the remainder in contract farming arrangements.
The Booths have now taken on 2,000 acres at the nearby Esslemont Estate on a contract farming agreement.
And according to Andrew Booth, the monitor farms project, which ended in 2014 and was run by AHDB Cereals and Oilseeds, made him realise that spreading his costs across a larger area of land would make the business more efficient.
“The one thing I have learned from the benchmarking part of the monitor farms programme is that scale reduces your costs. Variable costs are not variable – fixed costs are variable,” said Mr Booth.
“We don’t see ourselves as owning every single bit of land and doing every bit of work ourselves, and we will be sub-contracting out certain jobs.”
The family is no stranger to contract farming arrangements, having run one on the livestock side of the business for the past few years.
As well as finishing Aberdeen-Angus stores to produce meat for the farm shop, the business is involved in a joint venture with Glenapp Estate in Ayrshire.
“The animals arrive on a weight and on a price and we contract finish them. We sell them up here (the north-east) as either stores or a finished product,” said Mr Booth.
“And if there’s any spoils to share, there’s an agreed percentage given to each of us.”
The agreement is for around 100 animals and this year’s batch are all black and white dairy males.
Mr Booth said the latest expansion to the contracting farming side of the business would result in the company upping staff numbers by employing a dedicated arable operator, who will be responsible mainly for spraying and combining.
This is in addition to the employment of a new operations manager, Lewis Anderson, who runs a farm at East Cairnton.
Mr Anderson, who is a surveyor to trade, has been appointed to assist with both the farming operations and commercial property projects at the farm’s nearby Enerfield Business Park.
The pair are now overseeing the management of the extra 2,000 acres and building the infrastructure on the estate to support the farming operation.