ABSTRACT
This chapter explores individual businesses or groups that are using internal benchmarking and process benchmarking. The way ahead for sustainable change in agriculture is for incremental and continuous changes through the management of individual processes, activities and elements in farming. The chapter expresses that this will drive innovation in practice in the supply chain, on the farm and in environmental sustainability. In the food supply chain, management accounting practices are less advanced than might be supposed, but there are very sophisticated data capture systems in the form of electronic point of sale (EPOS), efficient customer response (ECR) and radio frequency identification (RFID) that could feed into benchmarking for best practice systems. The use of benchmarks in agriculture for the purpose of comparative analysis is a long-standing practice that goes back to the late nineteenth century. In terms of sophistication, agriculture is ahead of businesses in other industries which have just realized the benefits of collaborative network learning groups.
