Grounded Research has been researching farmer opinions for over 30 years. Pre 2022, when we started Five Bar Gate, it was standard practice in market research for the sector to cold call farmers and conduct telephone research. This was costly, time-consuming and didn't seem to benefit the farmers in the ways we wanted...we just had to wait for technology to catch up!
In 2022, we started Five Bar Gate, with three core principles;
Ensure Farmers are fairly compensated for their time and expertise
By running an engaged community of farmers, the costs associated with collecting responses (time, purchasing lists and advertising) could be passed on to the farmer. This means that unless it is charitable (because it would be unethical) or for the Government (because they aren't allowed to pay up) we pay around £100/hour for our farmers to take part in research.
Make sure the right voices are heard
All too often we see fraudulent and inaccurate data used in agricultural reports. A click farm in China or a tech fraudster in Africa should not be influencing policy in UK agriculture. We have robust security and verification processes, a team of researchers with enough agri knowledge to spot when something is amiss and we even throw in a few questions to test farmer-ness and keep things fun. Running a research community gives us access to the right farmers for the job with total transparency.
If it is important to you, it is important to us
We started life at the farmhouse kitchen table in 1994, and are now a small but effective team of 10. We are family-run run and two of our directors still actively farm. So we know what is important to farmers;
We won't pass on your data, use it irresponsibly or sell anything to our research community. We don't allow anyone else access to our community.
Lengthy interviews and surveys are unfair when you have a busy day, but sometimes these can't be helped. We try to keep things short and sweet, we compensate for time and have flexible working hours that can work around your plans.
Being able to have a 'proper conversation' about farming with someone who knows the sector and has spoken to many others on the same issue is a valuable form of knowledge exchange that wouldn't be possible without a knowledgeable team of researchers.
It has been exciting to grow this community to almost 1000 farmers, and we are always on the look out to get bigger so we can bring you more opportunities to take part in research. We have grown by word of mouth to date and are keen to avoid advertising as we don't want to attract farmer fraud. if you want to help us please tell your friends, or if you are members of networks or groups that may be interested in supporting us, we would appreciate an introduction!
Comments